Bastille Day and Chaos Manor

From Jerry Pournelle and Chaos Manor come a pair of good things.

First is his description of the storming of the Bastille. Wednesday was Bastille Day, a very important date for France, analagous to Independence Day for America:

On July 14, 1789, the Paris mob aided by units of the National Guard stormed the Bastille Fortress which stood in what had been the Royal area of France before the Louvre and Tuilleries took over that function. The Bastille was a bit like the Tower of London, a fortress prison under direct control of the Monarchy. It was used to house unusual prisoners, all aristocrats, in rather comfortable durance. The garrison consisted of soldiers invalided out of service and some older soldiers who didn't want to retire; it was considered an honor to be posted there, and the garrison took turns acting as valets to the aristocratic prisoners kept there by Royal order (not convicted by any court).

On July 14, 1789, the prisoner population consisted of four forgers, three madmen, and another. The forgers were aristocrats and were locked away in the Bastille rather than be sentenced by the regular courts. The madmen were kept in the Bastille in preference to the asylums: they were unmanageable at home, and needed to be locked away. The servants/warders were bribed to treat them well. The Bastille was stormed; the garrison was slaughtered to a man, some being stamped to death; their heads were displayed on pikes; and the prisoners were freed. The forgers vanished into the general population. The madmen were sent to the general madhouse. The last person freed was a young man who had challenged the best swordsman in Paris to a duel, and who had been locked up at his father's insistence lest he be killed. This worthy joined the mob and took on the name of Citizen Egalite. He was active in revolutionary politics until Robespierre had him beheaded in The Terror.

The national holidays of the US, Mexico, and France all celebrate rather different events...

I'll also leave you with this link to his thoughts on "Nature vs. nurture" as it relates to imperialism, the Iraq War and our Republic:

Humans are flawed, whether by Original Sin or by imperfect evolution. Good societies do not just happen, and they are seldom if ever built by design. They grow. They have roots, they are maintained by customs and traditions, some of which we do not even understand. One approaches such a society with awe, and tends to its flaws as one would the wounds of a father, tenderly and with care, with a scalpel not an axe.

Edmund Burke expressed this in political terms, and is the intellectual father of modern political conservatism, but the view has its roots in the ancients including Cicero and Aristotle. Plato wrote of his ideal Republic in which the philosophers would be kings and guardians, and build the perfect state in which there was the theory of freedom, but not much in practice: his Republic looks more like Sparta than Athens. Aristotle by contrast studied the constitutions of hundreds of states, and had what conservatives believe is a more realistic view: man has a nature; it is malleable but not infinitely so; and the affairs of men follow patterns.

He points to a writer I wasn't aware of, and about whom I'll have a post later, Vilfredo Pareto.

Thoughts for the Day

Right now I'm reading Michael Shaara's Killer Angels. It's a novelisation of the Battle of Gettysburg, with maps. It was also the basis for the movie Gettysburg, by Ron Maxwell, starring Martin Sheen, Tom Berenger and Jeff Daniels. I enjoyed the movie, for its realistic setting and battle scenes (filmed at Gettysburg National Park) and attention to detail, but also found it just too reverential and hagiographic, covered in a pall that managed to kill a lot of the tensions. Still, having seen the movie first, I wanted to read the novel.

Turns out that a lot of the movie came straight from the novel. Literally; whole speeches, etc. Ah well. Plus, Angels has to introduce a dizzying cast in short order and it's a bit of trouble to keep everyone straight. Still, I'm enjoying the story and will likely read the two sequels next, after I read The DaVinci Code, which my lunch-buddy Amanda is going to loan me.

There were some passages I loved in the movie, and they are present in the novel. Like this:

"This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you'll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we're here for something new. I don't...this hasn't happened much in the history of the world. We're an army going out to set other men free.

This is free ground. All the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be something. Here's a place to build a home. It isn't the land -- there's always more land. It's the idea that we all have value, you and me, we're worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I'd die for, but I'm not asking you to come join us and fight for dirt. What we're all fighting for, in the end, is each other." (Colonel Lawrence Chamberlain, pg. 32-33.)

That first paragraph is striking in this day and age. As is this quote from Napoleon:

The logical end to defensive warfare is surrender.

The movie version had a really PC passage with the film's only black character that read like something put in to mollify critics. It's not in the novel, which has a more complex and realistic exchange, part of which ended up in the film. Here's a passage from that:

Chamberlain said suddenly, "Buster, tell me something. What do you think of Negroes?"

Kilrain brooded.

"There are some who are unpopular," he concluded.

Chamberlain waited.

"Well, if you mean the race, well, I don't really know." He hunched his shoulders. "I have reservations, I will admit. As many a man does. As you well know. This is not a thing to be ashamed of. But the thing is, you cannot judge a race. Any man who judges by the group is a peawit. You take men one at a time, and I've seen a few blacks that earned my respect. A few. Not many, but a few."

Chamberlain said, "To me there was never any difference."

"None at all?"

"None. Of course, I didn't know that many. But those I knew...well, you looked in the eye and there was a man. There was the divine spark, as my mother used to say. That was all there was to it...all there is to it.

[snip]

They sat for a long while in silence. Then Kilrain said, softly smiling, "Colonel, you're a lovely man." He shook his head. "I see at last a great difference between us, and yet I admire ye, lad. You're an idealist, praise be."

Kilrain rubbed his nose, brooding. Then he said, "The truth is Colonel, that there's no divine spark, bless you. There's many a man alive no more alive than a dead dog. Believe me, when you've seen them hang each other.... Equality? Christ in Heaven. What I'm fighting for is the right to prove I'm a better man than many. Where have you seen this divine spark in operation, Colonel? Where have you noted this magnificent equality? The Great White Joker in the Sky dooms us all to stupidity or poverty from birth. No two things on earth are equal or have an equal chance, not a leaf nor a tree. There's many a man worse than me, and some better, but I don't think race or country matter a damn. What matters is justice. 'Tis why I'm here. I'll be treated as I deserve, not as my father deserved. I'm Kilrain, and I God damn all gentlemen. I don't know who me father was and I don't give a damn. There's only one aristocracy, and that's right here --" he tapped his white skull with a thick finger -- "And you, Colonel laddie, are a memeber of it and don't even know it. You are damned good at everything I've seen you do, a lovely soldier, an honest man, and you got a good heart on you too, which is rare in clever men. Strange thing, I'm not a clever man meself, but I know it when I run across it. The strange and marvelous thing about you. Colonel darlin', is that you believe in mankind, even preachers, whereas when you've got my great experience of the world you will have learned that good men are rare, much rarer than you think. Ah --" he raised his hands, smiling -- "don't you worry about ministers. The more you kill, the more you do the world a service." He chuckled, rubbing his face. His nose was fat and soft, rippling under his ringers.

Chamberlain said, "What has been done to the black is a terrible thing."

"True. From any point of view. But your freed black will turn out no better than many the white that's fighting to free him. The point is that we have a country where the past cannot keep a good man in chains, and that's the nature of the war. It's the aristocracy I'm after. All that lovely, plumed, stinking chivalry. The people who look at you like a piece of filth, a cockroach, ah." His face twitched to stark bitterness. "I tell you, Colonel, we got to win this war." He brooded. "What will happen, do you think, if we lose? Do you think the country will ever get back together again?"

"Doubt it. Wound is too deep. The differences.... If they win there'll be two countries, like France and Germany in Europe, and the border will be armed. Then there'll be a third country in the West, and that one will be the balance of power."

Kilrain sat moodily munching on a blade of grass. More cannon thumped; the dull sound rolled among the hills. Kilrain said, "They used to have signs on tavern doors: Dogs and Irishmen keep out. You ever see them signs, Colonel?"

Chamberlain nodded.

"They burned a Catholic church up your way not long ago. With some nuns in it."

"Yes."

"There was a divine spark." (Colonel Chamberlain and Sergeant Kilrain, p. 186 - 189.)

I'm only half-way through; early afternoon of the second day, as Chamberlain is defending Little Round Top from a flanking Confederate army advance. I find I enjoy the novelistic, less history-study approach of Shaara, though I'm sure now that I'll end up with some Shelby Foote for the details.

Still Twiddling

No, not back to blogging yet. But, I have been playing around with the new main page for Half-Bakered. I'm slowly learning more CSS and trying experiments with it. Nothing fancy, that's for sure, but it's still some fun results. I have nine stylesheets for you to choose from now, including some more new designs like Green Marble, Space Geek and Fall Leaves.

Next I'll be experimenting with absolute positioning and static graphics. More sophisticated stuff and maybe repositioning some of the elements with CSS. Please let me know if any of the templates look particularly wacky in your browser. I've only checked them in Firefox 9.2.

As for the problems with the Atom feed, mentioned by Jemima in comments down below, I have no idea. I just have the standard Blogger link on the page. All I can guess is that, since I use a DIV tag inside the posts (look at the source) to create my titles, instead of the new Title line that Blogger provides, it might be that screwing things up. Sorry. I don't want to change using that for now, as it will be what I'll use to delimit and categorise posts when I finally get around to importing all the old archives into Word Press or whatever.

As always, your thoughts on the redesign over at hollihan.net for the new blog home are welcomed.

Lastly, please consider hitting the PayPal tipjar over on the left there. Yes, Blog*spot is free, but I have a lot of stuff housed over at hollihan.net (like the Kerry Mockery page, the Why We Fight page, the Carol Wallop page, etc.; see the links under Web Empire), which isn't free. Hosting Matters has recently rejiggered their hosting plans to give even better deals (more space and bandwidth for the same price!), but it still costs me money. If you can help, I'll love you long time. Or something like that.

Thanks for stopping by. Y'all come back soon, OK?

I Would Have Your Thoughts

The story of Roger Easson and his apparent plagiarism of an Internet email for a column he wrote in the local Democratic Party newspaper keeps on rolling on. Since I documented the discovery of the apparent plagiarism, Rep. Kathryn Bowers has come out with a column of her own (in her own language) in another paper that seems to have sprung from what Easson originally "wrote."

Now, there's another development. This past Sunday, David Waters, the Commercial Appeal's religion columnist, wrote his own column about the coming Bush draft! Where he got his idea, I can't say. I may email him and ask, just to see. It's not impossible that he saw the Bowers column in the North Shelby Times, or read Easson's "article," or heard about this idea in Democratic circles somewhere.

It's the seeming one-two-three of progression that caught me eye. From party paper, to small newspaper, to big newspaper. From a party functionary, to the party's local leader, to one of the daily paper's two columnists. I'm almost positive at the connection between the first two, but it's the connection -- if any -- between Bowers and Waters that I wonder at.

And that's my dilemma. This despicable distortion is gaining ground locally. I'll give Waters some credit for not falling headlong and for explaining some truths, but he's still spreading the basic, dishonest meme. That's what bothers me.

So, I ask you. Should I go ahead and contact Christian Brothers University and David Waters? Should I tell them about Easson's apparent plagiarism? Should I contact one of the local television stations and give my work to a reporter? I'm not interested in political spite or "gotcha." This isn't about scoring points or crippling an enemy. This is about stopping a terrible and pernicious misrepresentation in its tracks.

Should I, or is it even worth the bother? I shared this with a local bookseller I know, who was stunned and amused. S/he wants to pass it on to a politician of his/her acquaintance, which I agreed to, though I have no idea what will happen there.

On the one hand, a university professor seems to have been caught plagiarising. On the other, it's only a small article in an obscure place. But then, if someone is willing to be so blatant about something so small, you have to wonder what they'll do for the big, important things. And then there's the way the original story seems to have been metamorphic in spreading, growing and gaining credibility. That distresses me, but is it worth possibly damaging (or ruining!) a professor's career? Or is it precisely the kind of thing that should be exposed, come what will.

As you can see, this is a moral and ethical dilemma for me. I'm just some guy with a website. I shoot off my mouth on a routine, if irregular, basis and I'm sure there's a lot down in the posts below that someone could make a lot of hay of, if they chose. If I push the wrong person I have no defenses against being pushed back, even though I've got my end of the story nailed down, I think. Yeah, I'm saying I'm a bit scared.

What do you think?

A View of the Future?

Been playing around with new blogging systems and a minor redesign of the blog, in anticipation of maybe moving the blog over to the hollihan.net domain. Or maybe not. I'm so slow and indifferent to the whole process, it's sad.

When Blogger "upgraded" to the new interface, I didn't really like it or care for it. I started to investigate Moveable Type, since the Blogcritics site uses that tool. It was a headache to set up, though, so I abandoned that idea.

Then, when MT announced their new pricing and product setup, that pretty much clinched it. Even though they've since moderated their initial program, it's still not appealing to move over to a system that may strand me with an old, abandoned product if I can't afford to start paying for it.

So, I looked into WordPress. That is one elegant and straight-forward blogging system. It set up on my domain host easily enough. But then I got into tweaking it to fit my needs on the hollihan.net domain and ran into trouble. Documentation is scarce and occasionally confusing. There's plenty of help on the support forums, but it's hit-and-miss; if you don't get the right answer right away, if you have to ask follow-up questions, you are out of luck. The crowd has moved on.

And then! Yes, there's more. My password stopped working, and I was locked out. Turns out that this is also a common problem, but not one addressed in a product fix yet. Being Open Source, who knows how long it'll be until that's repaired. I went into the Support Forums again and found a whole lot of answers, which are largely unclear and confusing. I'm still locked out for now.

Sigh....

It also meant learning PHP so I could tweak the index.php file, which was pretty daunting. I'm growing tired of learning new languages just to work with programs that are supposed to make my life easier! WordPress is without question a beautiful and subtle way to design a blog; ultimately, I'll end up there I'm sure. But it's more headache than I really want. Blogger is clunky, with too many click-throughs, both too many features and not the features I want, but I can work it well enough to get the job done. So, I'm still here and not really motivated to move along.

Sigh, again....

I had hoped to be able to do this blog's present design (with three columns, which is pretty much necessary for a link-heavy site like this, in my thinking) in WordPress with just CSS, which would be nice in terms of making easy changes to the underlying structure. But doing that (CSS only in WordPress) turns out to be a quest that many have made with mixed results. Most of them require tweakage on my part. Plus, learning about PHP, so I can adjust the index.php file to display how I want.

Plus, it looks like I'll have to hand-enter every single link myself, instead of doing some kind of bulk import! Shit on that.

So, I just reworked the present Blogspot design to be CSS-based, with the underlying index.html file being (mostly) pure structure and data. It's coming along nicely, too. I spent a couple of days experimenting and tweaking, since I sorta know HTML and CSS, and came up with something that's simpler to update when I need to. Not completely elegant, nor have I checked for validity, but it's coming along.

You can view the early beta version here. The URL is simple, which I wanted. I still opted to use tables for the underlying structure, but it's a simple, three-column table now. The outer columns are fixed-width, leaving the center (posting) column to expand with different resolutions and screen sizes. The design still feels cluttered, but maybe a bit less so now. Your comments are welcome.

I have alternate stylesheets now. Those of you who don't like white text on a black background (because you want to destroy your eyesight, I guess) now have a simple, "proper," stylesheet for yourself. Or, you can just look at the basic HTML structure (no formatting at all!). I think this can be adapted, minus the few graphics on the page, for PDA display, etc. We'll see. Once I move to hollihan.net, then I can use cookies to set the stylesheet preference for individual users! Whee!!

And, just for fun, I did a version with Hot Pink! on a black background. It's an eye-hurter, but I ended up with it by accident during some experimentation and decided to leave it available. Have a laugh. If you have any suggestions for other color combinations or layouts, give me your ideas and we'll see what happens. I'd like to try something else with black text / white type, but with narrow-border boxes around the categories labels and a narrow line down the inside margin alongside the links. Variable adjustment, drop-down lists for categories instead of loooooong lists?

I'll still likely go to WordPress, just for the extra features it offers, especially categories and search, and the CSS elegance. But it's been a headache since installation completed, when I wanted to customise it, then with the lockout, so that's on the backburner now.

Anyway, go to Half-Bakered's future home and look around. Play with the alternate stylesheets. Like I said, suggestions and opinions are welcomed.

Gmail For The Troops

As y'all know, I signed up for Gmail, thanks to Blogger. My addy is HalfBakered@Gmail.com. I got some free invites as well.

One of the invites I gave directly to a soldier I know who is going to Iraq in the Fall. Three more I donated to Gmail4Troops, which will be spread out to three other soldiers. Gmail is perfect for troops for a couple of reasons. First, it's web-based. Soldiers can access their accounts from any computer anywhere in the world that's hooked up to the Internet. Second, it comes with one gigabyte of memory. That's great for storing pictures and even short movies, or lots and lots of mail. If you have some Gmail invites laying around, please think about donating to this great cause.

The last two invites are available. Take me out to lunch, do me a nice, or offer something I might like and I'll give it to you. First come, first served, if I like your offer.

I'm an Evil Genius

I took this quiz and discovered I'm an Evil Genius! I've always suspected that.

You are an SEDF -- Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an evil genius. You are extremely focused and difficult to distract from your tasks. With luck, you have learned to channel your energies into improving your intellect, rather than destroying the weak and unsuspecting.

Your friends may find you remote and a hard nut to crack. Few of your peers know you very well--even those you have known a long time--because you have expert control of the face you put forth to the world. You prefer to observe, calculate, discern and decide. Your decisions are final, and your desire to be right is impenetrable.

You are not to be messed with. You may explode.

Yup, that's about right.

I'd like to give credit to who referred me to this quiz, but apparently it's a secret. ON THE INTERNET!

Taxes Are Ever With Us

A couple of bits on the Tennessee income tax front.

First, an early indicator of the likely recommendation of the Tennessee Tax Structure Study Commission comes in this nasty column by Grover Porter in The Tennessean. The TTSSC was a parting indignity inflicted on Tennesseans by outgoing Governor Donald Sundquist and his partner in almost-crime House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh. It's mission: to produce a report, for the subsequent governor, about Tennessee's tax structure and make recommendations about what to do.

Given that the TTSSC was stocked with pro-income tax folks by both Sundquist and Naifeh, most folks have correctly guessed that it will recommend an income tax. They will repeat the mantra that a sales tax is inelastic, even though Tennessee's sales tax is producing $300 million more than expected this year. They will recommend moving to a mix of sales and income taxes as a "protection" against future economic downturns.

I'd offer two counter-proposals. First, legislators need to be serious about the Reserve Fund in flush times, and fill it up. We know bad days will come again, though we can never predict when. Instead of squandering money as the Assembly did in the Nineties boom, some must always be set aside.

Second, close the loophole that allows the Legislature to routinely side-step the Constitutional provision that all of their budgets be balanced. This loophole allowed the Legislature to bust the cap during the boom years and drive spending up to astronomic levels, all with Sundquist's approval.

Reining in spending, as has happened for the most part under Democratic Governor Bredesen, would be an obvious smart move, too.

Giving our legislators both an income tax and a sales tax, as the study will likely suggest, is a recipe for drunken spending. They have yet to prove they can stay within limits. Having two revenue streams to play with, no matter what their assurances of fiscal restraint, is a dangerous thing: like giving children both matches and gasoline.

There's talk that the TTSSC's report, scheduled to be released this summer, may be delayed until after the Fall elections. Reminding voters of past behaviors, and drawing attention to current ones, isn't something our legislators want to do. I'm guessing it likely will be held back, then taken up in the next Assembly when we'll suddenly learn that there's a "backlog of spending needs" that "have to be addressed."

On a different front, Bill Hobbs points us to a great response from blogger Mark Rose, whom half-Bakered readers were introduced to yesterday. Rose tackles the duplicity of Tennesseans for Fair Taxation, a pro-income tax front group in league with the Tennessee teacher's unions.

TFT is claiming that a pending bill in the US Congress to allow Tennesseans to deduct their sales taxes from their Federal income tax is unfair to Tennesseans somehow. Rose finds a TFT publication on their own website where just two years ago they were touting the ability to deduct State income taxes as a selling point for the State income tax! Hypocrisy exposed.

It's a shame that these kinds of maneuverings aren't reported as regularly, nor as prominently, as they used to be by our Commercial Appeal and the television stations that follow its lead in State political reporting. People sticking their hands into your pocketbook or wallet to hand money to their friends and potential voters is as close to home as it gets.

Tennessee is running a $300 million revenue surplus from the sales tax that was increased just two years ago. Cutting the sales tax by 1/4 of a cent would bring present revenue back to parity this coming year while still growing even more as the economy continues to improve. That quarter-point sounds small, but the symbolism is huge. So is the reutrn of $300 million to our hands. Some of that will be taken by our County soon, now that schools are pressing for more money yet again. We could use that $300 million, one way or another.

So give it back!

Celebrating the Underblog

Via Instapundit, comes this invitation to plug your favorite under-recognised blogs! It's a way to bring notice to the small and mid-level blogs who toil every day with little or no reward. Head over and see what's already there. I even recognised a few names.

Herenton Does It Again

Thursday's surprise announcement by Mayor Willie Herenton that he may be under FBI investigation was typical Herenton.

During the swearing-in ceremony for incoming MLGW President Joseph Lee, when the spotlight should have been on Lee attaining the highest and most important position of his career, Herenton dropped his bombshell with these words:

...I am possibly facing an FBI investigation for simply being a man and doing the right thing. Young man [referring to Lee], welcome to a new world.

Sigh.... Upstaging another man's honor. It's all about the Willie. "Simply being a man?" No, for possibly being involved in criminal wrong-doing, which "men" try to avoid.

It's the "doing the right thing" that's a clue. Television news is reporting that the focus of the investigation is the City's $1.5 billion bond sale last year. If you'll remember, Herenton left town in the immediate wake of last year's Hurricane Elvis to run to Little Rock for a mayoral campaign fund-raiser. The company hosting the party was a minority bond firm trying to get an in with the Mayor, hoping to get a piece of that bond deal. Sure enough, not long after his return, Herenton sent a letter to the City's attorneys instructing them to include this firm in the bond sale.

The way that Herenton phrased that letter led to confusion. You can hear it in Herenton's tones and phrasing and it sounds like his usual proclamatory style. Or, you can just read the text and it sounds like a directive with hints of quid pro quo. Herenton denies it. He claims he was merely trying to increase minority participation in City bond sales, which are typically handled by the local big banking and bond firms. In his eyes, it was "doing the right thing." In some other eyes, it was rewarding a campaign contributor.

I'm intrigued by Herenton's "welcome to a new world" remark. It was directed at Lee, but was the Mayor welcoming Lee into the public profile world of civic leadership or announcing a new era of scandal-reporting for his own administration? Scandal isn't new to Herenton. In my time in Memphis I can remember the stink he caused by dating a supposed "teacher" while he was City School Superintendent, a woman who had a record of dating influential men in Nashville, if I recall the story correctly.

What's not being noted here is that the Memphis Flyer's own Jackson Baker hinted at this very thing a couple of weeks ago! It was just a short tag at the end of the usual political round-up:

The hottest rumor going about city government circles these days concerns -- are you sitting down? -- the imminent resignation of Memphis mayor Willie Herenton. Mayor spokesperson Gale Jones Carson dismissed that report, categorically and vehemently, as pure hooey. "That's crazy. That's just something that comes from people who are opposed to the mayor. He's not going anywhere!"

But, among others, a member of the City Council says he's heard the report of late -- repeatedly. "There are several variations," the councilman says, but all concern after-effects of two circumstances: an ongoing probe into the city's selection of brokers for last year's TVA prepayment and current speculation revolving around a fatal traffic accident involving the mayor's daughter-in-law, Andrea Herenton.

Bravo Jackson! He scooped everyone here.

In today's television reporting, it's being said that "everyone" on the City Council was surprised and some (Chumney, Lowery) denied any knowledge. Obviously, as Jackson reported, one male Councillor did know. WPTY's Jeni DiPrizio said that rumors had been flying for "months." And yet, every news source is calling this a "bombshell."

Yeah, right.

I want to see, if the investigation goes forward and produces allegations, how the City Council reacts. Will they return to the pugilistic stance we saw after Herenton's ill-starred inauguration speech and his "let's take it outside" taunt to Councillor Bruce Thompson? Will some attempt to pile on in order to weaken Herenton, or to extract petty revenges?

Interesting days ahead.

INSTANT UPDATE: The bashing is already starting! I just saw Councillor E.C. Jones on WPTY expressing bafflement at Herenton's choice of venue for his announcement. Jones made a crack, referring to Herenton, about upstaging "his man," Lee. Ah well....

FRIDAY MORNING UPDATE: Councillor Carol Chumney spoke up with her thoughts last nigt on several news programs, which earned her a rebuke and a chuckle from Mayor Herenton.

The Commercial Appeal has a rather odd write-up this morning. It's the sixth item down the list on the web page; not the top. The article initially makes it appear that Herenton made the admission directly to the paper, making no mention of the circumstances until more than half-way through. The writer also doesn't have any comments from City Council members, who appear to have been quite available last night, judging from the television news. On the plus side, they do quote more of the Mayor's words than has been heard on the television and radio, including further elaboration on his advice to MGLW President Lee.

Spreading a Sloppily "Borrowed" Lie

Every so often, I pick up the North Shelby Times, the little paper that could. It hovers between being a real, if shoestring, newspaper and being a Shopper's Guide rag.

The Editor is a gentleman named Frank Holland, who makes no bones about his partisan Democrat, anti-Bush leanings. His editorials are always on the front page, bottom-right corner. They are rants, really, bordering on the incoherent at times. But, it's his paper and he can do what he wants with it. That's the beauty of America.

Today, I happened to glance at a copy in the Pig on Madison while grocery shopping. What caught my eye -- and frankly almost stopped my heart -- was a picture of senior Shelby County Democrat, chairman of the County Democratic Party, Kathryn Bowers. Above her picture was the large headline "A Call to Arms."

Was she going to repeat the carefully constructed misrepresentations of Roger Easson in the party's newspaper, The Democrat? I've already shown how his article has suspicious borrowings from an Internet email making the rounds earlier this year. Substantial borrowings (half his article) Easson claims to know nothing about. He denies ever having seen it.

Bowers is smart enough to use her own words, but she repeats the same untruth: that a second Bush administration means an automatic return to the draft for men and women from 18 - 26. Of course, I don't think this is true and have been documenting why for a while now. You can also read Rev. Don Sensing's blog, where he has also clearly explained why this isn't likely to happen.

Her stuff is pernicious in repeating assumptions and bias and outright partisan propaganda as fact.

To top this off, this administration plans -- should the American people be so unwise as to elect it in November for another four years -- to restart the draft. Thousands of young men and women will be summoned to participate in military adventures planned by the Neoconservatives who have brought us this quagmire called Iraq.

Thi is not a call to artms about some distant threat. This is a call to arms fro the defense of the future of all our young men and women 18-26. During the next 12 months, their young lives are going to be disrupted by a universal call to military service. they will be conscripted by a government zealous to send you into the Middle East on another pre-emptive attack on Iran or Syria....

The volunteer army, the peace divident we harvested with the end of the Cold War, is no longer capable of providing enough blood or body bas required for this president's adventures in pre-emptive war....

That's enough. You get the idea.

I feel a bit like Alice through the looking glass here. It is simply passed over as irrelevant, so beneath concern it is never mentioned any more, that the draft bills were introduced by Democrats! They did it as a political taunt to the President and as a way to try to stir up young people, much as Bowers does here.

The fundamental dishonesty and distortion doesn't even concern these people. That leaves me so disoriented I don't see how I can talk to people who can hold such a 1984-ish doublethink in their heads. It's, to me, a sign of such driven, malicious delusion as to render them beyond the pale.

Honest debate can be had regarding a potential draft. You can look at figures and needs, look at the situation in the Middle East, make reasonable assumptions, and see how it's a possibility. I can have a discussion with someone like that. But when you encounter a Bowers or Easson or Holland, who will not even be honest, how can you get anywhere?

Frankly, you can't. But neither can you push them aside. One edits the local party paper and the other edits a local newspaper; the third is the doyen of the local party. I would hope that reasonable, intelligent people would disavow them and walk away.

I suspect that won't happen. Whole swathes of the Democrat party are heading in furious foment for the cliffs, aware of their passing from the scene and yet unable to see it. You can only stand aside and watch the destruction and waste with great sorrow.

The Eagles of Death Metal

Happened to land on the Conan O'Brian Show last night just in time to hear him say something about death metal. What? I thought. That would be a sight to see.

Turns out it was some goofy three piece (supplemented by a pair of swinging back-up singers) called The Eagles of Death Metal. But man, could they rock out! Two guitars with a sharp, hard sound. One really killer drummer who stayed just a fraction of a second ahead of the beat as he slammed his kit, which kept the music driving along. The lead singer looked like a cross between some wannabe biker ladies man and the geek with a mullet who stands in front of the mirror in his bedroom practicing all his cool, killer moves. One of the back-up chicks was wearing an enormous black handle-bar mustache, which is apparently some kind of in-joke.

Really strange presentation, but kick-ass music. Sharp, simple, hooky songwriting. I may have to buy their album, when I have money again. Go check them out.

No, Still No Draft

Much is being made of the Pentagon's call to bring in 5600 Individual Ready Reserve forces. Some, like the folks who think a draft is a certainty in a second Bush term, see this as yet more evidence they are right. It's not.

Mostly what you're seeing is a display of ignorance on the part of the print and news media. The IRR force is composed of people who signed up for an eight year hitch, but did active duty for only part of that. As part of the contract, they agree to remain available for call-up after their active duty. In the case of this call-up, the Army and other armed forces are mostly looking for people with prior Iraq experience who just completed service. They will need much less training to be mission-ready. And the folks being called back have specific skills in short supply. This isn't a general call.

You can read up on the details at BlackFive. He also talks about the appalling gaps in knowledge -- and lack of concern about it -- by the major media organisations. It turns out that very, very few people in the news have any military background at all! Couple this with an oppositional stance to any governmental organisation, fuel it with the generally Leftist views of the media which lead them to keep the military at arm's length, and you get where we are now.

I happened to catch FOX13's 9PM news for a bit last night. Jay Hermaczinksi (sorry for the spelling) was doing a story about this. He found a soldier in the IRR who had been told he was being recalled. Jay's story was pretty fair, as he did mention that the recall wasn't a surprise for the soldier; in fact, he had gone in on his own hoping to get an plum assignment and was happy to do it!

The major media so far are trying to paint this a bad thing. It's not, really. Yes, our armed forces are being pushed as never before. But if you read up, you'll see that re-enlistment rates are far above what the Pentagon expected, and what they presently need. If anything, what you'll see is an expansion of the Army by a few tens of thousands through recruitment and re-enlistment, which ought to do the job.

Changing from a volunteer Army to a drafted Army would be a major shift, a fundamental realignment of thinking and practice. I don't think it's going to happen any time soon. The present volunteer system, supplemented by the Reserves and the National Guard, is doing a spectacular job. As time goes on and Iraq cools down, the Pentagon will start drawing down forces there, and we'll be fine.

I'm not worrying yet, and I'm a worrywart.

Nets to Conventions: Eh

It's about time. The major television networks will devote even less time than in recent years to this summer's Demoratic and Republican conventions. Most are even ignoring the first two days, when there are due to be some major speakers. They are fobbing off wall-to-wall coverage to the cable news networks, if they want it.

This is a long-overdue move. The conventions ceased being real nominating conventions decades ago. Now, they are just beauty pageants for politicians, launching pads and lifetime achievement awards to the ambitious. It's nothing but free advertising to the two major parties.

I wish the two parties would go back to the old, pre-Seventies days, when the primaries were less important than the convention itself, where the action took place. Now that would be drama worth watching. Unfortunately, it is also too dangerous to the stability of the status quo, which is enriching everyone involved, so it will never happen.

Those of you on the port side of the political ship (ie. the left) who keep hoping for some convention miracle this year to energise things need to stop drinking the Kool-Aid and sober up. It ain't gonna happen. It can't under the present structure.

This is all good for me, as it means The Drew Carey Show, which is burning off its final season of episodes over the summer, won't get pre-empted. I hope. It's not even bad for democracy, as nothing important to the Republic will occur.

A win-win situation.

Television Blogs

I've been forgetting to plug the FOX13 weather blog! I was hipped to it by another blogger. Joey and Henry the Intern mostly keep it up. It's a great behind-the-scenes look, in the sense of seeing how Joey and the team make decisions about what to show and how to it, when to go wall-to-wall on storm coverage, etc.

Right now, he's asking for viewer comment on some new graphics they are trying out on air. Clever bit of marketing, that. Anyway, head on over and check it out. Joey himself will respond to your comments! How cool is that?

On a different front, SouthTV News, which reports on the anchors of Southern news stations and goings on at various television stations, is still running his annual poll. Memphis has been one of the cities he's got in his polls. Some interesting results....

Plus, he's got lots of news, including a few here in Memphis, and some ex-Memphians.

Jeebus F'ing Chris and Kerry

The Democrats keep descending to lower and lower levels of depravity and hyperbole in this election. They need to be defeated this year.

Whoa!

Monday's story about Roger Easson's possible plagiarism got picked up by a couple of bloggers (Bill Hobbs and Say Uncle. Thank you both.) and my daily traffic doubled! Tuesday was back down to normal, around 100 hits a day. Which is nice. It's not about the number of hits, but the trend. We're growing steadily here at Half-Bakered.

By the way, for the computer and 'Net types who read here, in looking at the referrer logs, I saw a whole lot of "unknown" listings. Are *all* of these spiders from search engines and blogroll aggregators? What else might they be? I sure get an awful lot. As much as a fifth of traffic on some days.

I also see an occasional "blocked referrer." What the heck is that? Secret, black-ops, Homeland Security types dropping in? Paranoid web surfers?

And hey, is it Spring or Summer right now? I can't tell.

Fun, Memphis Style

Three quickie funbits from Memphis bloggers.

Jen over at absolutely.nu offers a way to see the Moore film, Fat'n'hype 90210, without enriching the already wealthy creep. Sweet!

New-to-you blog Mid-South Politics has a great Memphis joke. It's funny because it's true, as Homer says.

Lastly, you can virtually attend a Redbirds game thanks to Len and his kinda-sorta baseblog of a recent game. Do the Wave along with him.

The Pentagon's New Map

Via Jerry Pournelle's blog, Chaos Manor, comes a pointer to this article from March 2003, by Thomas P.M. Barnett of the U.S. Naval War College. Like the subhead says, it's a look at "why we go to war and why we'll keep going to war."

When the United States finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf, it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or just an enforced disarmament of illegal weapons, or a distraction in the war on terror. Our next war in the Gulf will mark a historical tipping point—the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.

That is why the public debate about this war has been so important: It forces Americans to come to terms with I believe is the new security paradigm that shapes this age, namely, Disconnectedness defines danger. Saddam Hussein’s outlaw regime is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world, from its rule sets, its norms, and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence.

The problem with most discussion of globalization is that too many experts treat it as a binary outcome: Either it is great and sweeping the planet, or it is horrid and failing humanity everywhere. Neither view really works, because globalization as a historical process is simply too big and too complex for such summary judgments. Instead, this new world must be defined by where globalization has truly taken root and where it has not.

Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.

The job of the United States, as he sees it, is not to be ready to fight Russia or China because they are already in the process of joining the First World through market capitalism and globalisation. The places America needs to work on strengthening are the unstable areas along the edges: Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Phillipines, Indonesia. Our military will find itself in the countries in northern South America, Africa and the Middle East that are not a functioning part of the world economy.

I think he's on to something here. It's not a long read, but it makes globalisation take on a new, important role.

From the Blogcritics

Two excellent posts over at Blogcritics.org, where I am a sometime contributor.

First, is this in-depth study of Alan Moore's Watchmen comic, and I do mean in depth. David Fiore looks at the characters of that ground-breaking, landmark book in relation to the Marvel Comics archetypes and the larger canvas of American Romanticism. Really! I love Watchmen, a study in metaphysics and psychology told through the comic format, and this post really opened my eyes to some things I hadn't realised about it and the larger comic world. Surprisingly broad stuff.

Sadi Ransom-Polizzotti's post is an emotional, wide-ranging look at the changes wrought in one woman's world by the events of 9/11. She writes from her heart about the desire to trade some security for a little peace of mind and spirit. It's about knowledge: how much do we need and how much is enough?

These things, people said, happened somewhere else. They did not happen in the United States, and while I had never understood why America was immune, it seemed to me a very comfortable assumption and I felt myself slipping into it and believing it because it was better than believing the alternative or the truth, which is that nobody is immune, which is that if somebody wants to blow up a fucking plane they will and if they want to hurt you badly enough they will find a way, that in reality, for all of the searches and war and bombs and security and profiles etc. that we create, I think that there is only so much we can do.

Christ, if that were changeable then I would be all for it. I'm not saying I'd be happy about it - I'd be terrified, but I think that deep-down I believe that I could sacrifice virtually anything I have for this "greater good" that I hear about because I would know that this would protect the people that I love, even if that meant shooting my plane out of the sky because it was headed for the a building with thousands of others, then okay. It sucks, but alright. And while I never thought anyone could judge the value of one life over another, I find that despite this, part of me says that while I can't speak for anyone else, I can tell you that if a terrorist were using me as a pawn, as power to kill thousands of others and you had to choose, that perhaps it would be the lesser evil to let me die so that others can live. It's nuts, I know, but there you have it. I don't say this glibly or with any measure of comfort - the very idea of such a situation scares the shit out of me, but those are the circumstances - "the circumstances were the circumstances." War changes everything and this war in particular, because it is a war of unknown that is fought more subversively.

This doesn't even scratch the surface. Believe me. A long and draining read, but one that stares straight into Benjamin Franklin's warning:
Those who would trade essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither siberty nor security. Powerful, a little desperate, and full of yearning.