Gone Fishing

Well, gone, anyway, for a couple of weeks. And not a minute too soon. I'm having one of those days where it started out cloudy; now it's sunny; but it still feels cloudy.
See you in September.

Another heartbreaking story from Iraq...

... maybe the saddest I've heard:

Five-year-old-boy set on fire.

How can anyone justify to themselves an act like that, obliterating a young child's capacity and reasons to smile?

I have to hope an offer of medical aid will be made by some group or individual with the means to do so.

Poems from Guantanamo

This small book, edited by Marc Falkoff, a lawyer for 17 of the detainees, is subtitled "The Detainees Speak."
But Dan Chiasson from the NYT Sunday Book Review notes that it might be better titled "The Detainees Do Not Speak" or "The Detainees Are Not Allowed to Speak," due to the Pentagon's heavy vetting of the edition.
Still, given the human drive for expression, and the circumstances under which these were written, (one of them, Falkoff says, carved into a Styrofoam cup when pen and paper were banned, one of them, a despondent claim of innocence by a prisoner who has been in solitary confinement for nearly four years and tried to kill himself 12 times) it seems worth looking at.

Women's Options: Another Casualty of the War in Iraq

This CNN story about women resorting to prostitution when low-paid cleaning work is not enough to feed their children is generating a lot of interest, hopefully enough to make a difference among those in Iraq (and perhaps in Washington) with the power to alleviate the situation, as well as with the average CNN viewer.

But for the average CNN viewer, Arwa Damon provided a link to an organization that is accepting donations to help women in this situation, as well as women in Kurdistan who have been facing a horrific number of "honor killings."

I have to admit that I can't even comprehend what could bring someone to kill an immediate family member for an (often unsubstantiated) claim of dishonor. I can't imagine a father killing his own daughter for any reason at all besides insanity, although it happens at times, in all parts of the world. But for it to be considered routine is beyond what I can fathom.

The president of the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq, Yanar Mohammed, received the Eleanor Roosevelt Global Women’s Rights award this year. I try to donate something each year to one or two organizations, and I can't think of a better one than this.

In the meantime, it's free to sign the petition.

Related: Are these supposed to be the good guys?

The Rise and Fall

Listening to the rehash of the Rove resignation on The NewsHour, Charlie Rose, etc., last night and reading articles like this one in The Washington Post, I was just pondering the "might have been" for the Republican plans of a permanent majority were it not for A) Iraq, B) Katrina, and C) the campaign-driven decision to abandon "compassionate conservatism" for bringing out the base.
Compassionate conservatism was a great buzzword, and it got people excited in 2000 (even if not quite excited enough to elect GWB in the popular vote.) And after 9/11, Bush the Younger had won over even those who had considered him a laughingstock, at least temporarily.
However, none of those three events came from the "outside."
Iraq was the definition of pre-emptive.
The unfunded levees; the bureaucratic mishandling and seeming apathy from the White House toward Katrina were rooted in misplaced trust and serious disorganization in the ill-conceived Department of Homeland Security and in a growing isolation of those at the top, and an insulation of the president from anything seemingly unpleasant that was going on "out there" in the country.
And the choice to humor the base at all costs was a miscalculation that proved Rove's undoing, and an ironic one, since it's been pointed out that, back in Texas, the Religious Right was not in the W. camp. The battles within the GOP on immigration and the Harriet Miers disaster are reminders that there's still a bit of the Elder (moderate) Bush in the son, as well as the Texas pragmatist who once made his repuation on knowing how to compromise with Democrats.
When you ask what went wrong, the answer seems to simply be that Rove just took it all too far, and stopped listening to anyone, thinking he could somehow pull it back together in the end. It came to be just the two of them, and now they're going down together.
If things were otherwise, would the Democrats have simply faded away, little by little? It's very possible; that's how good the Rove machine was when it was good. If it hadn't self-imploded, even the lean and hungry team of Emanuel, Pelosi and Schumer would have struggled for a few seats here and there. But fortunately for the Dems, it did implode, and now, given a chance, they've begun to get their groove back. And the wheel keeps on turning.

Look, kids: real robot armies!

It's things like this that make me glad I wasn't born a single year later...

More Republicans Talking Sense (White House Edition)

First it was Newt Gingrich; now we have the infamous 1994 Cheney, talking the most sense I've ever heard (too bad 2007 Cheney is too stubborn to listen to advice.)

The popular YouTube video of Cheney in 1994 making the case not to invade Iraq

The transcript from "Editor & Publisher"


And Karl Rove is finally "movin' on down the road," to quote his boss. I have to admit that even I felt a twinge of sentiment listening to Karl choke up as he made his farewell speech beside the guy he's spent so many decades with and shared such a deeply symbiotic relationship. But then I cry over animated rats in Disney movies, so that doesn't mean I'm not glad to see the door hit him on the way out... to spend more time with his family (and perhaps Fred Thompson?)
We probably haven't seen the last of him, but at least he won't be architecting national policy for the next year and a half.

The Last Frontier...

... of human discovery may be our own brains. But this article sheds a lot of light on the subject:

10 Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain

(One month) older than my years...

... that's how I scored on the RealAge Test. I know this has been out a while, and I think I took it a few years ago, actually (and scored better, I think) but anyway, I guess it could be worse.
Positive factors included daily flossing, not smoking or eating much red meat, good BMI, education level, wearing my seatbelt and taking a vitamin every day.
Negatives included not enough exercise, never having lifted a weight in my life (okay, maybe once) not enough vitamin C, not enough Omega-3 (I try, but tuna has mercury in it and salmon is so darn expensive; back to stocking up on walnuts) and too small a social network.
Most of these things I knew, but good to have them reinforced, to motivate me to kick my age down to what I get mistaken for when ordering liquor (and not ordering liquor would probably kick it down even further, unless it's red wine ;)

What's the world coming to...

... when Newt Gingrich starts sounding (to my registered Democrat ears) like a voice of reason in this roiling sea of campaign insanity?

from his remarks at the National Press Club on Tuesday (and I'm sure his interest in the subject of the candidacy process is informed by his own deliberation process, but on that point, he's not opining.)

[The current system] turns the candidates into rigidity. Because if a candidate says something in March of 2007 and, in the course of the campaign, they learn something fundamentally different and they mature and change, and in August or September or October, they adopt a new position based on having grown during the year, they will promptly have flip-flopped.

And so you begin to trap people. As the campaigns get longer, you're asking a person who's going to be sworn in, in January of 2009, to tell you what they'll do, in January of 2007, when they haven't got a clue. Because they don't know what the world will be like.

And you're suggesting they won't learn anything through the two years of campaigning.

It was John F. Kennedy, campaigning in West Virginia, being horrified by poverty, which profoundly changed him in 1960.

And so we now have a system that is overly focused on money, overly delegated to technicians, and in which candidates are held to a rigidity standard that is very dangerous, while their answers are held to a soundbite and 30-second standard, which is just, frankly absurd.

What's your answer on Iraq in 30 seconds?

What's your answer on health care in 30 seconds?

Now, I believe this is really, really serious.

The War on War

I've been thinking lately... about this so-called war on terrorism (or struggle against global extremism -- whatever they're calling it today.)
For all my shame and disgust at the way it's being conducted, do I support the idea of a struggle against violent extremism?
As a self-professed radical moderate, I can't say there's much that I support more, in principle. And there certainly are some things we've gotten right about it, in practice. But there's a heck of a lot more that we've gotten wrong.
And there are other wars that I'd support as well...

To name a few:

A war on global poverty
A war on global injustice
A war on pandemic diseases
A war on diseases that are potentially curable through support for advances in medicine
A war on crime fed by hopelessness from within communities and apathy from without
A war on climate change fed by unchecked pollution fed in turn by corporate greed
A war on willful ignorance and intolerance due to arrogance or self-hatred
A war on unwillful ignorance fed by poor access to education
A war on inequality owing to systematic discrimination
A war on contempt for the mentally ill and the elderly
A war on contempt for, oppression of, and violence against women
A war on random, unfocused violence
A war on systematic, focused violence (what we call terrorism falls somewhere in between those two extremes. All three varieties equally suck.)
A war on a warlike mindset