Thanksgiving story

.

From the Bruderhoff site's Daily Dig, a short story for Thanksgiving.

Lights for Thanksgiving
A Memory from my Missouri Childhood
by Jean Bell Mosley

Dad was always full of plans and projects. Once he took a look at the old kerosene lamps and said, in the broad expansive manner he employed when launching his many and varied campaigns for the betterment of his family, “These old lamps have to go.” His white hair swept back neatly from his forehead and his stance was like Washington crossing the Delaware as he stood there in the old kitchen surveying the lamps. He smiled tolerantly and reminiscently as if they were already on display in a natural setting at some future museum.

“Why, Wilson, whatever on earth do you mean?” Mama asked, stopping her sewing machine only long enough to turn a corner seam. She was making new dresses for Lou and me for the Thanksgiving program at school.

“I mean—” Dad began, and stopped helplessly, waiting for the sewing machine to quiet down again. “I mean we’re going to have gas lights,” he said...

Allah Made Palestinians Funny

Today's most remarkable post is from a secret blog from arabia...
Local Hero is one three contributors to the group blog, listing his favorite Arab-American comedians. [permalink]

For some reason all of these comedians I have seen are Palestinians , but don’t let that put you off ;-)

There are some other guys like Ahmed Ahmed an Egyptian American guy and Indian American called Azhur Usmon who I think are funny as well but u’ll have to google for last guy to his site. Believe me, if you like good comedy it is better to listen to these guys than to sit through any more crap Arab sitcoms or hidden camera programs that you will find on TV. Ya3ny at what point does a guy wearing a batman outfit jumping out in front of an old lady with shopping stop being funny when you have seen the sketch or ones just like it for a hundred times? Arab comedy needs to get a little more sophisticated like their Arab American cousins.

I'm not sure what to make of this post. It doesn't fit with the bleakly serious picture of the Middle East that we are being fed daily. I linked to Ahmed Ahmed and it really is funny!

When JFK was killed

One of those timeless moments in 1963.
Anyone old enough to remember will recall that time stood still. Those memories are frozen with every detail -- when and where we were, how the word was passed and how people around reacted. Later, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and M.L. King would have a similar impact, but it was the death of Jack Kennedy that shook the nation to its roots.

I sometimes think that the Sixties in all their madness were a visceral response to that event. Children who have lost parents are known to internalize that trauma as guilt. At least that was the theory a few years back and the basis of trauma counseling for kids. I have seen it expressed both in movies and real life so there must be something to it. It's an irrational reaction, of course. There is no reason that a child whose parent has died as the result of an accident or medical condition should feel personally responsible, but that is how it is perceived. It was my fault. I was not good enough. I should have done more to protect him or her. I must have done something wrong.

There are cases, though, where the child really did do something to bring about the loss of the parent. Playing with fire, distracting a driver, handling a loaded firearm... In these cases the guilt is earned. The parent really is lost because of the actions of the child. Forgiveness and release does not come as easily in these cases, but "life goes on," such as it is, as the pain of loss fades but never quite disappears. Such was the case of the Sixties.

Some of us glimpsed a better way. We knew there were social habits that had to change. We knew that a war was underway somewhere in South Asia that should not have been started. We knew that conscripting young men for that war was not the same as doing so for World War II. We knew that the government was not being faithful to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And we knew that if we didn't correct these wrongs then we would have to live with the results. Like the child whose horseplay in the back seat caused the death of a parent in a car wreck, we looked at life with exaggerated seriousness. We sought to correct problems in a generation that later we would learn are endemic to the human condition.

In the process we lost our innocence. And like the young person who has smoked the first pack of cigarettes, finished the first bottle of alcohol with his buddies, or waked up after that first night of lovemaking, a whole generation embarked on a decade or so of boundary-testing. We learned the hard way that boundaries serve a practical purpose. We learned that without boundaries there is no order. We learned that role-modeling good behavior is more important to generational development as saying Do as I say, not as I do.

Unfortunately, and this is the legacy of the Clinton years, we learned too late. It took nearly three decades for the Sixties to work its way through the system to become manifest at the highest office in government. Bill Clinton's presidency represents in many ways the culmination of what began in the Sixties, with all the excitement and hopes for the future, but also with its dark underside of moral turpitude. Having been there and done that I now hope that the lessons of that time have been learned and internalized. Unfortunately, it seems politically impossible for anyone to change his mind or behavior without being called a hypocrite. We saw that plainly in the last election with the pathetic and failed attempt of John Kerry to reconcile the contradictions of his past with mandates of the present.

For many of us the last year or two have been deja vu. I know that Iraq is not Vietnam and the attack on the WTC is not the same as Kennedy's assassination. White phosphorus is not the same as napalm and Abu Ghraib is not My Lai. But our behavior as a nation strikes me as inappropriate and irrational as that of the Sixties. I almost said the "children" of the Sixties, but it was not all done by young people. Many of those whom we followed, who guided our behavior, were adults. They were mature, solid, wholesome, responsible adults. Some were already old and would never live to see the results of what they were encouraging, not because they were killed or sacrificed, but simply because they were too old to live that long.

To the degree that adults can make the same mistakes as children, that happened to us as a nation in the Sixties. And in many ways, the same thing is happening again today.

Christmas lights extraordinaire

Carson Williams from Mason Ohio used 88 light-o-rama channels to control his 16,000 Christmas lights...

Thanks Rocketboom.

(Is this blog eclectic or what? Sorry about that. If I can't link to what strikes my fancy, what's the point of blogging? Sometimes I feel as though I'm drowning in a cloud of seriousness and need a break.)

Behavior watch: Old habits don't die. They hibernate.

This is not encouraging news, except for Christians.

Habitual activity--smoking, eating fatty foods, gambling--changes neural activity patterns in a specific region of the brain when habits are formed. These neural patterns created by habit can be changed or altered. But when a stimulus from the old days returns, the dormant pattern can reassert itself, according to a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, putting an individual in a neural state akin to being on autopilot.

So why is this not as problematical for Christians?

There are two reasons. First, and most important, Christians who know and experience the healing power of Christ often lay aside behaviors that have defined their life until the moment of salvation. No need for testimonies here. The New Testament is already full of them. And so are most churches.

Second, there is a teaching that we are to "take captive every thought," which may have been one of St. Paul's most valuable insights into human behavior. It's not news: nearly all behavior begins by thinking about it. What we do with an idea determines our behavior. We have little control over what happens to us, but a lot of control over how we respond.

If the Devil made you do it, you blew it.

Web 2.0 is Google

It's happening. Google seems to be morphing into the Next Big Thing, eating what we now think of as the internet. Top site this morning on Blogsnow. (Actually second after Zarqawi, but that's not as much fun.)

Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.

Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering
ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.
[...]
There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a thousand ways -- most of them not even envisioned by Google) there's suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business. That's the goal.

All this is based, of course, on Google's proven network and hardware expertise. Have you seen Google's Search Appliance? They ship you a 1U prebuilt server. You connect it to your network, fill out a simple configuration screen, and it scans and indexes your web site (or sites) for you. Google monitors and manages it remotely, and sucks up the data and adds it to theirs. You just plug the thing in and turn it on. It just works. You need do nothing else to keep it running. Google understands how to do this stuff. Microsoft definitely does not.
[...]

There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies. ISPs, which we've thought of as a threatened species, won't be touched, but then their profit margins are so low they aren't worth touching. After all, Wal-Mart doesn't try to own the roads its goods are carried over. And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google.

Microsoft can't compete. Yahoo probably can't compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That's less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year.

Game over.

So who is Robert X. Cringley?

When it comes to information technology, I know what I am talking about. Twenty years in and around the PC business have earned me wisdom, if not wealth. It's not that I am so smart, but that my friends are smart. The best and brightest in Silicon Valley talk to me all the time. It's my job to sift through their thoughts for valuable bits to share with you. But wait, if I am so great, why is this service free? Good question! Maybe it's time to renegotiate my contract with PBS.

RTWT. More fun than stomping baby chickens.

H5N1 Must read

From Canada's Globe and Mail, tip to the H5N1 Blog...
Salvation's Army

"Everyone who works at Mount Sinai during the pandemic will receive Tamiflu as a prophylactic," he says. But then he adds that "it might be that there is just not enough of the drug available."

All of a sudden, hands start shooting up like exclamation points.

One father wants to know if he should buy a $70 respirator from Home Depot for his asthmatic kids; a woman asks how much she should stockpile. Gradually, a fine, almost invisible mist of concern rises in the auditorium.

As Dr. Low says, everyone's greatest concern at the hospital during SARS was "taking it home to their families. And that's going to be one of the things in a pandemic."

If you thought the recent rioting in France was bad, wait until there's not enough Tamiflu to go around in a pandemic.

Heavy-duty stuff here, folks.
Serious reading. Very well-written.
Too long to read from the monitor. Printed out it takes six or seven pages. It won't be wasted ink or paper. You can pass it on to somebody who needs to know.
Do it now, read it later when you can pay attention.

Hospitals are grave places, after all, and Leslie Vincent has worked in them (as a cancer nurse, no less) for 30 years, ever since she began her nursing studies at McGill University at the age of 16. "When you're a nurse," Ms. Vincent says, "and you're helping someone who's dying to get in and out of bed every day, you feel their weakness. You experience them getting weaker every day."

But these difficulties never stop her. She can't change the fact that people die, but she can do something about how they die. This approach had helped her to the top of Mount Sinai, where she's senior vice-president of nursing — 1,200 employees, a budget of $115-million, a salary pushing a quarter of a million dollars a year. Not that the money matters that much to her: She still brings her lunch to work. She is still the chief nurse of the hospital.

During the SARS epidemic that made Mount Sinai world-famous, Ms. Vincent had to tell her employees that the hospital was taking in its own staff as SARS patients. It was one of the hardest days of her entire career.

So it is a matter of some note when Leslie Vincent, the salt of the nursing earth, is
scared by the thought of a flu pandemic. The problem is that the bird flu is so confounding, she's not sure this time any of them can make a difference.

It's not just the million practical details of preparing a hospital for an inevitable pandemic — whether there are enough ventilators (probably not), how the infected should be admitted (a flow-chart job no one wants), the gruesome issue of morgue overflow, or even the basic question of how to decide when a pandemic has actually begun.

Susan Poutanen, a microbiologist and infectious-disease consultant who is the vice-chairman of the flu committee, reminds everyone that they have already decided that rather than "relying on the Ministry of Health's stockpiles of Tamiflu, given the quantity that would be available to us from the ministry, it would be prudent for us to consider stockpiling our own" — i.e., the government's 12.4 million doses, which would treat a million people, aren't enough, so it's every hospital, business and essential service for itself.

It's a reasonable precaution: If hospital workers get sick, we're all finished.

Singing unlocks the brain

"The first time we went to Singing for the Brain he did not join in. On the second session he was starting to join in and by the third he was thoroughly taking part.

"It was wonderful for us. The singing had started to change something. It really did make a tremendous difference. He started to come out of himself.

"His personality started to change and he became much as he was before, and he was able to hold a conversation.

"He is 82 and likes all the old-time
songs, but he also started singing some Beatles songs and songs from the Broadway shows and even some modern stuff as well.

"He seemed to be able to slowly learn things again. I would take the song sheets home after the sessions and we would sing them at home. It enlivened him and he really enjoyed doing it."

From BBC News via 3QuarksDaily...

There are so many people I would like to target with music lessons I don't know where to start. Besides, it would be a cheap shot.

God save the queen!

This is probably old, but I haven't seen it before. Still cute.

To the citizens of the United States of America

In light of your failure to elect a competent President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen ElizabethII will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, andterritories (excepting Kansas, which she does not fancy).

Your new prime minister, Tony Blair, will appoint a governor for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rulesare introduced with immediate effect: (You should look up "revocation" inthe Oxford English Dictionary.)

1. Then look up aluminium, and check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.

2. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'favour' and 'neighbour.' Likewise, you will learn to spell 'doughnut' without skipping half the letters, and the suffix ize will be replaced by the suffix ise.

Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. (look up vocabulary).

There is a string of items ending with Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 pm with proper cups, never mugs, with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes; strawberries in season.

Check the first comment which has a reply from the president declining the offer and informing Her Majesty that the US is undertaking a leveraged buyout of the United Kingdom.
Funny stuff.

Secret Dubai Diary

That's the name of the blog, Secret Dubai Dairy. Not very secret on the internet, but the name tells something of how cautious one sometimes needs to be. The writing is delicious. I have an image of a place awash with money where citizens flush with the luxuries of oil wealth are the top crust of a society teeming with foriegners who are the nuts and bolts of everyday living.

Life on the road

For the past car-less week, due to a severe let-down by Lease-A-Lambo, a peasant-like existence has taken place of trekking daily through the jungles around Cell Block G to forage food and water from Ibn Battuta.

A colleague, horrified by this Kiplingesque existence, passed on the name of an insider at CheapiCar. Just days after faxing several hundred documents and identity cards over to them, a gleaming Silver Shadow was delivered to the gulag.

Freedom to roam again at last! To ride the wild roads of Sheikh Zayed once more, racing past sluggish white Nissan Sunnies as sheikhmobiles fly up the hard shoulder in a cloud of dust. Being able to snooze peacefully in the late afternoon at the wheel of the Shadow, as it rests in hour-long stationary gridlock.

Driving past the great sights of Dubai: the post-apocalyptic concrete monoliths of Jumeirah Beach Residence with their glittering, clanking cranes; the beautifully landscaped Beach Road with its lovely sandy trenches, lane closures, myriad plastic cones and glorious netting barriers lining each side; the white-trash-christmas flashing neon artificial ski slope at Emirates Mall.

Oh, the joys of driving in Dubai.

Very poetic and descriptive. I imagine that indicates at least a small dose of Western education. The blogroll is another feeding place I have not yet tasted.
Thanks secret blog from arabia for the link.

Saturday radio blogging, Writer's Almanac

Garrison Keillor's little five-minute radio spot is one of the few programs that I take a moment to listen to attentively, even in the middle of a conversation. There are few predictable diversions giving so much reward, having a beginning and end in the space of a few minutes.

Today we are reminded that Abe Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was delivered November 19, 1863. Keillor's remembrance and tribute are worth a few minutes of your time as well. If you don't have the time or inclination to read, there is a link to the audio.

It was a foggy, cold morning on this day in 1863. Lincoln arrived about 10 a.m. Around noon the sun broke out as the crowds gathered on a hill overlooking the battlefield. A military band played, a local preacher offered a long prayer, and the headlining orator Edward Everett spoke for over two hours, describing the Battle of Gettysburg in great detail, and he brought the audience to tears more than once.

When Everett was finished, Lincoln got up, and pulled his speech from his coat pocket. It consisted of ten sentences, a total of 272 words. Lincoln did not mention any of the specifics of the war or any of the details of the battle of Gettysburg. He did not mention the North or the South. He did not mention slavery. Instead, he explained, in ordinary language, that our nation was founded on the idea that all men are created equal, and that we must continue to fight for that principle, in honor of those who have died fighting for it.

Unfortunately for Lincoln, the audience was distracted by a photographer setting up his camera, and by the time Lincoln had finished his speech and sat down the audience didn't even realize he had spoken. Lincoln was disappointed in his performance, but the next day Edward Everett told the President, "I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." The speech was reprinted in newspapers around the country, and it went on to become one of the most famous speeches in American history.

It would be tacky to point out the parallels between that tragic time and events of our own time, but the similarities bear thinking about. We are again engaged in a great civil war, but this time it is that of another country. Today's cost in casualties is very small compared with the tens of thousands of past wars. The Battle of Gettysburg alone took the lives of six or seven thousand men. I suppose civilization is creeping along, but there is a long, long way to go.

As an aside, the current debate over torture and atrocities can be put into historical perspective by knowing what has occurred in past wars. Lest we too quickly point the finger at our enemies, it would be wise to take a look at some of our own dirty linen. And I'm not referring to today's despicable but historically unremarkable reports.

Last year Donald Sensing did some research following the release of the movie version of Cold Mountain, coming upon some pretty disturbing history from our own Civil War era.

I am sort of a stickler for historical accuracy in movies that derive the context from history. I found the Home Guard portrayals very offputting. (Other Home Guard detachments of the state hound Inman as he makes his way home.) I had never read of such brutalities being done by during the war by Confederate states to their own people, and reacted to this part of the move - and a major part it is - with scorn. This, I thought, was a fatal flaw of the story. While I had no doubt that Confederate authorities did try to capture deserters, I dismissed the idea that Home Guard "brownshirts" ever had the authority simply to shoot down deserters on the roadside or savage Southern civilian families. So I Googled "confederate home guard" today. And discovered Cold Mountain is accurate. Consider:

Allen Lowery was born 1795 in Robeson County, NC. He died 9 Mar 1865 in Robeson County, NC from Shot to Death by the Robeson County Home Guard and was buried in Lowery family cemetery near Pembroke, NC.

... Allen and his son (William) was killed by the Robeson County Confederate Home Guard, because they where believed to have helped Union soldiers during the Civil War.

Confederate deserter Henry Tucker joined the Union forces following bad treatment by the Alabama Home Guard for failing to respond to the "callup" for men to fight for the Confederacy. He made the mistake of coming home for a visit where he was caught...

... arrested by the Home Guard at his home in Marion County and tortured to death. He was tied to a tree, castrated, his eyes removed and his tongue cut out before he was literally skinned alive. He is buried at Hopewell Cemetery, south of Glen Allen, Ala.

But Tucker's vicious death was avenged. Home Guard leader Stoke Roberts who personally directed the torture of Tucker, was eventually caught by a group of unionists near Winfield. They took a long iron spike and drove it through his mouth and out the back of his head and nailed him to the root of a big oak tree.

We can be in denial, but there are apples today (uh, acorns?) that didn't fall too far from that tree.

Pop Quiz

Don't peek.
Here is a quote.
Identify the time (to the nearest year) and source of the quote:

It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.

Answer here.
Thanks to The Duck of Minerva

It's time

Blogsnow is no more political than an outdoor thermometer telling you from the comfort of your kitchen that the temperature outside is cold as ice. Right now (5:00 am) the top hit-collecting sites all link to the same story: Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha, retired Marine colonel and thirty-one year representative to Congress, says it is time to end the war in Iraq. It is revealing that he is being attacked, not because of his arguments but because of his politics.

...a statement issued Thursday night by Bush spokesman Scott McClellan compared Murtha with anti-war filmmaker Michael Moore and echoed earlier statements by House GOP leaders in accusing him of "surrender."
And Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, blasted Murtha for his comments.
"It is clear that [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi's top lieutenant on armed services, Rep. Murtha, and Democratic leaders have adopted a policy of cut-and-run," Hastert said in a statement. "They would prefer that the United States surrender to the terrorists who would harm innocent Americans."

U.S. Congressman = Michael Moore. Interesting comment. "Prefer surrender...cut and run..." Hmm. I don't think that's what I read.

The press release from Congressman Murtha's office is top-linked.
If you want to see what all the fuss is about you might want to take time to read it. My guess is, however, that most of us already have our minds made up, so reading anything more would be a waste of energy. In all that I have read, I have seen very few instances of anyone's admitting to a changed mind about the war.

#01 Congressman John Murtha - Pennsylvania's 12th Congressional District - Press Releases
74 links · 13 hours

Followed by...

#04 Hawkish Democrat Calls for Iraq Pullout - Yahoo! News
65 links · 13 hours

#06 CNN.com - Senior Democrat calls for U.S. troops to leave Iraq - Nov 17, 2005
52 links · 13 hours

#10 The Stakeholder:: Murtha in Full
35 links · 8 hours

#16 Crooks and Liars
31 links · 7 hours

#26 Hawkish Democrat Calls for Iraq Pullout - Yahoo! News
20 links · 2 hours

#28 Pro-Defense Democrat Calls for Immediate Troop Withdrawal
24 links · 8 hours

To be fair, a number of links are also climbing the chart criticising Murtha's remarks.

#38 Instapundit.com -
17 links · 3 hours

Take the stripes of your flag and give us the stars...

You can tell when a post wells up from the heart. Sometimes it's between the lines, sometimes it's in your face. This one's in your face. The writer is a hybrid whose gentle voice is uniquely balanced in a world of polarized extremes.

The Dove's father is a Lebanese Christian immigrant, with relatives spread out from Lebanon to Australia. Her mother is a Southern WASP whose family lives in Virginia, Texas and other parts. The Dove's father's Christian Lebanese village is right next door to a Muslim Palestinian refugee camp, built on what was once our family farmland. The Dove is married to a wonderful man who does bear a Scottish surname but is halachically Jewish, via his lovely mother, who has a large and supportive family. The Dove herself grew up in the Midwest and South, but spent many long summers and one school year in Lebanon as a child; also lived in Cairo, Egypt for a junior year in college. Full disclosure: a 4 year marriage to a Muslim Egyptian in her 20s gave her an inside view into upper class Cairene families, and an appreciation for secular modern Muslims and their relationship to Islam.

Her posts are quiet and infrequent, but always deeply sincere. She was in class when a poem overtook her emotions.

So I'm reading this and crying, and somebody passes me a kleenex, and when the poem is over we talk about it and I pull myself together, but then we go on a break and I walk down the hall and find a student lounge where I put my face between a bookshelf and the wall and weep.

I got put down pretty hard first thing this morning and don't quite know how to respond. We pacifists are a pretty wimpy lot.
Thank God.

A gathering of hens in a foxden

From the Aardvark, Mark Lynch...

I've written many times about Tunisia's horrific record on press freedoms, and the absurdity of its being the host for the World Summit on the Information Society (or of America's Middle East Partnership Initiative, but that's another story).
Well, the WSIS is nigh, the Tunisian authorities are playing to form (they actually banned the director of Reporters Without Borders from attending), and now's the time for activists to turn the spotlight on the regime. Ethan Zuckerman is on his way there, and Global Voices Online should have regular roundups.

That's okay, though.
We already know about that. ["Tunisia has been a voice for moderation. Tunisia has been a voice for regional harmony. Tunisia has been a voice for putting effort and resources into development rather than wasting them on arms races or conflict or weapons of mass destruction." Richard Boucher for the State Department.]
It's our fox.

Excellent Flu/Pandemic policy proposals

Tyler Cowen has put together a forty-page national policy proposal for coping with a possible pandemic. It begins sensibly with an obvious reality deriving from our past experience with "Swine" Flu and others that turned out to be less dramatic than advertised:

The single most important thing we can do for a pandemic--whether avian flu or not--is to have well-prepared local health care systems. We should prepare for pandemics in ways that are politically sustainable and remain useful even if an avian flu pandemic does not occur.

A quick look at history will reveal that those who have raised concerns have been punished for having done so when their concerns proved to be only that: concerns. This is an obvious mistake to be avoided.

The rest is equally compelling. Lets hope this proposal gets serious study backed by action at the federal, state and local levels.

War spinning

The debate drones on and on...How and why did the war start? Intel? WMD? Whatever...
E.J.Dionne Jr. has two cents worth that is pretty good. He compares and contrasts the very different ways the two Presidents Bush handled the politics of going to war. Here's how it ends:

The bad faith of Bush's current argument is staggering. He wants to say that the "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate" who "voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power" thereby gave up their right to question his use of intelligence forever after. But he does not want to acknowledge that he forced the war vote to take place under circumstances that guaranteed the minimum amount of reflection and debate, and that opened anyone who dared question his policies to charges, right before an election, that they were soft on Hussein.

By linking the war on terrorism to a partisan war against Democrats, Bush undercut his capacity to lead the nation in this fight. And by resorting to partisan attacks again last week, Bush only reminded us of the shameful circumstances in which the whole thing started.

I'm waiting for someone to raise a more obvious question:
Regardless of how and why the US got into Iraq...Why. Are. We. Still. There ???

Dan Drezner provides part of the answer in a dense but inciteful post reacting to Mark Lynch. Policy wonks are interested. I find the comments of both men to be smart, important, timely and understandable.

Returning to my question above, we are still in Iraq partly because the academic community, think tanks and policy advisors who make the best decisions do so with a lot more circumspection than the political types who create the problems. See Dionne's essay cited above. Waiting for clear thinking to penetrate the thick skulls we put into office takes time. Lots of time.

Holiday Recipes

Okay, I promise not to become yet another recipe and cooking blog.
But a career in the food business does something to your head when it comes to recipes. I'm like Columbo when he said "I dunno...maybe it's the line of work I'm in...every time I get around a dead body I think somebody killed it..."

Anyway, I found this page of recipe links that looks good. They came via Fr. Karl at Summa Contra Mundum, my one and only Byzantine Catholic link. I haven't done any of them, but I have read enough recipes and done enough cooking that I can tell you they look okay to me.
Never saw a Shepherds Pie with veggie burgers and walnuts, but it sounds like a great idea if you need a meatless entree. Stuffing bell peppers with beans and chilies, and flavoring with cumin also sounds like a good idea.

Okay, I got that out of my system.
Back to other things...

A native son speaks out against terrorism

The Muslims cannot allow America to fight this war on terror, because it is in essence a war against us. It is the Muslims who need to wage jihad against Al Qa3da ,because America and the West are incapable of differentiating between civilians and combatants or Islam and terrorism. We cannot blame them for this confusion because it seems like our own Ummah (the entire Muslim population)cannot tell the difference either.

...[Bid3ah]...
The biggest sin in Islam is a thing called Bid3ah (innovation). All changes (bid3ah) to how our religion is to be practiced from that of the way our Prophet prescribed for us will ‘lead to the hell fire.’ Jihad is not a bid3ah and as Muslims we should be prepared to fight and kill to protect our religion and our lands…BUT Terrorism IS a bid3ah. There are strict rules of engagement to fighting Jihad that our Prophet Mohamed recommended for us:
1) Women and children are not allowed to be killed. This is a bid3ah.
2) Only Allah is allowed to take human life with fire. Suicide bombings are a bid3ah.
3) It is not permissible to spill the blood of another Muslim. This is a bid3ah.
4) Murder is 100% illegal in Islam. To do this and then ascribe it to our religion is perhaps the worst bid3ah.

It is time Muslims got on the offensive and took the war too Al Qa3da ourselves. We cannot allow America to fight this war for us because she doesn’t care for us. This war on terrorism is not about Us or Them as that idiot Bush said. It is simply about us ...and the Iraq situation is not going to remain contained. That family slaughter in Jordan is proof that we are all at risk and should be our wake up call...

A breath of fresh air in a smothering environment. Praise the Lord! Praise God! Praise the Prophet!
Read, inhale and rejoice!

New blog, a secret blog from arabia... started in July, via Aquol.

Paying the rent by blogging

I may presume too much, but I don't think so. Looks like Andrew Sullivan may be. (Thanks, Peaktalk.)

I'm glad to say that in the near future, this blog will have a new home. We're moving to Time.com's home-page and will be hosted by their server...The blog has gotten far bigger than I originally believed possible - and much bigger than I want to handle on my own. Time.com, with all sorts of internet links, technical support and a huge potential audience, will, I hope, make this blog more accessible to more people, bring more advertizing and marketing to the site, and take the blog to a new level of exposure...I will continue to write simply what I believe or think, however misguided I may be. ... the essence of the blog won't change. You will still like it for the same reasons or hate it for the same reasons; or, as many of you keep telling me, both.

Rootkit explained...updated before the next day!

What?
Rootkit?
Never heard of it. Well now you have, and so have I.
A couple of weeks ago blogsnow reported a lot of activity at a technical site so full of geektalk that I couldn't read it. My buddy Bob explained it in a line or two and described the high level of techie interest as "flies over molasses," a wonderful image that I have to remember to use.

Here is a Crooked Timber post that goes into more detail and reveals now cd's now can plant programming features into Windows software leaving the system vulnerable to other, less-benign invasive attacks.

It’s bad enough that Sony would do this without giving users adequate notification. But the system they used – licensed from a company called First 4 Internet – did this in a particularly clunky way. Any file starting with the prefix $sys$ would also be hidden from the operating system, leaving the computer open to other hacks that would themselves be hidden.

Additional information update...

I was a bit breezy with my post. BoingBoing, which originally broke the story, says the problem is more serious than first thought. Ed Felten reports on his blog:

Alex Halderman and I have confirmed that Sony’s Web-based XCP uninstallation utility exposes users to serious security risk. Under at least some circumstances, running Sony’s Web-based uninstaller opens a huge security hole on your computer. We have a working demonstration exploit.

We are working furiously to nail down the details and will report our results here as
soon as we can.

In the meantime, we recommend strongly against downloading or running Sony’s Web-based XCP uninstaller.

Saudi teacher jailed for mocking religion

Probably teaching evolution as well.

H/T Crossroads Arabia

Four little stories from Abu Khaleel

Blog-friend Abu Khaleel shares four anecdotes. There is a lot to be learned by listening and reading between the lines.

.

Illiterates with Mobile 'Phones

Sometime ago, I met a farmer who was an old, illiterate man. He had a mobile ‘phone. I asked how he managed to use it. He said that it was quite simple. Some of his children stored his contacts for him on the ‘phone. He would fumble with the keypad and make a call to anybody at random. He would then ask whoever he was calling to pass on his message to the one he had in mind! Usually the one he was trying to call would call back… making the phone call also less costly!

Go read the others.

Laura Rozen on WSJ and torture

This is one I want to capture. She says it all.

WSJ editorial board comes out for torture. I wish I had 100 WSJ subscriptions to cancel. Appalling and history's scum. I will never post another WSJ story here. Ever. Even their website outreach guy sends me about 3 emails a day with their stories. Save it for the the pro-torture media. Can we get the WSJ advertisers to sign off on the next batch of Abu Ghraib photos to be released? Maybe there are particular techniques they'd like to weigh in on? Yes on humiliating and degrading, no on organ failure? Yes on child rape and using guard dogs on detainees, no on holding the chain of command responsible? Yes on gulags in Eastern Europe? I'd like to hear the advertisers weigh in on what they think seems reasonable and how they'd like to be associated with the forthcoming releases.

Update: Rereading this editorial, the content is so awful, but it's written in that
typical let's be reasonable, contrary to what you've been hearing and taught at church, the kind of torture we're doing is really the only way to win the war. Honestly, this one should be saved for the history books, like those photos of lynching, about a low point in American history. The WSJ editors should truly be ashamed of themselves. And I hope the advertisers are ashamed of their association with such views that do not befit a first world country, or a democracy.

Back in February I was afraid the torture discussion would be swept under the rug. Those of us of the lunatic fringe are forever being swept aside in the name of "common sense" or "utopian thinking" or "zealous over-reactions." We get used to it after a while. In my case, it is almost a way of life. I have had ideas and opinions dismissed so often that when I find someone in agreement with what I have said about a "controversial" subject I wonder I might have failed to make myself clear!

Sometimes, though, we hit pay dirt. Sometimes there is a soft spot in the armor and we are able to penetrate just a little. In the case of the torture question, that "just a little" comes in the form of a Senatorial initiative from none other than John McCain, inspired by the letter of Capt. Fishback, advancing the notion that the US should have a clear and unambiguous policy against the use of torture. Period.

One would think that such a proposal would be as routine as passing a pork-laden highway bill to be signed by the president without further ado. But there is a snag. Seems there are people in high places that don't want to go along with such a clear and all-encompassing official. They use words like "rarely used" and "in some cases" to leave space for those times that torture -- and that is exactly what we are talking about -- is to be officially used.

Enough of that. The public debate is up and running. Smarter people than I are carrying the torch now and I can direct my attention to another related point that has started to come clear in my mind just today. This post is not the place to elaborate on that point, but I feel vindicated that a serious debate is now under way about torture. Here's another reference.

There remains the matter of trading war images for pornography which is related to a lack of leadership in professional expectations. I have learned in life that the tail cannot wag the dog. The same leadership that finds a way to permit torture will consider trading war pictures for porn to be a trivial matter, not an indication that a moral compass needs replacement. These stories could not compete with two hurricanes. Let's hope the ticking Libby bomb will remain out of the spotlight long enough that a meaningful policy against torture can make its way through Congress. We can hope that a veto-proof majority will not be required, but who knows?

The Little Showgirl

Go now and look at this picture.
It will only take a moment (unless you let yourself get trapped looking at others, but for now, this one is worth your time).
When you get there, toggle Function 11 [F11] to get rid of toolbars.
Click on the image to get just the picture.
Now find the icon that enlarges the image to fill the screen.
Enjoy.

Blog takedown...big one

Blog: The word "blog" is literally shorthand for "boring;" a vulgar, overused word that strikes your ear with the dull thud of a cudgel to the soft spot of a child. It's an abbreviation used by journalism drop outs to give legitimacy to their shallow opinions and amateur photography that seems to be permanently stuck in first draft hell. Looking in the archives of the blogs, one would expect someone who has been at it for years to slowly hone their craft and improve their writing and photographs, since it's usually safe to assume that if someone does something long enough, he or she will eventually not suck at it. Even with lowered expectations, you'll get a shotgun blast of disappointment in your face.
It's an unspoken rule that every blog must use the same layout as every other blog: long, slender columns of annoyingly condensed text, thousands of links to other blogs, plugs for shitty political books, and more links to yet more blogs...

Maddox, who modestly calls his site The Best Page in the Universe, has been doing his thing about as long as the internets have been in business. The Archive starts at 1998 and a quick glance indicates that he is not losing any steam as the years go by. In fact he is writing a book and there are a couple of fan sites.

I have missed Rachel Lucas. This site will be a suitable replacement for her in my somewhat eclectic reading diet. I think it is important to have a standard of extreme excellence in ranting and harsh commentary in order to keep the rest of the world in proper perspective. That's why I listen to talk radio and read politically conservative websites. If Ambrose Bierce were writing today, I imagine his output might look something like Maddox.

Fragile Reader Advisory: Profanity, Insensitivity, Insults and Occasional Rough Graphics abound at this site. In the same way that you go to the park to walk the dog, enjoy sunshine and pleasant breezes or watch children play...you can go here to work out your frustrations.

If you are an ordinary person who goes to a gym you will see examples of other human beings who look like Grecian statues. They make you want never to go near a mirror again. This site is like that. It lets you know that no matter how frustrated you thought you were, there is a person out there whose frustrations and talent for describing them is just under the gift of Thomas Jefferson who created Monticello in an otherwise savage American Frontier.

Today's link is directed at blogs and blogging everywhere. I feel embarrassed that it has been out there since July and I am just finding it. He has something smart-assed to say about Bloggers, Blogged, Blogosphere, Blogomania, Blogroll, Blogshare, Blogstorm, Blog Swarm, Blogging community, Blawg, Blogumentary, Blogebrity...and the list goes on.

Here's a couple of samples:

Photoblog: Photoblogs make me yearn for the day when cameras weren't digital, film cost money, and it took time to develop pictures. I remember back when it wasn't easy for any random asshole with a camera to go out take countless pictures of nothing. Nothing is exactly what these pictures are of. No focus, no theme, no message, no posturing. Just countless pictures of Denny's at 2 AM. We don't care that you went to Denny's. You're not an artist. You're not deep. Get a new hobby.

Warblog: A blog that primarily deals with war. Filled with whiny blow hards who are fixated on their stubborn ideas and conspiracy theories. For example, there are countless hours pissed away by conspiracy theorists who think the WTC towers were demolished by bombs planted by the government. These armchair engineers write endlessly about how the physics of the collapse was impossible, how the temperature wasn't hot enough to melt steel, and how the planes were carrying missiles. Of course, the one thing they don't postulate is a REASON. My personal favorite warblog was one that had a flash animation with people who were quoted as saying "it didn't sound like a plane to me... it sounded like a missile." Thank you Joe Nobody for giving me your expert opinion on what missile sounds like, because gas station superintendents are usually the best people to ask about the sonic signature of ballistic missile thrust.

This one I especially liked:

Liberal media: Whiny, bitching, cry-baby conservatives love to prattle on and on about the "liberal media." To be fair, except for FOX News (Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, John Gibson, Neil Cavuto, Steve Doocy, E.D. Hill, Brian Kilmeade, Brit Hume), Clear Channel, Laura Ingraham, Dr. Laura, Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, Ann Coulter, Newsmax, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan, Michael Savage, The New York Post, Sinclair Broadcast Group (WLOS13, Fox 45, WTTO21, WB49, KGAN, WICD, WICS, WCHS, WVAH, WTAT, WSTR, WSYX, WTTE, WKEF, WRGT, KDSM,WSMH, WXLV, WURN, KVWB, KFBT, WDKY, WMSN, WVTV, WEAR, WZTV, KOTH, WYZZ, WPGH, WGME, WLFL, WRLH, WUHF, KABB, WGGB, WSYT, WTTA), David Horowitz, Rupert Murdoch, PAX, and MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, they're right.

I see WGBH in Boston and Minnesota Public Radio didn't make the list. It reminded me of a similar piece I came across a few months ago. (He probably doesn't want to get credit for it, but hat tip to Josh Claybourn for the link.)

Good story for the weekend

Read this:

The parents of a Palestinian boy killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank have donated his organs for use in Israel, in the hope of promoting peace.

Now this:

The vital organs of a Palestinian boy mistakenly killed by the Israel Defense Forces last week have been transplanted into the bodies of six Israelis, after the boy's family donated his organs "for the sake of peace between peoples," Israel Radio reported.

And this:

JENIN: The organs of a Palestinian boy killed by Israeli troops have been used for transplants in Israel, after his family donated them voicing hope that the life-saving gesture could bring peace a little closer.

That's the same story from three sources: Arab, Jewish and the Beeb.

I just learned about it from Rafah Pundits. Their version concludes:

...the Israeli army spokespersons announced that their troops have accidentally killed a Palestinian boy in the city of Jenin during a military operation. They claimed that the victim was mistaken by sniper from the army unit, who thought that the boy was an armed Palestinian man pointing a gun at the operating troops.

Ahmad’s parents were greatly devastated by the killing of their only son, but they decided to do something which really shocked the Palestinians, maybe the Israelis and probably the whole world. In fact, his parents decided to donate his body organs to Rimbam Hospital in Haifa City in Israel. In a very emotional statement to the Al-Quds local newspaper, Ahmad’s mother said:

"We decided to donate our son’s body organs to an Israeli hospital in order to help ill Israeli children to survive. Israel must understand that despite our son’s cold-blooded killing at the hands of an Israeli soldier, the family is absolutely determined to convey a message to his killer and to the rest of the army that you have wasted and continue to waste our lives, however we are humans and we appreciate life and will do anything to give life to other children"

Ahmed’s father said the family made the decision to donate his son’s organs

"For the sake of the world’s children and the children of this country. Ahmad’s body organs will be transplanted to a total of six children patients, including Israelis, Druze and an Israeli-Arab girl who had been waiting for heart replacement Surgery for over five years"

This is a great story. It has been picked up all over the place. Take your pick. Read about it, blog about it, e-mail it and pass it on.

If peace and reconcilliation were pursued as vigorously as hostility and conflict the world could become a better place.

Pretty naive on my part, huh?

Baheyya makes me want to know more about Egyptian politics

Yes, they have elections in Egypt.
No, not everybody votes.
Does that ever happen in America, land of the free, home of the brave, defender of democracy?
Well, sometimes. (Like last Tuesday?)

Egyptians are apathetic and don’t care to vote. This is the mother of all myths, unthinkingly parroted so many times by so many people that it’s sickening. Apathy is an atrocious little weasel word, invoked by the lazy and ignorant to “explain” that which they do not understand, and in the process feel all superior about themselves. Please pause for a second and think this one through. To judge “apathy,” one would have to clamber into people’s brains and look inside, now wouldn't one? Short of that, how do we really gauge whether someone is apathetic or not? I’d love to know. That Egyptians don’t care to vote is as clear as day, but whence comes the notion that this is due to “apathy”?

How can we really know what Egyptians are thinking or feeling about politics? I don’t trust any polling outfit in this country, such as they are, so even if pollsters went around door to door asking people how they feel about politics, that would never capture Egyptians’ complex mixture of extreme astuteness about and extreme distrust of politics. Again, why on earth would anyone package this under the simpleton rubric of ‘apathy’? That Egyptians distrust or even hate their politicians is one thing, that they are apathetic is to claim something else entirely. The interesting facts to learn are not why Egyptians don’t vote in an often violent and rigged process, but what they do to evade, surmount, or work with this distorted reality.

One highly underappreciated way to gauge this is to observe the details of candidate-constituent links in different constituencies at different stages of the vote. Such linkages can be clientelistic, charismatic, or programmatic. They can be all three at the same time. If they’re purely clientelistic, then we shouldn’t moan and wail about it but try to understand the nature of the relationship. Far from evincing apathy, many Egyptians seem exceptionally mobilised during election time, even if in purely clientelistic terms....

Election time offers opportunities for candidates to interact with and woo district residents. Vote-buying surely occurs, as preliminary accounts of the first round of voting are already making clear. But other ties are also possible. Residents may identify with an underdog or someone who stands up to rotten local bosses. Residents may be attracted by the appeal of a particular idea, e.g. “Islam is the Solution.” Residents may simply vote for one candidate to spite or protest against another. Even if candidates run entirely quixotic campaigns, they help ordinary Egyptians lay some claim to public politics, even if only fleetingly.
[...]
Elections are episodes when the tables are turned, if only for a spell. Even the most stalwart government kingpin relies on humble commoners to return him to the ranks of the plumed and powerful. In that exchange, so fraught with unexpected possibilities, commoners get a taste of their own importance. They have sometimes made choices between bad and less bad bosses, sometimes taken heroic stances in support of quixotic challengers, and sometimes aligned themselves with powerful incumbents. If this happens at least some of the time in some election districts every five years, then I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would describe this as "apathy."

Sounds to me like all politics is local.
Where have we heard that?

This woman has a mind like a steel trap.

Flu update

Hong Kong is preparing for the worst.
Remember the Hong Kong flu?
They don't take these things lightly.

The authority which manages all of Hong Kong's public hospitals fears an explosion of bird flu cases in the city early next year, a Chinese-language daily reported on Saturday, quoting a source at the authority.

"Spring is the peak season for human influenza. Once the human influenza virus mixes with bird flu, it will pose a big threat," Wen Wei Po said in a front-page story, quoting an unidentified source at the Hong Kong Hospital Authority.

"If bird flu explodes in the community, the first wave will be very severe. It will pose the biggest threat to young people," the pro-Beijing daily said.

Experts fear that the H5N1 bird flu virus could mutate and become easily transmissible between people, setting off a pandemic in which millions might die. The virus in its current form has killed around half of the people it has infected.

A study, published in the online medical journal Respiratory Research, suggested that if H5N1 did cause a pandemic, it could disproportionately affect the young and healthy as compared to seasonal flu, which kills many elderly but few young adults. In Hong Kong, the seasonal peak for human influenza is between January and March.

This link comes from H5N1 Blog.

Those interested in science might be interested in this.

The more you understand of this report from Respiratory Research, the less you'll like it: Proinflammatory cytokine responses induced by influenza A (H5N1) viruses in primary human alveolar and bronchial epithelial cells.
[...]
If I understand what they're saying, H5N1 has a talent for provoking the immune system into inflaming and destroying the lung tissue where the virus is thriving. The abstract goes on to say that recent virus strains from Vietnam are even better at inducing "chemokines" than the original 1997 strain of H5N1.

Or this via another bird flu blog.

Bird flu might cause such severe disease and kill so many people because it makes the immune system 'overreact', say researchers.

They say that suppressing the immune response could be a way to treat infection by the H5N1 virus, which has killed 64 people in Asia — about half of all confirmed cases.

In a study published online today (11 November) by Respiratory Research, the researchers showed that lung cells infected with the virus produce considerably more 'messenger' chemicals than cells infected with a normal human flu virus.

These chemical messengers alert the immune system to send white blood cells to attack the source of infection.

The production of so many messenger molecules could explain why H5N1-infected people's lungs are "full" of a kind of white blood cell called macrophages, says lead researcher Malik Peiris of the University of Hong Kong.

(More)

Veterans Day Post, 2005

Last year I read a sobering remembrance written by seventy-six year old LtCol George Goodson, USMC retired. The recollection of this piece has stayed with me ever since. It is appropriate for Veterans Day.

Jolly escorted me into the Sergeant Major’s office. "Sergeant Major, this is Colonel Goodson, the new Commanding Officer." The Sergeant Major stood, extended his hand and said, "Good to see you again, Colonel." I responded, "Hello Walt, how are you?" Jolly looked at me, raised an eyebrow, walked out, and closed the door.

I sat down with the Sergeant Major. We had the obligatory cup of coffee and talked about mutual acquaintances. Walt’s stress was palpable. Finally, I said, "Walt, what’s the hell’s wrong?" He turned his chair, looked out the window and said, "George, you’re going to wish you were back in Nam before you leave here. I’ve been in the Marine Corps since 1939. I was in the Pacific 36 months, Korea for 14 months, and Vietnam for 12 months. Now I come here to bury these kids. I’m putting my letter in. I can’t take it anymore." I said, "OK Walt. If that’s what you want, I’ll endorse your request for retirement and do what I can to push it through Headquarters Marine Corps."

Sergeant Major Walt Xxxxx retired 12 weeks later. He had been a good Marine for 28 years, but he had seen too much death and too much suffering. He was used up.

Don't skim this one.
The link will take you to "My First Notification." Scroll back a bit to the start of the post to read the background.

If you don't have time to read it slow and allow yourself to be there, don't waste your valuable time.

Fayrouz is throwing in the towel

I will have to adjust my little blogroll. Fayrouz is changing direction in her life and doesn't expect to be blogging as much. Best to you, Fayrouz.

She leaves on an unhappy note. Her expectations for Iraq seem to have been dashed. And her link to Kurdo does not make for a happy read.

Her post deserves to be read carefully and thoughtfully. The comments thread is a revealing litany.

The link to Kurdo is revealing as well.

People are now working for "democracy" for Kurdistan. Well, you might have heard from media reports that Kurdistan is already democratic. Rubbish !!!. Corruption and unequality and not respecting laws by the two major Kurdish ruling parties have angered a lot of people. For example, in the last 2 months there have been several bloody and peaceful protests against the ruling Kurdish parties over the gas, electricity, and other services....you might have heard that Kurdistan had the highest turnout and people ran to the polling stations to vote. Again Rubbish !!...if you do anything against the Kurdish ruling parties, you will be accused of being a terrorist....we have supported these two parties with our souls...Why now they are not building a democratic , equal, transparent, free system in which all of us could be treated equally ?

Together, these two links make a sad commentary.

"Liberal" defined

Dwight Meredith has written the best descriptions of "Liberal" and "Conservative" I have seen in a long time. Even better than Ambrose Bierce's definitions ("Conservative: someone enamored of existing evils as opposed to a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with new ones.") Unfortumately I can't get the hyperlinks to work, so am stealing the whole post. This one can't get lost. It's too good. [Later: It's working now, but I still stole it. Go read the original. His format is better than mine. Unless he objects, I want to keep this copy for my own reference.]

Some years ago, among certain people, it was considered witty to remark that a conservative was a liberal who had been mugged. Google returns 138,000 hits for “conservative” + “liberal” + “mugged”.

Let’s turn the adage around and ask “a liberal is a conservative who has -----.” How can we fill in the blank?

Craig Westover points us to the story of Ron Carey.

Ron Carey is the Chairman of the Republican Party of Minnesota. He is a fiscal conservative generally opposed to government spending. He became Chairman of the party, in part, because some Republicans feared that Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty was too free in spending government money.

Carey also has an eight year old autistic son. His son needed ABA services that were available at the Minnesota Autism Center. The Center receives the majority of its funding from the federal and state governments. Some of the kids serviced by the Center need intensive therapy. That therapy can cost upwards of $100,000 per year.

Despite Carey’s general attitude against government spending, he accepted the taxpayer support for the services his son needed and supported the taxpayer funding of services for other kids.

Some have argued that the two positions make Carey a hypocrite. I do not see it that way.
Carey makes the point that spending money on autistic kids saves money in the long run:

"There's research that shows this program is very effective," Carey said. "Kids are being helped to become indistinguishable from the rest of the society. These kids can grow up to be independent, tax-paying citizens. As a fiscal conservative, I can argue that a dollar spent on this saves $10 down the line."Not only do I think that is right, but I think Carey’s position is inevitable:

But it may have been David Strom, who heads the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, the organization devoted to lowering taxes, who best cut through the contradictory lives we lead.

"I can't speak directly to his situation," Strom said of Carey. "But I think no parent, given a chance to do something for his child, would turn that chance down."

By virtue of having an autistic child, Carey has seen the benefit of publicly funded autism programs. He knows that ABA is the state of the art therapy for young autistics and sees the public benefit in providing such services. I do not see that as contradicting the position of being against ineffective government spending. As Carey says:

"Government by nature is not bad," Carey said. "It's abuse that's bad. It's waste that's bad."

Carey’s personal experience with an autistic child has demonstrated to him that public spending on the Minnesota Autism Center is good public policy.

There is nothing inherently contradictory about that even for a fiscal conservative. Indeed, the list of “conservatives” who support “liberal” programs based on personal experience with the issue is extensive.

Dick Cheney is a pretty conservative guy. During the 2000 Vice Presidential debate, the subject of gay marriage arose. The conservative position opposes any recognition by the state of gay couples. Indeed, the GOP is pushing a constitutional amendment to prevent individual states from making individual choices in the matter. What was Dick Cheney’s position?

The fact of the matter is we live in a free society, and freedom means freedom for everybody. We shouldn't be able to choose and say you get to live free and you don't. That means people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It's no one's business in terms of regulating behavior in that regard. The next step then, of course, is the question you ask of whether or not there ought to be some kind of official sanction of the relationships or if they should be treated the same as a traditional marriage. That's a tougher problem. That's not a slam dunk. The fact of the matter is that matter is regulated by the states. I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions, and that's appropriate. I don't think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area. I try to be open minded about it as much as I can and tolerant of those relationships. And like Joe, I'm also wrestling with the extent to which there ought to be legal sanction of those relationships. I think we ought to do everything we can to tolerate and accommodate whatever kind of relationships people want to enter into.

Mr. Cheney happens to have a lesbian daughter. It seems clear that his personal experience has shaped his views on the issue.

One current issue is whether the United States should ever engage in torture or abusive conduct towards detainees in the war on terror. The administration’s position is that such measures should not be specifically outlawed by statute. Conservative Republican Senator John McCain is leading the fight to pass legislation outlawing such treatment of detainees. Did John McCain’s personal experience animate his position on the issue? Of course it did:

Former combat pilot John McCain was often tortured during his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Because his father was an admiral, he was offered earlier release by his captors but refused to be freed before prisoners who had been held longer.
During the Senate debate on his amendment, McCain cited the letter he had received from Captain Ian Fishback (whom he later met), and also recalled his years in a North Vietnamese cell:

"Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death. But every one of us—every single one of us—knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies."

When the issue of University of Michigan's affirmative action case came to the Supreme Court, the conservative position was that such program was unconstitutional. Many groups filed amicus curiae with the Supreme Court. Among those asking that the Court uphold the Michigan affirmative action program were a number of organization that do not often take what are generally considered to be liberal positions. Those groups included retired military leaders and a whole host of Fortune 500 companies.

Neither big business nor the military are widely as hotbeds of liberalism. Among the administration leaders supporting affirmative action were Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
New Mexico's Pete Domenici is a pretty conservative Senator with a 2004 American Conservative Union rating of 95.

On one issue, mental health, Domenici teamed up with the late Senator Paul Wellstone to push legislation that many would consider liberal. From Domenici’s web site:

It was not too long ago that society considered many mental illnesses untreatable. However, over the years, a strong commitment to addressing mental health issues has led to landmark breakthroughs in our understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of mental illnesses. During his years in the Senate, Senator Domenici has taken an active leadership role with issues relating to mental illness like: mental health parity, increased funding for cutting edge mental health research, erasing the stigma surrounding mental illness, and increasing funding for those in prison or homeless suffering from a mental illness…

Many insurance companies believe illnesses of the brain should receive less coverage than illnesses or injuries to the body. As such, Senator Domenici introduced the first ever Congressional legislation requiring insurance companies to provide parity between mental health benefits and medical and surgical benefits. The landmark "Mental Health Parity Act of 1996" passed Congress and was signed into law.

While this was a historic first step, more must be done and Senator Domenici is currently working to expand the 1996 law to provide full parity between all mental health benefits and medical and surgical benefits. Specifically, the "Senator Paul Wellstone Mental Health Equitable Treatment Act of 2003" seeks to prohibit a group health plan from imposing treatment limitations or financial requirements on mental health benefits unless comparable limitations are imposed on medical and surgical benefits.

Is it coincidence that a conservative like Domenici would take such seemingly liberal positions on mental health or could it be related to the fact that he has special expertise on ths issue bu virtue of the fact that he has a daughter who suffers from mental illness?

We now have our answers. A liberal is a conservative with an autistic son. A liberal is a conservative with a lesbian daughter. A liberal is a conservative who has been tortured. A liberal is a conservative who has felt the sting of racial discrimination. A liberal is a conservative with a mentally ill relative.

Perhaps, though, we should just listen to people whose personal experience provides them with particular insight on an issue and not worry about whether than makes them a liberal or a conservative.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at 02:21 PM

I say Wow!
Just, Wow!
Hoots

Footnote to the Amman bombing

John Burgess of Crossroads Arabia had personal contact with one of the victims.

...an acquaintance, Mustapha Akkad, was injured and his daughter was killed. Akkad is a Syrian, from the city of Aleppo. I met him through his sister, who was with the University of Aleppo, with whom I worked when I was Cultural Affairs Officer in Damascus.

You may not recognize his name, but you will certainly recognize his work. Akkad is an accomplished film producer. Among his films are the "Halloween" series of horror films, produced from 1978-2002. (A 25-year retrospective is scheduled for release this year, as is "Halloween 9".)

In the Arab world, he is noted for two films that didn’t get much distribution in the US: "The Messenger" and "Lion of the Desert". Both films are available through Netflix and worth seeing."Lion of the Desert" (1981) told the story of Omar Mukhtar, a Libyan tribal leader who led the resistance against Italian occupation in the inter-war years. The film is magnificent in its scope, but was a commercial disaster. That Libyan ruler Qaddhafi was out of favor in/with the US didn’t help the film’s prospects much.

He also made the earlier film, "The Messenger". This was a film biography of the Prophet Mohammed. Curiously, this film was shot in parallel with an Arabic-language version of the film, with a different set of actors stepping in after a scene was shot to film in the other language. This film caused an uproar in the Muslim world, with many decrying it as blasphemous. Blasphemy was part of the complaints of a group of American Black-Muslims, the "Hanafi Muslims". The group undertook a series of simultaneous actions in Washington, DC in 1977, attacking a B’nai Brith headquarters as well as the District Building, the city hall for Washington's local government. In attempting to defend the building, Marion Barry, then a City Councilman, was shot and nearly killed. Barry went on to be elected Mayor six times–with an interlude in jail for drug use and possession between his third and fourth terms.

A seminal horror film producer, Akkad has also had his films manage to be at the center of one of the earliest American experiences of Islamic extremism. I send my condolences for his daughter's death and hope for his swift recovery.

Followup a few hours later...

Mr. Akkad died overnight. NBC Today reported the story with a quote from someone who remarked that the death of his daughter would hurt him worse than any injury. She died at once in the bombing. He had a heart attack which he didn't survive.

The report I just found includes this:

In Washington a US intelligence official said the claim of responsibility by Al-Qaeda's Baraibn al-Malik Brigade was the strongest indication yet that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, is using Iraq as a base from which to expand his operations in the region.

"The Jordanian press is reporting at least two (bombers) are likely Iraqis. We have no definitive answer as to whether they are Iraqi or not," the official said.

"However, the name of the group is the same name that Al-Qaeda uses in Iraq for their suicide martyr unit. So it stands to reason it is likely that they are Iraqi."

King Abdullah II vowed in a televised speech to catch those behind the bombings and said his country, only the second Arab nation to have signed a peace treaty with Israel, would not be "blackmailed" into changing its policies.

Deputy Prime Minister Marwan Moasher said Zarqawi was "certainly the prime suspect" and that remains of the three bombers had been found but not yet identified.
Zarqawi was released from a Jordanian jail in 1999 under a general amnesty granted by King Abdullah but now faces a death sentence in Jordan for the killing of a US diplomat in 2002 and is wanted for a number of attack plots.

He and his Al-Qaeda supporters are blamed for some of the worst attacks in Iraq.
Security officials said Iraqis were among those arrested in the investigation and that two of the six vehicles seized soon after the attacks had Iraqi license plates.