Tannishblog

My friend and blogging antithesis, Leucanthemum, has set me off again. In her latest column for her town newspaper, repeated here, she compares the Iraqi War with the Chicago Bears. Let that sink in a moment.

She’s referring to the media’s coverage of President Bush’s flip-flop on the status of the war; from "Absolutely, we’re winning," to "We’re not winning and we’re not losing." (As if the latter comment makes any sense. My father used to talk like that: "I may not always be right, but I’m never wrong." Say What?)

My favorite blogging flower defends the whole debacle, as usual. She’s consistent. But to compare a war to a football game leaves much to ponder. First, football, as all team sports and competitions, are highly stylized battles. That’s their appeal. That such events are entertainment to the masses and by extension huge business enterprises says mush about the un-evolved nature of human tendencies (see yesterday’s posting.) In may ways we’re still approach live much like Neanderthals.

Second, her comparison of a war where, I remind her, people are being killed, to a sporting event shows a great flaw in any person still foolish enough to support this tragedy - the dehumanization and trivialization of systemized, politically sanctioned murder.

Not to flippantly compare a war  with football games, but it seems to me, our troops have a hugely loyal fan base, and a history of mostly winning, even when they’re statistical underdogs.

Oh, but you are.

It’s still midseason, not even at playoffs, yet.   Of course we’re not winning, right now.  But that doesn’t mean we won’t, as long as we don’t do something Chicago-sports-stupid,  like giving up and coming home before the season is over.

The popular eighties band the Police sang about "Too many cameras and not enough food," and that mentality is exemplified by the war-is-spectator-sport crowd. They would rather see blood and destruction than a more evolved attitude of, say, rebuilding Iraq without losing billions of earmarked dollars in the process. I remember Hockey games were more popular with blood on the ice. While the home crowd is cheering, people in Iraq are dying. While we bolster support for a lagging team whose fans are slipping away, collateral damage is leveling cities, destroying families, exacerbating a cultural hatred that needed no help, destroying the lives and future of children both in Iraq and at home when they learn their beloved parents are not coming home.

This is not a sport, people!

As I follow the Mark Foley "Innocence Lost" tour, I get curious about what the Fighting Keyboarders are typing. I try not to rail against the furious in Right Blogistan. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to resist.

My first foray led me to a site called Passionate America which took the stance that the MSM is doctoring data in the form of minor edits to published Foley emails. We’re talking punctuation, here. This pundit’s big question is - writ in red, no less - "Who Altered Foley’s Emails?" Let me be the next to say, a missing apostrophe does not a conspiracy make, fool! It seems the larger issues of congressional sexual misconduct and the attendant hypocrisy by a member of the Caucus of Missing and Exploited Children are too much for this little mind.

The good Captain, celebrating his third blogiversary, (Congrats!) goes after speaker Hastert for his hand-off approach to a hands-on situation. One for the record books: I agree with the Captain: boil ‘em in oil, those foul beastians who look askance who pretend it will go away! (Okay, so I missed pirate-talk day. Whatever.) The Captain is casting wide for expulsion of Speaker Hastert for doing nothing since last year. 

Malodorous Michele sharpens her scalpel on the whole issue. She condemns Mark Foley easily enough, but is carefully avoiding casting her net too wide. She can’t avoid altogether the possibility of a complicit GOP, but no names are offered. How adroit.

There is a time and place for attacking the Dems and the MSM. Now is not that time. Parents need assurance that their kids are safe on Capitol Hill. If Beltway GOP elites can’t understand this, they are beyond hope.

Then there’s LGF, the site you love to hate. A loud silence is heard from that quarter, as the only mention of Mark Foley is circular link to the email- altering non-question. No scathing editorial about ethics, protection of children… nothing. I guess the whole thing is okay with them. Such a little thing couldn’t distract them from their focus in terror 24/7/365.

Next, onto Freeperland followed by a careful washing of hands. A quick search of the word "Foley" small results. A blurb about how the President is "Disgusted," and a notion about how ABC News is (apparently to some) playing up the story in a possible effort to "make up with the Democrats," after taunting them with the 9/11 docudrama thingy. Next up, a scathing attack against the NY Times for - get this - running over a Republican:

For the Times’ editors, sexual perversion in political Washington is always a sideline issue. Nothing has changed at the Times; they will run with a sex scandal only if they can run over a Republican. This morning, they glance over Congressman Foley’s alleged behavior, move on to their target, and totally ignore that a watchdog group and members of the media may have let children remain at risk.

Just how free is this republic lately?

That’s about all I can stand of the polluted waters of Right Blogistan. It sometimes amazes me how quick we humans are to defile each other. While I believe Mr. Foley escaped the worst of possibilities by his quick resignation, and I believe much needs to be done in congress with a pervasive look-away attitude toward their peers (both parties), it nevertheless amazes me how quickly the carrion dogs feed.

This reminds me of an important moral lesson I learned from my cat: Don’t Shit Where You Eat. Humans, I’m reminded once again, tend to do that.

Happy Rosh Hashanah to all those inclined that way. Happy equinox for everyone, whether you care or not. For all others, TGIF.

Children have always amazed me. Contrary to my upbringing of "be seen and not heard," today’s version of parenthood is more inclusive. Maybe I speak only of myself, but it seems to me that if a child is encouraged to excel, reinforced with positive rewards for positive behavior, then that child will succeed. If a parent also allows the child to chose what to excel at, neither pushing nor resisting, then that child will exceed expectations in many areas. There is no limit on human capacity that a child cannot surmount - if allowed. Limits are enforced. The natural response is to first become defiant, then to give in. Thus many of my generation have learned to cave in to the status quo because humans like to take the path of least resistance.

In our current hyper-connected world, our teenagers are putting themselves on display through the Internet. Much has been pondered as the the relative safety of social networking sites like My Space, Xanga, and Faces. That’s because the establishment (read: old people who make rules) cannot understand them. Concerns abound regarding predators without the acknowledgement of how these agents of ill-will are from the very same group of old folks who cannot fathom the new technology. What we are afraid of, essentially, is our own generation’s hangups.

Parents should know their children’s web presence as they would any other aspect of their offspring. Your children’s blog or My Space profile page should be bookmarked and visited often. That said; I sometimes forget to check my daughter’s blog for weeks on end. Bad Papa! When I do visit, however, I’m always amazed. Unlike many, she chooses (wisely, I think) not to publish personal episodes of her life, but instead showcase her vivid imagination and her love of words: hers is a fiction site wherein she experiments with prose, and other forms of verbosity. Here’s a recent example that blew my socks off.

Enough of the proud parental boasting, already! Do you know what your kids are blogging? Do you encourage them to explore themselves through the medium that defines their lifestyles as much as television defines ours? Or, are you taken in by the scare tactics of media know-nothings and hold your children back? Their involvement in Internet culture cannot be held back; they will do so with or without permission. That is the world they live in, the world we made that they will inherit. Know who they are online. Embrace them, guide them without force as you would do with any other aspect of their upbringing. Let them shine.

Do all this and your children will amaze you, too.

I missed another Friday Night Zen post. While you may be ambivalent, these are important to me because it is one thing about this blog that may be unique. At least, I haven’t yet found anyone else doing such. Too, it is a great exercise for me to re-affirm my convictions ant to learn how to communicate such slippery concepts. It’s sort of like the Jehovah Witness’ practice of going door to door to proselytize, but less annoying.

To the (imagined) few who like reading my Friday posts, I apologize. You are out there, aren’t you? The other week, and again last night, I became involved in a project that, while overtly consumer focused, has a Zen-like calming affect in me: Disassembling and reassembling computers.

After three long years of squirreling away spare Hamiltons, I bought an impressive pile of computer guts and am trying to recreate Frankenstein. (Its’ much easier extracting electronic intestines that it is to insert them.) I’ll spare you the boring specs. Once that is done, I’ll try to use the older, still useful parts to upgrade other machines in the family, rebuild my Linux box, and generally delay paternal responsibility as much as I can.

The tired, old adage is true: "You can separate the men from the boys by the price of their toys…" I’m okay with that.

Okay, so I started a blog at Democrats.org. I’ll admit the driving force is to whore my homepage, but also to play along in what promises to be an interesting experiment. Linking Democrats through the web…not exactly a new idea, but to create a central clearinghouse of sorts… this we need.

A problem I see, mostly because I fit the stereotype, is what I call Armchair Activists. We, of the couch-legume genus tend to let inertia keep us in our place. We tend to seek a path of least resistance, whatever we can accomplish by mouse-clicking we will gladly do - especially if it doesn’t involve our wallets. So for yet another community complaint site, this should be successful. Whining is easier than action.

So, to create a truly helpful clearinghouse, one that moves us forward (for a change), more needs doing. That, I surmise, is what the Fundraising link is for, but is it enough? Linking to another like-mined soul, building community, creating a feedback loop of angst only creates a positive outlook if followed up with on-the-street action.

I fear the average Internet junkie is unwilling to make such sacrifices to their lifestyles - even in the short term.

Don’t mind me, I tend to take a negative view of things. Always, though, I welcome the kindness of others to prove me wrong, but for various reasons this rarely happens. But count this Armchair Activist in, all the way from the Island of Blue that is Chicagoland, to see what happens. If you all can fire me up, you can fire anyone. I challenge you.

It’s a beautiful morning - sunny, warm instead of hot, a bit hazy, quiet. Through the picture window I see some leaves edged in brown; I welcome the thought of Autumn. I grab a coffee and sit in my armchair, laptop ready, hearing the crickets in the forsythia bush outside the window.

Today’s news is warmed-over, almost like the world is holding it’s breath or sleeping in like my family is this morning. Either trying to catch a few more moments of blessed sleep or waiting for the next big story to hit. My bookmarks are a mess. I begin organizing them and stumble across a link I’ve not visited in a while: Baghdad Burning. One click and I’m in another world. I catch up on the last few post by Riverbend. I feel her despair, applaud her spirit, cheer her bravery. I’m grateful for the Internet as an uncensored conduit of information human’s need to hear,  pondering the irony of how tools of empirical Capitalism work to expose atrocities committed for the sake of greed and gain.

Words leap from the page:

(On the Lebannon war)
And the world wonders how ‘terrorists’ are created! A 15-year-old Lebanese girl lost five of her siblings and her parents and home in the Qana bombing… Ehud Olmert might as well kill her now because if he thinks she’s going to grow up with anything but hate in her heart towards him and everything he represents, then he’s delusional.

[…]

(On the Haditha rape-and-slaughter)
It’s like Baghdad is no longer one city, it’s a dozen different smaller cities each infected with its own form of violence. It’s gotten so that I dread sleeping because the morning always brings so much bad news. The television shows the images and the radio stations broadcast it. The newspapers show images of corpses and angry words jump out at you from their pages, "civil war… death… killing… bombing… rape…"

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it’s not really the latest- it’s just the one that’s being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don’t report rapes here, they avenge them. We’ve been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can’t believe their ‘heroes’ are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?

In the news they’re estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes… Raise your heads high supporters of the ‘liberation’ - your troops have made you proud today. I don’t believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an ‘independent investigation’, ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn’t his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops.

It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It’s been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can’t bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can’t bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can’t bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can’t bring myself to care because it’s difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they’ll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?

Now, the sublime sunlight is strained. I get more coffee and glance at the newspaper open to an almost-finished crossword. The facing page celebrates a local theatre’s upcoming program of music, dance and comedy revues. It’s surreal. Am I on the same planet as Riverbend? Certainly mine is a different world. As I breath the welcome weekend breeze, resting up from another five-day episode of sweat, toil and backache that barely keeps the family fed, I read what others must live through so I can have the privilege of driving to work.

Oil fuels my world; oil is bought with blood. Therefore, oil is blood. We gather the blood of innocents and burn it for electricity, for logistics, for gasoline. Because of death, I can type on my computer, drive to the store and ogle the latest consumer gadgetry. My food is brought to me by blood-burning trucks; my home is cooled by generators fueled by blood; my comfort is assured by the blood of others.

The sun is not-so-bright, now. The haze outside a sign of pollution, not moisture. The weatherman says it might get up to 92 degrees today - the average temperature of fresh blood. Surreal.

There’s a silent battle on your computer screen. So much effort is being allocated to a single court ruling, so many opposing opinions, a poor fool like me can’t hope to find reality.

This week Blogtopia is divided (as usual) over the ruling of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor against the NSA goings-on. While the left is pumping fists in the air, perhaps prematurely, the right is on smear-campaign war-footing, as usual. My Righty-blogger friend, Leucanthemum, who also write for her town paper, tries to undermine the judgment against the NSA by playing it off as a childish whim. She points to a few like-minded "experts" to fuel her argument. One, the Volokh Cabal, makes extensive use of a posting by Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University who writes a great deal to prove his point. He’s a professor, alright. After a ten-page soliloquy, he ends with:

Conclusion. Anyway, that’s my tentative take; I hope it’s helpful. It’s entirely possible that I goofed the analysis somewhere along the way; FISA, the AUMF, and Article II aren’t my area of expertise, so we should consider this post a work in progress. I look forward to comments — civil and respectful, please.

Another link points to a NY Times article (I didn’t know she reads such trash) also dissing the embattled Michigan judge, wherein Mr. Kerr is quoted again. The author, Ann Althouse, is another professor of law who, give Mr. Kerr more credentials that he is willing to admit to himself. Her point is the transparency of Judge Taylor’s bias within her ruling. Hmm, I’ve heard this before…

To further heat up the bile against her on the right, Gateway Pundit makes sure to mention her connection to Jimmy Carter. Surely a liability in the eyes of  all repugnants. Further, he posts a picture of the good Judge to inform (subtly, I think not) the masses of exurbian xenophobes that she’s black while mentioning how she ruled in favor of the case, brought before her by the ACLU. To further aid the aforementioned masses, who may or may not have the patience to read while a good program is waiting on the tube, he emboldens a few choice lines to hammer his bias home.

Meanwhile, on the left of the spectrum, Glenn Greenwald has several interesting counters to the self-Righteous character assassins. Unfortunately for the Pundit, Glenn has serious street credentials. First, a primer on Polite Washington Discourse, and why the good Judge shattered them. Next, he posits Two Critical Under-recognized Points about Judge Taylor’s ruling. and , yep, the critics missed pointing them out. Then he Grades the Law Professors, and expects that apologies are due. I hope he won’t hold his breath. Finally, he berates the same NY Times article my friend found so credible.

I’d find more if I bothered, but why? Mr. Greenwald does such a good job holding up the left all by himself; few others could add more. the sheer volume of verbiage in the subject would keep me awake until New Years.

My point is so much is being said, mostly by hacks and ignoramuses (I’ll let you sort out who is whom) disguised as fact-writ-large, that the majority of us, who have an interest in this debate and no previous knowledge of the intricacies of the matter, cannot hope to gain anything useful. Is there anyone in America alive today who will not be affected by such a momentous decision? Even the young, who don’t like to think about our twisted politics, will have to live with the consequences of the Bush administration for decades. Just as we are all still paying out for previous administrations, left or right.

In an attempt to enlighten, the blogosphere obscures. So many voices, all whom are so sure of themselves, so full of themselves, who look so professional in their blog-templated finery. Because bloggers all love to string words together, and because they all believe themselves the only rational voice in Blogtopia, the uninitiated, the unwary and the under-informed are often victims of assumed credibility. The result is, of course, that a reader can only make time to read what is agreeable. As for sifting for the truth - what’s a soul to think?

Every day one can find a blogger that really hits on something. Nicholas Carr opines on the state of blogosphere and it’s likely future via the concept of innocent fraud.

Once upon a time there was an island named Blogosphere, and at the very center of that island stood a great castle built of stone, and spreading out from that castle for miles in every direction was a vast settlement of peasants who lived in shacks fashioned of tin and cardboard and straw.

Read more of Rough Type’s The Great Unread.

My household is experiencing an Internet brownout today. Fully two-thirds of pages we try to load result in a DNS error or, as Firefox translates: "Server not found. Firefox can’t find the server at www…"

Any blogspot address is nil, but Google works. Many advertising banners are void, diminishing the silent shouts of "lookee here!" characteristic of online blurbs (that’s actually nice…). Sometimes I can get to my Earthlink start page, sometimes not - but my games still work. PHEW!

I bet Al Qaida is behind this. No one on the planet has the sophistication, the will, the mastery to pull of such a stunt. I can see them now, sneaking into manholes with power tools to cut through fiber optic lines in geographical coordination, severing the information backbone of our fragile nation.

And what is the Department of Homeboy Scrutiny doing? Nothing. Wait - it just looks like they’re doing nothing because they’re doing it in secret. Yeah, that’s right. Secret. No doubt they’re honing in on the manholes, awaiting just outside with big wooden mallets to bop those evil Al Qaida on the heads as they emerge from their nefarious deeds, like some life-sized gopher game. SHHH! Don’t tell anyone.

It must be working, because I have finally loaded a Blogger page. Could be an anomaly, though.

From the Pew Internet & American Life Project comes results from the latest research study on Bloggers (PDF link). Interesting stuff.