cut on the bias

On Memorial Day

I didn't sleep well last night, and woke up about 4 a.m. to a restless wind blowing outside my window. I knew we were due heavy storms, and the air seemed to echo how I felt. I went outside and sat on my porch, listening to the silence of a small town, scattered safety lights breaking the darkness and casting the shadows of pine trees across my front yard. Off to the west, bright flashes of light pulsed over the tops of the trees, getting closer. Slowly the scene brightened, almost imperceptibly, until finally the first chirping of birds heralded a deeply gray and moody dawn. Then, directly across from me, a bolt of lightning split the sky in two, barely slashing its ragged way to the ground before thunder crashed and rain hit. I went inside, and sat on the floor behind my glass storm door while the storm raked through. Splashes of water flew through the little space where the door doesn't quite meet the sill, and dampened my feet.

I saw no more bolts of lightning, but sheets of it whitened the sky over and over. The rain became so heavy I could barely see the cemetery across the road. Once the light was not white, but sickly green, hanging in the air for two or three seconds, a faint sizzling sound threading through it. The electricity went off. Twice more in the next 10 minutes the green light replaced the white light, and each time the sizzling sound came from off to my left, even though the electricity was already out. Finally, as the sky still lightened, the thunder moved off and the rain diminished, I went back to bed. Sometime in the morning the electricity returned. I awoke to a cool house and a clock flashing 4:14 - the time since the power came back on.

The day is still gray, and more storms are expected. A lot of people will be holding their barbeques indoors, and the nearby lake beaches won't be as crowded. Perhaps some of those people will instead watch Memorial Day celebrations on television, or somehow spend time remembering the reason for Memorial Day.

I watched the dedication of the World War II memorial on Saturday, and cried through most of it. The wall of gold stars, hundreds of them, each representing at least 100 war dead, moved me the most. I don't think I will be able to stand in front of that, ever, and not cry. I haven't been able to when viewing the Vietnam War Memorial.

One thing I have done, repeatedly through the years, is take time out to visit war memorials. As the Civil and Revoluntionary wars are the only ones, until recently, fought on our land, those are the ones I visit the most. Each time, I try to envision real men, with real families, making the ultimate sacrifice. It's always overwhelming. So much death. Nearly 700,000 men died in the Civil War alone, and in a nation so much smaller then than now, that is an astronomical number. It is, in fact, half the total of all US military dead. What would our country have been like if all those men had lived, had children, contributed their talents and wisdom to our society? Or their criminality, because, truthfully, not all those who die in war are good men. But most are, average men doing the extraordinary, dying a death that can be gruesome or mundane, but all in the pursuit of what they believe is right. And you can't ask the question, what if they hadn't died?, without asking what would have happened to our nation if they had not accomplished their goals. Our goals.

So today is a time to honor the ones who have died to make this country ours, to give us our freedoms, to make it possible for us to gather with our families, to barbeque under an umbrella on a nasty day, to sit behind a storm door as dawn moves across the land, watching the rain and lightning. There is nothing we do that is not what it is because these men and women died.

I haven't any major plans for today - no parties, no visits to a war memorial or a parade or anything like that. Instead, today I'm going to work on my presentation for Spirit of America, in hopes of bringing some in the Birmingham community into the group to help our military in Iraq nurture peace and democracy. I think that's the best thing I can do to help insure that, next year, there are fewer war dead to memorialize than there otherwise might have been. Next year, I want to celebrate the safe return of our military, with the knowledge that they completed their mission with success and honor. I want as many soldiers, airmen, sailors, Marines, Coast Guard, and merchant marines as possible to be with their families on the next Memorial Day. I don't want the Gulf War I & II memorial to have so many gold stars.

Enjoy your day. It's a gift from history. And sometime during the day, listen to this.

[Last link via Sgt. Hook]

UPDATE: Some things to contemplate.

Civil War: Federal soldiers, McPherson Woods, 1863

Civil War: Civil War soldier in Spotsylvania, 1864

Here is a letter from a Union surgeon to his wife, written from the battlefield at Gettysburg - posted by his great-great-grandson.

WWI: Americans burying their dead, Bois de Consenvoye, France, 8 Nov 1918

WWII: American soldiers, stripped of all equipment, lie dead, face down in the slush of a crossroads somewhere on the western front." Captured German photograph. Belgium, ca. December 1944.

"Standing in the grassy sod bordering row upon row of white crosses in an American cemetery, two dungaree-clad Coast Guardsmen pay silent homage to the memory of a fellow Coast Guardsman who lost his life in action in the Ryukyu Islands." Benrud, ca. 1945. 26-G-4739.

Vietnam War: Vietnam. Medical Evacuation. Marines of Company E, 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines, while under heavy firefight with NVAs within the DMZ on Operation Hickory III, are carrying one of their fellow Marines to the H-34. 07/29/1967

Operation Enduring Freedom: Flag-draped coffins are shown inside a cargo plane April 7 at Kuwait International Airport, in a photograph published Sunday. The photographer said she hoped the image would help families understand the care with which fallen soldiers are returned home.

First two photos from the Library of Congress collections.

Remember the living too

It's Memorial Day, a time to remember the Americans who died on battlefields across the world and at home to make this country what it is today - an entity more good than bad, a whole better for having all its parts, the strongest and best nation ever to grace the world stage. Take some time to pay homage in your own way - reading a book about their sacrifices, visiting a military cemetery, spending time with veterans, talking to your family members who have served, writing letters to soldiers far from home with little family support.

And take a little time to say a prayer for the ones who've come home, who find their world changed, and not necessarily in a good way. Sometimes the coming home is as hard as the being gone:

Like most soldiers here, Sgt. Jeremy Kerr, 26, says he is fine. He is happy to be safely home, watching afternoon cartoons with his young daughter, Alexus, and son, Jacoby.

Sergeant Kerr says he is not getting counseling. He does not need it, he says. He says he has a deep faith in God, a Christian wife and a strongly supportive church.

Still, when he drives, he says, he finds himself scanning the roads, imagining bombs in bags of trash and potholes. Sometimes he studies Junction City rooftops for snipers. And he often wakes from dreams with the rattling boom of an explosion right beside him.

"My whole head will be ringing and buzzing like the real thing, and then I wake up," he said.

But this, he said, is an improvement. Sergeant Kerr came home to Junction City in February after an improvised bomb went off next to him in Iraq, sending shrapnel into his legs and leaving scars like lunar craters. The two Fort Riley soldiers beside him died.

For a week, he said, the image of a colleague with no legs and his face ripped apart haunted him. He could not sleep.

He and his wife, Felicia, admit that they struggled to get along at first. He was in a wheelchair then, and Felicia had to tend to his every need. He could not go to the bathroom alone.

"He was kind of getting on my nerves, to tell the truth," Ms. Kerr said. "I had kind of gotten things set up around here, and I wasn't ready to do that, too."

"It drove me crazy, too," Sergeant Kerr said. "I felt worthless."

He was there because we sent him there. Spare a little time to thank him and all the others for what they've done.

UPDATE: If you came here from another site, you may want to check out my second Memorial Day post, here.

UPDATE II: I've put together a MS Word document listing all the organizations I know of that offer help to Iraqis or US troops in the war, based on posts at The Winds of Change and Blackfive. If any of you would like to have a copy for distribution in hard copy to people in your community, please let me know and I'll be happy to send it. Some day I'll learn how to convert to PDF, and just post it. Some day.

UPDATE II: Apparently "some day" is today! Here's the link to the PDF file, converted via Adobe's free online trial program.

NYT copy editor caught sleeping

At least I hope that's the reason for this headline:

Honk Kong Rally Signals Start of Turbulent Summer

I'm sure they'll change it soon, but that's very funny.

And yes, they do mean "Hong Kong". But it sounds like a King Kong rumble movie, doesn't it?

Update - not so infuriated

Yesterday I posted my initial email to a local television station written after I saw a segment on The Day After Tomorrow that I thought presented the movie as possibly having some basis in reality. They also used a screen shot of MoveOn.org, presented as a neutral environmental group, not the rabid political partisans they are. As I am wont to do, I waxed eloquent.

Now, about 24 hours later, I've had a couple of exchanges with various news people there, including the on-air reporter, and I wanted to let you know that it was a very good exchange. They were responsive, not particularly defensive, and in the second round of emails conceded that they could have made other choices in presenting the material that would have been more balanced. I don't have the impression that a conscious (or strong unconscious) bias was going on. I had been impressed with the station before, and this has increased my confidence in them as a genuinely professional news organization that wants to do their job well - which is to say, fairly and with balance. That's not to say they're perfect, but then, who is? At least they're not complacently convinced of their own perfection, like, oh, say... Eason Jordan, or Howell Raines.

One more reason to like Alabama.

UPDATE: Corrected "Howard" to "Howell". Yeesh. I never get his name correct the first time. This time I thought I was doing great because I had decided that last time I called him "Harold" when it was "Howard". No, no, no! Next time I'll look it up. I just need to remember: "Howell" as in "howling bad journalism". Think that'll work?

Maybe. Maybe not. Lately I've been typing "UDPATE" each time and have to retype it. There could be no hope for me.

Amazing that Howling Howell is from Alabama. No wonder he's steeped to his eyeballs in Liberal White Man's Guilt. Burned him in the Jayson deal, didn't it? Heh.

No...no, I wouldn't say that

Strongly political, but ... pacifist? Hardly. Nor am I a warmonger. Just a compassionate conservative. Ha. I think very few things are pointless, I'm not generally depressing OR depressed, although sometimes I am. Those are pretty rocks, though. If you want to read the actual poem, it's in the "More" section. It's actually pretty good.

(Found at Amy Loves Books, which I found via Tony Woodlief. And who knows where I found him - I don't even have a cat!)

English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.

705. Dover Beach

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)


THE SEA is calm to-night,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. 5
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 10
At their return, up the high strand.
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago 15
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 20

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 25
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems 30
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain 35
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Infuriating local reporting

A local television news report on The Day After Tomorrow tonight set me off. I've written the reporter who made the report, copying it to the two people who anchor the news program. Here's the text of the letter:

Mr. Ward -

I was very surprised by your report on the 6 p.m. news tonight about the new movie, The Day After Tomorrow. Specifically, I honestly was shocked by the poor reporting that threaded through it. The basic point you made, albeit without saying it directly, was that The Day After Tomorrow actually has something of value to say about the environment. You interspersed scenes from the movie, narrated with bits about how it could be true, with interviews with local people who have no credentials that I could see to be making judgments about the validity of the movie's claims. And then, you capped it off with a screen shot of MoveOn.org, a flagrantly leftist organization centered right now on defeating President George Bush in the November election. They are NOT an environmentalist organization, and no organization of any credibility. Their urging to watch the movie is grounded in whatever harm it can cause the current administration if people believe the movie, not in any kind of genuine concern for the environment or any knowledge of environmental truth.

It wouldn't have taken you very long to track down some more credible sources. In ten minutes online, I found these:

------------------------------
* http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Global-Warming.html

Group Uses Film to Oppose Global Warming

...Environmentalists admit that many of the special-effects scenarios featured in ``The Day After Tomorrow'' are far-fetched...

``This movie distorts global warming, obviously,'' said Maureen Drouin, northeast regional representative of the Sierra Club. ``It's a disaster movie. But we also feel that the Bush administration is distorting the science on global warming.``

...To Jon Reisman, it is all just so much hype. Reisman, associate professor of economics and public policy at the University of Maine at Machias, said environmentalists' activities around ``The Day After Tomorrow'' fit a pattern in the development of climate change policy.

``To get it on the agenda,'' he said, ``you have to make people think something terrible is happening.''

* http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/entertainment-film-controversy.html

Controversy Doesn't Spell Hit at Box Office

The past few weeks have witnessed a couple of classic ``controversies'' as the talking heads -- or make that butting heads -- have had at it over the Walt Disney Co.'s refusal to allow Miramax Films to distribute ``Fahrenheit 9/11.'' And they then moved on to debate whether 20th Century Fox's multimillion-dollar disaster pic ``The Day After Tomorrow'' is actually an environmentalist Trojan horse...

...initial media reports suggested that Fox also was shying away from any suggestions that ``Day'' was an environmentalist tract -- even as Al Gore and MoveOn.org were piggybacking on the movie's New York premiere with their own parallel event...

A popcorn movie, ``Day'' may be even more subversive than the unapologetically partisan ``Fahrenheit'' because it takes potshots at a Dick Cheney-like vice president who has resisted efforts like the Kyoto Accords, designed to combat global warming.

* http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1215824,00.html

A hard rain's a-gonna fall

(writer is environmentalist George Monbiot)

...The Day After Tomorrow is a great movie and lousy science...

So will The Day After Tomorrow wake people up to the realities of global warming? The danger is that the movie bears so little relation to the science that it will encourage people either to dismiss the entire climate change story as fantasy, or to keep waiting for the effects they have seen in the film before they accept that climate change is really happening. On the other hand, the film makes the subject much harder to ignore.

------------------------

You can hardly accuse The New York Times, Reuters and UK's The Guardian of being patsies for conservatives, or of being in bed with big business and against environmentalism. In fact, I can extensively document their liberal bent, and support of most liberal political agendas. And even THEY say the movie is "lousy science", "distorts global warming", and "takes potshots at a Dick Cheney-like vice president".

And this comes from Patrick J. Michaels, a "senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of the upcoming book, Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media":

-------------
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-05-24-michaels_x.htm

As a scientist, I bristle when lies dressed up as "science" are used to influence political discourse. The latest example is the global-warming disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow.

This film is propaganda designed to shift the policy of this nation on climate change. At least that's what I take from producer Mark Gordon's comment that "part of the reason we made this movie" was to "raise consciousness about the environment."

Fox spokesman Jeffrey Godsick says, "The real power of the movie is to raise consciousness on the issue of (global warming)."
---------------

As for MoveOn.org, here's a little bit of info for you:

-------------------
http://www.moveonpac.org/

On April 20th, Bush/Cheney '04 campaign manager Ken Mehlman told associates that "MoveOn.org is a huge threat and has hurt the president." We're launching a campaign to prove him right -- a $50 million grassroots fundraising drive we call 50 for the Future. Together, over 500,000 of us will chip in to elect John Kerry, support progressive officials for office, and run ads to counter President Bush's spin.
----------------

And even THEY say the movie is pathetic science:

-------------------

http://www.moveon.org/front/

This weekend, Hollywood will be releasing a summer blockbuster movie that's making the Bush administration very nervous. In fact, they'd rather you didn't see it at all. Why? Because it's a disaster movie about a potential climate crisis.

While "The Day After Tomorrow" is more science fiction than science fact, everyone will be talking about it — and asking "Could it really happen?" This is an unprecedented opportunity to talk to millions of Americans about the real dangers of global warming and expose President Bush's foot-dragging on the issue.

---------------

Let me just repeat that one section for you:

*"The Day After Tomorrow" is more science fiction than science fact*

So please, explain to me, when all this information about the movie, about MoveOn.org, is available out there, did you do a piece creating such a completely false picture? At best, it's poor reporting. At worst, it's flagrant bias toward a liberal environmentalist agenda. You tell me.

best,
Susanna Cornett
Columbiana, AL
bias.blogfodder.net

There you have it. And no, I don't know why I signed off "best". I couldn't think of another closing that was polite but less friendly. It'll do. Besides, I do wish him the best, which includes a more accurate and impartial approach to his reporting. I'm trying really hard, by the way, not to think that his report has something to do with the fact that he grew up and started his career in the NYC area. He's not a Yankee liberal. He's not a Yankee liberal...

UPDATE: I have to confess. The poor reporting connecting the movie to local things was just... sad, and I was sitting there shaking my head, thinking, "This reporter is incompetent or at least was today." Then he popped up that screen shot of MoveOn.org, acting as if it were some credible environmentalist organization, and I just blew. It was MoveOn that did it.

UPDATE II: My brother. He thinks he's so funny. What's annoying is that sometimes he actually is.

I was yelling at him (typing in all caps) on MSN Messenger about this reporter flashing the screen shot of MoveOn.org, and doing that biased piece on the environment. Here's our exchange: (NOTE: It's in the extended entry, sorry to be confusing but this post got too long and I wanted to put in another update. I trust your ability to figure it out.)

UPDATE III: I just got an email back from one of the anchors at the television station. I won't post it, since I don't have his permission, but I was impressed with his concern and tone. He had questions about the piece too, and said it would be followed up. He didn't trash anyone, but I also don't think it was a "pacify the viewer" email either. My appreciation for the station has gone up; definitely recovered from the blow of the movie piece. Unless, of course, they go off the deep end again. But the channel, NBC 13, is the best local news broadcast in the market, so I'm glad to see that extends to their anchors as more than on-air personalities.

I can sleep now.

:D

Alan says: clearly, you are unconcerned about the environment Susanna says: yes Susanna says: of course I am Alan says: you seem to have a bit of an attitude about it Susanna says: it was just that screen shot of MoveOn.org that tipped me over Susanna says: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Alan says: lol Alan says: it's not in your favorites? Susanna says: DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS?! Alan says: must you shout? Alan says: do I know what what is? Susanna says: MoveOn.org!! Alan says: you're excitable aren't you? Alan says: yes, I do Susanna says: I'm just infuriated to have seen a screen shot of that leftist evil group flashed on my TV screen, in Alabama!, as if it were some kind of genuine environmentalist group Alan says: lol Susanna says: the Sierra Club would have been bad enough Susanna says: It would be like flashing up a website by Thierry Meyssan as a source for reasoned questions about 9/11 Alan says: I think it's pretty hard to argue against the fact we've had a pretty steady warm-up over the last several weeks Susanna says: LOL Susanna says: uhoh Susanna says: now that you mention it... Alan says: I mean, just a few weeks ago we were using the heater here Alan says: now it's the AC every day Susanna says: I'm going to use that

And so I did.

See what I mean?

Turning in my reporter credentials

Remember the huge fire just 1/2 mile from me that I told you I completely missed on Saturday?

There's a photo and article on it on the front page of the Shelby County Reporter, my local weekly paper. It's clear that my reportorial instincts haven't just lessened, they've rolled over and sighed their last. Pathetic. There were even firefighters in uniform to watch, and I missed it entirely.

However! It's possible my writing skills are not so thoroughly compromised.

I've decided to learn my county, so I'm trying to remember to read the whole paper every week. It's a start. In that spirit, I dived into this article, about development planning in the county. For context: Shelby County is directly south of B'ham, which is expanding mostly south. The northern part of the county is booming with development while the southern part, including Columbiana, the county seat, is still quite rural in both population and feel. For those of you familiar with Louisville, KY, think about Oldham County. Columbiana feels very like LaGrange did when I worked for the Oldham Era back in the mid 80s. It's also about as far from the Big City, although Columbiana isn't right on an interstate.

The development article was interesting to me too because development was always a huge topic in Lexington-Fayette County when I worked for their city/county council. I know a little bit about it, at least the general debates and concerns, so I wanted to know what was going on here. As far as their revision of the comprehensive plan, I question the cluster concept they're touting as the new-thing-taking-us-back-to-the-old-thing, i.e. relatively self-contained neighborhoods. It works in small doses, but this is one instance where you built it, they won't come. Most especially they want to redirect traffic off the big corridors and establish satellite shopping areas in these "made" communities, to reduce the volume on the big corridors.

Clue: You're about two decades too late.

Anyway, enough analysis of their plan. What first caught my eye about the article was, unsurprisingly, the lead (or lede, which I never called it in all my years of journalism):

James Ponseti thinks of the clock tower in the town square from the movie "Back to the Future" when he describes his vision of the communities supported by Shelby County's new comprehensive plan, which has not been adopted yet.

A nice snappy reference to an old movie, an understandable sentence, gets a lot of necessary bits in there. But... the writer never mentions the movie again! He doesn't explain the movie, he doesn't tell you when it came out, he doesn't tell you why dude thinks about the movie. Somehow he just does, that's all, and it could just as well be tomatoes or steel girders he thinks of. At least, that's true for all you, the reader, know.

People, when you open an article with a comparison to something, you have to play out the comparison elsewhere in the piece. If you're really good, you can dot references through the piece and actually close with a line harking back to the lead. It has to be done with a steady hand, though, because too much becomes parody. Of course, too little leaves the reader hanging, saying, "wha?" As is the case here.

I can't completely fault the writer, without knowing more. Sometimes editors, especially not very good editors, will gut a metaphor or simile without so much as a tremor of remorse. Perhaps they don't even notice, which is even worse. I once wrote a long feature piece on a local attorney, for a (tiny tiny tiny) newspaper, and constructed what I thought was a lovely description of the woman. It was all interconnected, building to a crescendo. Oh, I was full of myself in those days. When I finally saw it pasted on the page, after my editor finished with it, the thing was eviscerated. No other word for it. She thought it was too long, and just sliced and diced without giving it back to me for rewrite, or even smoothing of the ragged, bloody edges. I was ashamed to see it run. I learned a lesson.

The main one being, get out of Dodge. Which I did, but that's another story.

So maybe the writer did have other movie references in the story, and the editor showed his (her?) incompetence. But either way, this actually pretty good story, which explains fairly complex doings in clear, easy to follow language, in the final analysis leaves you saying, "wha?" because of that obscure, disconnected reference to a 1980s movie.

But then, I miss massive fires, which are a bit larger than similes. Or metaphors, for that matter.

An interesting thought

Should we be thankful for violent video games, instead of horrified?

Doug Kerns's TCS article on the wussification of cartoons in the 70s, and Gen X's ability to become decent people anyway, is well worth reading if only for this point:

[I]f we accept that sex differences are something to be celebrated, not denied, then we can get back to the age-old task of taming - but not breaking - the male spirit.

I say, bravo to that. Let guys be guys! But it's the corollary to that statement that really caught my attention:

It's true that some notorious teen monsters (like Klebold and Harris from the Columbine tragedy) enjoyed violent shooting games - but so do most teenaged boys. Most likely those savage young men turned to video games as an outlet for the chaotic impulses that they could not control. Perhaps we should be grateful for games that transform adolescent rage into harmless electronic depictions on a screen. Perhaps transformation can succeed where suppression fails.

The official psychological term for it is displacement, "A psychological defense mechanism in which there is an unconscious shift of emotions, affect, or desires from the original object to a more acceptable or immediate substitute." The general trend is to think that violence begats violence, and there's possibly some validity to that. But I think equal attention needs to go to the therapeutic benefits of displacement, taking strong aggressive impulses and channeling them into play of some sort where no one gets truly hurt. Is it possible that some personalities will actually feed on the violence, and birth more violence as a result? Certainly. But what needs to be noted is that it's a refinement or amplification of an already present dysfunction, at least in my judgment. Klebold and Harris weren't charming, loveable little fuzzballs of compassion before they got their hands on guns and explosives.

The question to ask isn't, what is it about violence that twists little (or big) minds? The question to ask is, why does natural male aggression sometimes result in fine warriors like Pat Tillman, and other times in execrable fiends like Klebold and Harris? I think the answer lies outside the realm of applied violence itself, and rests in training and character, in the channeling of that aggression. And Kerns's article makes it clear what role something as simple as comics can play.

Something to think about.

Gnostics and nonsense

My brother Alan has a couple of excellent posts at theosebes. First, he links an article discussing why the so-called "lost books" of the NT weren't lost at all - they were deliberately excluded from the canon, for good reason, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code notwithstanding.

Then he ruminates on the trend of rural churches to lose membership, some merging into larger congregations with newer buildings. It's a sad, in a way, but what's important is not where you meet or where your grandmother went to church, but who you worship and how you worship Him.

The church where I attended as a child had bare wood walls, a pot-bellied stove for heat and outdoor "facilities" when I started going there at 5 years old. It upgraded to air conditioning and electric heating over the years, and about the time I left for college they built a modern building with indoor restrooms and central air. A major improvement. But as Alan notes, the number of members is steadily declining, and in general the group is aging. Not many if any new families, or young children, attend there. Perhaps a new building would help. But I agree with Alan that I'm not sure there'll be a congregation there in 10 or 20 years. I guess that's the way time works. There'll be all kinds of new congregations popping up in places there weren't any before, and groups merging to make stronger and more effective groups. And that's a good thing.

Alan focuses on rural churches in his post, but I noticed a trend of empty church buildings in Newark too. There was one cathedral that you could see from miles away, a truly spectacular structure. But when you got close, you could see it was no longer in active use. I tend to think that the Lord's money is better spent other places than for a magnificent building, but as someone who appreciates the past, and admires historical ecclesiastical architecture for its sheer beauty (not present in most modern ecclesiastical structures), I regret the eventual loss of that building.

Gotcha!

It's about time this started happening, but it needs to happen a lot more:

A man who sent 850 million junk e-mails through accounts he opened with stolen identities was sentenced to up to seven years in prison on Thursday.

And specifically which ones did he send?

Earthlink said Carmack ran 343 illegal e-mail accounts under false names from 2002 until his arrest last May, using them to send unsolicited e-mail ads for things like get-rich-quick schemes and sexual enhancers.

But this is the best one of the lot:

Carmack told the judge he believed the case against him was overblown, saying there were no victims. "I obviously regret this whole involvement," he said.

Emphasis mine. How much bandwidth is used to send and store these things? How much time is taken up to delete them or develop software to stop them? How many people are duped, or have their computers damaged by them? Just with comment spam alone, I spend a couple of hours a week deleting it, putting the URLs on the MT Blacklist, and closing out the comments on posts where it was placed. I consider myself a victim, thankyouverymuch.

And it's not like it's a small problem either:

Spam last month accounted for two-thirds of all e-mail traffic, according to e-mail monitoring firm MessageLabs Inc. Things are even worse in the United States, where spam accounted for more than four in five e-mails, according to Message Labs...

According to the firm, 83 percent of the e-mails it filtered last month for its mostly U.S.-based clients was spam. That was up from 78 percent in January, when the new anti-spam federal law, the CAN-SPAM Act, took effect...

There's also been increased use of Trojan horse programs designed to turn home Internet users into unwitting partners in spam delivery, he said. The programs allow spammers to hijack innocent people's computers in order to send spam.

What was that about victims?

Trying too hard, are we?

Roy Peter Clark is a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, and a former jurist on a Pulitzer Prize selection committee. I'm sure he writes lovely, singing prose on most every occasion. In this article, he's discussing the startling fact that this year's Pulitzer Committee didn't award a prize for features despite having the usual three finalists for the award. Clark laments that the pieces are "way too long and difficult to read, devoid of memorable characters, and surprisingly weak in the use of language, indecisive about narrative structure". Fighting words. He especially decries the length of the pieces - each involving multiple articles - saying they would be better categorized as "explanatory journalism". He adds, "[t]hese three series can barely be called "features" by any definition of the newspaper feature story I understand."

To further reinforce his point, he draws this simile, referring to the one of the three finalists he likes best:

But to allow it to elbow its way through the features category is allow an elephant to race against gazelles in a broom closet.

And this man is bemoaning someone else's less-than-sterling prose? I'm sure if I read some of his features, I'd be just riveted. But this little creative effort dropped in his feature criticism piece just doesn't work. It's clunky, it makes no sense, and the visual imagery is difficult to construct. I know what he meant to say, but I greatly bemoan his effort to say it in a clever manner.

Which works better here: Physician, heal thyself? Or perhaps, he who is without sin, throw the first stone?

Well. Choosing the best descriptor is like trying to chase a greased pig through a traffic jam. Perhaps instead I will leave you with a moral:

Don't write poorly in an article criticizing someone else's writing.

I know, I know, "He who is without sin..."

A beautiful thing to see

Instapundit linked a Boston Herald editorial excoriating Al Gore, so naturally I had to go read it. You should too. My favorite piece?

The real disgrace is that this repugnant human being once held the second highest office in this great land.

Amen.

Axis to grind

As a new member of the Axis of Weevil, I feel obligated to answer Terry's Thursday Three. The fact that I'm tired from my first day back in the classroom for the summer has no bearing on my willingness to snatch up an easy post.

First, to prime the pump, go visit Charles. That should convince you that anything I post is a bounteous blessing in comparison. Ready? Good.

1) Who is the most peculiar person you know personally? Please give a short listing of their particular foibles you find most compellingly peculiar. Obviously, the more peculiar, the more prudent it will be to disguise their identity to some extent--giving their name, address, and aluminum-foil-hat communicator number is probably a bit too much information. You know how those people are.

That's a challenge. The most peculiar? Hmmm. It's a tie. One is a guy I went to school with, way back. He was tall, thin, always rumpled looking in a the-slacks-and-shirt-were-on-the-floor-together kind of way. He desperately wanted to marry but had no conversation or social skills. He would sit at the school's basketball games reading books like "How To Find A Wife". If a woman said hello, he was like leech. Once he called me to ask me to go out for pizza. I said no, he begged, I said no, he said it was his b-day and no one else would go, I said no (feeling very horrible and mean), he said please please and I said I have to work on a paper. I did, but it wasn't due for a while. However, I diligently started work on it as soon as I got off the phone, and didn't even go out with friends later because I had told him I was working on the paper.

The other one was a science professor. The class was bizarrely easy, because he handed out worksheets that had text with blanks for some of the words. His lectures consisted of giving us the information to fill in the blanks. He was a nice man, in some ways, but very buttoned up. He was always dressed in a white dress shirt, dress slacks and a tie, very 50s looking with short hair. He was cheerful, always telling jokes that weren't funny except to him. He moved about the room with jerky movements, as if he needed just a little grease in his joints. He seemed somehow disconnected from reality, the kind of person who you suspected might have his mother mummified in the basement and played chess with her everynight, cheerfully. Just... odd.

2) What characteristic(s) about yourself do you think others might find just a tad bit peculiar?

Like the song says, where do I begin? I have a terrible time focusing on something, and tend to flit from project to project. I have hundreds of books I trail from state to state without reading, and big piles of fabric stashed in bins even though I haven't sewed in months (much). Once I move away from a place, I generally don't go back much, and it's like I've moved to a different world. I never want to move back to a place I've been before. Yet I almost obsessively keep mementoes from all the places I've lived. Zesta saltines with orange juice is one of my favorite snacks. No dipping, though. NO DIPPING! Dipping a cracker or cookie into liquid is an offense against mankind. I'm very friendly and outgoing when I meet people one on one or small groups, but I don't like parties and will mostly hide when I'm at one. I like privacy and could go several days without talking to other people and not mind it. I don't like coffee.

3) Knowing how Peculiar-Americans tend to have rather different ideas when it comes to politics, have you ever voted for a person who was identified as something other than a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or little-‘I’ independent?

No. I'm pretty much a straight-party voter, although I tell myself I'm not and prove it by turning each lever individually, instead of pulling the "straight party" lever. I suppose it's one of my peculiarities.

Did I mention I love ginger in almost any way it can be served, except pickled?

R.I.P.

Winfred Duff, the father of my close friend Melody, passed away yesterday at the age of 80. He had been ill for some time, so it wasn't unexpected. He just slipped away peacefully as Melody and her husband Morris stood beside his bed, at their home. It was a quiet and dignified death after a long, happy life taking care of his family, helping others and attaining wide professional acclaim in his home town. I didn't know him until he moved to stay with Melody after her mother's death 7 years ago, but I'm glad I got to know him then. He was a kind, funny and sharp gentleman, always glad to see me when I visited, always interested in what was going on with me, and interested in the world around him. I could see a lot of him in Melody, who has been a dear friend for the past 9 years.

Rest in peace, Winfred. I'm glad I knew you.

A quilt for the lost ones

A young woman in Florida is making a lap quilt for the families of each soldier who has died in Iraq. So far she's made 500, sometimes up to 7-8 per day, with the help of people who send her quilt tops and fabric:

"It’s all about sacrifice," explains 19-year-old Jessica Porter of Hudson, Florida. Americans who have paid the ultimate price in Iraq "have sacrificed everything to protect us. I just wanted to give their families something respectful in return."

...With your help, Jessica has already completed and sent close to 500 quilts to families as of May 15. Thanks to you, she receives 10-15 packages per day of fabric and quilt tops.

If you're interested in helping her out, her address is posted on the site with some information about what fabric she needs. It doesn't mention dollar donations.

What a huge task. What a great gesture.

Religion at the polls

Tuesday is primary day in Alabama, and you can tell by the advertisements on television. I've only noticed two races with heavy television campaigns, so I'm assuming those are the two most hotly contested. But only one of them is all about who's the most on God's side.

What a change from New Jersey.

I'm sure you remember the furor over the Ten Commandments and Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore last fall. He had a large statue featuring the Commandments installed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building, then refused to remove it when ordered to do so by a federal judge. His fellow justices voted to comply with the federal ruling, and the statue was removed. Last November, Moore was thrown off the court by a judicial ethics panel for refusing to comply with a ruling from a higher court.

Now, in this political season, the situation is heating up again:

Supporters of former Chief Justice Roy Moore have lined up to run for one congressional seat and all three state Supreme Court seats up for election.

A number of business groups are supporting the non-Moore Republican candidates, and some claim that it's a business vs religion issue. Certainly religion is an issue nationwide in ways it hasn't been for quite a while. But here the campaigning is quite flagrant. The candidates in my area are Judge Jean Brown, the incumbent, and Tom Parker, who is Moore's former legal adviser. In both instances, the focus of the ads are how conservative and religious the candidates are. Brown talks about her faith, and states that she has brought the Ten Commandments back into the justice building "the right way". I'm not sure what that means (I could find out, but the ad doesn't make it clear). She tells us that she has "one of the most conservative records" on the court, hitting a good note with me when she says she believes her job is to "strictly interprete the law, not make it". But that's a minor part of the ad. Parker, on the other hand, could be running for Evangelist Of The Year on the Roy Moore Sidekick ticket. He is shown preaching, holding a Bible open, and appearing with Moore in a variety of settings.

It's unnerving.

Of course I want a justice who believes in God, who understands the moral underpinning of this country's laws don't arise from the earth like mist, but rather are founded on our Judeo-Christian history. However, I don't want a justice who uses the bench to bend and make law to suit Christians, or at least the ones he hangs out with, any more than I want some leftist freak judge doing the same to suit the left. What I want is a justice who will strictly interprete the law, with a tendency to lean conservative when there's some ambivalence about what the answer should be.

I just saw another ad, for another woman running for justice - Pam Baschab. It was a good ad, emphasizing her track record of working as a justice, and her judicial philosophy. Then it had to end with a photo of Moore and a scrolling through of the Ten Commandments, saying she was supported by Moore. Then her slogan: Three words, and the first one was Faith. That worries me. Yes, I want her to have faith. But I don't want her running with her Christianity as her primary or most important qualification.

This statement from her website (spelling errors not withstanding) is a little more reassuring:

I understand that the rule of law is one of the cornerstones of our freedom. I respect it and will protect it fiercely. But I also believe that within this principle is the idea that no decision is every final. You can not give up your beliefs simply because the decisions do not go you way; with every legal means at your disposal, you must keep fighting for what you believe, no matter how long the struggle.

The key here is with every legal means at your disposal. I disagreed with Justice Moore's decision to flaut the federal judge's ruling. We must be governed by rule of law. I'm not bothered at all by the candidates mentioning or even emphasizing their faith. But I'm very disturbed by the implication that ignoring or making law is okay as long as it's in the name of Christianity.

A curiosity

Why do I have a 6-foot closet nearly full of clothes, and various other stashes of clothing here and there, yet I still don't have anything to wear?

Why do I have 20 pairs of shoes but not the ones I need?

A conundrum.

UPDATE: I start teaching tomorrow, so I've been working on my rosters and handouts and things for teaching, which is why I've not posted more. I feel vaguely guilty, as if I should take up the slack for Instaguy traveling. However! I have managed to emerge from the guilt relatively unscathed.

One of my tasks today was to contact all kinds of cop types in the area. If things go as planned, my students in policing this semester will hear from local municipal police, from a county sheriff, from an Alabama State Trooper and an FBI agent. How cool is that? I'm excited.

Meanwhile, I've been pondering the clothing thing, and I can tell you right now what the problem is. I have lots of bottoms but no acceptable tops. I've got probably 20 skirts and slacks that fit me and I like, but only about 8 tops that are doable amongst them. Some have no matches at all. Most of the bottoms are patterned, but when I go to find tops, mainly what I find is... patterns. No dice! It's very difficult to find attractively styled, non-boring, well-fitting solid colored tops, whether it's blouses or t-shirts or whatever. I get really tired of wearing a white t-shirt every other day. So. I'd say that's true of a lot of women - we have individual pieces that we like but nothing to complete the outfit acceptably. This often prompts us to buy more outfits, when we should be buying pieces to complete what we've already got.

And then there are the outfits that are old styles but we still kinda like and think may come back in, and the outfits that are a wee bit too snug (or, although we won't admit it, would fit rather like a sausage casing) but we're going to fit into next week or next month or at least by next summer. And finally there are the clothes that were really poor purchases to begin with, that fluffy sweater that makes me look like a startled giant chicken but was originally $100 that I got on sale for $10... You hate to destroy the memory of that victory by finally admitting that it was $10 for a reason, namely, it would make Kate Moss look obese. So all these things accumulate in your closet over time, until there's no room for new things and yet... nothing you would be seen in outside of your bedroom, and then only if you're alone in there.

Men, if you want to see your wife clean out her closet... do a home What Not To Wear episode. Of course, it involves a $5,000 new wardrobe...

As for shoes, well... First, women's shoes mostly cost less than men's, if you're buying decent shoes and not ones that will wear out in one season and destroy your foot in the process. I can buy three pairs of cute little sandals for what it costs a guy to buy a decent pair of walking shoes on sale. Then there's the color thing. If you stripped down my shoes to white, brown and black, I'd have maybe six pairs instead of 20. Okay, 10. Anyway. Men don't need shoes in red and hot pink and deep orange and bright blue and and and. At least, not the men who would be complaining about all the women's shoes in their closet. So the first thing to do is compare shoe budgets instead of numbers of shoes.

A second option is to identify your shoes as a hobby - you read up on styles, and shop around, and buy shoes to match all your little outfits. It's a hobby. Then you compare hobby budgets with your guy. If necessary, you can include drinking beer as a hobby. But any guy with some kind of guyish hobby is going to be sinking great hunks of change into it - an outboard motor, say, or a mammoth grill, or many many books, or the very latest computer gadgetry. Put it this way - tell him every time he spends $1000 on his fishing boat, you're going to spend $1000 on shoes. That should shut him up.

Not that the goal is shutting him up. I'm just saying it would. Or should.

The goal is, rather, explaining why we have so many shoes. Ultimately, it's because we think fashion is fun and guys mostly don't. How hard is that to understand?

(If it gets really bad, just tell him you'll buy a pair with 5" heels to wear just for him.)

Nice disclaimer

At the end of a long, detailed and numbers-ridden article about the fact that Dallas topped the biggest US cities in crime rate for 2003, much of which is spent comparing Dallas to other cities, the NBC affiliate posting the article tacks on this graph:

The FBI discourages city crime comparisons because reporting disparities and various sociological factors skew the numbers.

Couldn't we have seen that a little further up? And they're right - the FBI does actively discourage such comparisons:

Since crime is a sociological phenomenon influenced by a variety of factors, the FBI discourages data users from ranking agencies and using the data as a measurement of law enforcement effectiveness.

To ensure these data are uniformly reported, the FBI provides contributing law enforcement agencies with a handbook that explains how to classify and score offenses and provides uniform crime offense definitions. Acknowledging that offense definitions may vary from state to state, the FBI cautions agencies to report offenses not according to local or state statutes but according to those guidelines provided in the handbook. Most agencies make a good faith effort to comply with established guidelines.

Finally, in a given year, nearly 17,000 agencies contribute data to the FBI; however, because of computer problems, changes in record management systems, personnel shortages, or a number of other reasons, some agencies cannot provide data for publication.

And their UCR FAQ gives some other reasons why (although they don't identify it as problematic data collection):

Q8. How are crimes estimated for publication in Crime in the United States?

A8. Due to the fact that not all law enforcement agencies provide complete data for a given year, it is sometimes necessary for the UCR Program to generate crime estimates at the local, state, and national levels. Using the known crime experiences of similar areas within a state, the estimates are computed by assigning the same proportional crime volumes to non-reporting agencies. The size of an agency, type of jurisdiction, e.g., police department versus sheriff's office, and geographic location are considered in the estimation process. A similar procedure is used for national arrest estimates.

In other words, there's a goodly amount of guessing going on. Not always a bad thing, but certainly an important thing to consider for anyone analyzing the data for policy purposes. And there's more:

Q14. What is the Hierarchy Rule?

A14. The Hierarchy Rule states: In a multiple-offense situation (i.e., one where several offenses are committed at the same time and place), after classifying all Part I offenses, score only the highest ranking offense, and ignore all others, regardless of the number of offenders and victims. (UCR Handbook, Pg. 33)

Example:

Incident: During the commission of an armed bank robbery, the offender strikes a teller with the butt of a handgun. The robber runs from the bank and steals an automobile at curb side.

Classification: Robbery, Aggravated Assault, and Motor Vehicle Theft are three Part I offenses apparent in this situation. Each of these offenses appears on the report listed in a certain order, and of these three crimes, Robbery is the "highest" on the list. Therefore, this incident would be classified as Robbery, and, accordingly, one offense would be scored. All of the other offenses would be ignored. (UCR Handbook, Pg. 33)

So it's quite possible that the actual crimes committed and reported in Dallas are much higher than what the UCR records. Another point of skew.

The FBI collects crime data for its own purposes, and is very clear about its methods. I'm not faulting them particularly - what they have is far better than nothing at all. What I am faulting is the media's reporting on it. All the information necessary to understand the basics of how the UCR is developed is on the FBI's website in layman's language. It's actually a great opportunity to help the average citizen begin to understand the complexities of statistics and the care with which we should assess statistical information. But does the media, at least in this instance, take that opportunity? Nooooo. Instead, they put that little disclaimer there.

Another opportunity to educate lost to laziness.

A lovely tribute

Dan at Signposts wrote a lovely tribute to his Great Aunt Stella, whose funeral he attended yesterday. A lot of what he says calls to my mind my own childhood attending a small country church in Kentucky. She was a member of a church of Christ, as am I, and most of them (although I don't know about where she attended) do not use instrumental music in worship. No piano, no organ, no drums or guitars. As I can attest, that makes this more noticable:

On the way there, once we had caught up sufficiently with each other's lives, my sister and I shared our abiding memories of our Aunt. We said we would never forget her old lady country voice - whether just talking to you or singing loudly and off-key to hymns at the church. My sister teared up at the service when she heard an old lady singing very badly and loudly to the hymn "Nearer my God to Thee" - I heard Stella singing, she said.

I could identify a lot of individual voices during singing in the congregation I attended as a child. We knew more songs than tunes, but the singing was heartfelt and during a gospel meeting, when the old frame building was packed to capacity, we shook the walls. That still ranks up there as among the most moving experiences of my life. And I can see - and hear - in my mind many of the older people, now mostly gone, who filled those benches.

Thank you for sharing Great Aunt Stella with us, Dan. I hope to sit down with her for a few verses of "Nearer My God to Thee" myself, some day.

Hunter S. Rall

Apparently somewhere in this great country of ours, Hunter S. Thompson got so loose on drugs that he somehow absorbed Ted Rall into his very core. That's the only possible reason I can see for this complete breakdown of intelligence, humanity and perspective:

"Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these photographs did."

He's speaking, if you can't tell, about the Abu Ghraib photos. How charming is that? Anyone want to chip in and buy a couple of water balloons to hit these guys with? You know they'd melt.

I learned of Thompson's insanity through a post by Steve at Little Tiny Lies, who also made the Rall connection. He goes on to thoroughly dismember Thompson's credibility, melting its flesh in lye and feeding the bones to pigs. It was a light snack, given that his credibility lacked much substance to begin with.

There's one glitch in all this - the column where Thompson said it is here, but the Hitler quote is not. Steve says ESPN deleted it. For all that Steve has a strong propensity for fiction when writing Nigerian spammers, I see no reason to question him on this. I would like to see a screen shot of the original column.

UPDATE: Drudge reports the editing of Thompson's column.

Thanks, Bryan, for calling my attention to it. Ain't cross-linking grand?

One quick question for ESPN: Why don't you have a right-wing columnist as over the top as Thompson?

Oh, the places I'll go

I want to visit all the states in the US, but I'm obviously long overdue for a Northwest jaunt. I should pack up my little riding lawnmower of a car and take about a month to go through some fine countryside. But not in the winter. June sounds good.

create your own personalized map of the USA
or write about it on the open travel guide

I don't quite know how I missed Louisiana, and I'm not even sure I have. But I don't remember Louisiana, ditto Kansas and Oklahoma. If I was in Utah it was while driving from Phoenix to Las Vegas. And no, I didn't even clip Rhode Island while zipping around the Yankee states these last few years. I meant to. I didn't.

But it gives me a goal. Hey, anybody in those non-red states want to invite me over? I'll bring the cornbread and Milo's Tea. If you're really good, I'll detour through Kentucky and bring you some Ale81 (that's Ale Eight One, not Ale Eighty-One, for those of you not in the know).

I found this map thingy through Karol at Spot On, who is also hosting this week's Carnival of Vanities. She sounds like an all around good person. Speaking of visiting states, Karol, come on down to Alabama! I have an extra bedroom. You can sit on my front porch and watch the grass grow, then we can go to PaPaw's Restaurant for grits, or to The Golden Rule for barbeque and iced tea. Sweet, of course. Failing that, we'll hang out at La Mela in Little Italy next time I'm in Manhattan, and discuss conservatism in The Big Apple.

Speaking of media bias...

Glenn Reynolds has linked to several major media bias indicators in the past few days, most notably this article on the Pew Research Center survey of the politics of news people. And now Vanessa Pierce, a Republican journalism grad from Seattle, reports that she's seen it on the ground:

When I was applying for reporting jobs after graduation last year, I felt obligated to tell editors that I am a Republican. Why? Subconsciously, I think it was a test. My test would determine the media bias once and for all.

It worked.

When I applied for an arts and entertainment section, the editor asked me how I could objectively report on art if I didn't agree with the National Endowment for the Arts. My rationale stemmed from core beliefs involving conservative theory; nonetheless, I told her that art is a necessary component to our culture. It didn't matter. It was no interview, but rather an attack. I had to defend my beliefs, not my capability.

My question would be, how can you report on anything if you don't take everything with a grain of salt? Certainly the arts and entertainment editor showed herself to be rankly biased toward public endowment of the arts, which is a political position to take. I would say it also indicates a bias toward the so-called fine arts, as those are what the NEA generally support.

Pierce's column is interesting, and long on bulleted points about other reasons to think the media is biased. But I have comments on two areas of it specifically.

First, her assumption is that bias is conscious. I'm increasingly inclined to think a lot of it is not. It's not a conspiracy in most cases, but rather an instance of people with similar politics going into the same field where they are each other's primary peers and reference points, leading to a sense of themselves as reasoned moderates or neutral when actually they're quite skewed to the liberal side. Their problem isn't a lack of desire to hold themselves to a standard, but rather that their standard is skewed and so ingrained that they can't see that it's wrong. The saving grace on the conservative side, I think, is not less ideology but more honesty and self-examination about it. I do think there are journalists who recognize their own biases but believe they're correct in their views, approaching their coverage with an Upton Sinclair kind of zeal. But that's not being honest, with either themselves or their audience.

The other issue I have with Pierce is her telling potential employers about her political affiliation. I'm a conservative, and if I was an editor interviewing reporters, someone volunteering to me that they are Republican would send up all manner of red flags. If I asked her a question about objectivity, and how she would insure that she practiced it, it would be appropriate for her to mention her personal views and how she would monitor herself professionally. But to volunteer it would make me think she is driven too hard ideologically to separate herself effectively from it. I'd want to see some of her work to make sure it didn't show up there. I would also think she was defensive, and completely aside from political affiliation that is not a good trait in an employee. Finally, I would worry about a prospective employee who considers her own career advancement as less important than proving an ideological belief.

I don't know Pierce, so it's quite possible she's a lovely young woman who is highly competent and precisely the kind of person I'd want on my team. I don't want to indicate by this criticism that I think she's a loser. Not at all. But her column triggered my concern, and I wanted to explain my thoughts.

Idiots. Scum. Low-rent opportunists.

My Internet connection has been dicey all day, I'd get on for 2-3 minutes and it would go away. I guess that's because my phone has worked all day, and why should BellSouth allow me to have two of the services I pay them for work simultaneously? I mean, let's not get greedy.

So then I DO get online, the connection seems fine (I haven't checked my phone to see if this means it's out), and I find that some low-life idiot comment spammer has left 56 comments. Charming. I've put them on the Blacklist, but now I have to go dig out all of them on the site, delete them and rebuild. How much does that bite? Quite a bit. I'll give them one little link though: Everyone, please go express your utmost contempt and derision for Listbanx.com.

On a somewhat brighter note, yet still not all roses and peace, at the urging of John from Just Some Poor Schmuck, I'm working on a low graphic page that can be viewed more easily on PDAs and cell phones. He directed me to the code on this page, which I used precisely as they said in the instructions. The page works when entered independently, but for whatever reason the top post doesn't show, and the link won't work from the front page (it's over there on the right, under "High Tech Doins". The link is http://bias.blogfodder.net/PDA.php. Does it work from here? I don't know. We'll see after I post this. So that's a work in progress. And yes, I know the colors aren't right on the PDA page. I'll get to it.

Other than that, today has been a totally useless day. Or perhaps I should say, more accurately, that I have been totally useless today. And things seem to be on a downward spiral.

I hope yours is going well.

UPDATE: The spammer was even more incompetent than I knew - (s)he left all 57 spams (I miscounted originally) on the same post. Easy fix. Idiot. And the PDA page won't click over. Sigh. But when I type this in:

http://bias.blogfodder.net/pda.php

It goes right to it. Freaky. And yes, apparently it doesn't show the last post. If I can't fix it I may put up a placeholder post always on top to push down the new stuff. When I'm in a better mood.

UPDATE !!! - Well, thanks to Jim in comments, I realized just how touchy touchy computer code is. I changed PDA to pda in one link, and took a / out of another, and now both the link in the post and the link on the sidebar WORK!

Yay!

Thanks, Jim. I figured it was a susanna-glitch.

Children lost to hopelessness

When lives are cheap, can you afford to care?

There's a good deal of digging and thinking behind this post by Bigwig about the history of child raising, and what it has to say about the attitude of those Muslims who seem to count their children's lives as tools to use up rather than unique lives to cherish and nurture. He points out that the attitude is neither unusual in history nor in modern times, and explains why. It's a compelling argument, although I wouldn't say it's a comprehensive explanation. And he doesn't say it is either - just that it's a strong factor in some cultures. Very interesting, and sad.

I can't imagine how hard it would be not just to lose a child, but to know before your first pregnancy that you would likely lose several over the course of your life. I'm sure there are and were people who responded to each loss just as we would, but Bigwig's assessment rings true on a broad scale. My grandmother's generation was the last in this country to suffer the level of losses common to history, and in her case that was true as much because of her location as her time. She has told me several times of the death of her oldest sister, Claudia, who married a brutish man because she became pregnant by him out of wedlock, how his family forced her to heavy labor during her pregnancy, including scrubbing clothes outside in the raw winter air, and how in her weakened state she died in childbirth. Not a unique or uncommon story. Her child was born alive and healthy, but was kept by the father's uncaring family and, as my granny says, "It didn't live long." It. I don't even know if the child was ever named. That's just not a world I can relate to. But it underscores for me the truths in Bigwig's piece.

But how do you give hope to people who refuse to lift up their heads to see it? And how do you help people to have hope in a place like Iraq when so many who are secure in their own peace, comfort and hope seem so determined to snatch it from them?

No Moore, please!!

Michael Moore's anti-Bush rant won the top honors at the Cannes Film Festival this year. I'll pause a moment while you express your complete and dumbfounded shock .................................................................... ............................... ......................................................... .................................... .................................................. ..............

Back up off the floor now?

The entertainment elites continue doing their best to damage our efforts to root democracy in Iraq while eating brie and caviar and engaging in nauseating self-congratulation. And Moore's special moment wasn't without humor:

Moore said [Cannes jury member and movie director Quentin] Tarantino whispered to him on stage, telling him: "We want you to know that the politics of your film had nothing to do with this award, we are not here to give a political award, on this jury we have different politics and some of us have no politics -- you were given this award because you made a great film."

I've not seen it and I don't know that I will be able to bring myself to watch it. But having seen Bowling for Columbine, and knowing the topic of this one, I can promise you that it's a great film only if you enjoy a virulent mass of half-truths served up as Absolute Truth with a side of cutting mockery and disdain for America.

And it's only fitting that the writer of the article show his/her own colors in the closing paragraph:

The deteriorating situation in Iraq and the unfolding discovery that US soldiers badly mistreated Iraqi prisoners dominated news reports during the festival's week and a half run, adding a timeliness to Moore's movie.

I'm not aware that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating; in fact, I've seen several reports from military personnel saying precisely the opposite. It's not all love and roses yet, but it's not deteriorating, except on the media front. And of course the Iraqi prisoner abuse dominated the news, crowding out oh, say, the UN's wicked duplicity in the Oil for Food scam, and abuse in French prisons likely not far from the caviar crowd feting Moore. After all, we wouldn't want to allow fairness, balance and news judgment interfere with a good anti-American meme.

I just can't begin to express my contempt for these people.

Day by Day - coming to... something near you?

Chris Muir and his Day by Day cartoon are among the finest things on the Internet. Since he was "discovered" by the blogosphere, we've all been agitating to get him into some kind of syndication, because he deserves great distribution. At least the kind of distribution and attention of, say, Doonesbury. He's funny, he's insightful, he's incisive and he knows how to choose his topics. What's not to love?

Well, it appears that perhaps his star has been discovered. We're promised more later. When, Chris, when?!

It'll be cool some time in a few years when we'll see people in the malls and at ballgames and at the local Pizza Hut wearing t-shirts with the DbD characters and their pithy sayings. Won't that be extremely cool? We'll sigh, and say, we knew him in the early days...

(Thanks to Dodd for drawing my attention to this. Figures that the few days I miss DbD Chris would throw down something like this. Sheesh.)

Conservative insurrections in mainline denominations

Theosebes links to an interesting article about a group that is making liberals in the Christian denominations quite edgy:

In each denomination, the flashpoint is homosexuality, but there is another common denominator as well. In each case, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a small organization based in Washington, has helped incubate traditionalist insurrections against the liberal politics of the denomination's leaders...

Rev. Robert Edgar [said]..."They have caused so many internal issues that some progressive leaders are afraid to take the courageous positions they would have taken a few decades ago because a third of their parishioners would cut their legs off."

The struggle is for the influence the churches have, for the power of the pulpit and the money and the overseas missions. Edgar claims that they represent only a third of the mainstream church members, but I have a few questions to ask him - Is what those members believe unimportant or unscriptural, or just inconvenient for those "progressive" leaders who want to pull the power their own way? And why is what this organization is doing wrong, when the National Council on Churches and other groups of that ilk have been doing similar things with similar goals, albeit diametrically opposed ideology, for decades? I would say that before the "progressives" wedged their way into pulpits nationwide, that 33% was more like 90%. He's being a hypocrite when he criticizes their tactics.

It seems to me that once you get away from the core of Biblical teaching and the attitude that God and His Word are what's central to Christianity, this kind of dissension and power struggle is inevitable. How can you meaningfully defend your teaching as Biblical when you've dismissed the majority of Scripture as parochial, judgmental, not really from God and more of an impediment than aid? To me this isn't just a struggle between power factions, it's a struggle between those who want to follow the Bible and those who see it more as a starting point for their own manmade philosophies.

Martin Devon put up a post this week about rabbis who use their religious soapboxes to advance their own (risible) political viewpoints. He's against it, and does a wonderful fisk of an email he received from them, dealing with both the substance of it and the attitude it conveys. I think a lot of what he says is germane to this discussion too.

My main question is: Where's God, and the humility of service, in all this?

UPDATE: Jack Rich tags another wild liberal in the pulpit.

al Qaeda in Japan?

I hadn't heard about this:

The Japanese police said Thursday that they were investigating whether a French citizen said to be linked to Al Qaeda tried to set up a terrorist cell here, after reports in the Japanese news media this week that the man had repeatedly entered the country from Malaysia using a fake passport.

Very curious. Not surprising, given that the bombers in Bali were connected to al Qaeda. Obviously they're moving into any environment where they think they can drum up anti-US sentiment. Of course their goal is more local, for now, but US-hatred is their primary recruiting tool.

Sean at The White Peril called my attention to this latest development, through his post on the al Qaeda link in Japan - his information comes from a Japanese newspaper, written in Japanese, so that's pretty directly from the source. One point he makes clear that isn't so clear in the NY Times article is that the man, Lionel Dumont, essentially lived in Niigata for just over a year. The NY Times mentioned that he "lived and worked in Niigata on a series of 90-day visas", but that doesn't make clear that it was continuous.

I'll be interested to see how this works out.

Sean also discusses a hot topic in Japan, the return of some abducted Japanese citizens from North Korea. It's a big diplomatic issue between North Korea and Japan right now, when they're also dealing with North Korea's nuclear capabilities. The US is involved to a degree because the husband of one of the abductees is American, and lives in North Korea with his children, also the children of his Japanese wife now living in Japan:

The Japanese are trying to get abductees' family members (mostly children) in North Korea to Japan, which is why there's such a fuss over US Army deserter Charles Jenkins, who defected to North Korea in the '60's and is married to abductee Hitomi Soga. The US has indicated that it may, in fact, expect him to be handed over for court martial if he accompanies his daughters to Japan to see their mother.

Interesting. And bizarre that an American would defect to North Korea. I guess he was pretty sure the US wouldn't come after him there. He's been right for over 30 years.

Foiled!

For the past several weeks I've been working out at a local gym. I'm not one of these women who "glow" when they work out. I sweat. A lot. Dripping, when I work hard, which I have been doing. I go first thing in the morning, and don't shower before I go, because what's the point of that? I'll just get nasty and have to shower again.

The gym is actually a combination gym and physical therapy practice, and I've been going to the physical therapist too for some neck problems (remember that tingling in my left arm?). I've been setting my appointments for the mornings just before I work out, to be efficient. But this PT guy does manual manipulations, which I'm not used to, he's actually touching me, massaging my neck, etc. Earlier this week I got all girly about the fact that I was going to PT before showering in the morning and decided that I would schedule the PT later in the day, so I could work out, go home, shower, and come back. Today was the first day of this new schedule - work out at 7:45, back for PT at 11:40.

I was nearly done with my workout, leaning over taking the cuff off my ankle after doing leg raises on a weight machine, literally dripping sweat on the mat, when the PT guy comes over and says, "There's no reason for you to have to come back later today. Just let me know when you're done here and we'll do your PT before you leave."

ACK!

I'm sure he meant to be nice and save me an extra trip. He's a nice guy, and a good PT. But here I was, arranging things in a girly way so I wouldn't have PT before showering, and now I was going to have PT after sweating for an hour! The horror! I said, "But I'll be all sweaty!" And he said, "We have towels."

Foiled. Foiled, foiled, foiled.

Sigh.

By the time I was done with my stretches and waited a few minutes for him to finish with a patient, I was considerably cooled off and my skin was dry, although my hair still was wet. He seemed completely unmoved by my disheveled state, and I'm sure he deals with worse than damp-haired sweaty PT patients all the time. But not me! My psyche is bruised. I clearly have bought into the excessively-clean societal attitude that so annoys those from some other countries. I must be strong, however.

I rescheduled my Tuesday appointment from early afternoon to morning before my workout. I guess two showers a day isn't that bad.

Cancel that Wisconsin vacation

I just baked 240 cheese heart-shaped puffs for a wedding reception Saturday.

That's a lot.

I don't want to see cheese again for a loooong time.

I'm not quite sure what to call them. They're smaller and crisper than a biscuit, but puffier and softer than a cracker. A biscker? A cracuit? What do you think?