Christopher's Blog

Black Friday.

2010-11-26T11:12:00.001-08:00

The Grateful Undead

2010-08-04T21:45:00.001-07:00

A tribute to Jerry Garcia and George Romero, two American icons!

Like it? ~ Get the t-shirt | postcard @ Zazzle.com

Great News for Fans of "Bloom County"

2009-11-26T14:55:00.001-08:00

Not subscribing to a newspaper I rarely have occasion to read the comics these days -- but my childhood and teenage years were spent devouring "Calvin and Hobbes", Trudeau's "Doonesbury" and Berkley Breathed's "Bloom County" (circa 1980-1989). For those who don't recognize the latter, IDW Publishing has announced the launch of The Bloom County Complete Library -- "a five volume collection featuring every daily and Sunday strip in chronological order, many reprinted for the first time."

The Bloom County Library will also contain a series of "Context Pages" sprinkled throughout the volumes, providing perspective for the reader and presenting a variety of real-life events and personalities that were contemporary at the time of original publication.

In a recent interview with Los Angeles Times' "Hero Complex", Breathed describes the circumstances that led to his decision to relenquish cartooning:

“When you’re young, you miss things, you just don’t see them,” said the 52-year-old Breathed, who walked away from comic strips last year because the Digital Age had eroded his newsprint audience and, worse, his artistic vigor and sense of whimsy. [...]
“Not to sound like someone swinging their cane, but in the 1980s there weren’t a thousand other voices screaming to be heard at the same time,” Breathed said of the decade when his “Bloom County” was featured in more than 1,200 newspapers and he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. “There was a quiet in the room that made being a commentator very exciting. There was no Web, there was barely any cable TV. If you were looking for humorous topical commentary, you would go to the Johnny Carson monologue, ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Doonesbury.’ That was it. After you have the silence of that room, you get really weary with the screaming it takes today. There’s also this bitterness in the public square now that is difficult to avoid. I never did an angry strip, but in recent years I saw that sneaking in.”

Breathe goes on to discuss Peanuts' Charles Schulz ("The major regret in my cartooning life is I didn’t get to know him"); Doonesbury's Garry Trudeu ("He came as close to a hero for me as I was going to have in the comics world") and Calvin & Hobbes' Bill Watterson ("Breathed’s fan, friend and rival").

Having departed from the world of comic-strips, Breathed now writes and illustrates children's books.

2009-06-03T23:45:00.001-07:00

2009-05-31T19:39:00.000-07:00

2009-05-13T13:44:00.000-07:00

“It’s the technology,” the roofer said. “They don’t know how to deal with a human being. They stand there with that text shrug”—he hunched his shoulders, bent his head down, moved from side to side, looking anywhere but at me—“and they go, ‘Ah, ah, um, um,’ and they just mumble. They can’t talk any more.” This inadequacy with physical space and direct interaction was an affliction of the educated, he said—“the more educated, the worse.” His poorer black customers in Bedford-Stuyvesant had no such problem, and he was much happier working on their roofs, but the recession had slowed things down there and these days he was forced to deal almost entirely with the cognitively damaged educated and professional classes.
“They hire someone—this has happened several times—so they don’t have to talk to me,” he went on, growing more animated and reddening with amazement. “It’s like they’re afraid of me! So they hire a guy who’s more comfortable dealing with a masculine-type person. I stand there and talk to the customer, and the customer doesn’t talk to me or look at me, he talks to the intermediary, and the intermediary talks to me. It’s the yuppie buffer.” He wasn’t slurring gay men—he described these customers as mainly “metrosexuals”—nor was the problem all yuppies, some of whom had been his customers for years. It was a new group who had moved from Manhattan in the past few years, and who could not detach themselves from their communications devices long enough to look someone in the eye or notice the source of a leak. This was a completely new phenomenon in the roofer’s world: a mass upper class that was so immersed in symbolic and digital cerebration that it had become incapable of carrying out the most ordinary functions—had become, in effect, like small children with Asperger’s symptoms. It was a ruling class that, out of sheer over-civilization, was quickly losing the ability to hold onto its power.

The view from a roofer's recession, by George Packer. New York Times

Selling Your Own Advertising Campaign as News

2009-04-18T20:44:00.000-07:00

CNN has tried to spin its disproportionate coverage of this “Twitter duel” as relevant to the growing importance of “new media” in breaking down barriers between celebrities and the public. Yet this obscures the real story: namely, the amazing ease with which traditional news outlets can create “news” that is useful to their marketing purposes, and then use “new media” platforms (and other networks’ gullible coverage of the pseudo-event) to spread their advertising gimmick “virally.” Indeed, with unnerving efficiency, CNN staged an event that put its brand-name front and center (i.e., “Kutcher vs. CNN”); hyped this as news-worthy on its network and website; recruited a famous dupe to ensure that its content was pumped throughout the blogosphere and reported in the MSM; and - in its most shameless act yet - broadcast “Kutcher supporters” wearing CNN-branded “Kutcher hands CNN its lunch in Twitter feud” t-shirts, which, naturally, are available for $15 apiece on CNN’s website!
In turn, CNN’s bold fabrication of the news suggests that “new media” isn’t necessarily “democratizing” the flow of information. Rather, insofar as the MSM is still responsible for determining what counts as news, “new media” platforms have provided traditional media outlets with enhanced capabilities for packaging - and broadly disseminating - their own advertising campaigns as “news.”

Eric Trager, "CNN Invents the News" Contentions 4.18.2009

Coffee - "Drink of God's Glory"

2009-02-27T23:35:00.000-08:00

The design ...

... The Coffee Mug.

The great NYU Kimmel Food Court Occupation comes to a bloodless end. (Or “how NOT to spend your college tuition”)

2009-02-25T22:20:00.001-08:00

Last week a group of "student-empowering, social-justice-minded" students and assorted ragamuffins and rabblerousers from neighboring colleges (many affiliated with TakeBackNYU) had the stunningly-brilliant idea of barricading themselves in a food court in New York University's Kimmell Center, "in a historic effort to bring pressure on NYU for its administrative and ethical failings regarding transparency, democracy and protection of human rights."

Charlie Eisenhood of NYU Local liveblogged the revolution -- replete with hilarious commentary .

Well, I'm sorry (not really) to report that the revolution has been brutally crushed. The Weekly Standard has the details:

The courageous (if minuscule) group of students who occupied the food court in NYU’s Kimmel Center really spoke truth to power, demanding, among other things: “The establishment of a student elected Socially Responsible Finance Committee....An in depth investigation of all investments in war and genocide profiteers, as well as companies profiting from the occupation of Palestinian territories...annual scholarships for thirteen Palestinian students,” and, hilariously, “that the general public have access to Bobst Library.” And they faced the consequences. No, they weren’t gassed, tazered, beaten, shot with rubber bullets, or hauled off in chains to waiting paddywagons. But security guards did tear down their barricades and brutally inspect their NYU ID cards! And, in spite of their pre-emptive call for “full legal and disciplinary amnesty for all parties involved in the occupation,” some of them got suspended!!
Happily, one brave young man brought his camera and recorded some of the action, providing a not-to-be-missed 10 minutes of viewing.

Which can be condensed to a few snippets of dialogue:

Son, there is no 'cooperation' -- you need to just leave."
"Ok, um, we need to democratically decide on that. ... We would like to democratically decide in a consensus area. ... We need to look at the relationship here, the power hierarchy here. ... We need to decide whether we're going to cooperate with their demand. ... guys, we need to talk to each other ... ok, who wants to be facilitator? who can facilitate at this point?"

I'm embarassed to say that 15 years ago, in the heady days of my college years, I would have more than likely joined in the festivities.

But, as with St. Paul,

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things

At this point, I can only wonder what the parents of the "food court liberators" might be thinking. (New York University tuition is reportedly upwards of 45k -- money well spent?) .. and pray to God that my own son (two decades from now) will find more productive ways to spend his years.

Eugene Edward Blosser 1917-2008

2008-06-11T22:08:00.000-07:00

* * *

Eugene Edward Blosser (March 27, 1917 – June 8, 2008), career missionary in China and Japan cited in The Mennonite Encyclopedia (1955+), died Sunday morning at Parkview Manor in Wellman, Iowa, following a long respiratory illness. The son of Perry and Ada V. Lahman Blosser of South English, IA, Eugene was the eighth of nine children. In 1932, he discontinued his education at South English High School in order to help his father farm. During WWII he served in the Civilian Public Service corps in Nebraska and Wisconsin. After passing his General Education Development exams, he was admitted to Goshen College in Indiana, from which he graduated with a Bible major in 1949. He later continued his studies at Goshen Biblical Seminary and post-graduate work in Far Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
In the summer of 1949, Eugene was commissioned by the Mennonite Board of Missions to serve as a missionary in China. Upon arriving in Hong Kong that September, he was married to Louella Gingerich, whom he had dated at Goshen, and who had preceded him to China as a medical missionary in 1947. They served together in Chengdu, Sichuan, from 1949 to 1951. Their efforts continue their work following the Maoist takeover of Chengdu on December 30, 1949, are chronicled in Dorothy McCammon's We Tried to Stay (1953). In March 1951 they returned to the U.S., and were reassigned to Japan in 1953. They planted new churches in Hokkaido (Taiki, Sapporo, Hiroo), served established congregations (Obihiro, Kushiro), and administered a boarding facility for missionary children attending Hokkaido International School in Sapporo. In 1981 they returned to the U.S. after Luella was diagnosed with brain cancer. She died in 1982. After serving as interim pastor in Oregon and Nebraska, Eugene married Elsie Zook of Wellman in 1984. The couple lived together in Wellman for 24 years, where they continued active involvement in the local Mennonite church after retirement.
Eugene was preceded in death by his first wife, Luella; and adopted son, Thomas Yoshiro; his parents, and all of his siblings, including six brothers, Wilmer, Aquila, Dwight, Menno, Oren, and Amos; and two sisters, Abbie (Zook) and Mary Kate (Yoder). He is survived by his second wife, Elsie; his children, Philip, Rachel (Derstine) and Meiko (Schoemig); eight grand-children (Christopher, Jonathan Benjamin, Nathaniel, Hannah, Katherine, Elizabeth, and Julia); and four great-grandchildren (Augustine, Ambrose, Cyprian, and Raphael).

2008-03-08T23:23:00.001-08:00

2008-03-01T23:19:00.001-08:00

George Bush, Zombie Killer

2008-02-23T05:43:00.000-08:00

"A Critical Look at Energy Drinks"

2008-02-22T18:55:00.000-08:00

Pure Energy: A Critical Look at Energy Drinks Kotaku.com:

What follows is a listing of the drinks I partook of, their manufacturers, and a few facts about their history where applicable, along with descriptions and grades given in two categories - flavor and buzz. I consumed a full can of each product, with several hours in between each drink in order to separate the effects. Of course this is not a scientifically sound test - this is strictly my opinion, but after drinking thirteen different cans of energy drinks over the course of a long weekend I am convinced that my opinion is completely awesome and I could - if needed - run completely through the living room wall into the neighboring apartment. . . .

Is Barack Obama the Messiah?

2008-02-09T14:25:00.000-08:00

18-1

2008-02-03T20:52:00.000-08:00

Politics As Usual . . .

2007-12-31T21:29:00.000-08:00

DES MOINES: In an act of political jujitsu, Mike Huckabee has halted a negative ad that he was about to broadcast on television Monday against his Republican rival, Mitt Romney. But while claiming the moral high ground, he proceeded to show the ad to a roomful of reporters, photographers and television cameras who are repeating his anti-Romney message for free while Huckabee declares that his hands are clean.
The display unfolded at the Marriott Hotel here to the mirth of the media who watched Huckabee's legerdemain even as the media itself became the conduit for his attacks against Romney.
At the same time, he pointed to media cynicism as the reason he felt compelled to show the ad, saying that unless he showed it, reporters would not believe that it really existed.

Source: International Herald Tribune December 31, 2007.

Facebook: The New Narcissism

2007-09-20T19:25:00.000-07:00

Today’s online social networks are congeries of mostly weak ties—no one who lists thousands of “friends” on MySpace thinks of those people in the same way as he does his flesh-and-blood acquaintances, for example. It is surely no coincidence, then, that the activities social networking sites promote are precisely the ones weak ties foster, like rumor-mongering, gossip, finding people, and tracking the ever-shifting movements of popular culture and fad. If this is our small world, it is one that gives its greatest attention to small things. . . .
The world of online social networking is practically homogenous in one other sense, however diverse it might at first appear: its users are committed to self-exposure. The creation and conspicuous consumption of intimate details and images of one’s own and others’ lives is the main activity in the online social networking world. There is no room for reticence; there is only revelation. Quickly peruse a profile and you know more about a potential acquaintance in a moment than you might have learned about a flesh-and-blood friend in a month. As one college student recently described to the New York Times Magazine: “You might run into someone at a party, and then you Facebook them: what are their interests? Are they crazy-religious, is their favorite quote from the Bible? Everyone takes great pains over presenting themselves. It’s like an embodiment of your personality.”
It seems that in our headlong rush to join social networking sites, many of us give up one of the Internet’s supposed charms: the promise of anonymity. As Michael Kinsley noted in Slate, in order to “stake their claims as unique individuals,” users enumerate personal information: “Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog.” Kinsley is not impressed; he judges these sites “vast celebrations of solipsism.” . . .
. . . The hypertext link called “friendship” on social networking sites is very different: public, fluid, and promiscuous, yet oddly bureaucratized. Friendship on these sites focuses a great deal on collecting, managing, and ranking the people you know. Everything about MySpace, for example, is designed to encourage users to gather as many friends as possible, as though friendship were philately. If you are so unfortunate as to have but one MySpace friend, for example, your page reads: “You have 1 friends,” along with a stretch of sad empty space where dozens of thumbnail photos of your acquaintances should appear.
This promotes a form of frantic friend procurement. As one young Facebook user with 800 friends told John Cassidy in The New Yorker, “I always find the competitive spirit in me wanting to up the number.” An associate dean at Purdue University recently boasted to the Christian Science Monitor that since establishing a Facebook profile, he had collected more than 700 friends. The phrase universally found on MySpace is, “Thanks for the add!” . . .
We should also take note of the trend toward giving up face-to-face for virtual contact—and, in some cases, a preference for the latter. Today, many of our cultural, social, and political interactions take place through eminently convenient technological surrogates—Why go to the bank if you can use the ATM? Why browse in a bookstore when you can simply peruse the personalized selections Amazon.com has made for you? In the same vein, social networking sites are often convenient surrogates for offline friendship and community. In this context it is worth considering an observation that Stanley Milgram made in 1974, regarding his experiments with obedience: “The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson,” he wrote. “Often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.” To an increasing degree, we find and form our friendships and communities in the virtual world as well as the real world. These virtual networks greatly expand our opportunities to meet others, but they might also result in our valuing less the capacity for genuine connection.

Excerpts from Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism New Atlantis Summer 2007

New Bin Laden Video Revealed!

2007-09-08T22:10:00.001-07:00

Poetic Justice

2007-09-03T21:23:00.000-07:00

If he didn't believe in karma before, Piers Morgan must surely do now.
The ex-newspaper editor, now a columnist for The Mail on Sunday's Live magazine, took great delight in making fun of President Bush for falling off a Segway - the two-wheeled, motorised, gyroscopically balanced scooter that, its makers promise, will never fall over.
His paper, the Daily Mirror, ran the headline in 2003: "You'd have to be an idiot to fall off, wouldn't you Mr President." It added: "If anyone can make a pig's ear of riding a sophisticated, self-balancing machine like this, Dubya can." So, it seems, can Mr Morgan.
He broke three ribs after falling off the Segway at 12mph in California - just three days before he was due to make his biggest TV appearance to date, as a judge on the grand final of reality show America's Got Talent.

"The moment Piers Morgan broke three ribs falling off the Segway he said was 'idiot-proof'" Daily Mail UK Sept. 2nd, 2007.

2007-09-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

No Coffee, by Jacob Norberg. Eurozine:

What is it about coffee – and coffeehouses – that makes it so agreeable to the bourgeoisie? asks Jakob Norberg in a brief social history of the dark, rich brew. For Jürgen Habermas, the coffeehouse is a place where bourgeois individuals can enter into relationships with one another without the restrictions of family, civil society, or the state. It is the site of a sort of universal community, integrated neither by power nor economic interests, but by common sense. For Carl Schmitt, coffee is a symbol of Gemütlichkeit, or the bourgeois desire to enjoy undisturbed security. And for Alexander Kluge, drinking coffee provides the opportunity for people to talk to each other beyond the constraints of purpose-governed exchanges, to enter into "human relationships".

2007-09-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

Army's Hallucinogenic Weapons Unveiled, by Sharon Weinberger (Wired.com):

Advocates of using chemical agents in nonlethal warfare are increasing, making now a good time to start reviewing the historical record. A recently published book on the Army's infamous "Edgewood Experiments" involving hallucinogenic agents like LSD may help shed more light on the debate. The infamous CIA work, MK ULTRA, is often considered synonymous with all government LSD experimentation. But the historical record is far more complex.
This may be the first and last time in my life that I call a self-published book a "must read," but psychiatrist James Ketchum's Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten is an usual case. As Steve Aftergood of Secrecy News has already pointed out, this book "is a candid, not entirely flattering, sometimes morbidly amusing account of a little-documented aspect of Army research."

Nazi Pizza

2007-08-25T14:16:00.000-07:00

One of the DUMBEST advertising campaigns of all time.

Elvis Presley: "There is a Greater King . . ."

2007-08-19T15:46:00.000-07:00

A selection of posts and articles commemorating the anniversary of Elvis Presley's passing (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977):

Fr. Nicholas Schofield (Roman Miscellany) recalls "Five Catholic Facts About Elvis".
"The King is Dead, Long Live the King", by Jay Anderson. Pro Ecclesia
New York Times' Peter Guralnick asks: How Did Elvis Get Turned Into a Racist? -- challenging a common (but sadly mistaken) assumption of the African-American community. (See also Elvis & Racism, a detailed exploration by Christopher Blank @ Elvis Australia).
Thinking About Elvis - Powerline writes about Elvis' charity to soldiers returning from service in Vietnam, and his letter of appreciation for (and subsequent meeting with) President Nixon to express "concern for our country. The Drug Culture, The Hippie Elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc. do not consider me as their enemy or as they call it The Establishment. I call it America and I Love it. Sir I can and will be of any Service that I can to help the country out." From a memo detailing Elvis' meeting with the President [.pdf format]:
Presley indicated to the President in a very emotionial mamner that he was "on your side." Presley kept repeating that he wanted to be helpful, that he wanted to restore some respect for the flag, which was being lost. He mentioned he was just a poor boy from Tennessee who had gotten a lot from his country, which in some way he wanted to repay.

Live in Hawaii - Elvis performing "An American Trilogy":

Elvis died when I was three years old, and my music tastes leaning to the harder and more extreme side, it was not until later that I learned to appreciate his contributions to the world of music and Elvis Presley, the man himself.

From 2003 -- a re-post:

Senior pastor of the Bruderhof and social critic Johann Christoph Arnold devoted a recent column on "Remembering the King" recently. No, not that King, but rather Elvis Presley. It might strike some as strange for a writer from a countercultural Christian community like the Bruderhof to be covering a mainstream cultural icon like Elvis (much less a blog devoted to Cardinal Ratzinger), but Christoph Arnold reminds all of us to look beneath the surface:

"Good" Christians often self-righteously dismiss celebrities because they are turned off by the glamour, fame, and excess that surround them. How many remember that behind the frenzied publicity and the scandals cooked up by tabloids is a vulnerable person with emotions—a real person with a heart—and not just a two-dimensional cardboard cutout? ¹

Back in March [of 2003], PBS television ran the documentary He Touched Me - The Gospel Music of Elvis Presley. Featuring plenty of live footage and interviews with close friends and gospel quartets that backed him up, it chronicles Elvis Presley's spiritual roots in Southern gospel music and aspects of his life that are seldom publicized -- like the fact that he insisted on singing "Peace in the Valley" during one of his appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show (some say it was to "tone down" his rebel image; the documentary claims it was on behalf of his mother), or that after concert performances he would invite his friends to join him in literally all night gospel singalongs.

Shortly thereafter I picked up a copy of "Amazing Grace", a collection of Elvis' religious performances (spanning a variety of genres -- soul, country, rock, gospel), and I was hooked. The world will remember Elvis Presley for his rock and roll, but from all accounts it appears that there was nothing he enjoyed more than singing gospel. As Gospel Music Association President Frank Breeden recalls:

"After the shows he would routinely sing with the gospel quartets that were used as his backgrounders . . . It was the gospel music that he turned to for inspiration and consolation. He was a person who appeared to be in conflict; he was not doing what he loved for a living ... he had a career that had just taken him captive."²

Or as Cheryl Thurber writes of the "Million Dollar Quartet" (Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash & Elvis Presley) -- the recording session at Sam Philips' Sun Studios in Memphis:

. . . When those rising stars of rock 'n' roll sang together the songs they chose to sing were largely gospel songs. It was the shared repertoire that they all knew. They sang other songs as well, such as current rock 'n' roll and recent and older country hits, but they seemed to sing more complete versions of the gospel songs. With gospel songs they knew all the words, not just snatches of the choruses. . . . It is clear when listening to the session that Elvis was the dominant force that day -- he was the one who started the singing of each song. It is also evident that he enjoyed the singing. This was Elvis having fun. ³

Of course, there are many who -- not without reason -- see Elvis Presley as the harbinger of moral decay and the corruption of America's youth. (Fr. Jerry Pokarsky, for example, uses Elvis as a convenient metaphor for the narcissistic character of abuses in the post-Vatican II mass). ⁴ And by no means should one applaud every star(let)'s excursions into spirituality (I expect Christoph Arnold would have a much different reaction to Madonna's dalliance with watered-down Kabbalah). But for all of his flaws, and the nature of his tragic demise, there is something about Elvis Presley which Christoph Arnold finds praiseworthy:

Here was a unique individual struggling to find his true identity. I am certain that it was through this struggle that God gave him the humor, humility, and kindness that endeared him to millions of people. These traits were even more important than his music . . .
Elvis knew his shortcomings. He was an ordinary guy who battled all the normal temptations. But he also had a vision, as expressed in a comment he made to a reporter:
"I ain’t no saint, but I’ve tried never to do anything that would hurt my family or offend God. I figure all any kid needs is hope and the feeling he or she belongs. If I could do or say anything that would give some kid that feeling, I would believe I had contributed something to the world."
In other words, for him, relationships were much more important than the glitter, fame, and money he is mostly known for.

I'll close this little tangent with a quote I found -- from an account of one fan's encounter with Elvis (or rather, a close call with his limo). It may or may not be true, but it's something I can easily envision coming from Presley:

"I know you consider me your king, but I am not worth dying for, there is a bigger King who is God whom you should be preparing yourself for."

1. Remembering The King: The Soul behind the Celebrity, by Johann Christoph Arnold. Bruderhof.com.
2. Gospel Music and Elvis: Inspiration & Consolation, by Helyn Trickey. CNN.com. August 26, 2002.
3. Elvis & Gospel Music, by Cheryl Thurber. REJOICE! The Gospel Music Magazine. (1988).
4. Elvis Sightings in the Roman Rite, Catholic World Report January 2002.

"In Praise of Tap Water"

2007-08-03T20:30:00.000-07:00

Here are the hard, dry facts: Yes, drinking water is a good thing, far better than buying soft drinks, or liquid candy, as nutritionists like to call it. And almost all municipal water in America is so good that nobody needs to import a single bottle from Italy or France or the Fiji Islands. Meanwhile, if you choose to get your recommended eight glasses a day from bottled water, you could spend up to $1,400 annually. The same amount of tap water would cost about 49 cents.
Next, there’s the environment. Water bottles, like other containers, are made from natural gas and petroleum. The Earth Policy Institute in Washington has estimated that it takes about 1.5 million barrels of oil to make the water bottles Americans use each year. That could fuel 100,000 cars a year instead. And, only about 23 percent of those bottles are recycled, in part because water bottles are often not included in local redemption plans that accept beer and soda cans. Add in the substantial amount of fuel used in transporting water, which is extremely heavy, and the impact on the environment is anything but refreshing.
Tap water may now be the equal of bottled water, but that could change. The more the wealthy opt out of drinking tap water, the less political support there will be for investing in maintaining America’s public water supply. That would be a serious loss. Access to cheap, clean water is basic to the nation’s health.

From In Praise of Tap Water New York Times Editorial. (Hat tip Bill Cork. I got no problem with tap water.

Life Explained

2007-07-06T14:45:00.000-07:00

Heard from a friend . . .

On the first day, God created the dog and said:
"Sit all day by the door of your house and bark at anyone who comes in or walks past. For this, I will give you a life span of twenty years."
The dog said: "That's a long time to be barking. How about only ten years and I'll give you back the other ten?"
So God agreed.
On the second day, God created the monkey and said:
"Entertain people, do tricks, and make them laugh. For this, I'll give you a twenty-year life span."
The monkey said: "Monkey tricks for twenty years? That's a pretty long time to perform. How about I give you back ten like the dog did?"
And God agreed.
On the third day, God created the cow and said:
"You must go into the field with the farmer all day long and suffer under the sun, have calves and give milk to support the farmer's family. For this, I will give you a life span of sixty Years."
The cow said: "That's kind of a tough life you want me to live for sixty years. How about twenty and I'll give back the other forty?" And God agreed again.
On the fourth day, God created man and said:
"Eat, sleep, play, marry and enjoy your life. For this, I'll give you twenty years."
But man said: "Only twenty years? Could you possibly give me my twenty, the forty the cow gave back, the ten the monkey gave back, and the ten the dog gave back; that makes eighty, okay?"
"Okay," said God, "You asked for it."
So that is why for our first twenty years we eat, sleep, play and enjoy ourselves. For the next forty years we slave in the sun to support our family. For the next ten years we do monkey tricks to entertain the grandchildren. And for the last ten years we sit on the front porch and bark at everyone.

2007-04-30T19:06:00.001-07:00

So I made some music.

2007-01-27T04:56:00.000-08:00

An item of utmost importance . . . What's Susan Sarandon Thinking Right Now??!?

Evan Thomas could give DeNiro some pointers on making a good espionage film

2007-01-01T12:40:00.000-08:00

I saw The Good Shepherd over the holiday weekend. Directed by Robert DeNiro, starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, it purports to be "the untold story of the birth of the CIA." Regretfully, it fails to deliver.

The plot is laid out across some notable events in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency -- it's origins in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) struggling to roll back the Soviet tide in World War II, in anticipation of Stalin's bid for power, it's later operations in Central America and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, tied together from the perspective of a fictional character named Edwin Wilson (an amalgam of James Jesus Angleton and Richard Bissell). Failing to heed the advice of his mentor ("Get out while you still can, while you still have a soul"), Wilson's gradual moral corruption in the in the clandestine world of espionage and U.S. foreign policy is a window into the soul of our nation. "The Godfather Part II set in Langley, Virginia" as one reviewer put it.

While I am generally unapposed to the use of fictional characters when making a historical film, I wonder if, in this particular case, DeNiro couldn't have done better to forego the soap-opera and emphasize the history -- and even confine his gaze on a small part of that history for that matter. Covering three decades of U.S. covert operations and espionage would have been better accomplished in the form of a documentary series on PBS television. As a sprawling two hour and 46 minute Hollywood epic, one gets the sense that the scriptwriter (Eric Roch - Munich 2005) bit off a little more than he could chew. As Wesley Morris notes:

Indeed, "The Good Shepherd" is chock full of everything -- assassinations, betrayal, comeuppance, marital discord, the rise of Castro, an intense torture sequence, defenestration, John Turturro as a sociopath agent, De Niro "Strangelove"-ing it up in that wheelchair, the brief return of Joe Pesci as an informant, and a manmade plague of locusts.
But that also leaves it a 2 1/2-hour farrago: a character study, a soap opera, a psychological profile, and a docudrama full of Roth's obvious affinity for cool spy jargon ("The doctor has no more patients," says Hurt to Damon about a CIA-backed coup in Cuba).

In short, the film fails in its effort to be "all things to all people". Buried within are the makings of what would have been a truly great "cloak and dagger" film (Wilson's sparring with his KGB nemesis Ulysses), or even a decent chronicle of U.S. covert operations, but in the end, I found myself more annoyed than anything else -- suffering through the dreary soap-opera of the protagonist's life and anxiously awaiting the occasional snatches of historical reference that filtered through. And the fact that the main characters in the the film are works of fiction, their relation to the major players in this period of covert history, was for me the greatest aggravation of all. To concur with reviewer William Arnold (The Seattle Post-Intelligencer):

[DeNiro] can't begin to tie the movie's sprawling events into a satisfying narrative package. It seems not only aimless, but redundant, choppy and unnecessarily confusing. . . . his characterizations are clumsy, and his members of the Power Elite always seem less real people than stick figures in a propaganda movie.

DeNiro's interpretation of the CIA's history is tainted with a strong dose of liberal spin which I imagine will appeal to the Howard Zinn school of history. If readers desire something a little more substantial, they would be better served putting their $10 towards purchasing Evan Thomas' engrossing The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA Simon & Schuster (October 17, 2006: 2nd Edition), which asks the same moral questions and covers much of the same historical ground as The Good Shepherd.

Whereas DeNiro attempts to blend history and Hollywood fiction, a drama spanning three decades interspersed with allusions to historical events, Thomas covers the actual lives of four pioneers of the CIA: Frank Wisner, Richard Bissel, Tracy Barnes and Desmond Fitzgerald: principled men with strong convictions and laudable goals (stemming the Communist tide), yet deeply flawed in its execution. Benefiting from extensive interviews, Thomas' book portrays the CIA "as it saw itself". One can appreciated the fact that Thomas is both respectful of the general intent of these figures (never dismissing or minimizing the very real concern over the Communist threat), and yet approaching his subject with a critical eye towards the moral quandaries of their profession.

As Thomas concludes: "In the end, they were too idealistic and too honorable, and were unsuited for the dark and duplicitious life of spying. Their hubris and naivete led them astray, producing both sensational coups and spectacular blunders").

Related Links

Review: "The Good Shepherd" by Harry Forbes. Catholic News Service Dec. 22, 2006.
The "Traditionalist" Catholic blog TradReviews has seen The Good Shepherd as well. Apparently the blogger appreciated the character development much more than I. Perhaps if I didn't see the film with the expection of a history lesson I would have had a better appreciation for the drama.
Readers interested in this subject may benefit from J. Ransom Clark's The Literature of Intelligence: A Bibliography of Materials. You can find reviews of the aformentioned book by Thomas here.
"The Need for Integrity: Thoughts Provoked by The Very Best Men, by Michael Thompson. A "moment of reflection" from the CIA periodical Studies in Intelligence Vol. 39, Number 5, 1996:
[Thomas'] empathy for his subjects--even though an air of amused condescension filters through to an audience when he speaks of his book--points up issues that would otherwise be obscure, as does his vivid evocation of a period when, contrary to the underlying realities of American politics (as we have since learned, sometimes painfully), a dominant Executive, a compliant Congress, a complicit press, a largely unquestioning public, and almost unlimited funds allowed the DDP to function virtually without oversight or accountability.
"Expert's Picks: Books on Espionage, Selected by Evan Thomas" Washington Post, 31 Jan. 1999

"Hottest Substance Known to Man"

2006-09-06T15:31:00.000-07:00

One of the stores I visited during a weekend stay at Port Jefferson was 'Pepperheads Hot Sauce' -- a mecca of wall-to-wall hot sauces. They even had a table with samples out front for tasting. =)

On the back wall they had the 'Holy Grail' of spiciness - Blair's 16 Million Reserve:

That's it. The race is over. It's chemically impossible to get any hotter ! Not really a sauce, but worthy of inclusion.
What you will find inside the Famous Reserve bottle is amazing, a 1ml pharmaceutical grade vial filled with this Pure Capsaicin Crystal.

Check out The Hot Sauce Blog. The author was brave (crazy? stupid?) enough to add a grain to a bowl of tomato soup, and subsequently made the mistake of giving it to his wife. Read the blog and the comments, and you'll see the testimonies of a few "I can take anything" idiots who've actually tried it straight.

Chile-head that I am, I had my wife take a photo of it, just to say that I saw it. At $275 it was a little over my budget. It's not really something you would use -- more like a collector's item.

I ended up buying another hot sauce -- Blair's MegaDeath -- for my collection -- alleged 550,000 Scoville Units (see link for explanation). They made me sign a disclaimer before purchasing, explaining that after a certain limit they require the disclaimer for legal reasons, citing possible customer misuse of a life-endangering product. (As one commentator noted, after 700,000 SU's you're not really dealing with "sauce" but rather an extract, not intended for direct application).

Here is a list of the hottest sauces known to man.

2006-08-27T18:27:00.000-07:00

"One of the great delusional fictions that bloggers operate under is that there are people out there who actually care what a blogger has to say!"

- Fr. Edward T. Oakes (blogging at First Things' "On The Square")

The Media Ambulance Hoax

2006-08-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

I'm going to agree with "neo-neocon": If you read one thing today, it should be this:

On the night of July 23, 2006, an Israeli aircraft intentionally fired missiles at and struck two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances performing rescue operations, causing huge explosions that injured everyone inside the vehicles. Or so says the global media, including Time magazine, the BBC, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and thousands of other outlets around the world. If true, the incident would have been an egregious and indefensible violation of the Geneva Convention, and would constitute a war crime committed by the state of Israel.
But there's one problem: It never happened.

-- The Red Cross Ambulance Incident: How the Media Legitimized an Anti-Israel Hoax and Changed the Course of a War zombietime August 23, 2006.

As Neo-Neocon observes:

One of the advantages the blogosphere offers is that--and this is no secret, nor is it a criticism--many bloggers have some form of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Now, OCD in its milder form isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's only really a problem if it's over the top and out of control, such as the Jack Nicholson role in the movie "As Good As it Gets." But the milder form of OCD merely lends those who demonstrate it an enhanced ability to tend to detail, to persevere and follow through on a line of questioning and research.
And this tendency, marked in many bloggers, allows them to have uncovered a phenomenal phenomenon, to wit: the number of hoaxes perpetrated both on and by the media. From the debunking of the Rathergate memos to Pallywood to Green Helmet Guy to the present sordid and alarming story, the Red Cross Ambulance Hoax, it took the time and perspicacity available to bloggers to uncover some exceptionally disturbing--and historically influential--trends.

Read the expose. Judge for yourself. Can we say media bias against Israel?

"Jump to Prevent Global Warming"

2006-07-23T00:51:00.000-07:00

Jump to Prevent Global Warming. WorldJumpDay.org, an Internet site created to recruit 600,000,000 people to jump simultaneously on July 20 at 11:39:13 GMT in an effort to shift Earth's position, on the premise that

[on July 20] "Earth occupies one of the most fragile positions in its orbits for the last 100 years." According to the site, the shift in orbit will "stop global warming, extend daytime hours and create a more homogeneous climate."

The site and project -- but of course -- is a a joke, but nevertheless managed to garner the estimated participation of 600,248.012 "registered jumpers."

Link by Shawn at Everything I Know Is Wrong.

The War Against Israel - News and Commentary Part II

2006-07-19T23:45:00.000-07:00

[A continuation of coverage on Israel's struggle for survival against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria; for previous coverage click here -- CB]

The political cartoonist duo John Cox and Allen Forkum (popularly known as "Cox & Farkum") published a cartoon depicting the "disporportionate response" toward Israel, including a depiction of the Pope which provokes intense discussion by Amy Welborn's Open Book. Most Catholic bloggers happen to agree agree on the tastelessness of the cartoon ("Portraying the Holy Father using the tip of his crozier as a spear - inflicting injury on a bound, prostrate Jew is malignant") but, as expected, disagree with each other over the justness of the Vatican -- or, rather, Cardinal Sodano's -- pronouncement on the matter. Protests Christopher Fotos:
Multiple statements of grave concern do not, with all sincerely due respect, protect Israel from terrorism. The bitter experience of Israel is that after they withdraw from contested areas, whether under international blessing as from Lebanon or unilaterally from Gaza, these areas are then used as operating areas to launch more terror attacks. I don't expect the Catholic Church to advocate for war. I hope it is not too much to expect some kind of recognition that Israel faces an existential threat.
HonestReporting.com provides Israel Under Fire: "A look at some of the myths and facts following Hezbollah's attack on Israel" July 16, 2006; MEMRI (Middle East Research Institute) has a 5-part (to date) series chronicling Iran and the Recent Escalation on Israel's Borders: Reactions in Iran, Lebanon, and Syria
IDF enters Lebanon: A New Buffer Zone? - Bill Roggio examines Israel's intent in the IDF's brief entrances into Lebanon "to target Hizbullah bases along the border in order to push the terrorist group out of rocket-firing range" (Jerusalem Post); included is a disturbing graphic by Kathryn Cramer depicting the extent to which Israel falls within the sights of Iranian built missiles possibily in Hezbollah's arsenal.
According to London-based, Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, "Teheran has supplied Hezbollah with approximately 11,500 missiles and projectiles" and "more than 3,000 Hezbollah members have undergone training in Iran." In The Israeli Rocket Blitz (Winds of Change July 17, 2006), we learn that "more than 70 percent of Israel's population and 80 percent of the country's idustrial base within Katyusha [rocket] range from hostile borders."
Substantial analysis of Israel's incursion into Lebanon by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (with help from counterterrorism consultant Daniel Darling) is available from the CounterTerrorism Blog.
The Israeli blogger Kishkushim provides real-time updates from Haifa, including the following observation on the nature of civilian casualties in the present conflict:
So many civilians are dying because this war is being conducted against an enemy who launches missiles from the safety of non-combatant population centers at Israeli cities, towns, and villages with the explicit goal of harming civilians. As much as the equivocators will try to deny this, the IDF does not aim to kill non-combatants. Even if you want to believe that the Israeli army is morally indifferent, you have to concede that civilian deaths cause tremendous harm to the reputation of the country and its ability to operate in the international arena. It is against the IDF's own strategic interests to harm civilians.
Kishkushim's point is perhaps validated by the diary of this IDF pilot participating in the raids on Lebanon:
Major E, my formation leader walks into the briefing room, still in his jeans. He's been called to come ASAP. What's happening? He asks me. I update him, and we brief for our mission quickly. He is concerned about making mistakes, and bombing the wrong targets. He is experienced, and has been around long enough to see mistakes happen and innocent civilians killed. A friend of his, a helicopter pilot once mistook a letter in a target's name, and ended up shooting at the wrong target, killing a whole family. Major E does not want the same thing to happen to us. He emphasizes that there is no rush, that we must check and recheck every coordinate we receive, make sure we understand EXACTLY what we are supposed to target.
We land in the base, and are relieved to learn that we went for a Hizbullah post. Probably unmanned. It's strange how the focus in these missions is not to succeed, hit the target precisely, but rather - not to make any mistakes. The message is clear all the way from the Squadron commander to the last pilot. One mistake can jeopardize the whole war, like in Kfar-Kana, in one of the last operations in Lebanon, where artillery bombarded a refugee camp, killing over 100 people, which resulted in international pressure that halted the operation. Hitting the target is expected, no misses are acceptable. There aren't any congratulations for a well-performed mission. Only a hammer on the head if something goes wrong. Personally, I think it's a healthy attitude; it causes the whole system to be less rash and hot on the trigger.
Meanwhile, there is a report from the IDF that Hizbullah preventing civilians from leaving villages in southern Lebanon:
Roadblocks have been set up outside some of the villages to prevent residents from leaving, while in other villages Hizbullah is preventing UN representatives from entering, who are trying to help residents leave. In two villages, exchanges of fire between residents and Hizbullah have broken out. (Hanan Greenberg)
It has likewise been reported that Hezbollah is deliberately targeting civilians with missiles containing ball-bearings. According to the (by no means conservative) organization Human Rights Watch:
Hezbollah's attacks in Israel on Sunday and Monday were at best indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas, at worst the deliberate targeting of civilians. Either way, they were serious violations of international humanitarian law and probable war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today. In addition, the warheads used suggest a desire to maximize harm to civilians. Some of the rockets launched against Haifa over the past two days contained hundreds of metal ball bearings that are of limited use against military targets but cause great harm to civilians and civilian property. The ball bearings lodge in the body and cause serious harm
(Lebanon: Hezbollah Rocket Attacks on Haifa Designed to Kill Civilians Human Rights Watch July 18, 2006).
Michael Kraft at Counterterrorismblog comments:
The story was unusual in that it was one of the few that have reported that the terrorist groups attacking Israelis are not using only explosives but also pieces of metal intended to deliberately cause pain and suffering to victims who are not killed outright. The Hamas makers of the suicide bomb belts routinely pack the bombs with nuts and bolts and nails. There also have been reports that the metal fragments are sometimes dipped into a pesticide, in order to maximize the damage to the victims and make it more difficult for doctors to effectively treat their patients. However there has been little public reporting in the western media of this tactic, which causes torture to the victims who survive the original blast and additional agony for their families and friends.
Just War for the Sake of Argument - UCLA Law Professor and Catholic blogger Stephen Bainbridge addressese Cardinal Sodano's criticism that "Israel's right to self-defense "does not exempt it from respecting the norms of international law, especially as regards the protection of civilian populations," the rebuttal of fellow blogger (and Catholic) Ed Morrisey (of the popular conservative blog Captain's Quarters) and Israel's strategy of targeting the Lebanese civilian instructure which supports Hezbollah:
In fact, however, Israel clearly is targeting not just Hezbollah, but also Lebanon's official military, and, most important for our purposes, Lebanon's basic civilian infrastructure. The Beirut airport has been closed by Israeli attacks. Bridges, ports, roads, and power stations are all being targeted. As this column was being written, more than 100 civilian fatalities -- including some citizens of neutral countries, most notably Canada -- already had been reported. More surely will have occurred before this column is published.
In short, even a just war must be waged justly. Israel is entitled to defend itself, but is not entitled to do so disproportionately or to wage war on civilians. Yet, that is precisely what Israel appears to be on the brink of doing.
Rob Driscoll at The Remedy responds to Prof. Bainbridge on Proportionality in War:
I'm hardly convinced that Israel's attacks are disproportionate. When fighting an enemy that consciously blends civilians and military actors in order to disguise themselves and use civilians as human shields, the death of innocents is inevitable. How is it, asks Wretchard, that those who use indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets are considered to have the moral high ground over those who use precision strikes to minimize civilian deaths?
Further, it is not clear to me that attacking infrastructure is per se disproportionate. Roads and fuel depots are as easily used for rocket attacks on Israeli cities as they are for legitimate civilian ends. If the infrastructure is not a legitimate target, and precision strikes aimed at terrorists who hide amongst women and children are not acceptable, just what may the Israeli military do without violating just war doctrine?
In Israel, Right or Wrong? Fr. Martin Fox, pastor of St. Mary and St. Boniface Parishes in Piqua, Ohio, expresses his thoughts on Lebanon's culpability and complicity in Hezbollah's attacks on Israel, the proportionality of Israel's response, and the Vatican's statement on the matter. There are no easy answers to such questions, but I certainly agree with his conclusion:
. . . I think it's abundantly clear Israel operates far more according to values of compassion and human dignity; and who can say that about Hamas, Hizbollah, Iran or Syria, with a straight face?
Finally, Judith Sudilovsky of the Catholic News Service reports that U.S. Catholic educators in Israel say rockets give them new outlook (July 18, 2006):
Some 30 Catholic educators from the United States found themselves in the line of fire in northern Israel as the recent crisis between Israel and Lebanon began, but several said it gave them a new perspective on the Middle East. [. . .] The group was traveling in the north and was to spend the evening of July 14 in Tzfat when word came that Katyusha rockets had fallen on the city . . .

The War Against Israel - News and Commentary

2006-07-17T23:27:00.000-07:00

What you need to know about the war in the Middle East, the American Papist provides a good roundup of information and resources on the present eruption of conflict between Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah.

To supplement his post, some further news and commentary culled from the web, which may be of interest to our readers:

As Israel Goes for Withdrawal, Its Enemies Go Berserk, by David Brooks. New York Times July 16, 2006 (via American Future). David Brooks explains "Why is this Middle East crisis different from all other Middle East crises?":
Because in all other Middle East crises, Israel's main rivals were the P.L.O., Egypt, Iraq and Syria, but in this crisis the main rivals are the jihadists in Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and, most important, Iran. In all other crises the nutjobs were on the fringes, but now the nutjobs in Hamas and Hezbollah are in governments and lead factions of major parties.
In all other crises, the Palestinians, thanks to Yasir Arafat's strenuous efforts, owned their own cause, but now the clerics in Iran are taking control of the Palestinian cause and turning it into a weapon in a much larger struggle.
In all other crises there was a negotiation process, a set of plans and some hope of reconciliation. But this crisis is different. Iran doesn't do road maps. The jihadists who are driving this crisis don't do reconciliation.
In other words, this crisis is a return to the elemental conflict between Israel and those who seek to destroy it. And you can kiss goodbye, at least for the time being, to some of the features of the recent crises. . . .
The Weekly Standard's editor William Kristol has a similar take ("It's Our War" Volume 011, Issue 42 ):
. . . it's not an Arab-Israeli war. Most of Israel's traditional Arab enemies have checked out of the current conflict. The governments of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia are, to say the least, indifferent to the fate of Hamas and Hezbollah. The Palestine Liberation Organization (Fatah) isn't a player. The prime mover behind the terrorist groups who have started this war is a non-Arab state, Iran, which wasn't involved in any of Israel's previous wars.
What's happening in the Middle East, then, isn't just another chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict. What's happening is an Islamist-Israeli war.
The Rogues Strike Back: Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah vs. Israel, by Robert Satloff. Weekly Standard 07/24/2006, Volume 011, Issue 42:
Iran thumbs its nose at Western diplomats and continues nuclear enrichment. Hamas's chief, speaking from Damascus, boasts about kidnapping an Israeli soldier. Hezbollah launches a cross-border raid, prompting Israeli retaliation in Beirut and a return volley of rockets on northern Israel. Just another bleak week in the hopeless Middle East? Regrettably, no. This one was different. This was the week the Dark Side went on the offensive.
On the Middle East - Amy Welborn's blog hosts a mostly-civil discussion of the formal response of the Vatican, controversy sparked by Cardinal Secretary of State Angelo Sodano's condemnation of "the attack on Lebanon, a free and sovereign nation." (A nation which happens to host a vicious terrorist organization -- as one reader comments: "'Lebanon' is a fiction, not a sovereign state. It is a playpen for Hezbollah").
Domenico Bettinelli offers further analysis of the Vatican's statement: "I haven’t been shy about criticizing certain Vatican diplomats’ past embraces of Palestinian terrorists at the expense of Israel, but I think the criticism may be a bit unwarranted here."
The loss of self, by Josh Tevino. Enchiridion Militis July 16, 2006:
Deutsche Welle has an interesting little roundup of European press reaction to Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, most of which appears to condemn the Israeli actions as “disproportionate.” As a corollary, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero (of Spanish Flee fame) went on record stating that the results of the Israeli response to the agents of radicalization, fanaticism, conflict and instability will be “radicalization, fanaticism, conflict and instability.” The European reaction is instructive for several reasons: First, because it is indicative of the extent to which nationalism and national feeling has declined — there is simply little understanding of why a state would seek so dramatically to protect its own. Second, because it illustrates the European mindset on Islamism — that it is indestructible, and by implication, that its agents cannot be repelled or thwarted. Third, because it lets us know, again, that the Europeans do not see Israel as one of its own — even though, in the cultural and historical sense, it is — and that they blame Israel in a manner reminiscent of those who would blame a provocatively-dressed woman for her rape.
European received wisdom is wrong on all counts.
War By Proxy In Lebanon, by Mark Gordon. Suicide of the West July 14, 2006:
The world demanded that Israel leave Lebanon, so in 2000 it did. The world demanded that Israel leave Gaza, so in 2005 it did. Rather than planting date trees, Lebanese extremists turned their country into an outpost of Iranian and Syrian aggression. Rather than plant olive trees, the Palestinians in Gaza planted mortar tubes in the soil and strapped suicide belts on their children. Neither aggression against Israel - Lebanese or Gazan - can possibly be chalked up to Israeli “occupation” because there was no occupation two weeks ago. No, what the present hostilities demonstrate is that the goal of the Islamists - the destruction of Israel - has not changed and cannot change.
The Left should be supporting Israel in this war - A British socialist makes the case for the Left.
Regular updates on news and commentary From a pro-Israel perspective -- Jewish Issues Watchdog - "keeping an eye on Jewish affairs - extracting the essential".
Meanwhile the Situation Worsens Dramatically For Anti-Hezbollah Lebanese, reports Alcibiades @ KesherTalk, with a report by Michael J. Totten, who has close friends in Lebanon.
LiveBlogging the War and What You Can Do - a compilation of links to Israeli bloggers from J-Blogosphere; TruthLaidBear: MidEastCrisis offers reporting by Jewish, Palestinian and Lebanese bloggers.
For a roundup of news on Iran, see Regime Change Iran: A Daily Briefing on Iran.

* * *

So here's an honest question I posed to some friends recently: When does "anti-Zionism" become "anti-Semitism"? The dilemma was provoked when an author at left-wing blog Daily Kos mused Imagine a world without Israel -- which, if you think about it, is more or less the formal policy objective of Hezbollah, Hamas, and other terrorist organizations who would like nothing better than to make that dream a reality.

Hat tip to the conservative-blogging collective Little Green Footballs, who points out that the Daily Kos may be getting their talking points from the "non-profit, non-bias, non-political" -- but decidely pro-Islamic and conspiracy-minded -- Media Monitors Network (MNN): What If Israel Had Never Been Created?, by William Hughes (Tuesday July 11 2006).

Be Here To Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt

2006-07-03T21:51:00.000-07:00

"Well, many of the songs, they aren't sad, they're hopeless."
Townes Van Zandt, after being asked why he only wrote sad songs.
"Aloneness is a state of being, whereas loneliness is a state of feeling. It's like the difference between being broke and being poor." -- Townes Van Zandt
"Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that. -- Steve Earle

Having just seen the documentary Be Here To Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt, I feel like I've just discovered a long-lost musical friend and a man after my own heart. The movie's not quite as good as Dig (still the greatest musical documentary of all time), but it's still a great introduction to a great artist.

Check him out.

Bush goes Jogging with Iraqi Amputee (Not the First Time)

2006-06-27T21:48:00.000-07:00

Bush jogs with wounded soldier, by Jenniver Loven (Associated Press) June 27, 2006:

WASHINGTON - President Bush took a jog Tuesday with a soldier who lost part of both legs in Iraq, following through on a bedside promise even the president had doubts about at the time.
Despite a slight drizzle, Bush and Staff Sgt. Christian Bagge took a slow jog around a spongy track that circles the White House's South Lawn. About halfway through their approximately half-mile run, Bush and Bagge paused briefly for reporters.
"He ran the president into the ground, I might add," Bush said, as the two gripped hands in an emotional, lengthy shake. "But I'm proud of you. I'm proud of your strength, proud of your character."

What is interesting is that this is not the first time our President has heeded such an offer. In April 2004, he followed up on a similar promise to U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Michael McNaughton, who lost a leg in Afghanistan:

In the months since his wounding, Sgt. McNaughton has undergone at least 11 separate operations as a result of his injuries and has been fitted with a thin, robotic prosthetic shaft to replace his right leg. While recuperating at Walter Reed, Sgt. McNaughton was honored to receive a visit from President Bush. One of the subjects of common interest they discussed was running, and the President extended an invitation to Sgt. McNaughton to come running with him once he was up and about.
The President's invitation posed something of a dilemma for Sgt. McNaughton: "He said give him a call and we'll go running. How are you supposed to just call the president?" Fortunately, Sgt. McNaughton's doctor at Walter Reed was also a doctor for the President, and the two men were able to keep in touch through her.
In April 2004, Sgt. McNaughton and his family made the trip to Washington, and — true to his word — the President went for a run with him.

("Born to Run" Snopes.com).

Great Moments in the History of Pacifism

2006-06-17T22:48:00.000-07:00

"I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions...
"If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman and child to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them."

Mahatma Gandhi

2006-06-12T21:38:00.000-07:00

Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegitimate, and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive.

-- Alexis De Tocqueville: Introduction - Democracy in America

2006-04-28T18:22:00.000-07:00

Through the sloth that is sin, man barricades himself against the challenge handed to him by his own dignity. He resists being a spiritual entity endowed with the power to make decisions; he simply does not want to be that for which God lifted him above all natural potentiality…. He who is in conflict with himself in his inmost dwelling, who consequently does not will to be what he fundamentally is anyway, cannot dwell with himself and cannot be at home with himself.”

Josef Pieper

“The Obscurity of Hope and Despair” in Josef Pieper: An Anthology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 23-24.

* * *

We must abandon any idea that we are the slaves of chance, or environment, or our subconscious; any vague notion that good and evil are merely relative terms, or that conduct and opinion do not really matter; any comfortabl persuasion that, however shiftlessly we muddy through life it will somehow or other all come right on the night. We must try to believe that man’s will is free, that he ca consciously exercise choice, and his choice can be decisive t all eternity. For The Divine Comedy is precisely the drama of the soul’s choice.

Dorothy Sayers, “Introduction,” Dante’s The Divine Comedy, trans. by Dorothy Sayers (Baltimore: Penguin Classics, 1959, Vol. I. Hell, 11.

The Da Vinci Code - Criticism and Commentary

2006-04-26T18:30:00.000-07:00

A new project from the Ratzinger Fan Club

Scott Carson on 'The Examined Life'

2006-04-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

In other passages in other dialogues Socrates (that is, Plato, using Socrates) draws a distinction between two kinds of ignorance. One kind is the straightforward ignorance of objective facts for which no one can be held morally blameworthy unless they claim to know something that they know full well they don't know. But the other kind, which Plato appears to have regarded as a moral failing, is ignorance of the fact that one is ignorant--a kind of ignorance of one's own limitations with regard to expertise. Although Socrates always professed to be ignorant in the first sense, he admitted that he did not believe himself to be ignorant in the second sense--the sense that, for Plato, was far more important. It was precisely because Plato regarded Socrates as wise in this latter sense that he regarded Socrates as the paradigm case of a wise person.
If it accomplishes nothing else, philosophy will teach you about your own limitations, even as it illumines the limitations of others. You come to understand very quickly that, not only is there no such thing as progess in philosophy, but there is not really any such thing as progress at all, other than the banal sort that allows us to build better bridges or manufacture better textiles, machinery, and medicines. We are more technologically advanced today than the ancient Greeks were, but morally, psychologically, philosophically--in any really important sense, we are no further than they. In some ways, I imagine, we have yet to catch up with them.

Scott Carson, The Examined Life.

First Anniversary of Pope John Paul II - 1920-2005

2006-04-02T22:32:00.000-07:00

God our Father, you reward all who believe in you. May your servant, John Paul II, our Pope, vicar of Peter, and shepherd of your Church, who faithfully administered the mysteries of your forgiveness and love on earth, rejoice with you for ever in heaven. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

- Roman Missal.

First Anniversary of Pope John Paul the Great - Lane Core Jr., with a collection of blog-posts from the previous year.
The World Remembers, Reflects and Pays Tribute to Pope John Paul II Against The Grain April 3, 2005.
Pope John Paul II: 1920-2005 - CNN Special Report. (See also "The Last Days of John Paul II", a CNN Special Presentation airing today/tonight).

Thomas Blosser - "Uncle Tom" - Memories and Request for Prayer

2006-03-27T18:55:00.001-08:00

I only have distant (but very fond) memories of my uncle -- He was Japanese, adopted by birth, but in many ways more American than my father, having imbibed Western culture to the fullest, marrying a bluegrass banjo legend from Alabama named Wendy Holcombe (he played bass guitar, although I don't know the precise circumstances of their meeting). I remember the first time we met Uncle Tom and Aunt Wendy in Knoxville -- they treated my brother Jon and me to pizza at Chucky Cheese, and a Walt Disney movie (The Black Cauldron).

Later on they came to Hickory, NC, where they stayed for a brief spell, and Aunt Wendy played banjo in our living room, including "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" (theme from Bonnie & Clyde).

There was a legend going around that a bunch of silver dollars were buried in the dirt-floor basement of the house we lived in at the time. I remember Uncle Tom actually rented a metal detector and spent the afternoon excavating with a shovel, to no avail. He was crazy and full of fun. He also helped my brothers and me rake leaves in the backyard (a never-ending chore during the fall).

Funny the little things you remember.

Aunt Wendy died very young, a victim of a heart ailment, and Uncle Tom never fully recovered in his grief. He had fallen out of touch with the rest of the Blossers, eluding my father's efforts to locate him.

This past Friday, my father got a call from my grandfather, who was just informed by somebody in Birmingham, Alabama, that my Uncle Tom had passed away.

We had always entertained the faint hope of seeing Uncle Tom again, so this is especially hard news to take.

Please keep Thomas Blosser in your prayers, as well as my father and the rest of our extended family.

The Adoption of Our Son Thomas, from the collected memoirs of Eugene and Louella Gingerich Blosser.
Thomas Blosser (1951-2006), RIP - Dr. Blosser, March 29, 2006.
Thomas Yoshiro Blosser - In Memoriam The obituary in The Birmingham News gave only the following spare details for Thomas Yoshiro Blosser the following Monday morning:
BLOSSER, THOMAS YOSHIRO, Accomplished local musician, Thomas Yoshiro Blosser, died suddenly of natural causes on Thursday, March 23, 2006. Born November 3, 1951, in Muroran, Japan, he became a naturalized US Citizen, was married to the late Wendy Holcombe, and is survived by his adoptive father, Eugene, and siblings, Philip, Rachel and Meiko. Memorial Services will be held on Monday at 2:00 p.m. at Charter Funeral Home, 621-0800. Published in The Birmingham News on 3/27/2006.
These few sentences, of course, do not begin to fathom the story of Tom's life; nor can I, for that matter, in the brief compass of this post. But the story begins long ago in Japan. Read the rest of the story here.

Reflections on Steven Spielberg's Munich

2006-01-26T22:25:00.000-08:00

At 5:00 AM, September 5th, 1972, a seminal event in the development of modern terrorism took place. Eight Palestinian terrorists invaded the site of the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. They killed and took hostage eleven Israeli athletes competing in the Games, demanding the release of over 200 imprisoned Arabs and 2 German terrorists. Over the next few tension-filled days, all the hostages and some of the terrorists were killed, and the remaining terrorists escaped, mostly due to incompetence and perfidy of the German government. The Olympic Committee made a controversial decision to continue the Games, and has never held any memorial for the slain athletes. Eventually almost all of the remaining terrorists were hunted down and killed by Israeli agents, directed by then Prime Minister Golda Meir.

-- Munich Remembered, by Judith @ Kesher Talk.

The authoritative documentary of the Munich Massacre is One Day in September.

The new Steven Spielberg film Munich, loosely based on George Jonas' book Vengeance, purports to be "the story of what happens next," following the 1972 Munich Massacre. Many critics and pundits (predominantly those on the left) have praised it as a stirring commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its "cycle of violence", as well as a cinematic protest against the Bush administration's "war on terrorism."

Munich: Praise

Discussing The Morality of 'Munich' Alternet Dec. 24, 2005), Jordan Elgrably heralds Munich as "the work of a mature filmmaker--one who does not appear beholden to popular American Jewish opinion that Israel is always the underdog," with a timely moral lesson for today's conflict:

The military occupation of Palestinian territories is in its 38th year; the settlement movement continues apace; and all the international peace initiatives have failed. The one dependable reality of the conflict -- Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli targeted assassinations -- is utterly bankrupt. Nothing remains but for the Palestinians to seek justice with a nonviolent revolution for peace, in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, and for the Israeli people to follow new leaders who can devise political rather than military solutions.

Andrew Gumbel applauds Munich's implicit criticism of President Bush: (The Independent January 5, 2006):

The material not only takes a sideswipe at Israel and its long-standing policy of doing whatever it takes to guarantee its own survival. The parallels with George Bush's America are also unmistakable, at a time when the moral standing of the United States around the world has been severely undermined by reports of torture, targeted killings and war justified by intelligence that was either incorrect or deliberately skewed to suit a pre-determined political agenda. To ensure that the point is not missed, the film concludes with a shot of the lower Manhattan skyline including the now-fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center.

David DiCerto of the USCCB's (Conference of Catholic Bishops) Office for Film & Broadcasting praises Munich as "a clear statement by the filmmaker that violence comes at a cost of one's soul," a continuation of "a cinematic conversation about the value of human life begun with Schindler's List. The message of that film was that 'whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.' The grim counterpoint here suggests that in taking lives the light of our humanity is collectively dimmed."

And JB (aka Dawnwatchman explicates Munich's gospel of nonviolence:

Munich speaks extensively about home, brotherhood, morals, and achieving peace on earth. However, these themes are secondary to the point Spielberg is trying to make through a powerful meditation. The dogma of an eye for an eye does not work. Here is where the irony comes into play, for the solution is most likely beyond what Spielberg intended. For we know that only the New Law is capable of justifying a man in the sight of God. Therefore, the problems and conflicts in the Middle East can’t be arbitrated using a precept of the Old Law. The New Law alone is sufficient. What this means is something which neither side is willing to accept. Israelis and Palestinians need to learn to live together. To break bread together, so to speak. It’s either that or somebody has to relocate to another part of the world, either of this life or the next. In better words, the Old Law must pass away:
“You have heard that it hath been said: An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you not to resist evil: but if one strike thee on thy right cheek, turn to him also the other.” – Matt., 5:38-39

Munich: Criticism

On the other hand, other critics have charged that the very zealousness with which Spielberg condemns the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has led him to entertain the notion of "moral equivalence" -- namely, that there is, with a view to the consequences, no ultimate difference between the Palestinian terrorist and the Israeli soldier.

Captain's Quaters, for instance, gave a disappointing review of the film:

On its most facile level, Munich is a gripping film. Had it been based on complete fiction -- if Spielberg had had the sense to manufacture a hypothetical instead of hijacking history and twisting it -- then it might have even had a valid point to make. Spielberg has lost nothing as a film director in a technical sense, . . . The cinematography, music, mood, and all of the technical efforts put into the film are first rate, without a doubt.
And every last bit of it gets wasted by a silly sense of moral equivalency that comes from a fundamental misrepresentation of the threat Israel faces, and in the strongly suggested allegorical sense, the threat that faces the US and the West now.

The problem with Munich, says the author, is that "by equating the two sides, Spielberg and the world gave the perpetrators of terrorism the same moral standing as its victims, especially when the victims sought to ensure that their enemies could not live long enough to plan more such attacks."

Cliff Kincaid and Roger Aronoff of Accuracy in the Media describe the film in terms of a Hollywood Surrender to Terrorists:

It is apparent that the movie is not only supposed to be historical but meant to send a message to Israel, the U.S. and the Bush Administration. The film's website even says that "the film takes audiences into a hidden moment in history that resonates with many of the same emotions in our lives today." Spielberg intends to convince us that responding to terrorism with military force is hopeless. . . .
The real problem with the film is the moral equivalence, as Spielberg talks about "intransigence" and complains about "response to a response," as if Israel is at fault for trying to defend itself. What he seems to forget is that Israel is fighting for its very existence against an Arab/Muslim bloc of nations that still preaches hatred and destruction of Jews and Israelis.
Roger Ebert, who gave the film a big thumbs up, says about Spielberg's approach: "By not taking sides, he has taken both sides." But how can that be morally correct or defensible?

FrontPageMag also hosted a (sometimes heated) Symposium on Munich, inviting several authors and commentators -- pro and con -- to discuss the meaning of the film. Carl Horowitz points out that Munich mastermind Mohammed Daoud has voiced his disagreement with the film's depiction of his team, charging: "We did not target Israeli civilians. Some of the athletes had taken part in wars and killed many Palestinians. Whether a pianist or an athlete, any Israeli is a soldier." According to Horowitz, Doud's "factually-challenged rant performs a useful function. For it indicates that Spielberg would have had to have gone a lot further to appease his Arab critics – that is, to make a film that truly was morally equivalent."

Arnold Steinberg disagrees:

This movie is an assault on the war on terrorism. That's why the movie ends with the twin towers in the background. It's supposed to bring you full circle, on the cycle of violence b.s. which is the corollary of moral equivalence, alongside the Arabist belief that the U.S. provoked 9-11.
This movie clearly implies the Israeli response to Munich escalated, if not unleashed, a new generation of terrorism that culminated in 9-11. Kushner cleverly projected plausible even-handedness, but on the points that mattered, he gutted Israel. Remember, the Palestinian wins the homeland debate by default. I talk mainly about Kushner, because he used Spielberg, who has much more clout. . . . Munich was dishonest, overwhelmingly so, factually. Moreover, the mission, to the extent it existed, was not revenge, but to disrupt the terrorist hierarchy, which it did. And to quote Daoud attacking Spielberg? Bottom line -- this movie depicts the straight Arabist line -- this is a real estate conflict and ignores the reality that key Arab constituencies, from religious zealous to secular extremists, hate Jews and want them dead.

In Spielberg’s Moral Confusion (NRO, Jan. 6, 2006), Monica Charen criticizes Spielberg's inattention to history and the impact it will likely have on its audience, some of whom weren't even alive in 1972 (like myself, I admit) and probably won't bother investigating the actual facts of the incident:

Munich is a well-crafted movie, but it is a deeply and disturbingly dishonest one. Many moviegoers were not even born in 1972, and many who were alive will scarcely remember the details. Do moviemakers owe nothing to them? Do they owe nothing to the truth? This is not Oliver Stone’s JFK, but for that reason its effect may be more insidious. The film looks like history but it is a morality play of the artist’s imagination. Spielberg uses real historical figures like Golda Meir as props, putting words in their mouths that they not only did not say, but would never have said. During the opening credits, the audience is informed that the film is “inspired by real events.” That could mean anything — but movie audiences probably will not parse the words with lawyerly care. They will read it in the context of a film that offers generous servings of verisimilitude. There are clips of sportscaster Jim McKay reporting from the Munich Olympics in 1972, as well as the voice of Peter Jennings narrating the harrowing events. Some of the details of the kidnapping and murder of the eleven Israeli athletes are well-researched. But as CC Colton warned, “Falsehood is never so successful as when she baits her hook with truth.”

Credible Witness? -- Rinker Buck, George Jonas and Yuval Aviv

To compound the problem, Monica Charen notes that the very book Tony Kushner allegedly based his script on -- George Jonas' Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team -- is itself highly questionable:

Jonas based his tale on the word of one Israeli who claimed to have headed a clandestine assassination squad for the Mossad. But Jonas was the second, not the first author to whom this particular Israeli had peddled this tale of “Avner,” the Israeli hit man. The first, according to Time, was a writer named Rinker Buck who was offered an advance from Simon and Schuster. But the deal fizzled when Buck traveled to Europe to check his informant’s information and found that “he was changing his story daily.” Buck said he could not write the book in good conscience. Jonas apparently could. And while the book has been debunked for 20 years, Spielberg saw fit to build a movie upon it.

For background on Rinker Buck's conscientious refusal to peddle Avner's story, see "Believing What You Read", by Thomas Griffith Time June 25, 1984).
More on Jonas' book from Bret Stevens (Munich: What's wrong with Steven Spielberg's new movie Wall Street Journal Jan. 1, 2006): "Yuval Aviv, who claimed to be the model for Avner . . . was, according to Israeli sources, never in the Mossad and had no experience in intelligence beyond working as a screener for El Al, the Israeli airline."
For background on Yuval Aviv himself, see Spielberg could be on the wrong track, by Yosi Mellman Ha'aretz Jan. 8, 2006:
The problem arose five years later, in 1989, when a third party claimed in a lawsuit that private investigator Yuval Aviv, an Israeli, was Canadian journalist George Jonas' source. In the lawsuit, Jonas identified Aviv as a key figure in the book and argued that Aviv had dishonored an agreement and prevented him from receiving royalties due to him from the profits of the film.
After this identification, the international press began to publish articles about Aviv. Investigative reports about him revealed that he represented himself as a Mossad agent even though he had never worked in the Mossad and certainly had not participated in operations to kill those involved in the athletes' murder. Aviv, as he emerged from these investigative reports, had a special fondness for conspiracy theories, and it turned out that he was willing to hire out his services to anyone who was willing to pay, even to both sides of the same dispute.

Vengeance author George Jonas himself makes his case for telling "Avner's" story (and the eventual Hollywood cinematization/bastardization) in "the Spielberg massacre" (Macleans Jan. 7, 2006). Jonas stands by his man ("though he was not without a capacity for invention . . . "Avner" described a string of operations of which he had first-hand knowledge") and disavows any relationship with Aviv ("The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz floats the canard that my source was revealed to be one "Yuval Aviv" in the late 1980s when I sued him in a contract dispute in New York. The fact is, I've never sued anyone in my life, in New York or anyplace else").

At the same time, Jonas notes with clear disapproval Kushner's involvement with the Munich screenplay:

The confirmation that production will definitely be put over until 2005, pending a new script to be written by Tony Kushner, comes only in September. It doesn't come from Mendel. It comes from "Avner" who appears to be very much in the loop -- and thoroughly besotted. A spook in the grip of celebrity worship is a sight to behold.
"Avner" writes that with the new script Spielberg is planning "in some aspects to stay parallel with the book. But of course he [takes] the book where only Steven can take it." Considering Kushner's stance on Israel, it isn't hard to imagine where that will be. In addition to his magnum opus, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Spielberg's new screenwriter is co-author (with Alisa Solomon) of a 2003 book, Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. The title forecasts a film that will be a "progressive" Jewish-American response to the Munich massacre. No wonder there's a reluctance to let me see the script.

and expresses his disappointment with the finished project by the 'King of Hollywood' himself:

Spielberg's "Munich" follows the letter of my book closely enough. The spirit is almost the opposite. Vengeance holds there is a difference between terrorism and counterterrorism; "Munich" suggests there isn't. The book has no trouble telling an act of war from a war crime; the film finds it difficult. Spielberg's movie worries about the moral trap of resisting terror; my book worries about the moral trap of not resisting it.

Disputing Jonas' account of the operation is Time magazine Israeli correspondent Aaron Klein's newly-published Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response:

A main disagreement between the two books is whether the Mossad's assassinations of the Black September leaders that followed the 1972 Olympic attacks was an emotional reaction against the attackers, as "Vengeance" and "Munich" both assert, or whether, as Klein argues, it was also a strategic response to break up a terrorist network.
"Striking Back" was actually in the works at Random House several years ago, before Spielberg revealed he was working on the film, and wasn't set to come out until next year. Random House rushed publication when it learned of the film's release.

("Rival Tome Snipes at Munich Variety Award Central, Dec. 12, 2005).

Setting the Record Straight

The Jewish blog KesherTalk provides a good roundup of pundit reactions, reviews and blogger commentary on Munich.

Likewise, they do the world a favor by drawing our attention to the historical account of Munich -- the massacre, with a series of reflections on the senseless slaughter of the Israeli athletes:

Parting Thoughts

As one who appreciates Steven Spielberg's previous films (Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan especially) and his undeniable prowess in moviemaking, I'd certainly like to believe him when he repudiates "blind pacifism," proclaims his fidelity to Israel and defends the making of the film as an exercise in Talmudic questioning (A telephone call with Spielberg, by Roger Ebert. Dec. 25, 2005).

At the same time, having seen the movie myself, I've come to some judgements of my own about the film:

"Humanizing" Terrorism and drawing "Moral Equivalence"

Yes, a certain degree of "humanizing" of the terrorists does occur in the film -- the selected targets are shown in a positive light: a poet reading his translation of 'Arabian Nights' in Italian to a sidewalk audience; a good father with his loving wife and adoring daughter; a good-natured gentleman who offers a cigarette and sleeping pills to Avner before he goes off to bed (and to his death). In reminding us of their humanity, their crimes are practically hidden, their complicity in the deaths of innocents obscured by the veneer of gentleness and charm.

Yet, even in a stairwell encounter between Avner and a Palestinian named Ali, in which the latter is given the opportunity to present his grievances against Israel, I did not feel that Spielberg was putting forth "moral equivalence" in the sense that the direct actions of the terrorists and those of the Israeli strike team were of a piece. Whereas the Palestinians are shown mercilessly slaughtering the Olympic athletes, Avner and his men take scrupulous care not to harm innocent civilians, nearly-aborting one mission where the target's daughter was endangered. Some critics berated Avner's questioning and moral deliberation as a sign of weakness; I'm inclined to agree with Sonny Bunch (Munich Syndrom Weekly Standard Jan. 6, 2006):

. . . Compare this to the Palestinian terrorists who have no problem with turning AK-47s on hogtied hostages. And then there is the deeper question of humanity: Avner understand the justness of his mission, but still struggles with the taking of life. The terrorists show no such qualms.

And yet, I must say there was a great deal in the movie that could -- and did -- lead audiences to conclude a "moral equivalence" with respect to ends: in suggesting that the Israeli's counter-terrorism tactics were themselves a propogator of more terror, and that resorting to armed force for whatever reason inevitably perpetuates a "cycle of violence."

James Bowman, resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, lists "a few of the conventional ideas served up by [Spielberg and Kushner]" (Munich: A Review The American Spectator Dec. 30, 2005):

* Revenge is an uncivilized, savage act that lowers the revenger to the level of his victim. As a result, there is always a certain moral equivalence between killer and victim.
* Engaging in revenge perpetuates a cycle of violence.
* Those who are caught up in this cycle and who kill in cold blood often suffer terrible agonies of conscience: nightmares, paranoia, substance abuse, and other manifestations of what we have learned to call post-traumatic stress disorder.
* From governments of all kinds, corruption, violence, and lack of human compassion is to be expected.
* Therefore, one should put loyalty to one's family and friends ahead of loyalty to one's country.

Despite Spielberg's intentions, it seems to me that Munich renders itself easily exploitable by those who are anti-Israel, anti-Bush and anti-war, resisting the very idea that armed force can be used in a morally legitimate manner, in service to the good.

In his reflections on the film -- Art Needs Moral Vision (VictorHansen.com Dec. 27, 2005) -- Bruce Thornton describes the phrase "cycle of violence" as indicative of a modern moral pathology: the inclination to see force "not in moral terms — that is, as the instrument of a righteous or unrighteous choice and aim — but as a reflexive reaction to grievances and wounds to self-esteem." According to Thorton, it is a pathology that has been soundly exploited by Arab terrorists in the defense of their cause:

Jews traumatized by anti-Semitism and the Holocaust drove from their homes Arabs who, in turn traumatized by their suffering and the thwarting of their “nationalist aspirations,” turn to violence, which provokes a response from the Israelis, which creates more suffering, which provokes more violence, and on and on. All we need to do is break the cycle — which usually means getting Israel to stop reacting to Palestinian violence — create a Palestinian state, and the lion will lie down with the lamb.

Thorton himself sees this as the underlying viewpoint of Spielberg's Munich:

In Munich . . . force is viewed with the suspicion typical of the quasi-pacifist liberal. Using force against murderers is futile, the movie keeps telling us, for each dead terrorist is replaced by another one, each killing of a terrorist inspires another act of terrorist retribution. I wonder what would have happened if the same attitude had been taken regarding Nazis or kamikaze pilots. Thank goodness our fathers and grandfathers had more sense. They knew that evil men have to be destroyed, and you stick with the job until the evil men give up or are no more. They knew that evil men choose their evil to advance some aim, and will try to kill you no matter what you do, and are more likely to take heart from a failure to resist than to reconsider their evil aims or to abandon violence. They knew that the sorts of reservations Munich indulges are not signs of a sophisticated sensibility but rather the evasions borne of moral uncertainty, Hamlet-like doubts whose purpose is to avoid action and moral responsibility.
The moral evasions at the heart of Munich evoke another Munich, the Munich of Neville Chamberlain and appeasement, that moment in 1938 when moral exhaustion confronted evil and blinked, unleashing a force of destruction that cost 50 million dead and that was stopped not by understanding of context or empathy with the enemy’s humanity but by righteous force wielded by men who weren’t afraid to call evil by its proper name.

* * *

Munich and the Greater Question of 'Justified Use of Armed Force

I am presently reading The War to Oust Saddam Hussein: The Context, The Debate, The War and the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), by James Turner Johnson, a notable scholar of military ethics and the just war tradition. Professor Johnson is severely critical of Bishop Wilton Gregory's stance during the Iraq war (and the subsequent position of the USCCB), because its argument against the war began with the prejudice that, in the words of Bishop Gregory, "a moral presumption against the use of armed force." According to Johnson, such reasoning is at a marked variance with the classical just war tradition:

Just war thinking in its classic form is based on something quite different -- a conception of life in political community oriented to a just and peaceful order, in which the use of armed force is a necessary tool to be used by responsibile political authority to protect that just and peaceful order in a world in which serious threats are not only possible but actual. In the presumption against war model, force itself is the moral problem, and peace is defined as the absence of the use of such force. In the just war model rightly understood, injustice and the threat of injustice are the fundamental moral problems, for in the absence of justice, the political community is not rightly ordered, and there is no real peace either in that community or in its relation to other political communities. Force here is not evil in itself; it takes its moral character from who uses it, from the reasons that are used to justify it, and from the intention with which it is used. These are, of course, the classic just war requirements of sovereign authority, just cause, and right intention, and they correspond directly to right order, justice, and peace, the goods at which political community should aim as defined in the Augustinian conception of politics within which just war tradition is soundly rooted. To be sure, force is evil when it is employed to attack the justice and peace of a political order oriented toward these goods, but it is precisely to defend against such evil that the use of force may be good. Just war tradition had to do with defining the possible good use of force, not finding exceptional cases when it is possible to use something inherently evil (force) for the purposes of good.

This post is long enough, so in the interest of time I will refer the reader to James Turner Johnson's excellent essay Just War, As It Was and Is (First Things 149 (January 2005): 14-24); George Weigel also touches upon this briefly in Force of law, law of force (The Catholic Difference April 30, 2003), and at length in his study Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace Oxford UP, 1987.

I can't help but notice some affinities between those who praise Munich as a cinematic protest against violence (the use of force per se) and those who advocate "a moral presumption against the use of armed force" as the starting point for deliberation in matters of war. I think that a film like Munich might compel Catholics and Christians to evaluate where they stand with respect to this issue:

Is the only response to terrorism the eschewing of violence, the adoption of absolute pacifism?

Is there such a thing as a justifiable and legitimate use of armed force?

Is the 'just war tradition' as it has been developed in Catholic tradition rendered absolete, the opinion put forth by a few voices within the Vatican Curia?

With respect to the last question, I am well aware that then-Cardinal Ratzinger, in a May 2, 2003 interview with Zenit, expressed the opinion that "given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a 'just war.'" Some have (incorrectly, I think) imbued this specific line with the full weight of magisterial authority, while others -- like James Turner Johnson -- have questioned its implications, as well as its reasoning.

* * *

Likewise, the question is also raised: in responding to terrorism, what is the appropriate, reasonable and morally justifiable course of action?

Are "targeted assassinations" in the prevention of terrorism acceptable? The Logic of Israel's Targeted Killing, by Gal Luft (Middle East Quarterly Volume X, No. 1, Winter 2003) describes the procedure:

Israelis dislike the term "assassination policy." They would rather use another term—"extrajudicial punishment," "selective targeting," or "long-range hot pursuit"—to describe the pillar of their counterterrorism doctrine. But semantics do not change the fact that since the 1970s, dozens of terrorists have been assassinated by Israel's security forces, and in the two years of the Aqsa intifada, there have been at least eighty additional cases of Israel gunning down or blowing up Palestinian militants involved in the planning and execution of terror attacks.

The legality of Israel's policy is presently being debated in Israeli courts. In a July 2001 State Dept. briefing, the Bush Administration stated that "Israel needs to understand that targeted killings of Palestinians don't end the violence, but are only inflaming an already volatile situation and making it much harder to restore calm." Yet, in a Fox News interview August 2, 2001, Vice President Cheney has also suggested that

"If you've got an organization that has plotted or is plotting some kind of suicide bomber attack, for example, and they have evidence of who it is and where they're located, I think there's some justification in their trying to protect themselves by preempting."

The formal position of the U.S. Government is conveyed in Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan, directing that "no person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." According to the Washington Post, "the original version was signed in 1976 by President Gerald R. Ford in the wake of public disclosure in 1975 that the CIA, with White House support, had attempted assassinations in the 1950s and 1960s of Cuban President Fidel Castro and leaders in the Congo and the Dominican Republic" (Source: Walter Pincus, Washington Post 1998).

However, one can't help but note the "selective targeting" of Al Qaeda members in counter-terrorist operations (the most recent being a Pakistani air-strike which killed two senior members of Al Qaeda and the son-in-law of its No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri (New York Times Jan. 19, 2006). How does this differ from the present strategy of Israel?

At this time, Israel is faced with the threat of Iran, a nation that has barely concealed its active seeking nuclear arms, and whose president has stated that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and "God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism."

Michael Yon on 'Operation Iraqi Children'

2006-01-22T09:23:00.000-08:00

Operation Iraqi Children -- Michael Yon blogs about one of the latest grassroots efforts of the American people to aid the nation of Iraq:

I’ve seen the U.S. Army hold medical screenings, build schools and playgrounds, deliver sporting gear, and so on, but much of the help for Iraqi kids is coming from Joe Citizen, who has never been to Iraq, through a program started when one not-so-ordinary citizen traveled there and saw the immediate need.
While on a USO tour of Iraq in 2003, Gary Sinise recognized the potential as well as the plight of these children. Once back in the United States, he joined forces with a couple of smart and good-hearted people, Laura Hillenbrand and Mary Eisenhower, and took action to address the educational needs of Iraqi kids. In what he describes as “a few breathtaking and exhausting weeks,” these three dynamos organized Operation Iraqi Children (OIC). . . .

A must-read post and a project worth supporting by preparing and sending your own School Supply Kit.

Abbie Hoffman - Unpublished Interview

2006-01-21T17:54:00.000-08:00

In 1986, Kesher Talk contributor Van Wallach interviewed 60s radical Abbie Hoffman for a New York publication. Based on five hours of conversation, the edited transcript never got published. Hoffman died, at his own hand, in 1989. Now, thanks to the magic of blogging, Hoffman's wit and energy live again -- see "Conversations with a Ghost: The Abbie Hoffman Interview".

Christmas Vacation 2005

2005-12-31T04:26:00.000-08:00

12/23/05 - Flight at 9:00am with a nice 3 hour layover in Washington Reagan airport, long enough to grab a pint (Old Dominion ale, quite nice) and a burger and people-watch as the other travelers rushed around. Got into Knoxville, TN around 3:30pm and met Jon. We took a side-trip to his workplace (Toyota) where he showed me his office and the gigantic warehouse where he coordinates the supply of car-parts from Japan and Vietnam to various manufacturers in the state. We hung out at his place for a bit and then hit the town, first the Downtown Grill & Brewery (so-so fajitas, decent beer, great wings) followed by Patrick Sullivan's (founded in 1888), where I proceeded to leave behind a very special (sentimental) Pop Will Eat Itself hat from their '94 tour and my semester in England. Argh!
12/24/05 Woke up and drove to Hickory, NC where we arrived concurrently with Renata and Nathan, fresh back from his Naval tour of the Middle East. In traditional Blosser fashion we presented beloved dad with a fifth of liquor, a six pack and some nice wine for the missus. We got a nice buzz on and spent some time male-bonding on the back porch, target-practice with Nathan's old BB gun.
Amy's parents came over for dinner -- cheese fondu and a honey-baked ham courtesy of Jon's employers, with some delicious cake for dessert.
Best of all, I got to see my baby sister Hannah Cabrini for the first time; she's a real cutie, and when she's not screaming she's got an impish grin on her face and a tendency to put anything and everything in her mouth.
After dinner we opened our Christmas presents -- a set of Iraq's "Most Wanted" Poker Cards from Pa; new fleece sweater from Amy's parents; a blue baseball cap embroidered with J.R.R. Tolkien's "Not All Who Wander Are Lost" from Amy (way cool).
We played several rounds of poker before/after dinner -- Jon taught me "Texas Hold 'Em" and Nathan a game called "Spit In The Ocean." I don't play all that often, but managed to win $20 in dimes and quarters over the course of the evening, with the loser doing mini-shots of Jim Beam. Unfortunately, Jon did most of the losing and passed out face-first on his old bunkbed in the garage (he slept on the bottom, myself on top) and we had to take off his shoes.
I had a fitful sleep, partly because I was on the top bunk and from Jon kicking me whenever I started snoring. We learned from Renata that ALL THREE of us were snoring away, poor girl.
12/25/05 . . . and then Pa started blaring Handel's Messiah at six o'clock in the morning. I don't recall this being a Christmas tradition, at least not at such an early hour. Amy's mom had prepared a delicious casserole of eggs, sausage and cheese -- I was tempted to get the recipe but I don't think soy sausage would suffice as an ingredient. We bundled up and went to Mass at St. Aloysius', Hickory where I was confirmed. Saw a lot of familiar faces. The choir was sparse due to the holidays but -- how shall we put this graciously? -- they tried very hard. Afterwards we went to lunch at Amy's parents, where "Grandpa" John showed us his (very impressive) collection of firearms (including World War II era), followed by more presents for Pa and Amy. Christmas evening was pretty low-key as we were all recovering from the night before; we saw The Big Lebowski (a personal favorite of Jon and I). Pa and I got into a minor dispute over the merits of The New Oxford Review, particularly editor Dale Vree's latest hatchet-piece on the neocons (Pa's a longtime fan, I'm really not). I went to bed in the guest room so as to spare Jon and Nathan my snoring.
12/26/05 -- Pa & Amy packed up and left early morning bound for Iowa to see Grandpa & Grandma Blosser. We went out to El Chapala Mexican restaurant (a tried-and-true source of authentic Mexican cuisine -- great margeritas, too) with Nathan and Renata, after which they left for home and Jon and I went shopping for supplies for our camping trip. We cleaned up the house and spent the evening at McGuire's Pub, another Blosser favorite and preferable to the rather pretentious Taproom. We talked politics, relationships and music and I did my best to persuade Jon on the merits of Elvis Presley, the Misfits and (classic) country & western. He'll
12/27/05 - After a brief stop at Outdoor Supply and the old Army-Navy store, Jon and I drove to the Wilson's Creek Wilderness Area, which is known for its many waterfalls. It was cold and the roads were a little icy. The main road leading to our trail was closed, so we were forced to pick an alternative route. We hiked in for .8 of a mile to a campground, where the trail veered off to the right and seemed to fade out -- nobody had been down there in a while, so we thrashed around in the brush a bit before finding out way onto another, longer trail and hiked along the creek a bit to a nice spot where we pitched camp and got a good, roaring fire going. Beef stew (canned) and beer (cheap six pack) for dinner; hot chocolate for dessert. The evening sky was cold, crisp and absolutely clear, making for perfect stargazing before bed. Jon brought a deck of cards and taught me Rummy.
12/28/05 Jon and I woke up around ten o'clock the next morning and after a breakfast of sausage and eggs broke camp and hiked out -- quite the workout for me, as New Yorker that I was, I hadn't been hiking (much less camping) in five years: going in was tough on the knees, coming out hell on the calves . . . all the more incentive to start exercising in the new year. We reached the end around noon, feasted on some fresh tangerines and made our way to Asheville, NC.
We showered and rested at Mom's apartment for a bit, spent an hour solving a five-star difficulty game of Sudoku that she had printed out for us, and then met her as she got off work at Earth Fare. Had a great Chipotle Chicken Burrito at Mamacita's Mexican Grill washed down with a good pint at Ed Boudreaux's BBQ. Walking around Asheville we ran into old and good friends Lisa Miller and Carrie, both of whom still reside in Hickory and had fled to Asheville for a change of scenery. (If you've ever lived in Hickory, you'll understand that fleeing to Asheville is a frequent and -- for the sake of preserving one's sanity -- necessary pasttime).
12/29/05 Spent the day in Asheville with my mom; breakfast, then laundry, a few used music and book stores, lunch of spicy Thai chicken curry and Basil Noodles at Doc Chey's and a pint of Chocolate Stout at Jack O' The Wood (where I picked up a t-shirt per wife's request).
12/30/05 Quick brunch of pulled pork, sweet fries and macaroni & cheese at Ed Boudreaux's BBQ (had to get in one last good BBQ meal while in the South); then off to Asheville airport for a 2:00pm flight to La Guardia, NYC.

All in all, an excellent vacation. (More photos from Pa here).

P.S. Jon swung by Sullivan's on the way back home and picked up my PWEI hat, so all is well and good in the land of Blosser.

Maintaining my Status as a Warblogger: The Mother of All Roundups

2005-12-03T22:19:00.000-08:00

Various critics (friend and foe alike) have referred to me as a "warblogger" -- a label I find rather curious, since my actual blogging on the war is rather minimal compared to my other interests, and when I do blog, my meager efforts in this regard pale in comparison to the likes of, say, Little Green Footballs or Winds of Change.

When I think of "war blogs," I think of the reporting of combat journalist Michal Yon or blogger Bill Roggio, currently touring Anbar Province, Iraq by invitation of the 2nd Marine Division, or the real 'milbloggers' posting from the trenches.

However, Wikipedia defines a "warblog" as

"A warblog is a weblog devoted mostly or wholly to covering news events concerning an ongoing war. Sometimes the use of the term "warblog" implies that the blog concerned has a pro-war slant."

So on that note perhaps I'd qualify.

It has been quite a while since I did any significant posting on this subject . . . so in the interest of bolstering my reputation, here's a roundup of recommended links on the subject culled from the past few months.

From Bill Roggio's The Fourth Rail, An Interview with Colonel Davis Oct. 30, 2005, "Commander of Marine Regimental Combat Team - 2, who is responsible for fighting in western Anbar province, also known as AO Denver" -- who, among other things, summarizes his regiment's mission in Iraq:
. . . I don't like to talk in terms of winning and losing when it comes to the issues in the Middle East. Americans have a very Western way of thinking: you identify the problem; you analyze the problem and then fix it and move onto the next problem. Out here you need to be vigilant and do a lot of continuous maintenance work, which pays off over time.
Saddam never controlled this region of Iraq. It is very tribal and fiercely independent. He sent in the army to kill and intimidate the population. He established two tribes in the region: the Salmanis and the Karabilah tribes, to further his goals and counter balance existing dominating tribes. The Iraqis out west, particularly in Haditha are well educated and are able to provide for their own needs. They have operated this way for centuries and can do so again with the proper security environment. We have a simple equation we use out here:
Presence = Security = Stability = the environment for self governance.
Our goal is to enfranchise the Iraqi security forces and allow them to provide for the security in the region and improve the lives of the Iraqi people. We will continue to conduct civil/military affairs operations to improve the lives of the Iraqi people. In Haditha, we are rebuilding the hospital the jihadis attacked with a car bomb and then used as a base of operation. We are working to enhance schools and other services vital to the people. We will continue to maintain a presence until the Iraqi Army is capable of standing on its own.
Thanks to Chris Burgwald, who introduced me to the blog. See also this piece on Iran's sponsorship of international terrorism including Al Qaeda.
Update: The Fourth Rail is now closed, as Bill Roggio is currently blogging from Iraq (Anbar Province) by special invitation from senior Marine officers with the Regimental Combat Team - 2, 2nd Marine Division. You can now read him at ThreatsWatch.org.
Purple-Ink & Other Underreported Successes, by W. Thomas Smith, Jr. National Review Oct. 31, 2005:
Lance Corporal Tara Pryor has been in Iraq for only three weeks. Already, she has learned that what readers glean from newspapers and television broadcasts back home are not as things really are.
“I am surprised,” says the 21-year-old Strongsville, Ohio, native who currently serves with the Marine’s 6th Civil Affairs Group in Fallujah. “The majority of the [Iraqi] people appreciate what we are trying to do.”
Pryor’s revelation is no surprise to those who have been there. Back home, military servicemen and women contend the daily fare from the various media ranges from disturbing to false to downright manipulative. . . .
A War to be Proud Of, by Christopher Hitchens. The Weekly Standard 09/05/2005, Volume 010, Issue 47. The former Nation journalist turned neocon poses some difficult questions that beg for answers:
The balance sheet of the Iraq war, if it is to be seriously drawn up, must also involve a confrontation with at least this much of recent history. Was the Bush administration right to leave--actually to confirm--Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait in 1991? Was James Baker correct to say, in his delightfully folksy manner, that the United States did not "have a dog in the fight" that involved ethnic cleansing for the mad dream of a Greater Serbia? Was the Clinton administration prudent in its retreat from Somalia, or wise in its opposition to the U.N. resolution that called for a preemptive strengthening of the U.N. forces in Rwanda?
Our Troops Must Stay: "America can't abandon 27 million Iraqis to 10,000 terrorists", by Senator Joe Lieberman. Wall Street Journal Nov. 29, 2005. In case you missed it, a gutsy article from the Democratic senator from Connecticut, who returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months, and has good things to report.
Over at Mudville Gazette, Greyhawk questions John P Murtha's citation that "Over 15,500 have been seriously injured" in Iraq:
There have indeed been over 15,500 wounded. But of those, 8375 returned to duty within 72 hours - so although those wounds weren't funny perhaps those wounds weren't quite serious either. Still, 7347 troops have been wounded severely enough to require over 72 hours recuperation. Furthermore, 2,791 Soldiers were wounded seriously enough to require evacuation to Stateside Army Medical facilities. And 280 amputees have been treated in Army facilities as a result of the war. A lot of unscrupulous types who just want to pretend to "support the troops" ignore these facts in favor of the less correct (and more impressive) claim that 15,500 troops have been seriously wounded, or maimed, or mutilated. The real numbers are big enough - I just can't understand why some feel the need to pad them
Here's yet another reason to love Hollywood action-hero Bruce Willis (besides Die Hard):
Unlike many Hollywood stars Willis supports the war and recently offered a $1m (about £583,000) bounty for the capture of any of Al-Qaeda’s most wanted leaders such as Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri or Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, its commander in Iraq. Willis visited the war zone with his rock and blues band, the Accelerators, in 2003.
“I am baffled to understand why the things I saw happening in Iraq are not being reported,” he told MSNBC, the American news channel.
Source: Sunday Times Nov. 27, 2005. Willis is planning on making a film on Deuce Four, the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry, "which has spent the past year battling insurgents in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul."
The film will be based on the reporting of blogger Michael Yon, "a former special forces green beret who was embedded with Deuce Four and sent regular dispatches about their heroics." (P.S. Due recognition to Charlie Daniels as well, who raised thousands of dollars in donated musical instruments for troops in Iraq.)
Rerum-Novarum: Miscellaneous Threads Worth Reviewing Nov. 19, 2005. In case you haven't had enough, another roundup with commentary from I. Shawn McElhinney, with notes on Able Danger, the question of missing WMD's and . . . Kurt Vonnegut.

History Lesson(s)

A Brief History of a Long War (1990-2003), by Greyhawk (Mudville Gazette), providing a necessary corrective to those who quickly forget the history of this conflict:
. . . One of the most blatant - and most effective - examples [of revisionism] has been the highly successful propagation of the idea that the war in Iraq began as a misguided result of the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11th 2001. To achieve this feat of near-universal denial requires the dismissing of over a decade of real history - years in which a handful of Americans drew a line in the sand on distant shores - a line crossed repeatedly and re-drawn too frequently by too many hands to be forgotten so swiftly.
And it's nearly forgotten they are, those warriors of just a few short years ago. But not just yet, at least not completely. This work in progress is dedicated to my fellow members of the US military, those who stand the "line in the sand" now and those have done so for so many years past.
Look, here is what happened. Listen, here's what they said when it did. . . .
The New York Times and Iraq: 1993-2005. The blogger at American Future embarks on an ambitious project to "employ the New York Times’ editorials to trace and analyze the evolution of the newspaper’s stance on Iraq":
A war can be lost because public opinion turns against its continued prosecution. The New York Times – the self-described “newspaper of record” – is among the world’s most influential opinion leaders. As shown by the cited quotations, the newspaper’s stance on Iraq underwent a complete transformation during the decade separating 1993 and 2003. While its editors never lost their fear of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), their prescription for countering the threat posed by the weapons was altered beyond recognition. In 1993, by arguing that cease-fire violations nullified U.N. protection, the Times affirmed the right of a victorious party to resume hostilities at its sole discretion if the party it defeated did not abide by the terms of the agreement to which it affixed its signature. Ten years later, the Times reversed its stance, asserting that the United States should not go to war without the approval of the United Nations. In so doing, the Times implicitly argued that going to war with the approval of a multilateral institution took precedence over the use of military force to expeditiously eliminate the threat posed by Iraq’s WMD.
The New York Times and Iraq (1993-2005): Part I covers the eight years of the Clinton administration, is the first of three that employ the Times’ editorials to trace and analyze the evolution of the newspaper’s position on Iraq. Part II covers the Bush administration until the invasion of Iraq. Part III covers the Invasion of Iraq to Abu Ghraib (March 2003 - April 2004).
Where the WMDs Went, by Jamie Glazov. FrontPageMagazine.com | November 16, 2005. Interview with Bill Tierney, a former military intelligence officer and Arabic speaker "who worked at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and as a counter-infiltration operator in Baghdad in 2004. He was also an inspector (1996-1998) for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) for overseeing the elimination of WMD's and ballistic missiles in Iraq. He worked on the most intrusive inspections during this period and either participated in or planned inspections that led to four of the seventeen resolutions against Iraq."

Torture

Junkyard blogger B. Preston "would love it if Mark Shea simply defined torture -- What it is and what it isn’t. He's right, in that this post is a typically brilliant snark-fest but never actually addresses what the McCain Amendment will and will not do. . . . It’s seriously snarky and seriously angry, but doesn’t approach the issue with any genuine seriousness. In the end, it’s lazy." Much as I enjoy Mark's blog, I do think his snarkiness sometimes gets the better of him, together with his practice of labeling the opposition. Then again, perhaps that's part of his appeal. On his behalf, he did author the rather more serious appraisal of the issue in: Toying with Evil: May a Catholic Advocate Torture? Crisis March 9, 2005.
Military historian Victor Davis Hanson, meanwhile, joins others in backing the McCain amendment: On torture, U.S. must take the high road Chicago Tribune Dec. 2, 2005:
So we might as well admit that by foreswearing the use of torture, we will probably be at a disadvantage in obtaining key information and perhaps endanger American lives here at home. (And, ironically, those who now allege that we are too rough will no doubt decry "faulty intelligence" and "incompetence" should there be another terrorist attack on an American city.) Our restraint will not ensure any better treatment for our own captured soldiers. Nor will our allies or the UN appreciate American forbearance. The terrorists themselves will probably treat our magnanimity with disdain, as if we were weak rather than good.
But all that is precisely the risk we must take in supporting the McCain amendment--because it is a public reaffirmation of our country's ideals. The United States can win this global war without employing torture. That we will not resort to what comes so naturally to Islamic terrorists also defines the nobility of our cause, reminding us that we need not and will not become anything like our enemies.

Iraq & Al Qaeda

Night of the Living "Known Fact", by Leon H @ RedState.Org July 10, 2005:
One of the most persistent Known Facts in the lexicon of Known Fact users is the Known Fact that Iraq had no ties to Al-Qaeda. None whatsoever. This, of course, was the justification the New York Times (one of the great all-time users of Known Facts) used for their shrieking denunciation of Bush's June 28th speech. How could he even mention Iraq and 9/11 in the same speech? Doesn't he know that it's a Known Fact that there was no relationship between Iraq and Al-Qaeda?
Much of the evidence behind this Known Fact lies behind the findings of the 9/11 commission, which stated that it could find "no evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States." This, to the liberal mindset, was the same as saying, "We have proved conclusively that no such evidence exists, nor ever will exist, so let this henceforth be known as a Known Fact." The reality is that the commission said something very different, and the emergence of actual facts in the year since then has repeatedly put this Known Fact to death, only to see it rise up from the grave, more horrible and foul-smelling than ever before.
Case Not Dismissed: Ahmed Hikmat Shakir & the 9/11 Commission, by Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online. July 1, 2005.
Body of Evidence, by Stephen F. Hayes. Weekly Standard June 30, 2005:
"THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that Saddam Hussein was connected in any way to al Qaeda."
So declared CNN Anchor Carol Costello in an interview yesterday with Representative Robin Hayes (no relation) from North Carolina.
Hayes politely challenged her claim. "Ma'am, I'm sorry, but you're mistaken. There's evidence everywhere. We get access to it. Unfortunately, others don't."
CNN played the exchange throughout the day. At one point, anchor Daryn Kagan even seemed to correct Rep. Hayes after replaying the clip. "And according to the record, the 9/11 Commission in its final report found no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein."
The CNN claims are wrong. Not a matter of nuance. Not a matter of interpretation. Just plain incorrect. They are so mistaken, in fact, that viewers should demand an on-air correction.
If you want to investigate the alleged ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, there's no better place to start than Stephen Hayes' The Connection : How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America, which provides a good compilation of his investigation into this issue as it appeared in The Weekly Standard.
It's ALL about Al Qaeda, by Andrew McCarthy. National Review Online. June 29, 2005.
That was then, this is now, by John @ Powerline July 15, 2005:
This ABC News video from five years ago, courtesy of Media Research Center, is a classic. Before Democrats had a partisan motive to claim, contrary to all the evidence, that there was no relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and bin Laden's al Qaeda, their close and dangerous relationship was common knowledge. That common knowledge is reflected in this ABC news report, as it was in the Clinton administration's indictment of bin Laden in 1998 for, among other things, collaborating with Saddam on weapons of mass destruction.
It really is a fascinating question: in this era of digital media, can the news media and the Democrats get away with trying to flush what they said as recently as 1998 and 2000 down the memory hole?

Supporting Our Troops" - Images of the Opposition

From the Rhode Island blog Anchor Rising ("The Right Side of Hope in Rhode Island") comes a substantial roundup of informative commentary on Cindy Sheehan, mother of fallen soldier turned icon of the pacifist opposition to the "Iraqi occupation."
The Peace Movement's Moderate Face, by Amy Widenour (National Center, Nov. 27, 2005):
As Cindy Sheehan is once again protesting in Crawford, Texas, I thought it a good time to share some pictures that show -- as the mainstream media often does not -- the message of the anti-war protesters. These photos, of another anti-war rally in which Cindy Sheehan participated, were taken by Joe Roche. . . ."
"Supporting Our Troops" @ AmericanFuture.Net: "Chad Drake, a resident of Garland, Texas, was somehow identified as the 1,000th victim of the Iraq war. The Drake family attended a vigil at the Dallas City Hall, having been assured by a member of the Dallas Peace Center that the event would be non-political. . . ."
Sox or Soldiers? Which photos are White Sox World Series celebrations, and which ones are solemn memorials for 2000 dead soldiers and certainly not parties? (Pop quiz at Everlasting Phelps).
Academic freedom has its limits. When John Daly, adjunct English professor at Warren County Community College advocated the murder of American military officers, the public outcry (largely instigated by the Young America Foundation and the patriotic blogging community) forced him to resign. I say good riddance.
Anti-war protestors recently expressed their "support for the troops" by throwing Molotov cocktails at police officers, attempting to set fire to buildings, "fighting capitalism" and equating Hurricane Katrina with "genocide." Michelle Malkin has the roundup.
(Note: Don't get me wrong. I understand one can make a principled case against the war. But if this is the public face of the anti-war movement, as it seems to be, it's high time y'all hired a new public relations department).

2005-10-04T21:06:00.000-07:00

Cheney: “Look, just tell him that you couldn’t find anyone, but that you think you could probably just do it yourself.”

Miers: “There’s no way I can pull that off.”

Cheney: “He’ll go for it, I swear!”

Katrina.

2005-09-04T20:20:00.000-07:00

100 Hours after Stormfall - a useful summary of events from The Anchoress.
Coverage - Austin Bay recommends the New Orleans Times-Picayune for its outstanding coverage, including this article on the devastating loss of legal documents -- real estate records dating back to the early 1800s, and the loss of offices, files and other documents critical to civil and criminal legal cases, making for a beaurocratic nightmare as New Orleans' citizens struggle to rebuild.
Disaster Relief - Katrina Help WIKI [mirror-site] has a lot of resources; the bloggers at Little Green Footballs provide an extensive list of charities; Mark Shea recommends the Mercy Corps; Amy Welborn has another good list explaining what you can do to help (see her blog for ongoing updates as usual).
If you live in the SouthEast and approximately 300 miles of the disaster area, HurricanHousing.org is coordinating offers of free housing to hurricane evacuees. (One of the few organizing projects by MoveOn.org that I'll support). Operation: Share Your Home is a similar project, run by "concerned Louisiana citizens who have joined together to provide an immediate response to the tragedy that has struck our beloved state."
The Knights of Columbus has pledged a minimum of $2.5 million in financial assistance and will match any funds beyond that donated to the Knights of Columbus Katrina Relief Fund over the next 60 days.
Lee Scott, President and CEO of Wal-Mart, America's largest retailer, pledged $15 million to relief efforts, along with the promise to establish "mini-Wal-Mart stores in areas impacted by the hurricane. Items such as clothing, diapers, baby wipes, food, formula, toothbrushes, bedding and water will be given out free of charge to those with a demonstrated need." This display of generosity even while its stores in New Orleans were being looted and ransacked -- one wonders if this might earn a nod of grudging approval from the radical left? (Via Cries in the Night).
Karen W. Woods, Director for the Center for Effective Compassion at the Acton Institute, reminds us that when it comes to relief "It's in the details":
The first thing to remember is the principle of subsidiarity. The idea is common sense: Nothing should be done by larger and more complex organizations which can be done as well by smaller, simpler organizations closer to the need. In other words, leave the complex problems to the complex organizations; let the simpler groups take care of the more basic needs. . . . Local charities have been meeting local needs for decades. The ABC Pregnancy Resource Center in Lake Charles, La., delivered baby formula and baby clothes from their own program to a community center that is housing 2,500 Katrina refugees, with as many as 4,000 more expected this week. This community charity had the resources on hand and simply transferred them to the place of need. "I don't even have to ask my board," said director Nete Mire.
But the ABC Pregnancy Center in Lake Charles (email: abcpregnancycenter@copper.net, 866-434-2797) needs more formula, diapers, baby wipes, and baby bath products. They are trying to help serve 116 children under age 2 at the com munity center. The nonprofit Tutwiler Clinic in Tutwiler, Miss. would immediately use financial donations for prescription drugs for refugees. Dr. Anne Brooks says such donations would also help them replace household items for those in their community who lost homes. Both these programs are listed in the Samaritan Guide, www.samaritanguide.com, a reporting site for privately funded charities that serve individuals.
The Lake Charles Catholic Diocese is accepting donations for Katrina refugee assistance specifically in that community.
The principle of subsidiarity not only offers a more efficient means for relief of basic needs, it offers a component that no bureaucracy could provide, one that only individuals can provide: a human connection. Only an individual can provide the hope and encouragement that is as necessary to the well being of these refugees.
A strange place to build a city. Kevin Miller (Heart, Mind & Strength) posts a good geographical representation of NOLA's location with respect to Lake Ponchartrain and the Gulf.
Will New Orleans Recover?, by Nicole Gelinas. City Journal Vol. 15, No. 3, Summer 2005:
The truth is that even on a normal day, New Orleans is a sad city. Sure, tourists think New Orleans is fun: you can drink and hop from strip club to strip club all night on Bourbon Street, and gamble all your money away at Harrah’s. But the city’s decline over the past three decades has left it impoverished and lacking the resources to build its economy from within. New Orleans can’t take care of itself even when it is not 80 percent underwater; what is it going to do now, as waters continue to cripple it, and thousands of looters systematically destroy what Katrina left unscathed? . . .
Nicole describes NO as a city having "long suffered from incompetence and corruption", illustrating the necessity of moral renewal of local government, concurrent with economic and social rehabilitation.
Oswald Sobrino (Catholic Analysis) takes issue with the "Hurricane Finger-Pointers", the Bush-haters who lay the blame for the chaos in NO at the feet of the President. Sobrino, a native New Orleanian, describes his hometown as "the city that did not evacuate in the face of a Category 5 hurricane", and concurs with Gelinas' report:
The scandalous ineptness and stupidity shown by local and state officials in failing to enforce and implement a true evacuation of the most vulnerable is, unfortunately, a continuation of the long history of misrule that has marked my native city for decades. Remember that fact when you see local and state officials lashing out at the federal response. Their lashing out is an attempt at distracting from their own obvious responsibility for a self-magnified disaster.
Peter Sean Bradley (Lex Communis also has questions about New Orleans and its tradition of local governance, noting "hundreds of school buses in dirty contaminated water. School buses which were not sent to the Superdome on Saturday to evacuate those without transportation." What happened?
From Captain's Quarters and related bloggers, several good posts on the failure of local government, pointing out that 1) New Orleans had the opportunity to address the issues concerning emergency evacuation of a city nearly one year ago, in the advance of Hurrican Ivan in the Gulf; 2) that New Orleans' city government actually possessed a detailed hurricane disaster plan that it neglected to follow. Likewise, Americans for Freedom provides "a documented list of state and local failures" demonstrating why one cannot lay the blame for this on the federal government and the President.
Michael Novak finds that a look at the 2000 census data on New Orleans provides A Fuller Picture to the troubling images we're seeing on television.
From Arthur Chrenkoff:
Arguably not as stupid and inane as some of the quotes following the Asian tsunami (see here and here), one of the biggest natural disasters in American history has nevertheless provided many with a delicious opportunity to bash President Bush and the right side of the politics and the country generally. Here's the selection of some of the choiciest commentary . . .
(More quotes here).
Genevieve Kineke (Feminine Genius) relays a story of order amidst the chaos, which she describes as : "heart-rending because of the effort to create order as a sign of civility, which seems not to have mattered in the Big Picture. Of course, it does matter -- to those in this small place, to those struggling with despair, and to God." Pray that they get help.
64-year old African American "social justice advocate" Randall Robinson claims that "black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive". As opposed to, say, white hurricane victims, who possessing average human metabolisms can average 30 days without eating.
Fr. Jim Tucker admonishes those who foolishly ask What Did They Do to Deserve a Hurricane? -- meanwhile, Senior Kuwaiti Official did exactly that, proclaiming: "Katrina is a Wind of Torment and Evil from Allah Sent to This American Empire."
"This journal has become the Survival of New Orleans blog," says the author. "In less perilous times it was simply a blog for me to talk smack and chat with friends. Now this journal exists to share firsthand experience of the disaster and its aftermath with anyone interested."
Jimmy Akin brings his moral analysis to bear on a number of issues involving "disaster ethics" that have arisen in the past week. In part 1, he discusses "price gouging" and "the possibility, in situations of urgent necessity, of taking another's property without it being the sin of stealing"; in part two, moral situations which might justify the taking of another's property; in part three, what things you are allowed to take in such situations and what other rules there are concerning taking them".
Pope/St. Gregory the Great on Tribulation, Grieving the Dead, and Caring for the Living, from Teresa Polk (Blog By The Sea).
Finally, if I may be permitted to close with a bit of humor and advice -- Sean Penn, STAY OUT OF NEW ORLEANS. Go back to Hollywood, and let the real (i.e, trained) rescue crews do their job.

What kind of community does the Internet build?

2005-08-12T23:20:00.000-07:00

. . . perhaps the Internet does build "community," but what kind of community does it build?
It seems to me that, even in "community," the Internet is inherently isolating, depending as it does on corrupt notions of freedom and selfhood. The Internet may be the greatest tool of the modern age, but it comes with all the problematic dualities that this age and its products have had--both for good and bad, for weal and woe, for liberation and enslavement. Yet many today are unable to understand both the boon and the bane of the Internet, that it can, even while creating community, radically undermine community, and thus foster isolation.
The Internet is isolating because it subtly convinces people that fellowship and community can be had with only as much commitment as a click of a button. If I get bored, or frustrated, or angry, or hurt online, I can just log off, or connect to a different forum. The Internet is the ultimate voluntary society. And the voluntaristic impulse embedded in online interactions is destructive of real community. It erodes trust, and renders impossible the collective building of a shared history and a shared set of ideals.
The church, as a community, must do more than simply bless such an idea of community with tacit acceptance. Rather, the church ought to challenge it by living an authentic alternative. In preaching, worship, catechesis, and mission, the church has the opportunity to subvert the voluntaristic model of community many people learn from modern life, and from its most effective pedagogue, the Internet. The church can preach the good news that God in Christ established a community transcending our voluntarism. The church can teach about the meaning of the Gospel to an information-saturated people. And in mission with and among these same people the church can live out a constancy and patience that will not "log off" when times are difficult and relationships are strained.

Daniel M. Griswold - "Beyond the Hype: The Internet and the Church" Perspectives: Journal of Reformed Christian Thought January 2003.

Never had a problem with tap water, anyway.

2005-08-04T21:01:00.000-07:00

. . . Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline, even at today's high gasoline prices; depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water. Globally, bottled water is now a $46 billion industry. Why has it become so popular?
It cannot be the taste, since most people cannot tell the difference in a blind tasting. Much bottled water is, in any case, derived from municipal water supplies, though it is sometimes filtered, or has additional minerals added to it.
Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water. In one study, published in The Archives of Family Medicine, researchers compared bottled water with tap water from Cleveland, and found that nearly a quarter of the samples of bottled water had significantly higher levels of bacteria. The scientists concluded that "use of bottled water on the assumption of purity can be misguided." Another study carried out at the University of Geneva found that bottled water was no better from a nutritional point of view than ordinary tap water.
. . . Bottled water is undeniably more fashionable and portable than tap water. The practice of carrying a small bottle, pioneered by supermodels, has become commonplace. But despite its association with purity and cleanliness, bottled water is bad for the environment. It is shipped at vast expense from one part of the world to another, is then kept refrigerated before sale, and causes huge numbers of plastic bottles to go into landfills.
Of course, tap water is not so abundant in the developing world. And that is ultimately why I find the illogical enthusiasm for bottled water not simply peculiar, but distasteful. For those of us in the developed world, safe water is now so abundant that we can afford to shun the tap water under our noses, and drink bottled water instead: our choice of water has become a lifestyle option. For many people in the developing world, however, access to water remains a matter of life or death.

"Bad to the Last Drop", by Tom Standage. New York Times August 1, 2005.

Pope Benedict and Harry Potter

2005-07-17T16:47:00.000-07:00

Pope Benedict and Harry Potter @ The Ratzinger Fan Club.

A roundup of the relevant posts and articles for those interested in this truly momentous and controversial issue of international, nay, universal proportions.

Michael Foucault and Militant Islam

2005-06-17T19:55:00.000-07:00

Heidegger had his infatuation with National Socialism. Sartre with Communism; and Focoult with . . . Radical Islam? -- Alas, according to Kevin Anderson and Janet Afary's Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2005). The Boston Globe has the story:

When Foucault went to Tehran, he was France's dominant public intellectual, famous for a critique of modernity carried out through unsparing dissections of modern institutions that reversed the conventional wisdom about prisons, madness, and sexuality. In his most famous work, "Discipline and Punish," Foucault argued that liberal democracy was in fact a "disciplinary society" that punished with less physical severity in order to punish with greater efficiency. More broadly, his counternarrative of the Enlightenment suggested that the modern institutions we imagined were freeing us were in fact enslaving us in insidious ways. . . .
Foucault was virtually alone among Western observers, Anderson and Afary argue, in embracing the specifically Islamist wing of the revolution. Indeed, Foucault pokes fun at the secular leftists who thought they could use the Islamists as a weapon for their own purposes; the Islamists alone, he believed, reflected the "perfectly unified collective will" of the people.
The Iranian Revolution, Anderson and Afary write, appealed to certain of Foucault's characteristic preoccupations — with the spontaneous eruption of resistance to established power, the exploration of the limits of rationality, and the creativity unleashed by people willing to risk death. It also tied into his burgeoning interest in a "political spirituality" (by which he meant the return of religion into politics, a suspicious phenomenon in rigorously secular France) whose rise was then still obscured by the Cold War. These preoccupations made Foucault both more sensitive to the power of political religion, but also more prone to soft-pedal its dangers. In his articles, Foucault compared the Islamists to Savonarola, the Anabaptists, and Cromwell's militant Puritans. The comparisons were intended to flatter. . . .
There is a long tradition of Western intellectuals going abroad to sing the praises of revolutionaries in distant lands and finding in them the realization of their own intellectual hopes. But the irony of Foucault's embrace of the Iranian Revolution was that the earlier intellectuals who had sung hymns to tyrants tended to share a set of beliefs in the kind of absolutes — Marxism, humanism, rationality — that Foucault had made it his life's work to overturn. Rather than pronounce from on high, Foucault sought to listen to what he took to be the authentic voice of marginal people in revolt and let it speak through him. In practice, this turned out to be a distinction without a difference.

The philosopher and the ayatollah, by Wesley Yang. The Boston Globe June 12, 2005.

Herbert on Heideggar

2005-06-17T19:45:00.000-07:00

Did you know Franklin Herbert -- most popular for his SF novel/series Dune -- wrote a novel loosely-based on the philosophy of Martin Heideggar? It's called The Santaroga Barrier.

The Heideggerian philosophy blog Enowning relays the story and a brief critical review. For those who aren't amused and/or impressed by Herbert's literary exercise, try browsing a copy of Heidegger's 1927 Sein und Zeit ["Being and Time"] next time you're at a bookstore, and imagine rendering it as fiction.

Sudoku.

2005-06-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

Sudoku Clarification - Eamon Fitzgerald provides some background on a logic-game that's captured my interest as of late. It was introduced to me by a friend who plays it every morning. "Better than coffee," she says. I'm not sure I'd make the same comparison, but it is enjoyable and -- warning! -- potentially addictive.

Memorial Day - May 30, 2005

2005-05-29T23:48:00.000-07:00

Their service came not as a burden but as a duty. The Daily Demarche on the origins of Memorial Day:

In 1918 Moina Michael penned "We Shall Keep the Faith" in response to John McCrae’s "In Flanders Field" (both poems can be found at the end of this post) launching the idea of wearing a poppy on the 30th of May in remembrance of our fallen warriors. While Memorial Day has existed as a federal holiday since only 1966, the practice of honoring America’s war dead dates to at least the Civil War . . .

Also in the post, details on the petition to move Memorial Day back to the 30th of May. (Seems like a good idea to me) .

Via Michelle Malkin):

Legacy.com has set up a moving tribute page to honor service members who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company set up the site free of charge and launched it in March. The Guest Book sections are must read. Well over 19,000 Guest Book entries from readers have been posted since the site opened.

God & Man on the Frontlines, Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews Stephen Mansfield, author of The Faith of the American Soldier, on religion in the military and the necessity for a 'faith-based warrior code':

NRO: What does honor mean for the American on the battlefield?

Mansfield: Honor on the battlefield results from living by a code that rescues the warrior from barbarism and elevates the profession of arms. It means understanding soldiering as a spiritual service as much as a martial role. Honorable soldiers are devoted to the moral objectives of their nation in war, are willing to lay their lives on an altar of sacrifice, are courageous in subduing the enemy yet compassionate to civilians and prisoners, are devoted to a godly esprit de corps, and are eager to master the art of arms by way of fulfilling a calling.

NRO: How important was it that the Iraq war be addressed in theological just-war terms?

Mansfield: It is vital for a government to establish the morality of a war before sending soldiers into battle. The traditional just-war concept has to be satisfied. Soldiers don’t want to fight simply to defend a nation’s vanity or to support a corrupt vision. They want to know they are doing good. This is essential for them and for the nation that is going to welcome them home again. I have talked to hundreds of soldiers during the research of this book. Almost every one of them mentioned his or her need to believe in the goodness of their nation’s purposes in war.

And this interesting background to the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal:

NRO: Is Abu Ghraib a symptom of a non-faith-based warrior code?

Mansfield: The Abu Ghraib scandal has a faith backstory. The chaplain who was at Abu Ghraib during the scandals was told not to be in the way but to let the soldiers come to her. There was no moral presence and little spiritual influence during the time of the scandals. Chapel attendance was low and many soldiers later said they did not even know who the chaplain was. When that unit was replaced, the chaplains of the new unit were told to be present at prisoner interrogations, at shift changes and in the daily lives of the soldiers. The entire atmosphere changed. Chapel attendance reached into the hundreds and the prison became a model operation. This makes the case for continuous moral influence upon soldiers at war and for a faith based warrior code as a hedge against future abuses.

The Commanders - National Review Online May 27, 2005. Jim Lacy profiles General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other officers in our Armed Forces, countering the stereotype of "cold, unfeeling officers who callously send young soldiers out to die while sitting safely in the rear":

Those with no familiarity with America’s warriors might say they just like fighting and killing. Those people have never spoken to an officer who has been in a hard fight. They have never heard the cracking voice as he relates the difficulty of looking at people, whether enemy or ally, killed as a result of his orders. They have never heard the anguish of a leader replaying for the thousandth time the loss of one of his own. They did not hear an armored company commander answer a question about how he felt about having his soldiers rebuild schools after fighting to seize Baghdad literally days before. He said, "I cannot tell you how great it feels to be able to stop killing and start helping people." Such is the overwhelming compassion of those who fight our wars.

Lexington Green (ChicagoBoyz) would like us to become acquainted with Sergeant First Class Paul R. Smith -- "the first and only Medal of Honor recipient in this war, so far. He died on 4 April 2003. His sixteen men were attacked by over 100 Iraqi troops . . ."

Smith not only died heroically, but lived and led with intense professionalism. He trained his men hard, caring only for their lives and not whether he was popular. His life was an example self-sacrificing leadership which everyone in America should know about.

The news media would prefer to treat such men and their lives and sacrifices as "not news" -- or as mere numbers in a body count which can be publicized to defeat the cause they died for.

To them, a lie about a Koran in a toilet is news.

A Medal of Honor for a heroic American soldier, husband and father, leader and warrior, is not news.

What is important is not what is reported in the MSM. What is reported is not all the news there is. Seek it out. Be aware. The Internet has destroyed their monopoly.

Never trust these people. They lie by commission, and even worse by omission. What they choose not to talk about is where the real news is.

You can read more about him here.

Opening the Gates of Heaven - blogger Blackfive explains the meaning of TAPS:

When Taps is played at dusk, it has a completely different meaning than when Taps is played during the day. No soldier really wants to hear it played during daylight. For when the bugle plays Taps in the daylight...that means a soldier has fallen . . . There is a belief among some that Taps is the clarion call to open the gates of heaven for the fallen warrior and letting them know to "Safely Rest" . . .

For those who wish to convey their appreciation for those in service to our country, Blackfive also provides a list of organizations who "work dilligently to support our military personnel in many different and positive ways."

Hugo Schwyzer, "a progressive, consistent-life ethic Anabaptist/Episcopalian Democrat" learning to love the uniform after encountering a young soldier at a gas station:

. . . it brought back memories of the mid-1980s, when I was a freshman at Cal and participating in often-violent anti-ROTC demonstrations. (The ROTC building was actually burned down at one point, and no, I had nothing to do with that!) But years ago, I heaped my share of terrible verbal abuse at many a young cadet. I sprayed more than one young man with spittle as I railed on about whatever the issue was at the time (I think it was opposition to the Contra war in Nicaragua.) I overturned tables, ran from campus police, and took part in a variety of small acts of criminal destruction of ROTC property that seemed (at the time) to be enormously brave and today seem to me to be colossally juvenile. Trust me, folks, if I seem gentle today, it's an act of will and a gift of grace that have made me so. I could be a vicious hothead when I was younger and filled with more testosterone.

I wonder if I owe some sort of collective amends to the military. I don't know how the young men at whom I yelled and whom I called names (unprintable here) reacted to what I did some twenty years ago when I was a teenager. I can't imagine it was easy for them to remain stone-faced while I -- and my fellow upper middle-class self-righteous radicals -- directed apoplectic rage their way. Today, I think what I did back then was wrong and pointless. Alas, at eighteen I was at an age when I was indeed "often in error, and never in doubt." I'm ashamed of my past behavior, even though I haven't hurled profane opprobrium at any one in uniform since my last protest, which was fourteen years ago at the start of the first Gulf War in January 1991. . . .

In my early years (teens/20's) I shared a similar conception of our military as Hugo, and while never having gone so far as to verbally abuse a ROTC cadet, I confess there are things I've said in print in those days that I'm certainly not proud of. So I would like to extend my thanks to Hugo for his courage and honesty, and if I may second his words of remorse.

Today's roundup goes out to all of our brave men and women serving our nation in all branches of our Armed Forces. And especially to my young brother Nathan, US Navy, currently serving aboard the U.S.S. Kearsearge. We miss you, God bless!

Re-Thinking Iraq . . .

2005-05-29T17:01:00.000-07:00

There is a part of me that still is and will always be against the Iraq war. However noble the ends, the means will always be wrapped in a cloud of moral ambiguity. I remain, in every sense of the word, conflicted. I remember in the early spring of 2003, empowered by the heady idealism of a young activist, I committed myself to the cause in which I so emphatically believed in. Feverishly, we organized against a war we felt was unjust, immoral, illegal, and destructive. Those were times of a bygone age, times when we could still afford to believe in a world free of hatred, violence, and – yes – war.
Not quite even realizing it, it seemed as if we had become perennial protestors, angry at the world but helpless to change it. By opposing and resisting the “system” at every turn, we thought we could change it. Looking back, I think we were wrong.
Our goal, naturally, was to stop the war before it started (or perhaps we were just being naïve). As millions throughout the world flooded the streets in solidarity, it seemed – if only for a brief instant – that we might succeed.
On January 30, 2005, I saw something which would shatter any remaining illusions that opposing war in Iraq was the only moral position to take. Checking the news headlines online in my apartment in Jordan, I saw heart-wrenching pictures of thousands of Iraqis lining up, braving terrorist threats, to vote for the first time in their lives. These days, it is truly rare to be overwhelmed by hope but overwhelmed I was. In a hundred years, I expect – and I pray – that future generations will look back at January 30th as a historic moment, a moment that would forge the identity and aspirations of a people. For more than five decades, the Arab people have been denied their freedom by their own leaders as well as by Western powers, the latter fearing that free elections would lead to hostile bands of nationalists, leftists, or, now, Islamists coming to power.
The very thought of Iraqis voting after the unceremonious toppling of a most brutal dictator was both subversive and revolutionary. Millions of Arabs throughout the region, saw the same images on their television screens via satellite channels such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya. For those who dared comprehend the moment, the wall of Arab autocracy was being broken down before their eyes. . . . READ MORE

Rethinking Iraq: Time for American Muslims to Support Iraqi Democracy, by Shadi Hamid. Muslim Wakeup! May 28, 2005.

Goodbye, Papa.

2005-04-03T22:46:00.000-07:00

So, "Christ has opened the doors" to Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II. Curiously, I find myself moved by the experience of watching the passing of our Holy Father, but not particularly saddened or distraught. He has run the good race, fought the good fight, lived a full life of great service to Christ and his Church -- and he himself seems content to go when the Lord calls him.

Of course I will miss him, like all those faithful Catholics (and other Christians as well) who consider themselves blessed to live under his pontificate, but I know as well that he will be going to his eternal reward. Fr. Fessio, via Insight Scoop, offers some good advice on this matter:

The Pope, like all of us, is mortal. And like all of us he was created for eternal joy in heaven. If this is the moment God calls him to himself, we should all rejoice and pray that he will be rewarded for his heroic labors for Christ, the Church, human dignity, and the world. The achievements of his long and fruitful pontificate are too numerous and varied even to make a selection. But he certainly fulfilled the prophetic role of the Vicar of Christ and of every bishop and priest: to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ in season and out of season. His successor? It will be a surprise. The Holy Spirit will guide the choice. Speculation is a harmless indoor sport; but it is not a good use of one’s time.

According to the New York Post the Pope was able, with the help of his secretary, to write a note:

"I am happy. You should be as well. Let us pray."

EWTN has an excellent special feature on The Pontificate of Pope John Paul II.

Also, for those who are intrigued by this whole process, Catholic blogger Domenico Bettinelli Jr. has a post on Papal Election and Succession - What happens when a pope dies?

Pat Buchanan Doused With Salad Dressing

2005-04-01T09:28:00.000-08:00

"Stop the bigotry!" the demonstrator shouted as he hurled the liquid Thursday night during the program at Western Michigan University. The incident came just two days after another noted conservative, William Kristol, was struck by a pie during an appearance at a college in Indiana.

After he was hit, Buchanan cut short his question-and-answer session with the audience, saying, "Thank you all for coming, but I'm going to have to get my hair washed."

The demonstrator, identified by authorities as a 24-year-old student at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, was arrested and faces a misdemeanor charge of disturbing the peace. He was released on a $100 cash bond, pending his April 14 arraignment.

"He could have faced a felony assault charge, but Pat Buchanan decided to not press that charge," university spokesman Matt Kurz said.

Source: Associated Press April 1, 2005.

Seems to be a trend . . .

Earlham student hits Neocon Pundit with Pie

2005-03-30T23:36:00.000-08:00

RICHMOND, Ind. -- A pie in the face didn't silence conservative pundit William Kristol during a speech at Earlham College.
A man who later was identified as a student at the private Quaker college jumped onto the stage and splattered Kristol with the pie Tuesday night about 30 minutes into a speech about U.S. foreign policy.
Members of the audience jeered the student as he walked off the stage, then applauded as Kristol wiped the goo off his face with a paper towel and said, "Just let me finish this point," the Palladium-Item reported.
The student was suspended and could face expulsion following a disciplinary review, Earlham Provost Len Clark said today. . . . Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard in Washington who was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, finished his speech after he was hit by the pie and then took questions from the audience before spending 30 minutes talking with students and others who gathered at the edge of the stage.
Earlham is a liberal arts college of about 1,200 students that is well-known for its peace studies program.

Source: Associated Press March 30, 2005.

Attempting to disrupt a speech in such a manner is usually a good indication that you lack the knowledge and ability to best your opponent in a debate. Had Kristol's liberal critic to engage him during the Q&A session, he might have actually accomplished something.

Congrats to Bill, for finishing his speech with dignity, thus depriving the prankster of his goal and winning the respect of the audience. Not an easy task for a neocon speaking at a Quaker institution!

* * *

Further Commentary from Ruth Holladay ("Pie Hit Conservative Speaker but Missed Mark" IndyStar April 3, 2005)

Medlin and his small band of student supporters, meanwhile, are left with egg on their face. They've come off looking like spoiled and yes, silly, babies unwilling to tolerate a perspective different from theirs -- and this at a Quaker school founded on the Friends' tradition of inclusiveness and "respect for the consciousness of others."

The circumstances behind Kristol's presence at the eastern Indiana liberal arts school make this incident worthy of reflection. Kristol wears several hats, but the one that upsets Medlin, according to a statement he released Friday -- "Why I Threw the Pie" -- is Kristol's role as co-founder and chairman of the Project for the New American Century. The nonprofit promotes America's role as a world leader backed with a strong military. . . .

According to the account, Newell Pledger-Shinn, 24, an Earlham College graduate and assistant to Earlham President Doug Bennett, had proposed the idea of inviting Kristol with the hope that "On campus, where our mission is committed to truth wherever that will lead, I wanted us to model serious, respectful, challenging dialogue about things that matter." The pie-throwing incident seems to have subverted any impression that liberals are capable of intelligent debate:

Pledger-Shinn was "shocked and horrified" by the pie-throwing. "We had invited Kristol, hoping that Earlham students, being passionate, idealistic and articulate as they are, would give him a run for his money." But not a physical attack.
The college leadership concurs. Earlham issued a statement condemning the pie-throwing, although some faculty have asked for tolerance for Medlin -- who has been suspended indefinitely. Others on the faculty questioned why a pacifist school would welcome Kristol.
Still, a noon pro-pie-throwing rally Friday drew only a half-dozen or so of Medlin's supporters from among the 1,200 students. Despite Medlin's statement, saying he wanted to answer questions, he did not return phone calls Friday from his home in Lynn.
But the fact that another student at a Michigan college Thursday smeared conservative Pat Buchanan with salad oil, and cited Earlham, shows Medlin has had an impact. Sadly, it's about as substantial as cream pie.

One of my readers -- wow, I actually have readers? -- disputes the account, claiming:

Uhh..dude? Not only does the AP account NOT say that other students jeered the pietosser, but they didn't. They LAUGHED, because it was funny. Earlham students throw pies and fruit and all sorts of stuff at Ann Coulter, Bill Kristol, or whatever chickenshit neocon comes to speak. Ann Coulter was so scared her knees were shaking. I ahppen to know, as I was THERE.

Several observations:

The quote was directly lifted from the AP Press. I see the original link no longer works, so so here's another: "Members of the audience jeered the student, then applauded as Kristol wiped the pie from his face and said, "Just let me finish this point," the Palladium-Item reported. Of course, I wasn't there either, so we'll leave this as a case of "he said, she said."
More importantly, nice going, assaulting a woman. Regardless of whether she's Ann Coulter -- and I'm no more a fan of her than I assume you are -- your crude and immature behavior toward her is a real credit to the liberal cause.
I'm amused the by the subsequent salad-dressing dousing of Pat Buchanan at Western Michigan University. Pat Buchanan is a paleoconservative -- and as such, happens to be a bitter critic of the Bush Administration AND William Kristol, in short, the furthest thing from a neocon. The pranksters should have given him a hero's welcome for his unwavering criticism of the war.

Nat Hentoff: "Judicial Murder"

2005-03-29T21:37:00.000-08:00

Via I. Shawn McElhinney of Rerum Novarum, Nat Hentoff weighs in on the murder of Terri Schiavo, calling it for what it is:

For all the world to see, a 41-year-old woman, who has committed no crime, will die of dehydration and starvation in the longest public execution in American history.
She is not brain-dead or comatose, and breathes naturally on her own. Although brain-damaged, she is not in a persistent vegetative state, according to an increasing number of radiologists and neurologists.
Among many other violations of her due process rights, Terri Schiavo has never been allowed by the primary judge in her case -- Florida Circuit Judge George Greer, whose conclusions have been robotically upheld by all the courts above him -- to have her own lawyer represent her. . . . READ MORE

Terri Schiavo: Judicial Murder Village Voice March 29, 2005.

Net Hentoff, who was a friend and biographer of Cardinal John O'Connor, describes himself as a "Jewish, atheist, civil libertarian, left-wing pro-lifer" and is heralded by others as "the last honest liberal". As such, he is something of a curiousity on the usually militantly pro-abortion Village Voice. You can find a collection of his other articles here.

So much for the defense of Terri Schiavo being a sole manifestation of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

Warnin' the Moolahs

2005-03-04T20:24:00.000-08:00

Warnin' the Moolahs - Bush-haters often make fun of his Texan drawl and pronounciations, branding him an ignoramus. Alec Rawls (Error Theory) has a different take on the President.

New York Public Library's Image Collection Now Online

2005-03-04T17:57:00.000-08:00

The New York Public Library's collection of prints, maps, posters, photographs, illuminated manuscripts, sheet-music covers, dust jackets, menus and cigarette cards is now online (digitalgallery.nypl.org). If you dive in today without knowing why, you might not surface for a long, long time. The Public Library's digital gallery is lovely, dark and deep. Quite eccentric, too.

So far, about 275,000 items are online, and you can browse by subject, by collection, by name or by keyword. The images first appear in thumbnail pictures, a dozen to a page. Some include verso views. You can collect 'em, enlarge 'em, download 'em, print 'em and hang 'em on your wall at home. All are free, unless, of course, you plan to make money on them yourself. (Permission is required.)

Source: The Public Library Opens a Web Gallery of Images, by Sarah Boxer. New York Times March 3, 2005.

Save the . . . Gay Penguins?!?

2005-03-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

Gay outrage over penguin sex test BBC News. Feb. 14, 2005.

Radek Sikorski interviews Paul Wolfowitz

2005-02-27T19:04:00.000-08:00

Interview with Paul Wolfowitz, by Radek Sikorski, former deputy minister of defence for Poland and director of the New Atlantic Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute. Prospect Magazine | November 23, 2004. A good discussion of U.S.-Iraqi affairs and the broader context of the war on terrorism.

2005-02-27T18:00:00.000-08:00

Fight Club: The Return of Hobbes "Hobbes is reborn as Tyler to save "Jack" (a grown-up Calvin) from the slough of un-comic despair." From Metaphilm.com, which "absorb, filter, review, and interpret cinema for your entertainment and enlightenment." (For treatment of other films (including Spider Man II) click here).

Tim Blair on "Karl Rove's Evil Plan"

2005-02-26T13:59:00.000-08:00

Democrat congressman Maurice Hinchey, speaking on CNN, persists with the idea that Karl Rove devised the fake Rathergate memos.

"Using contemporaneous reports and several eye-witness sources", Tim Blair claimes to have "reconstructed the events of last August at Evil Rove Headquarters, located many miles beneath the earth’s surface . . ."

Hunter S. Thompson 1937-2005

2005-02-20T21:03:00.000-08:00

Hunter S. Thompson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Woody Creek on Sunday night. He was 67.

Regarded as one of the most legendary writers of the 20th century, Thompson is best known for the 1972 classic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." He is also credited with pioneering gonzo journalism - a style of writing that breaks tradition rules of news reporting and is purposefully slanted.

Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, who is a close personal friend of Thompson, confirmed the death. His son, Juan, found him Sunday evening.

Hunter Thompson commits suicide Denver Post Feb. 21, 2005.

Obituary The Economist Feb. 24, 2005.
The Thompson Style: A Sense of Self, and Outrage, by David Carr. New York Times Feb. 22, 2005.
So, farewell then, Duke, by Eamonn Fitzgerald. Feb. 26, 2005.

2005-02-15T20:03:00.000-08:00

I Pod Playa.

Oliver Stone's "Alexander the Great" - Apology for Neo-Conservativism?

2005-02-13T07:10:00.000-08:00

. . . Alexander understands that while an uneasy peace exists at the moment, Persia has to be pre-emptively attacked and defeated once and for all, if it's to never threaten the Greek world again. But there is another aspect to Alexander's military adventure - the desire to liberate the peoples of the East from under the Oriental despotism and tyranny [as discussed extensively throughout the movie by Alexander and his pal Hephaistion. The dialogue sounded so contemporary that my jaw, if didn't exactly drop, it certainly descended slightly. What the hell was Stone thinking?]. For this ambition, Alexander faces constant criticism from those (the realists) who think his vision too utopian; the Easterners, after all, are barbarians only accustomed to slavery, they don't know what freedom is and certainly wouldn't know how to handle it.
But despite such disdainful Macedonian criticisms as well as continuing rebellious grumblings from the Greeks, Alexander presses ahead and with a well-disciplined and well-trained military force, considered by many to be far too small for the task, he conquers the Persian empire in a series of land engagements in Mesopotamia and after a guerilla campaign in Afghanistan. At the height of his victories he is accused by many of his own of engaging in a never-ending war with no "exit strategy" that would allow his overstretched and exhausted military machine to return to civilian life and enjoy the spoils of victory.

"Alexander" - an ode to neo-conservatism, by Arthur Chrenkoff.

Judge Hamood Al-Hitar: Dialogue as antidote to fanaticism

2005-02-09T01:00:00.000-08:00

(Via Reason mag's HitandRun)

"If you can convince us that your ideas are justified by the Koran, then we will join you in your struggle," Judge al-Hitar tells militants. "But if we succeed in convincing you of our ideas, then you must agree to renounce violence." According to the story, Al-Hitar "invites militants to use the Koran to justify attacks on innocent civilians and when they cannot, he shows them numerous passages commanding Muslims not to attack civilians, to respect other religions, and fight only in self-defense." The exchanges may last for weeks. If prisoners renounce their Islamist views, they are released.

The judge himself notes that, "Since December 2002, when the first round of the dialogues ended, there have been no terrorist attacks here, even though many people thought that Yemen would become terror's capital. Three hundred and sixty-four young men have been released after going through the dialogues and none of these have left Yemen to fight anywhere else." . . .

Koranic duels ease terror, by James Brandon. Christian Science MonitorFeb. 4, 2005.

The soft-spoken Hitar, who quotes liberally from the Koran, said his team had so far held two dialogue sessions for almost 200 militants, mostly detainees and radicals who surrendered.

A third session, with some 250 suspects, is under way.

Sessions can last up to a year and involve lengthy discussions aimed at proving Islam preaches peace. Many of the participants fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and then joined Al Qaeda.

Participants who espouse this "right" thinking sign an oath to revoke violence. They are then released and, to ensure the programme's success, put under surveillance for several months.

Hitar admits most participants are not the die-hard Al Qaeda militants which Yemen is hunting down. But he points out the sessions have helped to reduce the number of smaller attacks, especially against security forces.

"Yemen judge wields Holy Koran to battle Al Qaeda", by Miral Fahmy. Jordan Times, Reuters, Monday, January 12, 2004

See Also: Judge Hamoud al-Hitar praised, Peter Willems. Yemen Times Feb. 8, 2005.

* * *

I saw an interesting film last month -- The Hamburg Cell. It is probably one of the more intelligent movies I've seen in the genre of 9/11 films (Review by Jamie Russell, Channel4.com):

"When the world talks about the men who carried out this holy operation they will be talking about the men who changed the course of history," exclaims a senior Al Qaeda member in this fictional docu-drama from director Antonia Bird. Charting the planning and execution of the World Trade Center attacks by a handful of Muslim fundamentalists led by Mohamed Atta (Kamel), The Hamburg Cell is a devastatingly powerful work that puts faces and personalities to the men who carried out the attacks against the US on the fateful morning of September 11th.

Based on a wide range of documentary evidence, from court transcriptions to video footage, this simmering yet understated little movie focuses on Lebanese student Ziad Jarrah (Saleh) as he's transformed from rich-boy student at the University of Applied Science in Hamburg to jihadist hijacker of United Airlines flight 93 (which crashed en route to the White House shortly after simultaneous attacks struck the Twin Towers and the Pentagon).

The movie was highly controversial because it bestowed a human face on the 9/11 attackers -- it does not condone their actions, but neither does it demonize them. One of the chief lessons that The Hamburg Cell tried to convey was that militant Islamic terrorists aren't made overnight. There is usually a gradual psychological process of recruitment and philosophical indoctrination, an internal engagement of conflicting ideas. Unfortunately, it is all too easy for those already disillusioned by the false promises of secular culture to develop an appreciation for the potent arguments of Islamic fundamentalism. And it is precisely at this stage of recruitment that the war on terror could use more people like Judge al-Hitar. To echo Paul Berman's challenge in "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror" New York Times March 23, 2003):

It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas -- it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.

But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal society's every failure? . . . Philosophers and religious leaders will have to do this on their own. Are they doing so? Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding -- one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.

There will always be those who are well beyond the reach of "dialogue" and disputation, and circumstances will certainly merit a justified use of military force, but alongside the force of arms we had better pay attention to the philosophers and religious leaders who -- like al-Hitar -- are winning the intellectual battles.

2005-02-08T20:32:00.000-08:00

Punk Cover Bands -- a good roundup of quirky punk and bluegrass cover bands via BoingBoing.

Iraqi Elections - A Roundup of Blogs & Commentary

2005-01-30T15:30:00.000-08:00

Iraqi Election Watch provides inside information from Iraq on the historic Jan. 30 elections compiled by FDD staff and fellows.
Iraqi Media Excerpts from Iraqi news sources on developments related to the election.
Iraqi Blogs - Highlights from Arabic and English-language blogs that provide new or interesting information on what's actually happening inside Iraq.
Democracy Activists - Reports from Iraqi democracy activists on the ground.
FDD Analysis - Commentary and analysis on the campaign, voting, and final results.
From the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).

From Oswald Sobrino (Catholic Analysis):
The AP photo by Adam Butler records an 83-year-old Iraqi preparing to vote in London. The AP reports that "[t]his is the first time she has participated in an Iraqi election" (see other AP report). The faces and smiles tell the story of freedom. All eyes are on the Iraqi elections this weekend. We pray that God will protect the brave who dare to go and vote for a decent and dignified future for themselves and their families (see London Timesonline report, "Voting fever takes hold of a people finally free to choose"). Thanks to President Bush and our military for making this future possible. Since the picture speaks for itself, no further commentary is needed today.
John Schultz (Catholic Light) passes along an email from Battalion Chaplain Lyle Shackelford delivering the voting machines and the ballots to villages and cities throughout Iraq, who asks for prayers on behalf of all who read:
. . . There is unlimited potential for God's presence in this process but if we do not pray, then our enemy will prevail (See Ephesians 6:10-17). A prayer vigil prior to the end of the month may be an innovative opportunity for those within your sphere of influence to pray. This is a political battle that needs spiritual intervention. A powerful story about God's intervention in the lives of David's mighty men is recorded in 2 Samuel 23:8-33. David and his warriors were victorious because of God's intervention. We want to overcome those who would stand in the way of freedom. David's mighty men triumphed over incredible odds and stood their ground and were victorious over the enemies of Israel. (Iraqi insurgents' vs God's praying people). They don't stand a chance.
I will pray with my soldiers before they leave on their convoys and move outside our installation gates here at Tallil. My soldiers are at the nerve center of the logistic operation to deliver the voting machines and election ballots. They will be driving to and entering the arena of the enemy.
This is not a game for them. It is an historic mission that is extremely dangerous. No voting machines or ballots, No elections. Your prayer support and God's intervention are needed to give democracy a chance in this war torn country. Thank you for your prayer support for me and my family. Stand firm in your battles.
Lane Core Jr. (Blog from the Core explains why our future hangs in the balance on January 30-31, 2005:
If we do not succesfully plant the seeds of democratic government in the Middle East — beginning with Iraq, and expanding thence over the years & decades & generations -- our children and grandchildren will be condemned to live in a world where freedom of religion and conscience -- where the rule of law and respect for individual dignity -- won't even be memories because they will have been obliterated.
The power of the United States of America — military, financial, diplomatic, and cultural — to project its force around the world, to remove despotic regimes and enforce the beginnings of freedom amongst peoples who have never known it, or have no living memory of it, is what stands between us and the Dark Ages of the Future.
That, and the courage of Iraqi citizens — those who stand for office, and those who vote. Please keep them, and our soldiers in Iraq, in your prayers these days.
Senator "No Blood for Oil" Kennedy took the opportunity to raise the spectre of Vietnam, calling for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops following the election. Belmont Club responds, marshalling the witness of Chaldean Bishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk.
The Daily Demarche has a special request
For all the Bush haters out there, for all the pundits who think it is clever to spell Republican with a triple "k", I have a challenge for all of you. For one day, less probably by the time you hear of this, devote some of that energy to wishing success to the people of Iraq in this election. Forget for one day your raging anger and calls for us to abandon Iraq. It’s not going to happen, and for this single day we could use your support. You can resume your attacks on the Administration on Monday - because you live in a free land.
Ali -- an Iraqi blogger in Baghdad:
All my life like all Iraqis, I was not in control of my life. I started looking to myself as a humanist many years ago. Maybe it's because I lost belief in my government and even sometimes in my country and my people. My country was just a stupid large piece of dirt that meant nothing and offered nothing to me but suffering and humiliation. . . .
Now, and thanks to other humans, not from my area, religion and who don't even speak my language, I and all Iraqis have the real chance to make the change. Now I OWN my home and I can decide who's going to run things in it and how and I won't waste that chance. Tomorrow as I cast my vote, I'll regain my home. I'll regain my humanity and my dignity, as I stand and fulfill part of my responsibilities to this part of the large brotherhood of humanity. Tomorrow I'll say I'M IRAQI AND I'M PROUD, as being Iraqi this time bears a different meaning in my mind. It's being an active and good part of humanity. Tomorrow I and the Iraqis that are going to vote will rule, not the politicians we're going to vote for, as it's our decision and they'll work for us this time and if we don't like them we'll kick them out! Tomorrow my heart will race my hand to the box. Tomorrow I'll race even the sun to the voting centre, my Ka'aba and my Mecca. I'm so excited and so happy that I can't even feel the fear I though I would have at this time. I can't wait until tomorrow.

Joyful Iraqi Exiles Vote in Landmark Election by Suleiman al-Khalidi. Reuters. Jan. 28, 2005.
Man drives to Calgary to vote in Iraqi election (14 hours!) - CBC News. Jan. 28, 2005.
Iraqis in Australia cast first votes in election, by Michael Perry. Reuters. Jan. 28, 2005.

Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine has a roundup of quotes from Iraqi bloggers' as they anticipate the vote. "They all should be an inspiration -- and perhaps a shame -- to those of us who have become blase about democracy and freedom, who growl over our choices and don't even bother showing up at the polls. Democracy is fragile and precious; we forget that. These people don't." Here's a Iraqi bloggers covering the election, also courtesy of Jeff.
FriendsofDemocracy.Org, another organization bringing you "ground-level election news from the Iraqi people."
Radioblogger has a photo-blog of proud Iraqis voting in El Toro, California. Lots of smiling faces and an interesting story -- two Iraqis men "came to vote today, with their families, and recognized each other. They started talking and realized that they hadn't seen each other in fifty years. They were about ten years old in Iraq the last time they saw each other." What a reunion!
How do you begin to contain the emotion of contributing to freedom for the very first time in over 50 years. And for many - the first time ever in their life?" -- Kevin McCullough captures the emotions of many Iraqis with another series of photos.
Michelle Malkin shares a relevant question from a reader: "Why don't we see the human shields at the polls in Iraq? They were willing to protect Iraq from bombs before the war started. Why aren't they protecting Iraq now?"
From BlogsofWar:
Atheer Almudhafer, from Falls Church, Va., gives the Iraqi sign of victory after casting his absentee ballot at the New Carrollton, Md., voting station, Jan. 28, 2005. His finger is marked with indelible blue ink, intended to prevent double voting. "I give the sign of peace and voting. Together it is victory." [Defense LINK]
A history lesson from Arthur Herman ("Sic Temper Tyrannis: 1649 and now" NRO, January 28, 2004):
This election, which many hope will spark a democratic revolution for the Middle East, falls on the same day -- January 30 -- as the event which set in motion the modern West's first democratic revolution more than 365 years ago. It was on that day in 1649 that King Charles I of England was beheaded after his formal trial for treason and tyranny, an epoch-shattering event that destroyed the notion of divine right of kings forever, and gave birth to the principle that reverberates down to today, from President Bush's inaugural address last week to the Iraqi election this Sunday: that all political authority requires the consent of the people. Although few like to admit it now, it was Charles's execution, along with the civil war that preceded it and the political turmoil that followed, that established our modern notions of democracy, liberty, and freedom of speech. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that "the tree of liberty must sometimes be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," he was thinking primarily of the legacy of the English civil war.
Captain's Quarters relays this report from FoxNews
Thousands of people are now walking a 13-mile stretch between Abu Ghraib and Gazaliyah to cast votes in the elections, military sources tell Fox News. The mass march has been caught by unmanned drones, and Fox says they will soon have pictures of the subtle demonstration of the Iraqi desire for liberty.
More as it develops. Fox also reports long lines in most polling stations, with some even calling for more ballot materials as they run out of ballots faster than they anticipated.
Arthur Chrenkoff has more reactions of Iraqi voters (E-Day & E-Day, Part II, including this from sometime Chrenkof correspondent:
Haider Ajina: "I just called my father in Baghdad to see if he and the rest of my Iraqi family over there have voted yet. He said we were all just heading out the door, but we will wait and talk to you (chuckling). I heard a strength and joy in his voice and could hear the rest of my relatives in the back ground. It sounded like a family reunion. My 84 year old Iraqi Grandmother will be voting for the first time in her life. My father (a naturalized U.S. Citizen) said we are all getting ready to go vote in a school near by. This school was just being built when I left Iraq in the late 70's. I know where it is and I can picture my father, uncles aunties and cousins along with the rest of the family walking through my old neighborhood to that school and vote. My father said 'For the first time in my life I voted in the U.S. and now I can vote in Iraq. We want our voices to count, we want to decide our future and we want the world to know we have a voice in our future and in our government, this will give the Iraqi government true legitimacy, just like in America'.
"I can now dream of the day when I can take my family to meet my extended family and the places were I played and grew up. They will also see what our men and women in our military fought for.
"To all the men and women who have served and serving in Iraq, to all the families of those who have paid the ultimate price to all those who have suffered during their service in Iraq, my family’s and my deepest thanks, gratitude and pride both from the U.S. and Iraq for all the sacrifices, endurance and service for our great country and Iraq and the Iraqis. God bless all of you and keep you safe."
Voices from the Revolution - Friends of Democracy interviews with citizens from the Zy Qar province and reports that the Election Goes Smoothly in Kirkuk ("During the elections the kids have nothing to do as everyone is busy voting").
More photoblogging the election from Ryan in Baghdad ("Farmer by genetics, Lawyer by training, currently "vacationing" in Iraq and advising the Iraqi government on border security issue"). Ryan cites a pertinent quote from Natan Sharansky's The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror:
Any time ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police."

BREAKING NEWS! - Iraqi Voting Disrupts News Reports of Bombings, by Scott Ott [Scrappleface.com]
(2005-01-30) -- News reports of terrorist bombings in Iraq were marred Sunday by shocking graphic images of Iraqi "insurgents" voting by the millions in their first free democratic election.
Despite reporters' hopes that a well-orchestrated barrage of mortar attacks and suicide bombings would put down the so-called 'freedom insurgency', hastily-formed battalions of rebels swarmed polling places to cast their ballots -- shattering the status quo and striking fear into the hearts of the leaders of the existing terror regime.
Hopes for a return to the stability of tyranny waned as rank upon rank of Iraqi men and women filed out of precinct stations, each armed with the distinctive mark of the new freedom guerrillas -- an ink-stained index finger, which one former Ba'athist called "the evidence of their betrayal of 50 years of Iraqi tradition."

Journalists struggled to put a positive spin on the day's events, but the video images of tyranny's traitors choosing a future of freedom overwhelmed the official story of bloodshed and mayhem.

Belmont Club asks: "Did we win?", comparing a number of MSM (mainstream media) reports on Iraqi voter turnout. Speaking to Reuters, University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole called the elections "a joke," and reinforces his prediction in a gloomy post to his own blog; however, eyewitness reports of an incredible voter turnout from BBC News Reporter's Log beg to differ.
Jeff Jarvis (Buzzmachine) believes this is "Not an election, a revolution" and provides an additional roundup of news headlines. Jeff asks a question which every American should think about:
This morning, I asked myself whether I would go to vote if I thought I could be bombed at the polling place or shot because of my blue finger. I don't think I'd have that courage. Most Americans would not (hell, most of us don't vote even in the lap of safety). Remember that every single Iraqi who came to vote today is a victory for democracy.
Another roundup of Iraqi bloggers, also courtesy of Jeff.
Captain's Quarters is reporting impressive turnout numbers by region; a change of heart at Reuters, and a welcome suprise from the Queen of Pessimistic Journalism: The New York Times acknowledges victory!
More analysis of the MSM's change in temperament from Instapundit, along with a great picture of Iraqis displaying "the ink-stained finger of democracy."

Amid Attacks, a Party Atmosphere on Baghdad's Closed Streets, by Dexter Filkins. New York Times January 30, 2005.
Iraqis Express Pride, Hope at Election, by Ellen Knickmeyer. Associated Press. January 30, 2005.
Iraq election declared 'success' BBC News. January 30, 2005.

Iraqi bloggers Mohammed and Omar @ Iraq The Model conclude: "The People have won"
The first thing we saw this morning on our way to the voting center was a convoy of the Iraqi army vehicles patrolling the street, the soldiers were cheering the people marching towards their voting centers then one of the soldiers chanted "vote for Allawi" less than a hundred meters, the convoy stopped and the captain in charge yelled at the soldier who did that and said:< p>"You're a member of the military institution and you have absolutely no right to support any political entity or interfere with the people's choice. This is Iraq's army, not Allawi's".
This was a good sign indeed and the young officer's statement was met by applause from the people on the street. The streets were completely empty except for the Iraqi and the coalition forces ' patrols, and of course kids seizing the chance to play soccer! . . .
I walked forward to my station, cast my vote and then headed to the box, where I wanted to stand as long as I could, then I moved to mark my finger with ink, I dipped it deep as if I was poking the eyes of all the world's tyrants.
I put the paper in the box and with it, there were tears that I couldn't hold; I was trembling with joy and I felt like I wanted to hug the box but the supervisor smiled at me and said "brother, would you please move ahead, the people are waiting for their turn".

Iraqis fight a lonely battle for democracy, The Guardian January 30, 2005. Michael Ignatieff explains why "whatever your view of the war, you should embrace today's election":
Just as depressing as the violence in Iraq is the indifference to it abroad. Americans and Europeans who have never lifted a finger to defend their own right to vote seem not to care that Iraqis are dying for the right to choose their own leaders. . . .
The Bush administration has managed the nearly impossible: to turn democracy into a disreputable slogan.
Liberals can't bring themselves to support freedom in Iraq lest they seem to collude with neo-conservative bombast. Anti-war ideologues can't support the Iraqis because that would require admitting that positive outcomes can result from bad policies. And then there are the ideological fools in the Arab world, and even a few in the West, who think the 'insurgents' are fighting a just war against US imperialism. This makes you wonder when the left forgot the proper name for people who bomb polling stations, kill election workers and assassinate candidates - fascists.
Liberty Marches Forward - Citizen Smash, aka. "Indepundit", has a another roundup of photos and stirring quotes:
We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of Liberty." -- John F. Kennedy
"The battle is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter; and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail." – George W. Bush
Via Little Green Footballs, an email from Mike, a major stationed in the Sunni Triangle:
The polls closed at 1700 (5PM) our time and 8AM CST but the initial reports are that 72% of the Iraqis voted. Folks we should be ashamed. We can’t get that many people to vote in the US and no one is trying to kill us.

Via Michelle Malkin, a child's display of solidarity with Iraqi voters:
10-year-old Billings girl, Shelby Dangerfield won't be going to the polls. But she will be will be showing her support by wearing ink on her finger - just like those Iraqis who have voted.
"It will symbolize our support if we wear ink on our fingers," Shelby said. "We're not forcing them to vote, but they have a chance to do it and they should take that chance."
"10-year-old supports vote of Iraqi people" Billings Gazette January 30, 2005 .
President Congratulates Iraqis on Election The White House. January 30, 2005.

* * *

So that's the roundup for the weekend . . . stay tuned to the various blogs mentioned above for the results and the aftermath, and please keep the people of Iraq, together with our troops, in your prayers.

IPod and Tivo: Ego-Driven Technology

2005-01-15T20:36:00.000-08:00

TiVos and iPods will never destroy us. But our romance with technologies of personalization has partially fulfilled Krutch’s prediction. We haven’t become more like machines. We’ve made the machines more like us. In the process we are encouraging the flourishing of some of our less attractive human tendencies: for passive spectacle; for constant, escapist fantasy; for excesses of consumption. These impulses are age-old, of course, but they are now fantastically easy to satisfy. Instead of attending a bear-baiting, we can TiVo the wrestling match. From the remote control to TiVo and iPod, we have crafted technologies that are superbly capable of giving us what we want. Our pleasure at exercising control over what we hear, what we see, and what we read is not intrinsically dangerous. But an unwillingness to recognize the potential excesses of this power—egocasting, fetishization, a vast cultural impatience, and the triumph of individual choice over all critical standards—is perilous indeed.

Christine Rosen, The Age of Egocasting The New Atlantis Fall 2004/Winter 2005.

A good article on the dangers of customizable entertainment technology, reminiscent of the late Neil Postman.

The U.S. Media -- "Aiding and Abetting the Enemy"

2005-01-15T13:44:00.000-08:00

What if domestic news outlets continually fed American readers headlines like: "Bloody Week on U.S. Highways: Some 700 Killed," or "More Than 900 Americans Die Weekly from Obesity-Related Diseases"? Both of these headlines might be true statistically, but do they really represent accurate pictures of the situations? What if you combined all of the negatives to be found in the state of Texas and used them as an indicator of the quality of life for all Texans? Imagine the headlines: "Anti-law Enforcement Elements Spread Robbery, Rape and Murder through Texas Cities." For all intents and purposes, this statement is true for any day of any year in any state. True -- yes, accurate -- yes, but in context with the greater good taking place -- no! After a year or two of headlines like these, more than a few folks back in Texas and the rest of the U.S. probably would be ready to jump off of a building and end it all. So, imagine being an American in Iraq right now. . . .

Lieutenant Colonel Tim Ryan (letter to BlackFive.net).

Dictionary of a History of Ideas

2005-01-15T07:45:00.000-08:00

Dictionary of a History of Ideas Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener, was published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, in 1973-74. . . . The DHI has been out of print for many years. Aware of the new potential offered by electronic access to texts, the Directors and Board of Editors of the Journal of the History of Ideas authorized a grant to support digitization of the DHI. Substantial support has also been provided by the University of Virginia Library through its Electronic Text Center. The project has been undertaken with the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons and of The Gale Group, of which Scribner's is a part.

Creative Commons

2005-01-15T07:42:00.000-08:00

CreativeCommons.Org - offers a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors and artists. We have built upon the "all rights reserved" of traditional copyright to create a voluntary "some rights reserved" copyright. We're a nonprofit. All of our tools are free.

Tons of Audio, photo, text, video files for noncommercial/commercial use.

BAD-ass!

Tsunami - Blame it on the United States?

2005-01-01T08:20:00.000-08:00

In the past three days I have been impressed by the originality of the latest critiques of the evil Americans. The earthquake and tsunami apparently had something to do with global warming, environmentalists say, caused of course by greedy American motorists. Then there was the rumour that the US military base at Diego Garcia was forewarned of the impending disaster and presumably because of some CIA-approved plot to undermine Islamic movements in Indonesia and Thailand did nothing about it.
To be fair, even the most animated America-hater, though, baulks at the idea of blaming George W. Bush for the destruction and death in southern Asia.

"Gerard Baker: Tsunami must be fault of the US", The Australian December 31, 2004.

Christmas with Snoopy and the Red Baron

2004-12-26T01:16:00.000-08:00

I hope you had a pleasant and joyful Christmas. I had the opportunity to spend mine with my brother Nathan, his wife and his relatively new in-laws, having married into a great Polish Catholic family from Queens (lots of meat and a liberal indulgence in spirits). Being a vegetarian, my wife tried her hand at making a delicious new stuffed-pastry dish with phyllo dough and brought along her prized banana bread (her own secret recipe).

The highlight of the evening, besides the 5th of Jack Daniels and two glasses from my brother, was when Father(in-law) Skibinski pulled out Snoopy vs. The Red Baron by the Royal Guardsmen (on original vinyl!) and played the entire thing -- a treasured album from my elementary school days that I had not heard in literally decades, but found myself knowing, and singing(!) every word by heart!

(Listen to "Snoopy's Christmas").

Midnight Mass was excellent as always, the choir ending with the 'Halleluah' chorus from Handel's Messiah -- and the priest's blessing a recently-refurbished tabernacle which they had discovered in the basement and installed in the center, directly behind the alter (motivated by the Holy Father's proclamation of "The Year of the Eucharist"). A move which definitely merits POD recognition.

Perhaps it is only in keeping with the spirit of the season, but for several Sundays in December our typical Eucharist hymn (which is drawn from modern fair and usually serves to bolster the premise of "Why Catholics Can't Sing") has been replaced by "Hidden God, Devoutly I Adore Thee," a translation of the famous hymn Adoro Te Devote by St. Thomas Aquinas.

I've read that there are twenty-five translations, and I'm not sure whether it's a modern or traditional musical rendering, but in any case, after being forced to sing (or sit through) the saccharine-sweet "One Bread, One Body", it's a welcome relief to sing so substantial a hymn, and to marvel at the meaning of the words -- allegedly written by the saint at the request of Pope Pius IV for the feast of Corpus Christi in 1264. I just hope it lasts, although I'm resigned to the possibility that come the transition to "normal time" we'll be returning to more contemporary works.

Reflections on Eucharist in Light of 'Adoro Te Devote', 1st Advent Sermon of Pontifical Household Preacher, Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa.

The Donald and The Troops

2004-12-24T20:23:00.000-08:00

. . . That is when I, without any thought, piped in with "Sir, you can talk to him, he's awake." He told the soldier, named Rob, how proud he was of his service. The soldier was in a bit of disbelief, because he couldn't see with one eye patched and the other swollen shut. He said he wanted to talk to Rumsfeld. That's when I said "He's standing right to your left, Rob, that's his voice you hear. You can talk to him." The kid was nervous at that point, but sputtered out how honored he was to talk to him. Mr. Rumsfeld replied, "No, it's an honor for me to talk to you."

Then remarkably, the young soldier, who had just lost his left hand and right eye from an explosion, came to the defense of the Secretary of Defense, stating "Mr. Rumsfeld, I want you to know, that you are doing a fantastic job. I know that you are taking a lot of heat for the problems with getting armor for vehicles. I want you to know that things are vastly improved. Our vehicles are great, and I have never searched through junk piles for scrap metal." . . .

Read more of Captain Dan Mattson's eyewitness account here; via Powerline.

Dry Quicksand On Video

2004-12-20T21:18:00.000-08:00

Reports that travelers and even whole vehicles have instantaneously vanished by sand have often been dismissed as products of fantasy. Rightly so? Our latest experiments show that such a dry quicksand may exist, and that objects can sink up to many diameters deep into very loose, fine sand.

Sand supports weight. Force chains are known to play a prominent role therein. We considerably weaken the force chain structure by letting air flow through very fine sand. Even when the air is turned off and the bed has settled, the prepared sand does not support weight: Balls sink into the sand up to five diameters deep. We call this state of sand dry quick sand. The state is not to be confused with the normal quick sand which is a mixture of sand, clay, and water. The final depth the ball reaches scales linearly with its mass and above a threshold mass, a sand jet is formed which shoots sand straight and violently into the air.

-- Dry Quicksand, an experiment of the Department of Science and Technology – University of Twente – The Netherlands. (Via OxBlog).

Earthsea

2004-12-14T18:27:00.000-08:00

It's been ages since I've read the Earthsea books, but I recall enjoying them as a child, and so when the SciFi channel announced they were making a miniseries I honestly didn't know what to expect . . . This is bad. Not quite as bad as John Travolta's abomination of a Sci-Fi film, but . . . Ouch. Further reactions on the SciFi Message Board.

Blackfive on "The President you never hear about"

2004-12-11T13:31:00.000-08:00

The San Diego Union Tribune reports that "President Bush came to the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base today on the 63rd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and vowed the United States would triumph over its current enemies." That was probably all you heard about the event -- I heard about it only because John Stewart made light of the President's remarks in his daily television show on the Comedy Channel.

But what you probably didn't know was the fact that our President took the time to meet individually with 170 family members mourning the loss of a loved one. BlackFive posts a stirring eyewitness account of "the President you never hear about".

"The DNA of Literature"

2004-12-10T22:53:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the DNA of literature -- over 50 years of literary wisdom rolled up in 300+ Writers-at-Work interviews, now available online -- free. Founder and former Editor George Plimpton dreamed of a day when anyone—a struggling writer in Texas, an English teacher in Amsterdam, even a subscriber in Central Asia—could easily access this vast literary resource; with the establishment of this online archive that day has finally come.

-- The Paris Review

How very cool of them.

Arthur Chrenkoff "loses his innocence"

2004-12-08T20:03:00.000-08:00

. . . I was sixteen and a half years old when I arrived in Australia in November 1988. I had so many other things to do with my time (like learn the language, for starters) that the political reality did not hit me straight away. It dawned on me slowly over time: my old Polish world-view was a sham. Or at least half of it was. The part about the overwhelming majority of my fellow residents of the Evil Empire wanting freedom and democracy was still right. The part about the West being full of... well, Westerners, wasn't.

You can imagine my shock and disappointment upon discovering that only a minority of the inhabitants of the Free World were truly committed to the ideas of liberal democracy, capitalism and anti-communism. Another minority was in various shades and degrees opposed to, or critical of, one or more of these concepts, and the group in the middle was largely indifferent and disinterested - not quite alienated from their own society, but too busy or too bored to fight against its enemies.

My innocence was truly lost.

Why are so few truly appreciative of the bounty of freedom and prosperity they're sharing in? I thought to myself. Why are so many hostile to their own society and so open to the visions of the enemies of democracy and liberty? Why do so many think that the West is worse or at least no better than the "prison of the nations" that most of my fellow prisoners wanted to escape from?

Read the further reflections of Arthur Chrenkoff.

Jacques Derrida - "bad reader par excellence"

2004-12-05T13:55:00.000-08:00

. . . a primary reason for skepticism about Derrida is that overwhelmingly those who engage in philosophical scholarship on figures like Plato and Nietzsche and Husserl find that Derrida misreads the texts, in careless and often intentionally flippant ways, inventing meanings, lifting passages out of context, misunderstanding philosophical arguments, and on and on. Derrida was the bad reader par excellence, who had the gall to conceal his scholarly recklessness within a theoretical framework. He was the figure who did more violence than any other to what Nietzsche had aptly called "the great, the incomparable art of reading well," "of reading facts without falsifying them by interpretation, without losing caution, patience, delicacy, in the desire to understand" (The Antichrist, sections 59 and 52).

Source: "The Derrida Industry" (www.butterfliesandwheels.com) -- Brian Leiter's fisking of Mark C. Taylor's ode to Derrida (New York Times Oct. 14, 2004).

Nietzsche: Not a delusional kook -- just a kook on an ego-trip.

2004-12-05T13:28:00.000-08:00

. . . After explaining that syphilis is a syndrome caused by the ravages of the spirochete Treponema pallidum (the lively, corkscrew-shaped bacterium), Margulis elaborates on her own recent research into spirochetes by weighing in on the long-running debate over Nietzsche's brain. Yes, Nietzsche's madness was undoubtedly caused by paresis, she writes -- but he most likely went crazy quite suddenly, as opposed to over the course of weeks and months. "Nietzsche's brain on January 3, 1889 experienced a transformation," she states -- which means that his books of 1888 weren't written by a delusional kook.

Source: "Bugs in the belfry", by Joshua Glenn. Boston Globe, Nov. 28, 2004.

Iranian bloggers jailed in government crackdown.

2004-12-05T08:52:00.000-08:00

We really take our freedom for granted here in the U.S. -- five Iranian webloggers were jailed in a government crackdown. Meanwhile, the blog RegimeChangeIran is requesting assistance for an Iranian Freeper (poster to the Free Republic bulletin board) who was forced to "go underground" and has recently escaped Iran. They are currently seeking a way to get him asylum.

The United Nations' Crisis of Moral Legitimacy

2004-11-25T08:40:00.000-08:00

The Diplomad, a blog by employees of the U.S. State Department, on the "United Nations -- "the thirty-year single malt of bureaucracies" -- and why we should regard it as "a massive, expensive hoax that needs to be ended once and for all."

Having actually worked for and with the U.N., they're entitled to make their case. Meanwhile:

AP reports "The United Nations is investigating about 150 allegations of sexual abuse by U.N. civilian staff and soldiers in the Congo, some of them recorded on videotape." Prompting Patrick Spero to wonder: "why is CNN reporting on it now when the story broke in May?" (via Instapundit).
Staff revolt gathers pace at UN Times Online, Nov. 20, 2004.
Fire Kofi, by the editors of National Review Online. Nov. 24, 2004.

Together with the U.N. Oil for Food scandal, I'm continually mystified by the contensions of those who contend that all manner of things will be well if the Bush Administration only learns to "work with the U.N."

Update: Sen. Norm Coleman of the Foreign Relations Committee says Kofi Annan must go.

Belmont Club gives a history lesson ("Bush = Hitler")

2004-11-21T07:57:00.000-08:00

This is an easy target and a worthless argument among educated folk, but given the degree to which the "Bush = Hitler" comparison comes up among the MoveOn.org, perhaps Belmont Club's history lesson is necessary:

Oliver Stone portrays Alexander the Great as gay and whether or not that was the case, it illustrates the potential dangers of learning history according to Hollywood. While the Third Reich still remains a potent historical image only the very old have any first hand recollection of it and there is the danger the term 'Nazi' may become just as much a figure of speech as 'working like a Trojan' -- a reference to nothing anyone understands in particular. When people aver that 'Bush is like Hitler', it presumes the speaker has a clear historical knowledge of what Hitler was really like, an assumption which is increasingly invalid.

For one, Hitler would have taken a very dim view of Jesusland, a country which George Bush is said to be in the process of founding, whose geographic location is to the immediate south of the United States of Canada. Martin Bormann said, "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable." Hitler, according to Klaus Fischer's Nazi Germany stated that "one day we want to be in a position where only complete idiots stand in the pulpit and preach to old women." In a concession to popular feeling, however, the Nazis offered the public certain acceptable 'faith traditions' including something called "Gottglaubig", a dished-up creed heavily overladen with ancient Germanic pagan beliefs with versions of rituals for birth, marriage and death. "By 1938, carols and nativity plays were were forbidden in the schools, and the words 'Christmas' itself was replaced by the word 'Yuletide'." . . . READ MORE

When God says "It's Not Your Time" . . . It's Not Your Time.

2004-11-20T22:13:00.000-08:00

A Hindu seer in India's eastern Orissa state was berated by angry crowds when he failed to die after declaring his soul would leave his body at an appointed time, a report said on Friday.

The chief cleric of the Sriguru Ashram in the Kharagaon area of Konark said he would die a natural death on Wednesday between 6am and noon, the Asian Age newspaper said, without naming him.

Elaborate police arrangements were made as a crowd of 15 000 turned up to see the "death by will" miracle. . . . reporters asked the seer what had happened, he replied: "Perhaps the will of God was somewhat different. I am very shocked to have given you so much pain. I wanted to leave my mortal body, but I could not. Please forgive me."

- Mail & Guardian Sapa-AFP. (Via The Revealer).

President George W. Bush - Dissident!

2004-11-20T21:53:00.000-08:00

"There is a great difference between politicians and dissidents. Politicians are focused on polls and the press. They are constantly making compromises. But dissidents focus on ideas. They have a message burning inside of them. They would stand up for their convictions no matter what the consequences.'

"In spite of all the polls warning you that talking about spreading democracy in the Middle East might be a losing issue — despite all the critics and the resistance you faced — you kept talking about the importance of free societies and free elections. You kept explaining that democracy is for everybody. You kept saying that only democracy will truly pave the way to peace and security. You, Mr. President, are a dissident among the leaders of the free world."

Natan Sharansky to President George Bush, in a private meeting.

According to the National Review, both the President and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice have read Sharansky's book, The Case for Democracy.

Lounge Against The Machine?!?

2004-11-20T11:50:00.000-08:00

"Lounge Against the Machine, by Richard Cheese.

On Lounge Against the Machine, alt-rock hits get the Vegas treatment way before their time. Vocalist Richard Cheese and his piano trio really know how to warp a song. Rage Against the Machine's "Guerilla Radio" sounds smooth as silk, if incredibly schmaltzy, in the hands of this wayward lounge act. The Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia" gets completely defanged in Cheese's rendition. And it's definitely strange to hear the rage drained out of Nirvana's "Rape Me" and replaced with bland, mindless enthusiasm. The tone of these covers is so far removed from the originals that at times you forget what you're really listening to. At moments like these, Cheese and the boys sound like some anonymous combo going through the motions. But then you'll hear the singer let loose with some foul language or croon a harsh line and it sounds downright strange and funny. Lounge Against the Machine can be tiresome at times, but it certainly takes the piss out of these songs.

-- Fred Cisterna (Amazon.com)

This is SO WRONG on so many levels . . . but, oddly intriguing just the same.

Of course, Pat Boone did it first, way back in 1997 with the phenomenal "In A Metal Mood".

The light through the darkness . . .

2004-11-19T20:58:00.000-08:00

According to Matthew Heidt (Froggy Ruminations):

I can’t say that these Four Horsemen are collaborating or conspiring against us, but the coalescence of these dark forces portends of future disaster not only for us but for them as well. Fear not, because we are defeating these foes where we can, and if we stay the course and make it out the other side, we will be able to bask in the sunlight of our victory. On that day we will have no debtors to repay, and yet we will be bloodied but not bowed.

Sometimes you just gotta laugh.

2004-11-11T22:18:00.000-08:00

In Jerusalem, an American female journalist heard about an old rabbi who visited the Wailing Wall to pray, twice a day, everyday, for a long, long time.

In an effort to check out the story, she went to the holy site and there he was. She watched the bearded old man at prayer. After 45 minutes, when he turned to leave, she approached him for an interview.

"I'm Rebecca Smith from CNN, sir, how long have you been coming to the Wailing Wall and praying?" she asked.

"For about 50 years," he said.

"50 years! That's amazing! What do you pray for?" she asked.

"I pray for peace between the Jews and the Arabs. I pray for all the hatred to stop, and I pray for all our children to grow up in safety and friendship," he said.

"And how do you feel, sir, after doing this for 50 years?" she asked.

Without hesitation he said, "Like I'm talking to a f**king wall."

Fayrouz ("Live from Dallas").

Post-Election Blogger Roundup

2004-11-06T22:30:00.000-08:00

Just a few of the post-election reflections that I found amusing, interesting, or appealing.

Jeff Jarvis offers some good advice his fellow Democrats: "suck it up and repeat after me: He's our President, too."
Mark Shea: explains why the Left is losing hearts and minds: "They don't know what's killing them. They cannot conceive of a world where those who disagree with them are not evil, stupid, or insane."
Case in point -- this message from John Passacantando, Executive Director of Greenpeace:
It's hard to know what to say. To see Bush re-elected with the first electoral majority since his father's first election is an emotional blow. He seems to have secured a mandate based on his policies of pre-emptive war, war on the environment, crony capitalism, veiled racism, homophobia and a fundamentalism that would make the Taliban proud. This despite the largest "Get out the Vote" effort in the history of progressive causes in the United States.
Meanwhile, Instapundit comments on some photos of sore losers voicing their discontent at a post-election rally in San Francisco: "The Democrats are going to have to distance themselves from stuff like this, if they want to carry swing states."
William Luse: "small blessings, Biblical proportions":
And the Lord God in His mercy looked down upon the earth and searched in His might from the Ohio River to the shores of Lake Erie, and found stuck somewhere in the midst of the vastness one TS O'Rama, and announced to the assembled heavenly host growing impatient with Ohio's slothfulness at counting votes in a timely manner: "Behold, any man who can pray, drink German beer, and watch election returns at the same time is a man worth saving.
Prof Bainbridge concludes they really do hate us, and cites a revelatory passage from Christopher Lasch:
[T]he new elites, the professional classes in particular, regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension. In the United States, "Middle America" -- a term that has both geographical and social implications—has come to symbolize everything that stands in the way of progress: "family values," mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, retrograde views of women. Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television. They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing. (p. 28 Revolt of the Elites).
Peggy Noonan wants us to savor the moment:
George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, became the first incumbent president to increase his majority in both the Senate and the House and to increase his own vote (by over 3.5 million) since Franklin D. Roosevelt, political genius of the 20th century, in 1936. This is huge.
Powerline on Dan Rather's "blame it on the bloggers" remark:
"This from a guy whose network coordinated an attack on the president, based on forged documents, with the Democratic party and the Kerry campaign?"
The New Criterion's weblog on the Democratic interpretation of "moral values":
. . . to draw a line from "moral values" to "gay marriage" is to misread this response completely. "Moral values" do not necessarily represent an "issue" distinct from terrorism, the Iraq war, domestic issues, gay marriage, and so on. Moral values inform the approach one takes to those issues. What voters may have seen in John Kerry is a man without convictions or values--at least, without any he made very clear. Voters may see just the opposite in Bush--and respect what they see, even in cases where Bush's convictions and values lead him to decisions with which they themselves disagree.
Jeff Miller ("Curt Jester") how to really annoy liberals:
Since many liberald said that Bush stole the first election and that they had to work to re-defeat Bush I propose we go along with them. Four years from now we have President Bush run again since he first four years were an electoral mulligan.
Bill Cork responds to Garry Wills and Thomas Friedman's laments on the Bush win with a lesson on the foundation of American freedom.
Phil Dilon, a self described "prairie apologist, transplanted Bostonian and Kennedy Democrat who has found refuge in the Kansas Flint Hills," provides an excellent roundup of Democrat hand-wringing over Bush's victory, with a focus on their latest epiphany that in order to win the votes of Middle America, they must speak the language of Middle America. Unfortunately, says Mr. Dillon, In Order To Be Sincere, You Must First Really Be Sincere.
Andrew ("The Backseat Philosopher") writes a letter To My Fellow Democrats. Probably the best advice for Democrats ever offered in a single post on this election. Read it.

Chrenkoff on the next coalition: "A bit more willing this time around?"

2004-11-03T22:38:00.000-08:00

For the past few years, the "international community" has built its policy vis-a-vis the United States on an assumption that Bush, that uncomfortable aberration from Texas, would be a one-termer. Walled in inside their own echo chamber, reinforced and amplified by the American mainstream media's anti-Bush stance, foreign governments have managed to convince themselves that no incumbent could survive electoraly the "quagmire" of Iraq abroad and the groundswell of opposition at home. In other words, the leaders from Caracas to Paris, and from Cairo to Kuala Lumpur, made the assumption that since they wouldn't vote for Bush, and the "New York Times" wouldn't vote for Bush, the American people wouldn't either - that is, for all the sophisticates' sneering about America and the Americans, the "unwilling" governments around the world thought that in the end the US voters would behave as "rationally" as the Belgians or the Jordanians would in these circumstances.

It was not to be. George W Bush has been clearly and convincingly re-elected and his policies at home - and most importantly abroad - re-endorsed by the majority of the electorate. And France, Germany, the EU, the UN, and all others are stuck with W in the White House for the next four years. Going back to the good old days of doing nothing and doing it all together is no longer a possibility.

Arthur Chrenkoff, chronicling the congratulatory statements of various nations around the globe (including France, Germany and Russia), who are re-thinking their past hostility and are now cozying up to President Bush.

Certifiably insane?

2004-11-02T23:31:00.000-08:00