Jeff Masters at the wunderground likes this book.
If you’re bewildered by the complexity of the climate change/global warming issue, and want a comprehensive, easy-to-understand guide that presents an unbiased view of the important issues, look no further than Robert Henson’s Rough Guide to Climate Change.
Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming is Changing the World is a comprehensive look at the world wide effects of climate change. In dramatic photographs, maps and quotes from world climate science leaders, this one-of-a-kind book shows how the earth is being changed right now.
The book illustrates on-going shifts from weather extremes and melting glaciers to disruptions of animal migration and plant growth — including the strong impact on human life, cities and cultures.
Earth Under Fire ends with a vision of how we can slow global warming and improve the lives of people everywhere.
A book you might want…
I, with 50 -100 mile days in the car, often turn to audio books, from Lincoln’s speeches to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. A few months ago I listened to Hampton Sides’ Blood and Thunder and shared weekly phone calls with three others reading it. [A very good demythification of Kit Carson and the American west before and after the Civil War.]
This month I have been listening to Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal.
This is not perhaps the best choice for in the car study. Though a book aimed at the educated it is not technical or abstruse. Krugman writes in the same accessible style we appreciate in his newspaper columns. By it’s nature however, there is a rich mine of quotes and data one, on listening, would like to remember. This is difficult in the car, with a porous brain and the impossibility of taking a few notes. Nevertheless one can follow his general argument and be struck by major themes, principally the centrality of race, as he sees it, in the skewing to the right of the electorate. The book is his worked out answer to two questions:
The first puzzle is economic: what happened to the middle class. I argue in the book that a large part of the rise in inequality is political in origin, having to do with the rise of movement conservatism, the cohesive set of people and institutions that has taken over the Republican Party. Maybe we’ll talk more about that in later conversation.
The other puzzle is why rising inequality, far from provoking a populist political backlash, has been accompanied by a move to the right: politicians who wanted to cut taxes on the rich and create bigger holes in the social safety net have more elections than not.
I’ll try to up date this post with my own thoughts and questions, but as time is pressing on with plenty of other tasks before me I thought I’d hook you up to TPM Bookclub where Professor Krugman starts off with an overview of the book, followed by 143 comments!
This opening post is followed by posts from other invited readers, each with a string of comments in their wake. [ To read the posts in sequence, start with the link above. When ready, click on the "Tag" "The Conscience of a Liberal (here) or below Krugman's post but before the comments. This will bring you to all the posts. Scroll down to find Krugman's, which you've just read, and go to the one above it, and then above that, etc.]
Aidan Delgado is a brave man. A man you want on your team. Not because he faces danger without trembling, but because he trembles as he looks into his own heart, and those of his companions, and asks, what can we know? In our descent into evil, what can we learn?
He begins his book, The Sutras of Abu Ghraib: Notes From A Conscientious Objector in Iraq, with an invocation: Give me the strength to remember.
Not about killings, not about the mortars, though there are some. Not about the cold or the heat or the misery. Not about the early murders under color of authority that presage full blown Abu Ghraibism. All these things, yes, but more. What he really wants to remember is the Road, the Way, and how he struggled to find it, and the choices we all have to make - soldier or civilian– to live an honest life. Delgado wants his book to leave the question hanging before us: how do we do this?
Early in the book he tells of a missile incoming:
“LIGHTNING, LIGHTNING, LIGHTNING…Instantly the cafeteria erupts in chaos. With one enormous sound of ripping Velcro, soldiers tearing open their hip bags, reaching for their gas masks…I remember having read in some book that 80 percent of all last words are “Oh shit” and these are exactly the words that cross my mind.”
He describes the confusion, the fear, the panic, and then the all-clear. They can laugh then at their fear but Delgado insists:
“in truth, I feel acutely mortal and frightened.”
Days before September 11 2001 exploded into the American experience Delgado, bored with college, had drifted over to a climbing wall on the campus, put up by Army recruiters. “Maybe that’s the change of scene I’ve been needing…. join the Army Reserve … get away from school for a while, get some discipline…” He signed the contract minutes before the first plane hit the Twin Towers and is inducted a week later, proud of himself and ready to defend America.
A diplomatic brat he had lived in Thailand, in Senegal, in Egypt; he spoke a brand of street Arabic and loved the desert. His first stop with his unit is Kuwait, March 30, 2003. The advanced American forces are already streaming up the roads towards Baghdad. Delgado, a light-wheeled mechanic and sometime interpreter, begins to read and re-read the books assigned for the course on Buddhism he had flunked out of in college. In the heat and misery of Kuwait, and the early formations of friends and enmities, something from his youth in Thailand, the land of the saffron robed monks, begins to surface and meet with the ideas he is beginning to form.
The first book he reads is Sylvia Boorstein’s “It’s Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness.” He begins idly, flicking through pages. Then, at midnight he sits up. He realizes he’s read the book straight through, cover to cover.
“I sit and ruminate for a moment. I’m a Buddhist. I didn’t become a Buddhist, I’ve been a Buddhist for a long time. I don’t experience a sense of conversion to Buddhism, only a sense of homecoming…”
“So here I stand: an American Buddhist in Iraq.”
He walks us, and himself, through the Four Noble Truths. And tells us: “The Way seems so impossibly distant, an unreachable dream. Reading the sutras makes me feel almost physically ill, so far am I from the ideal. I feel like there is nothing Buddhist about me,except that word, hovering over me like a badge of hypocrisy. Compassion…Loving Kindness…Although I call myself a Buddhist, I know that I am no follower of the Way, soldier and jailer that I am.”
For those of us who have never known Iraq, or the Army, perhaps know some saltings of Buddhist sayings or beliefs, Delgado’s memoir works like a slow seep of knowledge. He makes friends; he is attacked, and feeling sick at himself, fights back and wins. He loves the army; he hates the army. And most dangerous of all, he understands ‘the other.’
“There’s tension in the air that hasn’t been there before: a buzzing in the crowd and the stiff contorted movements of the soldiers… It’s hot as hell today and the sun is bearing down directly overhead. The mission is taking longer than expected. Tempers are bound to flare.
“Get the fuck away from me you fucking hajjs!”
I know the voice: a good guy. A friend of mine…
“I swear to God, one of these days I’m going to shoot one of you fuckers.”
Something seizes up inside me. I’ve heard things before, little flashes of aggression toward the Iraqis, but this is the first time it has boiled over. I’m hot and angry. Why does he have to act this way? … I walk up and get in his face. I raise my voice: “Chill out, man. They weren’t doing anything….”
He shoves me. “Why you always gotta be such a bitch, Delgado?”
Early in the occupation, his outfit in Tallil, south of Bagdhad, and before they are deployed to Abu Ghraib itself, he describes a scene, seeing the seeds of the ugly blossom that will appear two years later in photos and videos the world will see.
“The sight of ragged, starved Iraqi dogs running desperately from packs of gun-toting men in four wheelers.. we watch a pair of Air Force security corner some bag-of-bones canine…and fire repeatedly at it…the dog is cut down by a limb shot but manages to hobble back to its feet and limp away. The four-wheelers buzz off in pursuit of their prey.”
Yet Delgado is able to reflect, to see his own life within these acts he hates.
“There is something primal in witnessing an act of violence. Something about it stirs the soul in vague and subtly erotic ways. We all experience the rush, the first time we fire a rocket or unload a belt of SAW ammunition. It is something deeply rooted in the male identity and consciousness, an instinct for violence.”
Eventually, the knowledge has grown too big in him. He knows he must declare himself a Conscientious Objector. He turns in his weapon. He defends himself and explains his beliefs to whoever will listen. Many are not interested — in talking to cowards… One of those who listens best, and understands the most is a bible reading, Glory! Glory! praising black Sergeant, Delgado’s immediate superior.
“You’re in for a hard time, Delgado, but I’ll do what I can for you.”
And so the story is woven for us — of a kind of courage that very few of us have, to go against our own, to work out, alone, what beliefs we hold so deeply that we cannot let go, come what may.
On November 18, 2003, Delgado’s birthday, the unit arrives at Abu Ghraib. By November 24th, a prison protest against the food, the cold, the treatment is met with lethal force. Twelve prisoners are shot. Three die of those wounds.
“They took pictures of the bodies after the shooting….nothing special. The other soldiers are pressing McCullough for details; clearly they are proud of him and envious of his accomplishment: killing an Iraqi.”
In the days that come rumors sweep the compound of other pictures. Officers muster up the troops and tell them to quit talking about the photos; this is a family and we take care of our own business. Don’t tell your wives and sweethearts. Stop the crap.”
The reality of the photos and the actions in the prison wasn’t known to Delgado and his unit until it was to most of us. But the suspicion was high, and in Delgado, some hope:
“Perhaps the people back home will finally see a small part of the truth. Something here has got to give, for no sin this large and this great can be concealed forever. The law of karma, of action and reaction, is inescapable. Whatever the Army has sown here through its own policies and its own culture, it will reap in equal measure.”
And it is this that Delgado takes for his main theme and title. Its worth quoting at length.
“[There was] a daily reality inside Abu Ghraib: a reality so bleak and joyless it could drive men to the edge of madness, and did. Picture a cold, windswept wasteland of rubble and ruined buildings. Picture living there with a thousand other people guarding four or five thousand prisoners, some of whom want to kill you. Picture no heat and no light for a month. Picture no phones, no Internet, no contact with home for several months. Picture getting shelled every day by an invisible enemy and never being able to do anything about it. Imagine what that would do to your mind. Picture people around you getting killed or maimed by random explosions. Picture having to fix vehicles in three inches of freezing mud for a captain you despise. Picture have to work with and handle prisoners who are filthy, diseased, and angry. Picture not understanding a word they say. …That’s an environment that breaks people and some people have lower breaking points than others.
That’s part of it. That’s the universal part, something we could all understand: how stress and fear could turn ordinary people into monsters. Yet I’m not satisfied with that as the whole truth. There’s something deeper to it, something that hasn’t been talked about yet openly. The fact is there were thousands of soldiers rotated through Abu Ghraib and not all of them turned abusive, not all of them hurt and degraded the Iraqis, some of them even said no, some of them even did something about it. What separates us? What divides those who turned hateful and those who stayed human? The answer is complex and nontrivial. It can’t be summed up in a sound bite. Over these last few years I have meditated long and often on this topic, trying to see into the sometime abyss of the human heart. I believe that through reliving these times, I have found pieces of my own truth. I believe that Abu Ghraib holds many teachings, many sutras, about the way that men live. I’m still trying to unravel them.”
And so, this is a book you’ll want to read and perhaps, with Aidan Delgado, read others, trying along the way, the best you can, to read your own heart and to follow it, as hard as it may be, trying to read the hearts of others and come to know, in some small way The Sutras of Abu Ghraib.
I ran into a fabulous internet tool the other day. It’s called WorldCat, short for World Catalog, and is a means of searching for, and browsing, the holdings of all participating libraries. Your “hit” can be sorted into actual, physical libraries — by distance from a zip code you provide!
You can search for example for Mystery: Montana as I did, and get an enormous list of such books — by library!
Even better, each find (book) has several tags. My search turned up 256 hits. One was “Bitterroot” by James Lee Burke. It had tags for “Montana — Fiction,” of course, but also for “Private Investigators - Montana - Fiction,” and, surprise! “Vietnam War - Veterans - Fiction.” Off I go! And in every case, instead of being invited to buy the book, you can find a library near you holding it.
There are of course caveats, and rules.
For example: Can I check something out?
“It depends on whether you have an active membership with a library that owns the item, and whether that library’s Web site permits remote checkout of an item. WorldCat.org lets you find an item of interest and then locate a library near you that owns it. Usually you will link directly to the item record on the library’s Web site. The actions available to you on that page will vary from one library to another. You may be able to join a waiting list, reserve the item, check it out or even have it shipped or delivered.”
Besides good old paper and ink books there is much else.
“You can search for popular books, music CDs and videos—all of the physical items you’re used to getting from libraries. You can also discover many new kinds of digital content, such as downloadable audiobooks. You may also find article citations with links to their full text; authoritative research materials, such as documents and photos of local or historic significance; and digital versions of rare items that aren’t available to the public. Because WorldCat libraries serve diverse communities in dozens of countries, resources are available in many languages.”
But don’t hang around here! Check it out at http://worldcat.org/default.jsp
Langewiesche is quite a writer as I can testify, having been mesmerized by his The Outlaw Sea.
He’ll be appearing on BookTV this Sunday. (Subtract 3 hours to get Pacific time.)
William Langewiesche, The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor
William Langewiesche talks about the proliferation of nuclear weapons to poorer, more unstable counties and the threat this poses to the international community. Mr. Langewiesche also discusses the role played by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan in aiding countries like North Korea and Iran develop their nuclear weapons programs.
(Sunday 7 PM, Monday 6:45 AM ET)
Here’s the complete weekend schedule.
I heard Tara Mckelvey, the author of Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War, interviewed the other day, This is not a book you will joyously read but if you do, you will find it thoroughly researched through interviews with people who were once in US custody, including perhaps for the first time, women who were held in Abu Ghraib and other places.
BookTV.org takes over CSPAN2 on weekends. Lewis Lapham, the venerable editor of Harpers Magazine and proud Liberal is scheduled for several hours. Not sure I’ll take it all in but worth a look.
His latest book is “Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration.”
You can e-mail questions to the show ahead of time, here.
Chomsky’s Interventions available.
Andrew J. Bacevich, whose work on American militarism we have drawn your attention to, has a brief review of five books in The Nation, April 23 issue. Titled “The Semiwarriors” he reminds us that the Bush presidency is not by itself the problem. [Not that it's not a serious problem of course.] It, and all presidencies preceding it from the time of Harry S. Truman, have been symbiotically joined to a national security apparatus which takes as its foundational belief a permanent, national security crisis. Faced with this crisis, which can only be dealt with by firm, decisive, militaristic response, democratic debate is a fateful weakness.
For Forrestal and other members of the emergent national security elite, fired by the need to confront a never-ending array of looming threats, the presidency served as an accommodating host. Semiwarriors built the imperial presidency. On behalf of the chief executive–increasingly referred to as the Commander in Chief–they claimed new prerogatives. They created new institutions that became centers of extra-constitutional power: the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the various agencies that make up the intelligence “community.” When out of office, they inhabited think tanks, consulted, lobbied and generally raked in the dough, all the while positioning themselves for a return to power.
They also imprinted on the capital city a new style, one that emphasized perils without precedent, activism on a global scale and a preference for hard power. In 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt became President, the District of Columbia was merely a seat of government and the United States was still a republic. When FDR’s successor left office twenty years later, Washington fancied itself the center of the universe, with the United States now the self-anointed Leader of the Free World.
A couple of titles caught my eye in the weekend reviews.
Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas by Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher.
According to a few blurbs this is more a personal story than a legal analysis, so of minor interest to me. The fact that Thomas grew up poor and in a broken family might have some explanatory power as to his legal decisions but I don’t think it will make any of us more accepting of them. Lots of folks grow up in serious circumstances and go on to be forces for good in the world.
Freedom’s Power: The True Forces of Liberalism by Paul Starr looks genuinely interesting to those after the big picture of the contest between the main streams of American political debate.
Michael Lind’s review in the Times will give you a good sense of it.
Bill Bradley, who looked like he had a perfect resume for being a steady, thoughtful president but couldn’t get others very interested when he took on Al Gore in 2000, has a new book out: The New American Story. Could be of interest to some of you with wonkish bents though the reviewer in the Times, Timothy Noah, isn’t sending copies to all his friends.
I also looked with some longing at The Day of the Barbarians: The Battle That Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire by Alessandro Barbero (translated by John Cullen). Even at only 180 pages I don’t think I’ll get to what looks like an interesting history with perhaps some lessons for the empire builders and preservers of today.
City Lights Books had two books of its own publishing house arrive today. Don’t stop wanting them until they are in your hands.
“In this beautiful and brilliant novel, Sinan Antoon expresses the voice of those whose voices were robbed by oppression, stressing the fact that literature can at times be the only framework to protect human experiences from falling into oblivion. I`jaam is an honest and exciting window onto Iraq, written with both love and bitter sarcasm, hope and despair. It does not only illuminate reality in Iraq prior to the American invasion, but also the human experience in its insistence on resisting oppression and injustice.” – Elias Khoury, author of Gate of the Sun
*
Outcast is narrated by Haroun Soussan, a Jewish convert to Islam. Soussan’s character is based on a historical figure, Ahmad (Nissim) Soussa, who converted to Islam in the 1930s and whose work ended up being used as propaganda during the era of Saddam Hussein. The narrator is a civil engineer and historian who’s just completed his life’s work, The Jews and History. The book opens with his getting an award from the President (Saddam Hussein) during the period of the Iran-Iraq War. The text we are reading, the novel, is his autobiography, written at the age of seventy, where he explores his own personal and political history, including his relationship with his daughter and his friends, among them a militant communist in political exile in Eastern Europe.
For a truly distressing day you could do no worse than read Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Scahill appeared in a long interview by David Martin, CBS national security correspondent on BookTV.org this Sunday. Martin is a thoughtful and non provocative interviewer and the story Scahill tells is absolutely chilling.
He, like many Americans, first became aware of private armed forces in Iraq through the horrific incident of “civilians” being attacked, hacked, dragged behind vehicles, burned and hung from a bridge in Falluja, on March 31, 2004. These civilians were in fact employees of Blackwater USA and hired to be in Iraq to do any number of tasks. On the day of their murder they were transporting kitchen equipment. More usually Blackwater is engaged in all manner of armed interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones, from protecting visiting dignitaries (and even Paul Bremer when he was the man in charge in Baghdad) to fighting alongside US troops in day long fire-fights. Scahill, who had been in Fallujah in the years before the invasion, paid more attention than many to the details of the mob actions, the locations, the victims and the aftermath. He didn’t know he was onto a major story though until on a reporting visit to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Armed Blackwater employees were all over the city, hired by Homeland Security, patrolling with weapons no policeman could own. The result of Scahill’s investigation is this book.
The implications of this Cheney/Rumsfeld driven outsourcing of national security tasks are profound.The bottom line for Blackwater depends on warfare: no fighting, no income. The success of Blackwater in its mission — the provisioning of elite fighting units — depends on attracting men out of the Armed Forces. Kids who were making $28,000 a year in the Army are now making $40,000 a month for Blackwater. Since there are about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, alongside about 150,000 troops the implications for troop morale and cost of fighting are enormous. The presence of Blackwater squads in the war zone confuses and up-ends the chain of command — who decides to do what,when. Scahill documents cases in which Blackwater men issued orders to begin firing on Iraqis to US soldiers. Discipline for Blackwater employees is controlled not by the Armed Forces but by the corporation; while US Soldiers have been court-martialed and jailed for behavior at Abu Ghraib, contract troops were simply sent home — where they could seek employment from another contractor. And this just begins the story.
The killing of the contractors in Fallujah led to a full scale invasion of the city by US Marines, destruction of much of it and radicalization of the population — an invasion which likely would not have happened without the Blackwater trigger.
Families of the slaughtered men are suing the company which is trying to hide behind a “composition of forces” argument which says it can no more be sued than can the US Army. It is from these families that Scahill got lots of his information including charges that the company’s attention to its bottom line diverted it away from proper training and protection of its own employees.
The founder of Blackwater, Eric Prince, is the scion of a Michigan family which has deep ties to the Christian Right and to influential men in the Bush administration. [See third Scahill paragraph.] Its attorney of record is Kenneth Starr and its former lead attorney is Fred Fielding the recently appointed White House council.
For those of you with interests in military and national security affairs this is a must read, with vertiginous implications
The audio isn’t available yet on BookTV.org but when it is, you should be able to find it here, dated April 1.
Meanwhile, you could watch a clip of Scahill, or read a short piece by him, over at The Nation, for which he often writes. Some of the pieces are listed here.
Truthdig also did a longish interview which looks like it covers much of the same ground at BookTV.org, here – mp3 and transcript.
C-Span2 turns itself on weekends into 48 hours of book talk — a whole lotta books, and too many you’ll want to read. This Sunday, just for a taster, our friend Chalmers Johnson will be on to talk about his newest book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. [Here's a TomDispatch with Chalmers.]
Here’s the schedule. Don’t forget to subtract 3 hours to get west coast time.
Won’t be home at 7:00 p.m.? Don’t know how to record it? Heck, you can watch on line.
Then again, you might be more interested in The Political Economy of US Militarism by Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, an Iranian Kurd, now professor of economics at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.
Joe Conason has a new book, and has been around the circuits talking about it.
And talked about, over at Orcinus.
We went to hear Frank Rich speak in San Francisco on election eve. He’s on a book tour for his The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina. Steve Winn of the SF Chronicle was the interviewer, and a pretty decent one. Frank himself is not a great speaker; I’d rather read him than hear him. That’s not to say he isn’t as smart and widely informed as you’d think from just his NY Times Sunday essays — not to mention his earlier theatre and film work– just that the polish and acuteness of the writing is missing from his speaking.
I did learn some interesting things.
One of the first reporting assignments he had was a profile of Dan Ellsburg for Esquire. Then it was all theatre all the time — until he lost interest in being a drama critic in the mid to late 1990s.
The fulcrum for his movement from drama criticism to political criticism was the AIDS crisis. When he was beginning his theatre criticism in New York he knew nothing, in his own words, about gays, homosexuals. AIDS was not yet a word. Friends, colleagues, subjects of his reviews, began to die. They began to die so often that the plays he was reporting on were changed: actors, designers, directors went missing. He began reporting on the deaths, as part of the reviews. The deaths became political news as activists would no longer keep quiet; he began to report on the politics.
He was not new to politics. He had, after all, grown up in Washington DC. And, politics and theatre had from an early age, been sort of fraternal twins.
I was always a theater fanatic; the theater and politics fused in my mind because if you are interested in the theater you always know that what you’re seeing on stage is a bunch of scenery and actors playing roles in what is essentially fiction. But as you learn more about it, you know there are stagehands, there are things going on in the wings. I think that informed my view of Washington.
On one hand, you’re presented with this official view of Washington as this cradle of democracy and this fantastic egalitarian place where all the principles in the constitution and the bill of rights are being upheld. On the other hand, I could see every day, these incredible inequities—the way black people were treated, the way the city was run. That discrepancy in the theater between onstage and off to this day has affected my view of politics: I’m always curious about what’s happening in the wings.
He wasn’t predicting anything for election day and thought that win or lose for the Dems there would still be a viciously divided congress. If the Dems win, the most important thing is not some theatrical game of impeach the President but of getting some sober, smart, urgent people to start dealing with the very serious situation the US is now in.
I learned that Rich gets a week to write his Sunday pieces, that he didn’t like doing the twice a week 750 word columns but that this longer form suits him. He tries to have the theme ready by Tuesday, does the heavy lifting on Wednesday, writes most of Thursday, hands it in by noon Friday. It is copy edited and fact checked before midnight Friday and goes to final type. (Sounds like a model I wish I had!)
I learned (again) that when presenting a speaker, one should never hand out microphones to the audience. Too many questioners decorate their little moment of fame with lots of baroque handiwork and the question gets lost, both to us and to the featured speaker. Questions written and sorted through by the moderator are much more succinct and more likely to return interesting answers.
Scott Ritter has a new book out: Target Iran: The Truth about the White House’s Plans for Regime Change. You can imagine all too well what Ritter has to say. It isn’t pretty.
Christian Alfonsi has: Circle In the Sand: Why We Went Back to Iraq Says Bill Moyers: “A riveting can’t-put-it-down account of how history kicks back and keep getting it wrong.”
And for something more practical, and optimistic, we have Bill Scher’s Wait, Don’t Move to Canada. He’s over at FireDogLake being interviewed. Lots of good talk about the book.
I ran into an old friend at Book Passage in Corte Madera following the great Jerry McNerney fund raiser Wednesday evening (more later.) He was there reading, with others, from a new Maxine Hong Kingston edited book, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Maxine has been running writing-and-meditation workshops for veterans and their families for many years. These 80 or so short peices, mostly memoir, are a result of that work. From my brief reading so far it’s a book many of you will want on your night table, to read slowly and then to meditate: war does not end when the war ends. [If you hurry over there are still autographed copies available.]
And finally, Barak Obama has a new book out, The Audacity of Hope, prompting speculation by the Chicago Tribune that a Presidential run may come sooner rather than later. [By the way, Bay Area folks, Obama is at Marin Civic Center, Exhibition Hall, Wednesday, October 25, 2006 12:00 noon.]
Bob Woodward: Bush Misleads On Iraq
More on the Woodward book by David Sanger of the NY Times
In one of my many “careers” I was the lead seaman on the Block Island ferry, a shallow drafted car carrier making a two and a half hour trip from New London, Connecticut out to this low lying workingman’s Martha’s Vineyard. So it was with some wonder that I ran across this interesting report of center-of-the world stuff in the Block Island Times.
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, you may remember, published an article in the London Review of Books a month or so ago, raising the question of whether Israel and the U.S. Israel lobby had too much influence in Washington D.C. Folks in some quarters weren’t satisfied with calling for them to be ridden out of town on a rail; tar and feathers would have been better. Alan Dershowitz labled the mere asking of the question as anti-Semetic.
As it turns out the two men were invited panelists to the 57th Current Strategy Forum at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. For a few details read here. What is interesting however, is that Mearsheimer wound up his contribution by recalling his student days at West Point, the United States Military Academy.
An English professor had assigned his class to read French existentialist Albert Camus’ “The Plague.” The instructor explained that he was using the book as an allegory for what was happening in Vietnam: the plague came and went of its own accord - and humans “operated under the illusion that they could affect the plague one way or another.” Mearsheimer said he saw a similar dynamic afoot in Iraq.
“There are forces that we don’t have control over that are at play, and they will determine the outcome. I understand that’s very hard for Americans to understand, because Americans believe that they can shape the world in their interests.
“But I learned during the Vietnam years when I was a kid at West Point, that there are some things in the world that you just don’t control, and I think that’s where we’re at in Iraq.”
It was the end of the panel, and the predominately military audience broke out in applause.
Hat tip to War and Piece.
If evolution, as so thoroughly described by Charles Darwin, is true, how do we explain Ann Coulter? In Darwin’s theory “natural selection can act only through and for the good of each being,” and yet there is Ann. It is only possible therefore, according to Madame, that God did it, which is de facto proof that He is not entirely all good and all knowing as she would have us believe.
Jerry Coyne, professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, has a wonderfully abusive review of Ann’s book Godless: The Church of Liberalism [I will not provide a link to ... ] over at Powell’s
The etiolated Coulter issued a piercing squawk this spring with her now-notorious book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. Its thesis, harebrained even by her standards, is that liberals are an atheistic lot who have devised a substitute religion, replete with the sacraments of abortion, feminism, coddling of criminals, and — you guessed it — bestiality. Liberals also have their god, who, like Coulter’s, is bearded and imposing. He is none other than Charles Darwin. But the left-wing god is malevolent, for Coulter sees Darwin as the root cause of every ill afflicting our society, not to mention being responsible for the historical atrocities of Hitler and Stalin.
Read on, and don’t ever pay money for the book!
Oh, ow! I had to share his closing line with you.
Her case for ID involves the same stupid arguments that fundamentalists have made for a hundred years. They’re about as convincing as the blonde hair that gets her so much attention. By their roots shall ye know them.