Friday, March 17, 2006

Quote for the Day, 3/17/2006   "History is just those things that happened that you can't plausibly deny."   -Andrew Donaldson, Seven Thousand Years of Bad Luck   Yes, yes.  It's vain quoting one's self.  On the other hand, I haven't been thinking about quotes during the hiatus.  Comments on the book summary found above are welcome. 10:35:14 PM    comment []

Today's St. Patrick's Day, a day for loud boisterous drunkenness, and equally loud boisterous music.  Think of this as counter-programming.   Brendan Benson-What I'm Looking For  This is a pretty relaxed anthem for everybody who has no idea where they're going, and thinks that's okay.  If you think that not only is the search is more important than the destination, but that the search is the destination, this could be your song...but only if you're okay with a pretty (and) basic sound. The Promise Ring-Why Did Ever We Meet  When the album this was on came out (1999, I think), this was one of my favorite bands.  Of course, the earth's core has cooled significantly since then, but I still like this song. Tullycraft-Postcards from Mars  Disorientation is the loss of sense of place.  I always used to write about some place where I used to be...right up till last December, when I finished a novel set where I live.  In other words, I was disoriented my first 35 years.  This is a song about a guy who just wants to be anywhere else.  I am familiar with that feeling. The Lucksmiths-Smokers in Love  There's something romantic about a relationship that has a cancer at its core...where you feel good, but doom and denial cast such a profound shadow it'll keep you from sunburn.  This song's about that sort of thing, I think. 9:18:05 PM    comment []

The President's War on the War on Terrorism   I haven't been writing lately for another reason...I've been arguing for over a year that the Bush administration is disastrous, hateful, economically ruinous, and even un-American.  Recent events have made that seem so obvious it has seemed unnecessary for me to point that out myself.  (For lack of $2 billion shoring up New Orleans, somewhere between $60 and $200 billion will need to be spent:  Great thinking, there.)  Take national security:  National security trumps the Constitution, and the bother of actually going to a FISA court before wiretapping American citizens. When it comes to wiretapping American citizens whenever they speak with Arabs, they go ahead without any legal authority, in violation of the Constitutional protection against unauthorized searches.  No responsible government agency is involved in authorizing these wiretaps; they simply happen.  Granted, the executive branch okays the wiretaps, but if there is one thing that has been amply demonstrated in recent months, it is that the White House is not responsible.  The President has simply thrown out the Fifth Amendment in the Bill of Rights, because the war on terror is THAT important. At the same time, the President was willing to hand over the keys to our ports to the United Arab Emirates, a country which contributed 2 of the 9/11 bombers, was a state sponsor of the Taliban, and has frequently laundered money to al Qaeda.  National security is more important than liberty or the Constitution or the operation of the law, but at the same time MUCH less important than the safety of the ports of New York, Newark, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Miami.  Any business deal is more important than national security.  Granted, it has been amply demonstrated that the White House is indifferent to the security of New Orleans, but that it doesn't care about the other five cities is something of a surprise. In other words, if the White House had its way, someone making a phone call to the UAE would be wiretapped, but the UAE itself can buy unlimited access to any American coastal city without any difficulty.  Methinks I detect a contradiction. Thanks to Congress, of course, that's not going to happen.  The emirs must be crushed.  They'd promised jobs in those ports to a lot of disappointed Taliban. 1:29:49 PM    comment []

He's Ba-a-ack   I apologize for my month-long silence.  I recently (this January) started going back to college, and it's more fatiguing than it used to be, largely because I've been actually doing all the required readings...something I certainly never did before. 11:10:14 AM    comment []