ABBA -- Dancing Queen

Flashback time...



October, 2001.
We were in midtown Manhattan. The town was uncharacteristically quiet. Nobody was yelling or blowing horns (well, almost nobody...it was still New York). If a firetruck answered an alarm people on the sidewalk would notice and wave. Sometimes clap. American flags were affixed to fire trucks.
Makeshift shrines popped up in unexpected places. A community bulletin board in the Village was covered over with pictures of lost neighbors and family members. Ordinary service people or delivery men who had vanished in the World Trade Center Towers.
A fire station not far from Times Square would have gone un-noticed six weeks before was converted into an explosion of letters, construction paper drawings and pictures from children all over the country, prayers and messages of hope and pride, and flags...endless numbers of flags everywhere.
At the place now called "Ground Zero" there was a high chain link fence with a curtain blocking the non-view. It made no difference because the fence, like so much of the city, was covered top to bottom with letters and cards, messages and memorials...as far as you could see in both directions, an outpouring of anguished hope and pride.
I couldn't allow myself to read them. If I started to read anything I had to stop for the tears. It was embarrassing to be standing there on the sidewalk with tears running down my cheeks. Not strong. Not manly. Not under control,you know.
So we walked on. Silently, mostly, sometimes remarking on this or that...This store was open for business again. But look, this one is still covered with the grey dust of death. Nobody inside. It looks like an abandoned shoe store in a small town, shut down about two years ago...

And Mama Mia was playing on Broadway.
They say the seats have all been sold. No way to get a ticket.
So what.
What's the harm of asking?
We walked up to the ticket office and asked...
Sure enough, there were seats available...They were in a box seat, stage left. The whole box was available!
The view was poor...only the front of the stage and facing the audience more than the stage. You know how the old theatres are arranged.
So what. It was song and dance anyway. We could still hear. That's what music is all about.
So we went to Mama Mia for a matinee showing.
The place was filled with white hair and the show was all that anyone could want.
People were standing at the end, clapping to the music. Laughing, smiling broadly, a few dancing in place or in the aisles.
I will never forget. And the cheesy, familiar, irrepressible music of ABBA, cobbled together in a most unlikely way, lifted the mood of the city, allowing a brief escape from the painful reality of what had happened only a short time earlier.

When it was over, we returned to the grieving city. Some kind of white powder had been found two or three places not far away...an anthrax scare was under way.
I said, all these people here have to live here, work here, sleep here. Why can't we be part of them? At least we will be going home in a day or two. And we did. And I will never regret nor forget that we did.
It wasn't particularly brave, but it felt like it at the time.

And the music of ABBA will never be the same.
Thank God it was there to make us feel better. At least for a little while.

We didn't know it at the time, but it was to be a formative moment.
Within a week a final decision was made about lifestyle changes. The change didn't happen until the following June, but the decision was made then. There was no way that life after that moment could ever be lived the same. Things had to change.

Delayed gratification may be important for everyday living at the micro level, but at the macro level it could mean you wake up some day (or not) having lost priceless years and experiences, waiting for events and experiences that might never come, missing the ones that did.

The last five years have been a wonderful blessing.

"Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.".

Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, a little five-minute-long daily radio program is one of the treasures of the air, carried on most Public Radio stations. If I am driving and hear the theme music I invariably interrupt whatever I'm thinking about and pay attention for the next five minutes. He has always done his homework and the only person I know who regularly reads poetry aloud. And he does it extremely well.

Yesterday's show was noticed and blogged about by j.daniel at YAR. Rather than put together another me-too post about Keillor and yesterday's poem, I am sending readers to read and discover something for themselves. In addition to the poem and reading, pay attention to the blog and post. Like Keillor, this young man has also done his homework and put together a gem of a post. This will take about six or eight minutes of your busy day. You can think of it as prayer time as you listen to Garrison Keillor read the poem, reflect on the content and notice the context in which they all intersect.

Military Counseling Network

Via YAR I found the Military Counseling Network, a resource for military people who want out of the military for a variety of reasons. This group is located in Germany, but my guess is that they would be a good contact for anyone anywhere who needs such a resource. A link has been added in my sidebar.

Who are we? It is not an easy time to be an American in Europe, much less to be a soldier. As a soldier, you may not know what rights you have or be able to get straight answers in the military. MCN is a non-military network of organizations prepared to provide free counseling service to those soldiers who are questioning going to war or want to know more about military discharges and regulations.

What do we do? Operating primarily as a source of information, we have several counselors located in different regions throughout Germany. We are ready to respond to questions, provide guidance and supply legal information. Soldiers can contact us for information on discharges like, Hardship/Dependency, Medical/Disability, Other Designated Physical and Mental Conditions, Discharge in Lieu of Court-Martial, and Conscientious Objection.

How can we help? A counselor can discuss the various discharges with you, help you decide if one is good for you, explain procedures, work with you to gather the necessary documents, and support you throughout the process.

A lot has changed since I was drafted as a conscientious objector in 1965. At that time it was virtually impossible for anyone to declare objections to war unless they did so in advance of the draft. The local draft board made the determination of one's draft status, and that decision was not to be overturned by the Army. All CO's were sent to Fort Sam Houston, Texas for modified Basic Training after which all would be assigned to the Medical Service Corps. No other occupations or branches of service were options. Army Medic was the only assignment. (With two years music training at the university level I was told that Army bands were combat assignments.)

These days there is a more realistic attitude about conscientious objectors. It is not a widespread position and it probably never will become widespread. But not all who wear uniforms are suitable material to be wariors. And among those who are, some will discover after seeing and experiencing the realities of war that they no longer want to have anything to do with it.

There is no need for me to go into the arguments here. Those for whom these resources are provided already know what they need to know and it is not my mission to evangelize anyone to join their ranks. After serving my tour of duty I came to an understanding that warriors outnumber non-warriors by a vast order of magnitude. Conscientious objectors will always be an insignificant number. This is as it should be, because history shows the same uneven balance in all times and places. In the same way that predators are needed in nature, warriors are needed among men to keep one another in check. It is a great blessing to live in a society that respects that not everyone will be a warrior.

Egyptian Succession as Touchstone of Democracy

All this talk about Democracy in the Middle East is starting to have effect. Unfortunately for the totalitarian governments that have dominated the region for years, the infrastructures of power show signs of coming unglued.

In the same way that Hamas was able to win hearts and minds in Gaza by behaving for a little while, putting up a few schools and clinics, showing a somewhat human face to the populace, the Muslim Brotherhood (The Ikhwan) has been gaining popularity in Egypt. This is not good news for those at the top.

Baheyya's infrequent but incisive reports on the state of Egyptian political movements read like suspense thrillers, except they are not fiction. She must be widely read, but I don't find anyone picking her analysis apart.

Succession is always a tetchy matter for undemocratic regimes, but the danger is even more acute in this case where the man in charge has hogged power for 26 years without cultivating a successor other than his own dull and despised offspring. To thicken the plot, the succession scheme appears to involve elections as both the mechanism and the legitimation of the power handover. How else to interpret the engineering of new constitutional rules to disqualify the regime’s most effective electoral opponent (the Ikhwan) and defang effective electoral monitoring (by the judges)? But as we know, elections are an extraordinarily complicated, exhausting project involving intricate coordination between many sites and very high levels of uncertainty. It’s as if Mubarak’s regime picked the most risky successor possible and planned to install him using the riskiest method possible

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This piece is rather long, but worth the read. As I was reading, I couldn't help thinking that what is happening in Egypt is slowly happening all over the region. When it happens in America we call it populism and try to put a good face on it, but whatever it is, when vast numbers of ordinary people get involved more in politics than other daily diversions it is not a good sign for whoever holds the political reins.

Anyone advancing Democracy needs to remember the importance of bread and circuses.

§§§§§

The next generation of young people are pretty smart. It will not be possible to keep the wool pulled over their eyes much longer. Consider this post from Mideast Youth, a wonderful, percolating blog of youngsters from, as the name says, all over the Middle East.

Imagine the chaos and social unrest that would transpire following the pregnancy of a judge…..who’s a woman! It would be madness, what would God think?

This is my prediction and you can hold me to this, immediately following the conception of the baby darkness would fall over the earth, the ground would begin to shake and the earth would open up and swallow whole cities, it would be a catastrophe of epic magnitudes and possibly the onset of the end of days!

Unbelievable, I weep for the future of my country!

Read the whole post and comments. It's not too long but full of energy.

Chris Bliss, Fantastic Juggler Video

A bird in the hand...

Jail bird, that is.
Is this what they call the free-market economy?

Gordon Atkinson on Fox Faith, the brand

This is too good to miss.
I'll give them the first link and first word, because Real Live Preacher gets the last word. (And a devastating word it is, indeed. Read on.)

Well, I take that back. Part of it, anyway. The site has no hyperlinks and is put together in a way that I cannot copy/paste any quotes.

Here is a link to the Home Page. You're not allowed to go first to "About" without first reporting there for a proper first impression. I guess this is how the movie people do blogs. I'm not industrious enough to type all they say. You'll have to read it for yourself.

When you're done, go read what Real Live Preacher says about it. That's a lot more insightful than anything the Fox Films brand is peddling.

I'm gonna start with the punch line, but when you get to the post, you will still be edified. This is an appetizer, not a spoiler...

And when you're done with the post, take some time to get into the comments thread. Excuse the pun, but it's very spirited.

Listen, I'm just a guy with a bad haircut from a small church you've never heard of, but I hope you'll listen to me for a moment because I have something important to say. When it comes to God, religion, spirituality, whatever you want to call it, ignore just about everything you see on television or in movies. If you are serious about making a spiritual connection with a power greater than ourselves, try the following suggestions:

♥→Let go of big things and embrace little things.

♥→Ignore loud things and listen for quiet things.

♥→Put aside obvious things and seek out hidden things.

♥→Forget easy things and learn hard and ancient things.

♥→Stop saving your life and start losing it.

♥→Let your thinking and believing become doing and serving.

♥→Quit trying to arrive and become at home on the journey.

♥→Lose your road maps and find a wise guide to walk with you.

Love the idea of God with all your heart, soul, mind, body, life, work, and strength. And while you're at it, try loving other people as much as you love yourself. You won't be able to do either of these, but trying will be very good for you.

Do these things all of your days and forever. Do these things and live.

And may Fox Faith and everything like it go straight to hell.

ABC News -- Misleading Candidates for Military Service Recruiting

They report.
You decide.
I have been saying for some time that unless there is a slowdown in American military adventures, a military draft is inevitable.



To be clear, recruiting still seems to be going well. At the end of this snip we hear the reporter say...

Two thousand and six is going well for the Army. They've brought in eighty thousand new recruits this fiscal year. And in part because they've doubled the sign-up bonus from twenty to forty thousand. They've also increased the maximum allowable age from thirty-five to forty-two. They've dramatically increased recruiting forces, up some twenty percent. But part of the problem, according to military experts, is this tremendous pressure to meet quota. That serves as a catalyst for some of the undercover tactics we've seen in this undercover investigation.

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Money is indeed an incentive that will attract new recruits, especially our children. Oh, yes, I said children. The "maximum allowable age" may have been adjusted upward, but that little soundbite cleverly obscures the impact that money has on younger candidates as well. And when you are as old as I am, anyone who is still a teenager is still a child. At eighteen or nineteen, according to some sources, we still have not formed a mature understanding of risk.
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In this morning's Iraq Slogger Eason Jordan's summary of news coverage as reported by the New York Times and Washington Post says plainly that...

Both papers are relatively shallow on the hard news of Saturday, and neither mentions what is arguably the biggest Iraq news Saturday – Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki’s comments in an interview with the AP that he intends to re-organize the Iraqi government, fire several ministers, make his cabinet smaller, and, perhaps most importantly, that he intends to prosecute politicians allied with extremists.

The Washington Post limits its Iraq-focused hard news reporting to 10 measly paragraphs.

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And he points to a story from the Times underscoring exactly the point I just made, that money is a powerful incentive for children.

Dan Barry provides a page one feature about an 18-year-old Arizona woman, Resha Kane, shipping off to join the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division, presumably destined for Iraq. Her motivation in signing up: money. She says she’d rather not go to Iraq but she needs the money to go to college.

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I didn't read the report because I don't subscribe to Times Select, but the picture of this child looking up at her Dad with moist eyes is all I needed to see. I'm sorry, but I cannot us the word woman when I think of someone less than a year away from her school prom. It makes me angry and sad just to remember the image.

March 30 followup:

So here's a warm fuzzy [see October followup] for Resha Kane, provided, of course, she returns alive from her tour of duty.

Actor Alec Baldwin was so moved by the story of an 18-year-old Army soldier who is scheduled to serve in Iraq, he's going to help pay for her college education after she leaves the military.

The story of Pvt. Resha Kane of Needles, Calif., was on the front page of The New York Times on March 4 and was written as a narrative about the day Kane said goodbye to her friends and family on Feb. 27 in Mohave Valley, Ariz., six miles northeast of Needles. Accompanying the article was a large photo of a teary-eyed Kane looking into her father's eyes as he tenderly held her shoulders.

If every young recruit had such a benefactor this would not be much of a story. Reality is that her good fortune is more like a lottery win than an everyday occurance.

October followup:

That last link went inactive, but here is another story from another blog, with photo...

Bjørn Stærk on What Went Wrong?

This introspective essay has been getting a lot of attention by thoughtful people, so I decided to link it. Those of us who have been against the war from the beginning have no need to feel smug now that the ugliness and insanity of the enterprise is slowly but surely being revealed. I feel a little sad for sincere supporters who have come late to the realization that they may have been misguided at best, deceived at worst in their belief that not only was war the best remedy for a multitude of challenges, but that it was being waged with the best of intentions under the command of fully-informed leaders with the loftiest of intentions.

The jumping off point, of course, was September 11, 2001. By waving that bloody shirt the president could take his pick of places to start a war, knowing that no patriotic American would dare question his judgement. Indeed, even I, the essential pacifist dedicated to constructive non-violent engagement whenever possible, took satisfaction in learning that the official response was to be in Afghanistan, the reported hiding place of OBL, perpetrator of the crime. Even though the actual players were from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, our ally, the poisonous cup from which they had been drinking was not from the leadership of that country. In a short time they, too, would discover systemic problems and address them in their own way. But the Afghanistan move was as good as could be expected.

But moving the next piece on the board to Iraq was another matter. No thinking person who knew anything about the situation could imagine any meaningful connection between that secular, totalitarian state and the religious extremism of the Sunni extremists who crafted an attack on the World Trade Center. But the subtlety of the sales pitch, together with the growing levels of patriotic testosterone in the national circulatory system made it easy to aim the cannons a few degrees over to the side and start taking out some more of what were cleverly lumped together as Islamofascists and very soon insurgents.

There aren't many people left who believe that it was a good idea for the US, Britain and their coalition to invade Iraq in 2003. At least fifty thousand Iraqis dead, (or a hundred, or several hundred), maybe two million refugees, and who knows how many more when the Americans finally give up and leave. Supporters of the war have dropped off one by one, for different reasons. Some neo-conservative intellectuals believe that the plan was good, but that George W. Bush screwed it up. There might be something to this. With smarter people in charge, the odds might have been better. But this assumes that a smarter administration would have embraced their plan to invade Iraq in the first place. I don't think it would, and I think the blame belongs with the thinkers who pushed for war, as much as the officials who carried it out.

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I could go on for a long time tracing my own hand-wringing as I watched helplessly the US descent into the Hell of war...the ugliness of torture and the ultimate defense of that savagery by officials in high places, the swelling numbers of civilian casualties carelessly dismissed as collateral damage, despite the fact that every innocent non-combatant killed by the violence left behind a family ripe for recruitment into the ranks of the forces being organized to oppose with growing determination what was fast becoming the occupation, rather than the liberation, of Iraq. Don't let me start...
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Read the essay for yourself. Take a deep breath and read the comments. Finally, if stamina hold out, go to the trackbacks and see what others are saying.
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I do like what he says here:

Here's why I'm frustrated: I'm not sure where all this went wrong. I can look back at what I believed some five years ago, and what motivated me to hope for exactly the kind of thing we now have - a grassroots reaction to the centre-left multicultural consensus, edging steadily in on the mainstream - and I'm not so sure that I was wrong. This idea that it should be ok to discuss Muslim extremism, and make demands of immigrants, and not meet cruel traditions with a tolerant smile, I certainly still believe that. And this rebellious reaction I had to the media consensus, there was nothing wrong with that. And we really do need to revive some liberal and rational strands of thought that somewhat inaccurately go by the name of enlightenment values.

But there must have been something wrong with that starting point, nevertheless, because why else would so many people who adopted it gradually turn it into something distasteful and frigthening? Or maybe it was like that from the beginning, and it just took me a while to notice. However it was, their lack of doubt bothers me now, their self-righteousness and anger, their clear labelling of people as either corrupt enemies or enlightened friends.

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Corrupt enemies or enlightened friends. Indeed so. That is what we call polarization. And that, friends, is where we have gone.

Neuhaus on Schlesinger

The topical thread of Fr. John Neuhaus' discursive column might be the admirable but helpless little virtues of various infidels.

Hirsi Ali, for instance, is admirable for her courage, and (quoting Claire Berlinski) "has opened the eyes of many Europeans to the problems posed by Islam. But it does make her an unlikely—nay, an impossible—candidate for the leadership of any real movement to encourage Islam into modernity and welcome it into the bosom of civilization.”

Pointing to a piece by British historian Keith Thomas last year, he underscores how the discipline of history has morphed from a fairly straightforward generally accepted narrative of events to the convoluted, multi-textured wad of tissue that we see today.

How do the confident predictions and prescriptions of 1966 look now? Some were patently off target. Econometric history has not swept all before it; on the contrary, its intimidating formulae and rebarbative style have been partly responsible for the regrettable lack of interest shown by many of today's historians in economic history of any kind. Social history has not become a central subject around which other branches of history are organized, but has in its turn been overtaken by the newer genre of cultural history. There is more cooperative scholarship and organized research than there used to be, but the "individualist, prima donna tradition", against which the polemicists of 1966 inveighed, is, in the age of stars like Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson, more alive than ever.

On the other hand, the computer has out- performed all expectations. Who in 1966 would have guessed that today's historians would order their library books online, take their laptops to the archives, scroll through searchable databases and become highly dependent upon on such electronic aids as Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century-Collections Online (ECCO)?
[...]
During the past forty years, historians have learned from many other disciplines.

Geographers have taught them to study the physical environment and to map patterns of human settlement. Archaeologists have stimulated students of all periods into looking beyond written sources to the physical remains of the past, whether artefacts, buildings, or landscape. Art historians who have moved from high art to the study of visual culture have fostered a much greater sensitivity to history's visual dimension than was evident forty years ago, when it was highly unusual for a serious history book to carry any illustrations at all, leave alone the coloured ones we expect nowadays.
[...]
Many historians now believe, perhaps rather perversely, that what happened in the past is less important than what people thought had happened. This conviction helps to account for the decline of "hard" economic history. It is also the reason that social history, once envisaged as the detached study of supposedly objective groupings like families, households, communities and classes, has, since the 1980s, been mutating into cultural history, seen as an account of the mental assumptions and linguistic practices of the people involved.

Etc., Etc...

All this is leading to Neuhaus' anecdotal recollections of Schlesinger. Cute, forgettable in the aftermath of his legacy, but inciteful nevertheless.

The obituaries of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. have been surprising straightforward in noting the ways in which he was not a very good historian. His earlier work on, for instance, the age of Jackson (meaning Andrew) was eclipsed by his becoming the “house intellectual” of the John F. Kennedy administration. Yet it was all of a piece. In the 1960s, there was incessant debate on the left about whether it was possible to work for radical change within “the system.” At least for a time, when the system was in sync with where he thought history ought to be going, Arthur Schlesinger was determined to demonstrate a positive answer to that question.
[...]
He exemplified the insouciance of Lionel Trilling, who dismissed conservatism as irritable gestures trying to pass themselves off as ideas. More than that, for Schlesinger conservatism was indelibly tainted by racism, xenophobia, and, most damning of all, anticommunism. It is hard for many to remember today how deeply entrenched was the dogma of anti-anticommunism in the liberalism of those days.

He explains this enigmatic description by noting that he "rejected the ideology of communism and was among those who founded Americans for Democratic Action in order to distance liberalism from the 'Old Left' of the 1930s, which was still very much alive decades later." This was indeed true. I was keenly aware at the time that there was a sharp, unfinished struggle for leadership in progress among the Civil Rights and other student radial movements of the Sixties.

That decade we call The Sixties has been cast as a cohesive historic element casting a long shadow stretching over the next thirty or forty years. Those of us in the midst of it know better. There was nothing cohesive about it. It was a moment of chaos out of which a few important trends emerged. There is little appreciation, even now, of the critical role played at the time by people of faith whose influence and sacrifice protected the Leftward swing in North America from falling into the toxic mixture of ideas that was to become today's morally ambiguous European Left.

As for what we might call the "Global Left" one only has to look at what passes for Democratic trends to see how far afield the flame has burned. The president prates about promoting Democracy, but whenever a majority speaks in most of the world, from Venezuela to Haiti to South Asia to the Middle East, it is the voice of the great unwashed, economically deprived and having no part in a swelling global prosperity widening the gulf between rich and poor. In the end it is not the majority we really want to embrace, but the small number of enlightened leaders who will keep them under control until they internalize the virtues of civilized competition instead of taking what they want by force. Meantime, Global Business is light years ahead of Global Politics, and the movers and shakers of economic systems have learned how best to manipulate whole nations to their respective interests. (This is why the Internet is such a threat in many places. It is no accident that search engines bow to the power of Chinese policy-makers, or that Internet sites are selectively blocked in many parts of the world.)

When contemporary voices from the Right rail about the American Left, they have no clue how much worse it might have become. We have lived to see the emergence of a Conservative movement in America that makes Lionel Trilling's notion of "conservatism as irritable gestures trying to pass themselves off as ideas" downright quaint. A hardened, virtually impenetrable bedrock of belief in simplistic formulae has displaced any idea that there might be a better way to solve problems. Even the most constructive and gentle criticisms are dismissed as irrelevant, so an extremism on the left emerges as the only muscle strong enough to challenge power on the right. I hope to live long enough to see this dialectic return to the center, if for no other reason than the safety and security of my children and grandchildren.

Neuhaus concludes his glance at Schlesinger thus, noting that he "kept the faith" of old-school Liberalism.

Nonetheless, Arthur Schlesinger was a delightful interlocutor. It was simply that he had not had a fresh thought for years. Our last encounter was at Princeton in 2004 at a conference occasioned by the twentieth anniversary of my book The Naked Public Square. I’m not sure he had ever read the book, but he used the occasion of what he understood to be its argument to blast the Bush administration for being the most dangerously religious presidency in American history. He was then age eighty-six and somewhat frail, and the other speakers at the conference were gentle but firm in trying to set him straight. But I had the impression that Schlesinger wasn’t listening. At that point, and for many years before that point, he had made up his mind.

The most striking thing about Arthur Schlesinger, apart from his professorial manner and impish humor, was what seemed to be a lack of intellectual curiosity. The course of a thoroughly secularized liberalism was the trajectory of historical progress, and deviations from it were to be viewed with amused contempt and occasional spurts of anger. Trilling rose above his dismissive aphorism. I’m not sure that Schlesinger ever did. The self-confidence, often indistinguishable from smugness, of the liberal intellectual consensus of the 1940s and 1950s was unshakeable. It all came together with JFK, the star to which Schlesinger hitched his wagon. And he rather poignantly tried to bring it together again in his support of the presidential aspirations of Robert and Edward Kennedy.

Peter (aka geriatric 1927) on BBC Radio

Peter's video #44 is out. Unlike previous productions, this one is dedicated to an audio feed which is a ten-minute interview he granted with BBC Radio. He adds visual interest by a slide show of old pictures, but the show plays out before the end and the rest is just a black screen. Nevertheless, the radio interview is good enough to hold interest. He sees himself as the Grandad image for the You Tube generation. At the end he says he doesn't really know if his own real grandchildren have seen his videos. It's not something they talk about, he says. Of all that he has said, this remark strikes me as the oddest and least believable.

Arthur Schlesinger (1917-2007)

Another great old Liberal is gone. There will be more words written about Schlisinger than anyone can summarize in a blog post, but here are two brief snips that caught my eye.

Arianna Huffington's remembrance underscores Arthur Schlesinger's full embodiment of that old cliche gentleman and scholar.

So the very first person I approached about blogging for HuffPost was Arthur.

He invited me to lunch at the venerable Century Club to discuss it. I arrived to find Arthur and his wonderful wife, Alexandra, already seated at the table.

"What is a blog?" he asked. "And what is blogging?"

So in this bastion of the Old Guard, I found myself explaining to a man who didn't do e-mail, and who considered his fax machine a revolutionary way to communicate, what blogging is. Of course, he got itinstantly -- and almost as quickly agreed. With one proviso: "Can I fax you my blogs?" he said.

"Of course," I replied, since I've never agreed with the purists that it ain't blogging if it's not done on Moveable Type.

And, indeed, his first faxed blog post arrived -- and was posted -- on May 9, 2005, the day HuffPost launched. There was the President of the United States, deriding the Yalta conference as "one of the greatest wrongs of history." -- part and parcel of his ongoing derision of negotiations, diplomacy, and anything but unilateral cowboyism.

Writing in The American Prospect in December, 2004, Arthur Schlesinger showed the firm grasp he had of contemporary events all the way to the end.

In the longer run, the problem is to deal with Ronald Reagan’s excommunication of affirmative government. "Government is not the solution to our problem," Reagan said in his first inaugural address. "Government is the problem." Reaganism rested on two propositions: that government was the root of evil and that, once government was “off the people’s backs,” the free market would solve our problems.

Now it is evident that the free market does not provide health care for millions of our people, does not ensure full employment, does not protect the natural environment, does not improve our schools, does not clean up our inner cities, and does not stop global warming. The very character of these problems calls for a larger measure of public action. This is the intellectual and political challenge that Democratic brain trusters must meet.

The last seventy-two hours have seen global markets shudder, George Soros buying up shares of Halliburton, and the unbelievably tardy beginnings of diplomatic initiatives about Iraq only after the profit margins of Big Oil get put on paper. The so-called "free market" appears to be anything but.

The NY Times obit is a balanced read. It has this cute little snip...

Mr. Schlesinger never stopped seeming like the brightest student in every class, “the eternal Quiz Kid,” in Time magazine’s phrase. He had no advanced degrees, but his scholarly output, not to mention reams of articles for popular publications like TV Guide and Ladies Home Journal, dwarfed those who did. Even as a child he felt a duty to manage conversations, not to say monopolize them.

An article in The New York Times magazine in 1965 told of his mother asking him to be quiet so she could make her point.

“Mother, how can I be quiet if you insist upon making statements that are not factually accurate,” the boy, then 11 or 12, replied.

Blogs Now R.I.P.

Spam has taken out a fine piece of work, Andreas Wacker's Blogs Now.

February 27 2007
BlogsNow has been turned off.Recently the ratio of spam- vs. real blogshas shifted even further.
In order for BlogsNowto continue to create meaningful results I would have to add signifcantly more code for spam detection.
I decided not to do this right now.
Sorry.

This is a loss for me. Another of the small fry drops by the wayside and the big guys go on their merry way. The same thing happened to Scott Furgusson's Pundit Drome. Sigh.

I found out some time ago that technology is great but the internet is far greater than any metric can get a handle on. From time to time I take a look at places like TTLB or Technorati. I'm impressed with what they track, but puzzled by what they miss. I also know personally of several blogs that are essentially dead that are being credited with "links in" or the like, I think because Hoot's Place is on the blogroll, and others that have my blog on their blogroll that go without untracked. Someday the avalanche will slow down and some of the pebbles might start voting after all. We'll see.

Parkour Documentary

Parkour is the (pick one: art, sport, discipline, fad, phenomenon, all of the above...) now going global.
I found a documentary about it that takes about fifty minutes.
Set aside some time and watch it.
It will take your breath away.
Here is the link to my post that started two years ago with the Russian Climbing video. I had no idea what I was watching at the time.
Now I know more and I am very impressed.

Aphorisms -- Oldies but Goodies

I don't do this often, but for some reason these ring true this morning.
I like number twenty.

Pretend you're scanning your email spam...

1. Save the whales. Collect the whole set.
2. A day without sunshine is like night.
3. On the other hand, you have different fingers.
4. 42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.
5. 99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
6. Remember, half the people you know are below average.
7. He who laughs last thinks slowest.
8. Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
9. The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese in the trap.
10. Support bacteria. They're the only culture some people have.
11. A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
12. Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.
13. If you think nobody cares, try missing a couple of payments.
14. How many of you believe in psycho-kinesis? Raise my hand.
15. OK, so what's the speed of dark?
16. When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
17. Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.
18. Every one has a photographic memory. Some just don't have film.
19. How much deeper would the ocean be without sponges?
20. Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
21. What happens if you get scared half to death, twice?
22. I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder.
23. Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?
24. Inside every older person is a younger person wondering, "What the fuck happened?"
25. Just remember -- if the world didn't suck, we would all fall off.
26. Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
27. Life isn't like a box of chocolates . . it's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.

The Fat Lady Sings link.

"Get 'em to pull up their socks" Department

During the last day or two I have come across several unrelated references to poverty in America. No need for me to comment. I've about decided that my comments about poverty are like peeing in the ocean. I have spent most of my working life among the so-called "working poor" and have met with little success preaching the virtues of thrift, wise choices, endurance, everyday politeness and earning more by getting a higher-paying job...

My well-intended advice has been met with indifference on the part of those who might benefit, which includes my own children from time to time. I think the glitter of immediate gratification and easy credit is too much like chocolate when it comes to financial discipline. I wish I had a better attitude about this, but when I see the same mistakes getting the same results and those making them going back for more, I remember how tough it is to stop smoking or drinking, or how very popular lottery tickets are among those at the economic bottom.

Having said all that, I will also not throw in the towel in the quest to raise awareness of social problems in the minds of those who might be in a position to bring about changes. I don't believe government has all the answers, but neither do I worship at the altar of the marketplace, carrying a libertarian torch that says, in essence, "I got mine, so as long as you don't step on my toes, get your own. And if you can't make it, then it's the consequences of your own bad judgement and you deserve what you get."

Here are the links.
Read them and draw your own conclusions.

By the time Deamonte's own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George's County boy died. Washington Post article.

The nation has three-quarters of a million homeless people, filling emergency shelters through the year and spilling into special seasonal shelters in the coldest months, the government said Wednesday. Yahoo News with links.

"Nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty"--a category that includes individuals making less than $5,080 a year, and families of four bringing in less than $9,903 a year. That number, by the way, has been growing rapidly since 2000. New Republic link.

David Kurtz catches the link at Josh Marshall's place.

Fred Clark mentioned it. The comments thread is a study in many angles of the details. Read til you get tired.

hilzoy's commentary is a muckraking treasure. I wish I could write like her. Again, the comments thread is the real goldmine.

Dr. Bob is looking for a way out. I think he's on the right track.

Diplomatic Talks Begin "with an air of nonchalance"

With an air of nonchalance, the Bush administration says now it will meet Iran and Syria in the context of a regional conference aimed at improving security in Iraq.

That's how CFR headlined the scheduled meeting. Nonchalance. I love it.

No one can accuse the administration of not taking enough time to examine a hot horseshoe before dropping it. It may not be "too little, too late," but it's sure damn little, way late. (For those slow on the uptake, the horseshoe is the Iraq war.)

Nur made the best comment I have read.

Well, George Bush is finally desperate enough to negotiate with Syria and Iran in a regional conference on Iraq security. It only took 100,000+ civilian dead, probably half a million wounded, US 3000 KIAs and another 20,000 severely wounded, 3 million refugees and a trillion dollars.

People like us could have produced tremendous savings, but our advice was ignored. Meanwhile, the French and the Russians have been calling for an international conference since late 2003. But some geostratists have been saying it's now too late to do anything that doesn't hand victory to the jihadis, with further destabilization in the Middle East.

As I read this morning's blogposts I came across this by Barkley Rosser (link to his 30-page CV)at Max Speak, You Listen.

The mystery is solved.

It has to do with the "O" word.

While I continue to think that the immediate impetus for the US going into Iraq was more trivial and also misguided, the Cheney faction has clearly long wanted this since his widely quoted remarks in 1999 (it is requoted in the Escobar piece) about US oil companies needing more oil reserves, and Iraq the place to get them. This is clearly a triumph for them, and it is clear that the Bush administration has recently been pushing very hard on this, looking for some kind of gain out of all this mess, and for their pals in Big Oil, this is a huge win, now putting pressure on other oil producing countries to up the current 12% of world oil pumped on the basis of such PSAs.

Quelle surprise!

Addendum, March 6

Not all agree.
The Lounsbury at Aqoul offers another point of view with his customary nuanced subtlety.

The only people who can use this law - once it passes - in the foreseeable future are investors who can operate outside the frameworks of Western governance. No OECD bribery acts or other namby pamby niceness.

In short, China, Iran, and others unconstrained by scruples or the like, and without the risk profile of a Western investor.

Let me bold, No Western Investor in his right motherfucking mind is going to put equity up for anything in Iraq in the next FIVE years. At best. The risk is way outside even the most aggressive zone. And anyone who does, that is Westerner, is going to lose their fucking shirt.

The whankery from the Left morons and the Right dupes is nothing but pure, illiterate idiocy.

As the reader can see, his is the moderate position, neither Left nor Right. Squarely in the middle.
What a gentleman.
But hey, a lot of successful people have not been known for grace. When you swim with sharks and all that...

Amazing Grace -- a review

Amazing Grace, the movie, has been released.

Pejman Yousefzadeh saw the film.

He liked it.

It is easy for us to live our twenty-first century lives and to reassure ourselves that the triumph of William Wilberforce and other abolitionists over the British slave trade was as sure as morning following night. The truth, however, is that the victory of Right over Wrong is always a too close run thing for those who seek to be in the Right. People who are in the Right must always fight scared, if only because the stakes are so high. And in the event that I have not spelled matters out explicitly enough, linger over the next two sentences: No victory over an abomination can be taken for granted, even if those victories follow one after another at a dizzying pace. No triumph can be assumed, even if we sometimes think we have stumbled onto a treasure trove of them.

Victories of Right over Wrong take time. They take effort. They take sweat. They even take lives. There is nothing inevitable about them. And that is how it should be. Because if it were otherwise, then heroism would be devalued. Courage would be an everyday trait instead of an exceedingly rare one. Valor would be as natural as breathing, instead of being a prized and rare quality of the soul. And eloquence in service of the truly noble deed would put people to sleep instead of waking them up.

Tony Badran takedown of Seymour Hersh

Seymour Hersh has released yet another blockbuster article in The New Yorker. A line under the title reads "Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?"

Note the line ends with an interrogation, not an exclamation point. This seems to be a professional writer's touch. It's also a good technique for threading one's way between fact and innuendo. I have come across several references to this article in my reading. A good many smart people follow closely what Hersh says but after reading a different takedown of Seymour Hersh a couple of years ago I always think "salt shaker" when I see the name.

Have I read this most recent piece?
Nope. I will leave that to someone else.
This time it's Tony Badran instead of Chris Suellentrop.

I have enough trouble discovering the truth without having to pick my way through a lot of rhetorical prestidigitation trying to discover what is real and what is suggested. And I say this as someone who deeply wants to believe what he says. No one reading my blog will mistake me for either a supporter of the war or the administration, but throwing a lot of stuff against the wall to see how much will stick is no way to drive home a position.

March 1
Michael J. Totten also noticed. One more nail in the coffin.

Today's New Word: FRENEMY