Month: August 2008

Life 101

“No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one.”

— Wallace Stegner in Angle of Repose.

“The problem is it takes most of us most of our lives to understand what we should have known from the beginning.”

— Leon Uris in Trinity.

“Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing’s worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.”

— Richard Ford in Independence Day.

Henry Wiggen (Michael Moriarty): “Everybody’d be nice to you if they knew you were dying.”

Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro): “Everybody knows everybody is dying. That’s why people are as good as they are.”

— Bang the Drum Slowly

Let’s Compound the Blunder!

From an insightful piece about Georgia-Russia by Gregory Djerejian.

This is what our foreign policy mandarins masquerade about as they play policy-making, in their Washington work-stations. It’s, yes, worse than a crime, rather a sad, pitiable blunder.

And one McCain would have us compound, I stress, again! An honorable man who served his country well, it is clear his time has past and his grasp on the most basic foreign policy calls we’ll need to make in the coming years is very tentative indeed. He’ll be surrounded by second-tier ‘yes-man’ realists and residual neo-con swill, few with any ideas worth pursuing if we mean to take the national interest seriously with sobriety and freshness of perspective. So let us help him exit off-stage gracefully, as he served his country with dignity when called upon, but let us not sacrifice our children’s future to ignorants with deludely romantic notions of empire. Been there, done that.

10 Ice Age Giants

The Pleistocene Era began 1.8 million years ago and ended roughly 10,000 years ago. During that period were several Ice Ages. Many giant sized animals and birds that seem familiar to us (because they resemble modern animals) roamed the earth. They became extinct, possibly due to environmental conditions or disease, or possibly because they were hunted by humans.

mental_floss Blog tells about 10 Ice Age Giants.

Georgia and the Utter Fecklessness of Condi Rice

One would have thought that having an ace Kremlinologist on board as Secretary of State might have helped America defuse this Russo/Georgian powder keg.

But apparently this resurgence of Soviet style aggression (re-birth pangs, perhaps?) wasn’t enough to make Dr. Rice disrupt her vacation.

I do hope that this episode is the final nail in the coffin of the myth of Condi’s competence.

Tim Dickinson

Georgia, South Ossetia and Russia

Many factors are involved in the present conflict but the central one is straightforward: the majority of the Ossetes living south of the main Caucasus range in Georgia wish to unite with the Ossetes living to the north, in an autonomous republic of the Russian Federation; and the Georgians, regarding South Ossetia as both a legal and an historic part of their national territory, refuse to accept this.

Times Online

Update:

Here’s is the essence of what I posted earlier that Rob may be referencing in his commment. On reflection, I thought it was weak and took it out. Upon further reflection, possibly it is a decent illustration. In any case the analogy is not meant to imply right or wrong, simply that it’s not simple.

Let’s assume Texas broke away from the United States about 20 years ago. Let’s further assume that west Texans would rather be united with their compadres and kinfolk in New Mexico, which is still part of the U.S. (In this analogy the U.S. is Russia, Texas is Georgia, west Texas is the part of Georgia that wants to be separate from Georgia — namely South Ossetia, and New Mexico represents the Russian Republic of North Ossetia.)

Texas is refusing to let the west Texans reunite with the New Mexicans. The U.S. is supporting the west Texans and has invaded Texas.

Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Who knows?

You’re In Danger

And John McCain would ramp up all the worst traits of the current administration. His instincts are always toward force and the people advising him come squarely from the Cheney wing of the current administration. In comparison to Bush he’s not just more of the same. There’s every reason to believe he’d be much worse.

The current situation in Georgia and his response should make clear to everyone how dangerous a president John McCain would be.

Josh Marshall

Whatever you think of Obama and the Democratic Party, John McCain would be an unmitigated disaster as President of the United States.

If you’re against Obama, at least demand the Republicans chose someone capable of handling the job. Haven’t we had enough incompetence and wrong-headedness?

This and that

School starts this week in Albuquerque — Wednesday is the first full day. NewMexiKen never started school before Labor Day and none of my kids did either. What’s with this August-to-May school year anyway?

I bought regular gasoline yesterday for $3.58 (I’m rounding off the tenth of a cent from now on). I was thinking I shouldn’t fill up (that is, I should buy short), because the price will continue to drop at least until election day.

What percentage of time during the Olympic coverage on NBC is actually spent watching athletes do athlete stuff? 10 percent? 15 percent?

There are rumors that McCain will pledge just one term to offset the age issue. I know an even better way — no terms. The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch tells us Why McCain would be a mediocre president. “A careful look at McCain’s biography shows that he isn’t prepared for the job. His resume is much thinner than most people think.” Amazingly, McCain is even more of a dilettante than W.

Remember my rant about Comcast and the comment from a representative of Comcast? Well, it seems the outreach is real:

From a sparse desk dominated by two computer screens in the new Comcast Center here, Mr. Eliason uses readily available online tools to monitor public comments on blogs, message boards and social networks for any mention of Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company. When he sees a complaint like Mr. Dilbeck’s, he contacts the source to try to defuse the problem.

“When you’re having a two-way conversation, you really get to clear the air,” Mr. Eliason said.

The New York Times has more — Complaining Bloggers Have a Cable Company’s Ear.

The iPhone is great except for battery life, which is OK at best.

Before Phelps

During an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) swim meet, Duke Paoa Kahinu Mokoe Hulikohola Kahanamoku broke the world record in the 100-yard freestyle swim by 4.6 seconds in Honolulu Harbor on August 11, 1911. Officials were so incredulous at his time that the AAU would not recognize his feat until many years later. Duke Kahanamoku swam using a unique combination of an Australian crawl stroke with a flutter kick to add speed.

Known as Duke, or the Duke, he was a three-time Olympic gold medal winner. He broke another record and won a gold medal for the 100-meter freestyle swim at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics where he also won a silver medal in the 200-meter relay event. The 1916 Olympics were not held because of World War I. Kahanamoku broke his own record at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, winning gold in both the 100-meter freestyle and as a member of the U.S. 800-meter-relay team. At the 1924 Olympics in Paris, he won a silver medal in the 100-meter freestyle (his brother, Samuel Kahanamoku, won the bronze medal and Johnny Weismuller captured the gold). Kahanamoku also was an alternate member of the U.S. water polo team that won a bronze in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics.

The Library of Congress has more on Duke Kahanamoku, the Father of Surfing.

Alex Haley

… was born on this date in 1921. Haley was the author of two publishing phenomena — The Autobiography of Malcolm X (6 million copies) and Roots, which was not only a best-seller, but led to one of the most successful television series ever. Nearly half the people in the country watched the last episode in January 1977. Haley won a special Pulitizer for Roots, “the story of a black family from its origins in Africa through seven generations to the present day in America.”

NewMexiKen co-chaired a symposium at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1979, that included Haley. He was a very self-possessed and self-assured speaker, confident yet pleasant and informal. He spoke for some time without notes, telling the story about the story — that is, how he learned about his family. Along with the Archivist of the U.S. and the program co-chairman, I sat on the stage behind Haley as he spoke and could see the rapture on the faces of his listeners. To an audience of genealogists this was the Sermon on the Mount.

Subsequently it bothered me to learn he plagarized sections of the book and possibly fudged some of the genealogy. Clearly, that wasn’t right. Even so, the good his work did in educating both black and white America (and I include both books) was a legacy of major proportion.

Haley, who served in the U.S. Coast Guard 1939-1959, before becoming a full-time writer, died of a heart attack in 1992. The Coast Guard has named a cutter for him.

Racism by region

FiveThirtyEight.com takes a look at the Bradley Effect today. It includes this:

It may be that in the Northeast, which is arguably the most “politically correct” region of the country, expressions of racism are the least socially acceptable, and that therefore some people may misstate their intentions to pollsters. By contrast, in the South and the Midwest, if people are racist they will usually be pretty open about it, and in the West, which is nation’s most multicultural region, there is relatively little racism, either expressed or implicit.

Allowing for generalization, do you think he’s correct?

The Bradley Effect is named for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. When African-American Bradley ran for governor of California in 1982, exit polls showed him a clear winner. When he lost, subsequent analysis showed that some voters had lied about whom they voted for rather than appear racist to pollsters. The Bradley effect is about lying to pollsters, not about voting on the basis of race.

Cokie Roberts, so elite both of her parents were congress persons

… but still not afraid to suggest that Barack Obama go to some godawful resort to look more American, rather than to Hawaii TO VISIT HIS GRANDMOTHER and his sister and her family. As reported by digby:

“Cokie Roberts said today that Obama shouldn’t be going on vacation anywhere that has the ‘look of a foreign exotic place’ and should go to Myrtle Beach instead.”

Several other pundits have made this observation — some no doubt phoning it in from their vacation homes on Martha’s Vinyard or in The Hamptons. What a bunch of jerks.

Excellent idea

The view from DEEP right field

While watching the Colorado Rockies defeat the hapless San Diego Padres 6-3 Friday night, Ken, official oldest child of NewMexiKen, suggested that baseball adopt that European soccer practice of dropping the poorest team in the league each season and moving up the best team from the next level.

Good bye Mariners. Good bye Nationals or Padres.

Hello Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees. Hello Iowa Cubs or Salt Lake Bees.
 
 

Photo taken with iPhone from upper, upper right field seats August 8th. Click image for larger version.

Herbert Clark Hoover

… was born on this date in 1874. Mr. Hoover, who was the 31st President of the United States, lived until 1964. Among the presidents, only Ford, Reagan, and the first Adams have lived longer.

Born in Iowa, orphaned at nine, Hoover grew up in Oregon. He was in the first class at Stanford University, graduating as a mining engineer. Hoover earned millions in mining before turning his attention to public service. He was instrumental in relief and humanitarian efforts during and after World War I. He was Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge.

Hoover, the Republican, defeated Al Smith, the Democrat, handily in the 1928 election with 58% of the popular vote.

President at the time of the stock market crash and subsequent depression, Hoover believed that, while people should not suffer, assistance should be primarily a local and voluntary responsibility. Even so, he supported some measures to aid businesses and farmers; indeed, among his party he was moderate. But he was simply not bold enough to meet the crisis.

Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, 57.3% to 39.6% of the popular vote, 472-59 in the electoral vote.