Invitation to connect on LinkedIn

From George Henderson Specialist at Wide Wide World of Transportation Houston, Texas Area I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. - George Confirm that you know George You are receiving Invitation to Connect emails. Unsubscribe © 2012, LinkedIn Corporation. 2029 Stierlin Ct. Mountain View, CA 94043, USA

Running to Keep Up

Doing our best to keep our heads above water

SAN MATEO, Calif., July 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Con-way Inc. (NYSE: CNW) today reported net income to common shareholders for the second quarter of 2009 of $31.5 million (after preferred stock dividends), or 64 cents per diluted share. The results compared to second-quarter 2008 net income to common shareholders (after preferred stock dividends) of $48.7 million, or $1.02 per diluted share. The 2008 second-quarter net income included a net gain from discontinued operations of 4 cents per diluted share.

...

Revenue in the 2009 second quarter was $1.06 billion, a decrease of 21.2 percent from last year's revenue of $1.34 billion. Operating income in the 2009 second quarter was $66.0 million, a decrease of 30.5 percent compared to $94.9 million earned in the second quarter a year ago.

...

Con-way Truckload continued to manage effectively through a difficult market for full-truckload services. "The volume of shipper bid activity moderated from what we saw in the first quarter but weak demand and over-capacity kept pricing under pressure," Stotlar noted. "Our truckload unit took steps in the quarter to right-size its fleet, selling 195 older tractors and aligning its resource base closer to market demand. Con-way Truckload remains well positioned as a premium service provider with sound operations, a loyal customer base and excellent cost controls."

...

TRUCKLOAD

For the second quarter of 2009, Con-way Truckload, the company's full-truckload transportation operation, reported:

-- Operating income of $6.9 million, a 44.7 percent decline from last
year's operating income of $12.4 million. Results included an asset
disposition loss of $2.5 million from the sale of 195 tractors as fleet
capacity was realigned for market conditions, and a $1.0 million
write-down related to the 2007 CFI acquisition.
-- Revenue of $89.8 million was down 34.6 percent compared to 2008 revenues
of $137.4 million. The quarterly revenue reflects the elimination of
inter-company revenues of $53.5 million in 2009 and $44.2 million in
2008. The truckload market continued to experience soft demand
exacerbated by excess capacity.
-- Operating ratio on revenue, before inter-company eliminations and
exclusive of fuel surcharges, was 94.7 compared to last year's
operating ratio of 90.6.

Like I said earlier in the month, "It ain't bad but it could be better."

Forty four point seven percent down feels like the end of the world some weeks but at least there is a paycheck coming in every week. The suits at my company are really trying hard to keep all the moving parts moving together and doing a remarkable job.

Many of my kind are simply out of work.

2nd UPDATE: UPS 2Q Income Dn 49%; Sees 3Q Earnings Below Views

And, there might be light at the end of the tunnel

Freight volume: Tough times may be receding

Jul 24, 2009 3:26 PM, By Sean Kilcarr, senior editor

Though the slump in freight volume is expected to continue for the rest of the year, many transportation providers believe the toughest stretch may now be in the rearview mirror. And if the downturn removes weaker competitors from the playing field, some companies believe that may open up opportunities for growth and market share gains. ...

Just a glimmer but light all the same.

Ozark, Alabama

Well, it 's been better but it's not bad for the Friday before July 4th. Everything basically shutdown at noon today as far as freight is concerned, so

we'll be here awhile. Such is trucking on holidays. Been here since nine Thursday night. Learning all there is to learn about Ozark.

View Larger Map

Here we remain at the intersection of US 231 and Jernigan Rd until the gods find freight. As I say, It's not bad but it's been better.

Dreaming on down the road

My friends, rj and Migs, seem to be in an introspective mode, so, I suppose I can join them along the path. Seems I dreamt all night or perhaps only an instant - who's to say, it is the dream I recall when I awoke - about rolling a ball across the floor to a seated infant whose back was to the wall. The infant who could crawl and stand but not walk without support was faceless, or perhaps not faceless, not some horror movie blank faced no nose, no mouth, no eyes infant but rather just an infant whose features I did not recognize. It seems from this narrative that it, the baby, was a boy doesn't it. Anyway, I would roll a ball to the baby from some short distance across the floor, I was I believed seated on the floor, open legged, facing the baby. The baby was seated in a similar pose, opened legged, towards me and propped up by the wall behind him. The ball would roll into the area between his legs near his crotch and he would bat the ball away, generally making the ball go back in my direction. The very last scene in the dream the baby bats the ball in a direction that requires that I get up to retrieve the ball and then I lob the ball back to him in the air and the baby catches the ball on the first bounce, stands up and walks the ball back to me. Bingo! Eyes open! Awake! That's it. You go figure and comment here. Yes, I will answer questions about the dream content and anything else you might want to ask that is related to the dream. Waiting outside Charlotte until Wednesday morning when delivery is scheduled to occur. Waiting here since yesterday. Trying to expedite delivery to today but it's JIT and likely I'll just have to wait it out.

I Believe

I Believe
an essay by George Henderson

I believe in the power of love, in the healing and redemptive power of love. I believe that we should love everyone as we love ourselves. And, that in that simple statement, the encouragement to love our neighbor as our self lies a huge puzzle that we can profitably work on all of our lives. The puzzle is this, in loving someone else we learn to love ourselves and we must love ourselves in order to love someone else. The idea can be summed up but not elucidated in the phrase, "the unforgiving are most often the unforgiven" or its corollary, "the unloved are most often the most unloving". Forgiveness and love are so tied together as to be nearly the same thing, one does not exist without the other. "What is love?", you might ask. Well, you'll know it when you feel it, my friend otherwise I will have to refer you to Dr Maslow and his ideas of "unconditional positive regard". Unconditional positive regard is a great idea but expressing that idea is sometimes tricky. Often times we will do what we consider to be a loving act and the object of our action, our beloved, will either not notice our action or misinterpret our actions and then the fun begins.

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
1 John 4, down toward the end, as I recall.

Love yourself fully so that you might love another as well as you love yourself and let another love you fully so that you might learn to love yourself fully.

Got it? OK, do it!

Waiting for delivery in Hammond until Tuesday

Sherry,

Thanks for this wonderful story. Here is the complete article from the Washington Post with the photo essay

Something About Harry

Old Dogs are the Best Dogs

By Gene Weingarten

Sunday, October 5, 2008; Page W16

Not long before his death, Harry and I headed out for a walk that proved eventful. He was nearly 13, old for a big dog. Walks were no longer the slap-happy Iditarods of his youth, frenzies of purposeless pulling in which we would cast ~read more~

Without your forwarding of the chain letter I would not have found the original and the wonderful photo essay. In my unkinder moments in the past I would have done a "reply all" to send this little note to everyone in the chain with a preface excoriating them all for not having the gumption to attribute the work correctly and leaving out the photo essay. I will give the chain letter author credit for having included the Washington Post reference at the bottom of his text, complete I might add with the apocryphal caveat about being reproduced by permission. Chain letter writers, the writers of mass forwardings, the old send your friends a Xerox or a clipping of a magazine article approach to correspondence, have good intentions but it is a kind of laziness that galls me still to this day. But, I have grown older, wiser and more loving so I restrict my efforts to replying to you. The photo essay is a gem and should get wider distribution and to that end I might, emphasis might, post this in some fashion on my blog with the vain hope that it would get out to a wider audience.

I'm going to call you now and if I get you on the way to church, well, good, I'll talk to you and if I don't get you, well, I suppose I'll stop dawdling and go take a shower.

I love you more than words can express and time will allow, but I can write and I do have the rest of my life so I press on with the main task at hand, Loving Sherry, The Last Dance.

Later with love,

George

Nothing works today!

From: George Henderson <xxxxxxxxx@xxxx.com>
Date: Mon, May 25, 2009 at 4:23 AM
Subject: INABILITY TO ACCESS ACCOUNT INFO AND MANIPULATE ACCOUNT ONLINE
To: NYRcustserv@cdsfulfillment.com

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am extremely frustrated at the moment by the inability of your website to allow access to my account using correct account information.

Account Number:XXXXXXXXXX

Name:George Henderson

Address:Po Box xxxxxx,Clarksville,TN 37042,United States

E-mail:xxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxx.com

I am essentially a mechanized mahoot, I live in my over the road truck for all practical purposes and my mail goes to a Postal Box as you can see from the information above.

I am getting ready to move and cannot change my address online this morning nor can I access my account information to confirm the billing information you have. Additionally, and most frustratingly, I cannot enter gift subscriptions for my son’s nor my nieces upcoming graduation gifts.

I have registered successfully for The Digital Reader which is a big plus in my particular situation.

I have attempted several times this morning to enter the gift subscriptions, rechecking and confirming all my address and credit card information each time. The system always responds with some cryptic message about “an error occurred in committing your order”

Unfortunately the following errors occurred:

• There was an error committing the order.

https://magazine.newyorker.com/ecom/subscribe.jsp?oppId=1100290&_requestid=8290161

with no direction as to what the specific error(s) might be.

Your prompt response to this email and your prompt resolution of these issues will be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,

George M Henderson

P.S. Remember, everything you have now came to you on a truck.

There might be hope for the future

There might be hope for the future but it seems frought with difficulty and will be slow in coming

From The New Yorker

In Search Of Success

by Steve Coll

May 25, 2009

In Pakistan’s tribal regions, near the Afghan border, the United States deploys the armed flying robots known as Predator drones in attacks against Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. About a year ago, the United States began to acquire better intelligence regarding these terrorist groups. The recent accuracy of the attacks has caused Al Qaeda to murder suspected spies in self-defeating fits of paranoia, a trend that has disrupted the organization’s ability to plan attacks against the U.S. and its allies. General David Petraeus, the over-all American military commander in the region, told CNN, “Al Qaeda, in particular, has sustained some very serious losses over the course of the last six to ten months or so, and there is a considerable concern among those leaders because of the losses that they have sustained.”

It would be difficult for any President to set aside military analysis of this tenor; in any event, Obama has persisted with the Predator strikes at roughly the same rate as George W. Bush. There is no evidence, however, that the drone campaign has yet moved closer to Al Qaeda’s senior leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, or dismantled the group decisively; instead, the targeting still seems to be stuck in the middle of Al Qaeda’s leadership lists. Moreover, Pakistan’s government, although it apparently facilitates the drone attacks in private, finds it necessary to vocally oppose them in public, knowing how unpopular they are. Opportunism and hypocrisy hardly seem the foundation for a sustainable political-military partnership that breaks with the unhappy past.

There are some ideas in train that may truly be transformative. Last week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act, a bipartisan plan to provide Pakistan with $1.5 billion in annual nonmilitary aid, for at least five years. The legislation is intended to “mend a broken relationship with the Pakistani people,” as John Kerry, who co-sponsored the bill with Richard Lugar, put it. The bill has been well designed to support, for the first time in years, the long-term goal of rebalancing U.S. aid to strengthen pluralism and democracy in Pakistan. “Most Pakistanis feel that America has used and abandoned their country in the past,” Kerry noted. Indeed, most Afghans feel the same. Obama has inherited a toxic legacy; Congress, at least, could ease his burden.

Yes, it would be very nice if Congress began to work in earnest to ease Mr Obama's burden as well as the burden all the world bears from the toxic legacy of the Bush administration.

Inspiration

Friends ,and Loved Ones, Children and Grandchildren,

Gus Lloyd's blog Reflections is good his post today about the changes in the American Catholic Church as regards satisfying the obligation for the Feast of The Ascension is very informative.

Also, from a Protestant Evangelical perspective you might also be interested in Hank Hanegraaff

Hank Hanegraaff serves as president and chairman of the board of the North Carolina-based Christian Research Institute. He is also host of the Bible Answer Man radio program, which is broadcast daily across the United States and Canada—as well as around the world through the Internet at www.equip.org.

Widely regarded as one of the world’s leading Christian apologists, Hanegraaff is deeply committed to equipping Christians to be so familiar with truth that when counterfeits loom on the horizon, they recognize them instantaneously.

~read more~

Last Sunday, as we Catholics are aware from childhood, was the "Fifth Sunday After Easter", "The Fifth Sunday of Easter", or "The Fifth Sunday of Pacaltide" depending on which flavor of English you speak.

Recently, I have returned to a church to which I have a deep and long standing emotional attachment, St Michael's Houston, Texas, it is the building to be sure that I have the emotional attachment to and the Wicks organ. I have been going to Saint Mike's since it was built and I was there during the several days when the Wicks was installed.

Coming up this Sunday is Pentecost an important day in the Christian tradition. As much as the Western Protestants would like to object the liturgical calendar is still set by The Pope in Rome as far as I know and the best source I've found for the Christian liturgical calendar is The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wherein you will find Liturgical Calendar 2009 for the Dioceses of The United States of America. The USCCB also has an excellent page of documentation, Committee on Divine Worship, about the Catholic liturgy, if you're interested in such things.

Many of you, my children and grandchildren in particular, are of some faith, in some way, Epsicopalian or Protestant Evangelical, and one of you was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church in infancy. Some of you, my friends in particular are of no particular ostensible faith but still seem to have some sense of something beyond the senses, some measure of "the force" if nothing else that lies within human life and its various expressions in art and literature as well as social and political organizations.

I have had some extensive exposure to other philosophical traditions, in particular Zen Buddhism, and no less a person than His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama himself has encouraged me to continue in a spiritual tradition that is familiar to me, especially if that tradition and its training extend back into my preschool years. So, with the Dalai Lama's exhortation in mind I have begun to refamiliarize myself with my Catholic faith.

Pentecost is coming up this Sunday. No matter your faith, whether you have one or not, whether you have a little or alot, whether you can express your faith or lack of faith in words or hold it close to yourself in a nonverbal way, I encourage you strongly to at least read about the history and meaning of The Pentecost and perhaps consider the true meaning of the word inspiration and how it might apply to your life on a daily basis.

Inspiration

c.1303, "immediate influence of God or a god," especially that under which the holy books were written, from O.Fr. inspiration, from L.L. inspirationem (nom. inspiratio), from L. inspiratus, pp. of inspirare "inspire, inflame, blow into," from in-"in" + spirare "to breathe" (see spirit). Inspire in this sense is c.1340, from O.Fr. enspirer, from L. inspirare, a loan-transl. of Gk. pnein in the Bible. General sense of "influence or animate with an idea or purpose" is from 1390. Inspirational is 1839 as "influenced by inspiration;" 1884 as "tending to inspire."

Quick definitions (inspiration)

▸ noun: arousing to a particular emotion or action
▸ noun: a product of your creative thinking and work ("He had little respect for the inspirations of other artists")
▸ noun: a sudden intuition as part of solving a problem
▸ noun: arousal of the mind to special unusual activity or creativity
▸ noun: the act of inhaling; the drawing in of air (or other gases) as in breathing
▸ noun: (theology) a special influence of a divinity on the minds of human beings

From the Tent Maker, a few words worth thinking about, in my opinion, in this context, no matter how much you might not like the Tent Maker or his greater body of work, here he has, I think, something worthwhile

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

In My Own Words, By Bstan-ʼdzin-rgya-mtsho, His Holiness The Dalai Lama, His Holiness, The Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama XIV, Rajiv Mehrotra

The journey is the destination

And, from our old Hebrew brothers

Trust in the LORD with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make your paths straight.
Do not be wise in your own eyes;
fear the LORD and shun evil.
This will bring health to your body
and nourishment to your bones.

Well, I'm sure you've had enough by now. I can only encourage you to have some LORD in your life, some guiding principle verbalized or unverbalized, something you can be inspired by every waking moment.

Without competent and immediate medical intervention we are at any given time about six breaths and three heartbeats away from the next adventure.

Every breath is a gift, every beat of your heart is benevolence.

Be thankful, be inspired.

May the God of Hope fill you with all Joy and Peace as you trust in Him, so that You may overflow with Hope by the Power of the Holy Spirit. Amen! ~read more~

Love,

George

!-)

P.S. Yes, freight is slow. Sitting in Chicopee,MA waiting for a load since last night.

God does not call those who are ready but rather God makes ready those He calls.

www.qualityofthelight.blogspot.com

And now for something more positive

There maybe hope for those of us who know what to do now.

It's fire sale time again and there won't be an RTC. Ladies and Gentlemen get your licenses in order and your websites up and running.

Pascal Lamy, the director-general of the World Trade Organization, says,"My point is that retreating from market opening is not a solution to the economic crisis. For countries that depend on trade and have specialized according to comparative advantage, a reversal of openness will impose significant costs on the economy. What is more, setting up new barriers to trade will be seen as protectionism and will risk retaliation from trade partners. One country's exports are another country’s imports. Rather than reviving economies, the effect of this will be to worsen the global crisis."

~read more~

Mr Lamy seems to be dead on to me but as he says Washington seems to be a bit slow on processing and implementing ideas like his, but perhps slow is better than not moving along at all. There is always hope that things might pick up if they are at least moving in some way.

Where are we now?

'splain to me, Lucy, where are we now.

Does anyone know where we are now?

Last summer these guys knew where were and where we were going or thougt they did. Really, they really did. Does anyone really know now?

Slow Day

Zachary,LA - A slow day here.

Duhzn't get mo betta dan dis ma bruthers and sizters. No hit doan beez much mo betta.

Seven and a half hours from the area near the Bud brewery in Houston yesterday. Leaving at noon we arrived here in Zachary, read that far north Baton Rouge, at seven thirty last evening, a distance of two hundred eighty three miles. What rate of progress is that class? Only had to change clothes twice, once in Houston at the start and once in Zachary at the end. Did I mention the rain? We really do need to look into being able to raise the landing gear from the left seat. The load here seems to be canceled or at least has a severe SNAFU. My hotel and other travel arrangements for my niece's wedding in Charleston,SC on Saturday coming up are all in place along with my beautiful date for the event, the lovely Ms Bee Pee Oh. Beautiful woman Bee is, perhaps you've met her brother, Three. I should have been in Memphis by now.

Yas Sir, If dog farts wuz air I'd be N a Gotdamned hurricane bout now. Gawd! I just luvs de air here.

At least I've got Bee Pee Oh!

Anybody seen Three? Three, hey Man, we got to do a better job of getting these ducks in a row next time.

Everybody tried, the home office did a great job, the travel booking agents were superior and the shipper tried but sometimes ...

Three, yo dude, you got any double ought. Yeah, I know a bit heavy for ducks, but hey, if we hit'em they'll drop, right!

Oh Happy Day

It is a very happy day, indeed. Despite all the personal distress at the moment I can take some significant joy from last night's delivery of the prize after nearly two years worth of work by Obama and his team. Work with me here and just start the video below

and let it play while you read the rest of this post. Obama has shown his ability to fill the office of president ably if by nothing else than the highly effective campaign organization he has built and run. Obama is nothing if not plugged in to the modern media environment and all the tools it can provide for a new method of governing as Joshua Zumbrun writes in Forbes today, Obama's Machine. It's definitely a new day when you've got the co-founder of Facebook doing your campaign website.

Today, forty five years after Dr King's march on Washington and the "I have a dream" speech in August of 1963 and the fight over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law just ten months later in July, and all the civil unrest that followed we may have finally come to the beginnings of a post racial America. Now, if we can only get moving on getting to the post Neo-Con America.

It's going to be a bumpy ride I'm sure, a real roller coaster of a ride, one that may last beyond my lifetime - I participated in the Kennedy campaign in high school -, but a necessary ride that has finally begun. Obama is up to the ride I'm sure if he runs his administration as well as he has run his campaign.

If you're done with Choeur Gospel Celebration de Quebec with Sylvie Desgroseilliers and Oh Happy Day a few more videos are linked below and you might play these while you read Stephen Henderson from the Detroit Free Press today, Obama's win creates a new reality for world, and spend a bit of time on your own thinking about how far we've come, how far we have got to go, and how you, that's right you, are going to help get us there. Get us there today, tomorrow and all the next days. We surely need to get there.

Lyndon telling the nation "we shall overcome".


Pete singing We Shall Overcome.


And, finally Gill Scott - the father of rap music - telling us it won't be on the TV.


Oh Happy Day! The door is open now, we have to walk through. It's time to walk the walk!

And, just so we don't get too far from the cultural roots of this event here are a few quotes from the book of Romans, the fifteenth and the twelfth chapters as I recall, as best as I can recall them

May the God of Hope fill you will all Peace and Joy as you trust in Her so that you might overflow with Hope by the Power of the Holy Spirit.

Do not repay evil for evil. As far as is possible live at peace with everyone. Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good.

And finally, thanks to Marlyne who got me started today with her email entitled Oh Happy Day

What a night. I teared up when ABC predicted Ohio for Obama, as it sealed my conviction that we would win. ... I feel as if I got my country back tonight. Perhaps, just perhaps, we can reclaim the true values of America and move on.

See more of how things look at The Big Picture, The next President of the United States.

Feed, feed, feed

RSS, Atom, Feedburner, Google Stats, sitemaps

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead,
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head. Feed your head. Feed your head"

did we get there? I think so, there's an RSS chiclet at the top right hand corner.

We'll see, we'll see, darkly through the glass very likely but we'll see.

Perhaps the doormouse had it correctly, it's been nearly a year now, now let's see how do we go about this ...

Perhaps some pictures to start with, yes, that might be the ticket.

Here's one from another soul who follows the doormouse's instructions scrupulously hour by hour like an office.


And, in my office last week on Sunday we found an early Winter in Beaver, Utah and a wonderful Fall in Detroit on Wednesday.

Walked to Greektown for a lovely lunch with a former workmate who I'd not seen in nearly forty years and whose sparkling blue eyes revealed that as always she has avoided being bored by a tireless dedication to life.

How would we get rj and Marlyne together? They would enjoy each other immensely I think. Oh, yes the virtual world that's where they could meet, here.

IED

Acronyms, so many meanings for so few letters. Here, now, tonight, typing with my thumb on my phone to force a slow pace, it's explosive alright and intermittent but it's not a device it's a disorder. Like my "lysdexia" only a "reasonable accommodation" is possible never victory, never recovery. The dyslexia was reasonably accommodated in some serendipitous ways beginning at the age of four in 1951 when my father who had been teaching me to read using phonics discovered, much to his displeasure, that I could not read sentences of more than two or at most three words. After several visits to various extended family members who were teachers and the pediatrician it was decided that perhaps the best thing to do was to place me in school as soon as possible and hope that I either caught on in the hands of professionals or if necessary caught up by repeating the first few grades as often as required. The September before my fifth birthday in November I was placed in a private kindergarten and then the September before my sixth birthday I went into the first grade with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart at St Mary's School. In every room at St Mary's there was a placard above the front blackboard with the caption

Read it, Say it, Write it and Know it

displayed beneath a lithograph, some Renaissance Master's work I suppose, depicting a toddler Jesus, Mary and Joseph in the traditional family pose with Joseph standing behind a seated Mary, Jesus in Mary's lap and both Mary and Joseph looking down beneath their halos at the three or four year old Jesus who stared with the Deity's omniscient eyes straight out at the viewer. We did lots of oral recitation as a group and lots of "read it, say it, write it" individually in school and at home. By the sixth grade most traces of dyslexia were not manifest as long as I kept to the program which was simply lots of drill in the old method, filling reams of paper with my work. Eight years with the nuns and this method seemed to do the trick. By my senior year in a public High School I came out of the middle of my graduating class with ninetieth percentile SAT's and advanced placement in English, Russian, French and Math. I went on in the space of the next twenty years through a complete baccalaureate program in Biochemistry but never graduating, did two years of graduate work in Physiology and Pharmacology and later actually earned a BS in Computer Science, the only actual degree. No one seems to know but me and perhaps my writing coach of these last ten years who has simply been patient, leaned on me hard to straighten out my tangled thoughts and never even suggested the obvious. So reasonable accommodation is possible in one area at least. But, with Intermittent Explosive Disorder reasonable accommodation seemed to be at best at the tender age of sixty still a distant and perhaps unachievable goal until today. The U S Navy, from which I am now officially retired, innumerable hospital laboratory jobs, countless outside sales jobs, marriages and sundry other relationships have all at one time or another fallen victim to IED. Today the current position as a mechanized mahoot nearly became a casualty due to my extreme displeasure over some rather long repair delays, I'm still here waiting on repairs nearly twenty four hours after the problems erupted. Repairs that could have been avoided if some timely action had been taken earlier as I suggested. I would have exploded and walked off this morning if it were not for a few kind words from a very insightful site manager who himself has many of the same opinions about our company as I do. My site manager, who if he hasn't had training as a counselor or analyst certainly seems to have the skills, simply dissuaded me from taking a rent car and going home by saying that perhaps things would work out today if I just gave it all some more time and that often he had the same urge recently but has restrained himself and found a good result in most cases, if not exactly the result he wanted at least better than things were before. His opening statement in response to my question as to what would be the best cab company to use to pick up my rent car was, "Oh, that's not necessary I'll have someone drive you. Are you going on vacation?" My site manager has been placed in one of my company's major locations as a trouble shooter to straighten out a few wrinkles that have developed over the years. This fellow, my site manager, who grew up in Germany but has only the slightest trace of not having had English as a first language, is a shining example of how respect is earned not demanded. He is firm but sympathetic, an excellent listener but not incapable of giving orders and expecting them to be carried out. He is renowned among the longer term employees as a fair, straight talking guy who can get things done. It was in that vein that he presented his suggestion this morning that I just wait a bit, not quite an imperative but a soft command that might best be followed. Where was this fellow in all the other jobs and situations in the past when I needed him? Perhaps the old Zen aphorism, "The teacher arrives when the student is ready", has come to me in the flesh. Perhaps, just perhaps, some reasonable accommodation with IED is possible before we take the dirt nap. No big boom today, thank God and my site manager. Onward ever onward and upward, nearer my God to Thee. Wonder what happens if you write "JMJ" in the notes section of the daily log? Perhaps the nuns were right

Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body. 'In your anger do not sin' Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.

their method seemed to work before. A good manager, everyone needs a good manager. What do those troublesome Pentecostals always say, "Let go and let God." Hmm. Hmm, indeed.

All the correct connections

Tired of right and left, red and blue, well, try connecting correctly for a change to good solid thinking about some political issues, try

Friday Fronts: David Cole on Jack Goldsmith on The Daily Blague

and don't forget to try the PodCast.

Thawing out

Idling away the morning folding laundry and watching Iceman on AMC. Took my road bud back to his truck around six, came back home and took Pelé to school around seven, came back home again and began on the INet with The Solar Queen's new notebook, Compaq Presario C727, where the keyboard is just too small for my hands. On mine now, my laptop, Compaq Presario V6171CL, a bigger screen and a much larger and more comfortable keyboard. I don't think anyone truly understood the real meaning of "personal computer" until the advent of laptops, notebooks and handhelds or smartphones, they are for me truly an extension of my being. The physical devices themselves, my smartphone and my laptop are so personal, so known to me in their look and feel that they are like my shoes or my truck, they are in every sense mine and I am as uncomfortable using someone else's as I would be wearing someone else's shoes even if they were the same size and a proper fit. Iceman has been taken down now by The Solar Queen's preprogrammed recording of Democracy Now on Free SpeechTV with Amy Goodman. I'll dump Amy in a minute and probably hear about it later tonight but for now I just marvel at the marketing in play here with Amy's physical appearance and apparent left sided vagus nerve compression, she has all the signs of a mild case of Bell's Palsy to me. God forbid that she has Ramsey Hunt syndrome, not nice. Amy looks like a Mennonite or Amish woman in the privacy of her own room, plain straight unstyled hair, no visible makeup and certainly "plain dress". The content is not remarkable just the presentation format, image and marketing, it is all image and marketing. Style is everything they say, different styles for different marketing niches, I suppose. Where will all this fragmentation end or better yet lead us? Trent Lott is on now with video that was done on a cell phone or some lo res video but fairly high res audio device, it is noted in the upper right hand screen corner as " live on 26 Nov." Back to Iceman and soon back to my road truck to retrieve my own power adaptor for my laptop, I robbed The Solar Queen's just a moment ago to power up my laptop which had gone completely battery dead in "hibernate mode" since I last closed the lid on the road truck probably the day arrived here back on Wednesday before Thanksgiving. As I say, I have no one except Pelé to simply to talk with and he does a fine job within the limits of his small but ever expanding and developing realm. I try not to stretch him too far too soon. I suppose I talk to a lot of people daily but all within the bounds of the particular social context, fuel desk clerks, counter clerks at the food shops, drivers on the radio, my company's administrative staff on the phone, my shipper's and receiver's personnel on the phone and in person. Sort of an "open prison" I'm in it seems. Well, enough I'm sure, you have a life. This is in many ways the same stream of consciousness, the conversational monologue, if you will, reduced to writing that I was so prone to write for you three or four years ago but it seems more readable now. Not much better content but more readable. Perhaps we are on the way to really learning to write readable interior monologues for a larger and more organized narrative, a short story perhaps. But only perhaps, so many things stand in the way, mood, my personal mood and the time remaining in a lifetime not being the least of the obstacles.

I'm going to copy this to Quezon, if only to provoke an email conversation. I have other email to answer from him and will do the answering by one thirty when I have to leave to pick Pelé up from school. Pelé could, I suppose, ride the bus but we have fallen into the habit of my taking him and picking him up when I'm at home and able.

I feel a certain kinship with poor old Charlie, the defrosted Neanderthal, in Iceman. How long have I been thawed out now, thawed out in terms of relationships, loving or physical - it really doesn't matter at this point, physical will do - with other humans of my kind? What are my kind, I wonder?

Quezon has included in the email that I need to answer this morning a very well worded rant about his dissatisfaction, and the general dissatifaction of many educated Filipinos, with his country and culture. I will ask if I can excerpt that part and foward it to BoozWha for his comments to both of us.

Have a pleasant day. My phone is on and with me. Call, write or come by.

Tricks of the trade

How do I send email to someones cell phone?

Well, Bubba, here's how, at least for a number of CSP's that I've used successfully.

You have to know your recepient's CSP and then address the email to their "10digitphonenumber @ CSP MessagingPortal".

For example, for a Verizon cell phone whose number is 7135551212 use 7135551212@vtext.com.

Verizon: @vtext.com
Former AT&T customers: @mmode.com
Sprint: @messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile: @tmomail.net
Nextel: @messaging.nextel.com
Cingular: @cingularme.com
Virgin Mobile: @vmobl.com
Alltel: @alltelmessage.com OR @message.alltel.com
CellularOne: @mobile.celloneusa.com
Omnipoint: @omnipointpcs.com
Qwest: @qwestmp.com

Remember, any charges incured and the way messages are
delivered and displayed depends on the wireless device and service
plan.

How cozy

How cozy and it will be that way for quite sometime in fact for evermore it would seem

2. Supporting the Republic of Iraq in its efforts to combat all terrorist groups, at the forefront of which is Al-Qaeda, Saddamists, and all other outlaw groups regardless of affiliation, and destroy their logistical networks and their sources of finance, and defeat and uproot them from Iraq. This support will be provided consistent with mechanisms and arrangements to be established in the bilateral cooperation agreements mentioned herein. 3. Supporting the Republic of Iraq in training, equipping, and arming the Iraqi Security Forces to enable them to protect Iraq and all its peoples, and completing the building of its administrative systems, in accordance with the request of the Iraqi government. ~read more~

I try to restrain myself from drinking this early in the morning but this morning I just might relent. Won't someone, please, rid us of these troublesome NeoCons! And, the sooner the better. Where are Lee Harvey, James Earl or Charles when we really need them or is that just the way crazy people do things? Why surely no one would go out and create a stable of the unstable just in case no one might need to push them over the edge. Pushed of course in the right direction over the right edge. Well, let's not pursue this line of speculation lest the professional speculators send their cretinous goons out to talk to us, eh.

Trouble, we ain't got no trouble. None!

Sidiki Conde lost the use of his legs at the age of 14. In Guinea, where he was raised, the handicapped are looked at with suspicion and fear. In an effort to fit in with his culture, Sidiki learned to dance on his hands. He now performs as a dancer and teaches other wheelchair users to do the same. This pod is set in Miami, Florida and follows several people in wheelchairs as they prepare to perform in public. ~read & see more~

Doesn't hurt my eyes any, no not at all.

Now the heart, well, that remains to be seen. I would rather sail through a storm or two than stand on the pier. Every storm comes between long periods calm seas and fair winds. Looks like a pair of very rosy sunsets to me. With any luck there will be no red dawn, least wise nothing we can't handle. Ain't that right there, Quezon, ain't that right? And, me mate, Quezon, he said,"Try oranges." Funny fellow, Quezon, perhaps too much Curacao in his coffee lately. And so, Quezon and I have put out to test the seas again. How does it go

If you smile at me
I will understand
'Cause that is something
Everybody everywhere does in the same language

Something about wooden ships on the water as I recall, very free and easy I believe it went. Oh yes,

Go take a sister, then, by the hand
Lead her away from this foreign land
Far away, where we might laugh again
We are leaving, you don't need us

And it's a fair wind
Blowin' warm out of the south over my shoulder
Guess I'll set a course and go

I'm sure David will forgive me this lifting, he got it so right, so very free and easy.

Such a sweet sound to my ears

Aggies top Longhorns!

Tidbits

From The New York Times
Op-Ed Contributor
Catch Me, I’m Falling
By SAMUEL I. SCHWARTZ
Published: August 13, 2007
THE horrific collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis was but one more in the history of infrastructure failures, and I’m afraid it will be old news soon. In 1967, during the busy Christmas shopping season, the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River between Point Pleasant, W.Va., and Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed, plunging scores of people into the river and killing 46. During my nearly 20 years as an engineer with the New York City Department of Transportation, I witnessed ~read more~

"Money is like manure, it should be spread around." - Brooke ( Russell Kuser Marshall ) Astor, 30Mar1902-13Aug2002. How do you properly list all the previous surnames w/o a narrative?

Jonis Agee, author of TheRiver Wife, related to James?


From Early Warning
Posted at 08:43 AM ET, 08/14/2007
Partisan Warfare
In the coming weeks, as Congress and the American public prepare for the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus on the progress of the surge in Iraq, we'll hear a lot about the value of "professional" military advice. As President Bush has said, Washington ought not substitute "the opinions of politicians for the judgments of our military commanders."
But are military officers, specifically flag officers (generals and admirals), also political partisans? Increasingly -- and sadly -- they are. More important, the brass is profoundly "political," which is to say that its recommendations and decisions are hardly ever made for purely tactical or operational reasons....continue >>

From The Biscuit Report
Think about that for a minute. There are people in this country who believe, when hired to screen out naughty language and naked people, that non-profane criticism of George Bush somehow qualifies. We live in a country where it's possible to have such a "misunderstanding".Bravo, Republicans! Bravo! Why make it an actual crime to criticize the Dear Leader when you can just convince people to censor the criticism as a matter of course?

All I need now is a scene to plant this dialog within

Someone asked me recently at party, "Do you believe in Bush?" Not wanting to start a political conversation, I coyly replied, "Busch? No, God, no! Don't you have Miller Lite? Or, Killian's Red, that would be great," while I tensed with angst not knowing if they would take the bait and go to the bar or press me further. They took me for drunk and wandered away. Then I felt a warm surge of relief wash over me like the surf, "Believe in Dubbya? Believe? George W Bush? Really! Certainly not! Believing in or believing Dubbya is so ludicrous it makes believing in God seem rational," and I felt much better.

That dialog is largely stolen and reworded from Ann Lamott in one of the last chapters of Plan B: FurtherThoughts on Faith. Ms Lamott reminds me of Laurie Beth Jones who brought me Jesus in Blue Jeans: A Practical Guide to Everyday Spirituality but Ann is far more accessible to me. Laurie and Ann and I could talk in the church lobby but only Ann and I could go out and have a beer - I would be the only one drinking, Ann quit - and talk about faith and fucking. Admirably for a committed Christian Ms Lamott despises GWB and weaves this desperation and her wrestling with the resulting depression throughout Plan B where she deals, in language appropriate to the the topic and her mood at the time, with her daily battles in life and how her particular faith has sustained and strengthened her. Lamott is never preachy and though you might not agree with her you will, like I have, want her on your Lunch Dates I'd Love to Have list. I suppose that I should disclose that I listen to most books and have listened to unabridged versions of the two linked here. Both Laurie and Ann have soothing voices for the road but Ann just draws me in when she recounts how the apostles must have felt in the upper room on Holy Saturday, "... in a room filled with clouds of cigarette smoke I see some really wigged out guys drinking a bit of wine and thinking to themselves, 'boy are we really fucked!'"

Joni and the Cheshire Cat

Warm as ice, cold as fire.
Bright as night, dark as day.
I've looked at
the Cheshire Cat that way.
But, still somehow
it's cat's illusions I have known,
I really don't know cat's at all.

Is it what it seems
the Cheshire Cat
the smile
the smile in my dreams?



Watch for Bubba meets the Zen Shrimper in Bubba's Bait & Sushi, coming soon.

I'm back

Nearly a year since I've done any regular work here. Sometimes I feel like Amy, who commented on DB

Wow, how earnest and clever I was. And how utterly moribund Biscuit is. Every day I think to post on it, and then someone cries or yells "MOM, I need a box cutter and some glue!" and the moment is lost...

about not being able to tend to her blog because of her other responsibilities.

I am in Knoxville, TN since about eight my time, Central Daylight, last night when I fueled up and parked the truck to wait for my Monday morning delivery. It's a bit tight here at one of the older and smaller Pilot truck stops on the west side of Knoxville along IH-40. After I fueled up I had to circle back out in the street, come back in the parking lot, and then I waited for another driver to squeeze his fifty three foot dry van into one of the only open parking spaces directly behind the fuel islands, and then he very kindly got out of his truck and "spotted me" to back into the space next to his truck. There is just barely enough room to do it, pulling up through the fuel island and backing up to "hit the hole" puts you within inches of several obstructions, various curbs which bruise the side walls of your tires, the fuel island pump, trucks in the adjoining parking spaces and all the while other trucks are backed up in the parking lot coming in to fuel and waiting for you to park. Once I had gotten my truck settled into the space I got out to thank the driver, Anthony, who helped me. Anthony and I talked about trucking and all manner of things standing in the parking lot from around nine Knoxville time until nearly midnight with one break to buy soft drinks. It's a solitary business this over the road trucking and personal face to face conversation of any merit does not come often nor last long. Last night was a very unusual occurrence, generally such conversations last only minutes and are pure ritual courtesy but in this case we hit it off for some reason. I know Anthony lives in Chicago on the lakefront downtown with his wife and children, some of his past work history back to Seattle, WA and that he is originally from a small town in Mississippi and he has a similar grasp of my life. It turns out that we are both veterans of the US Navy though our service dates a very far apart, he enlisted in 1989 and I enlisted in 1967. I never asked for Anthony's last name nor he mine and likely we will never see each other again, but if we do meet again, there will certainly be the basis for another friendly conversation of some depth. Anthony and I are both from the South. Perhaps it's a Southern thing not asking for nor giving a last name when you spend some time with another person in a chance meeting, it felt very familiar and comfortable to me. We both agree that cornbread has no white flour nor sugar, only coarse ground yellow corn meal, bacon fat, salt, soda and buttermilk. And, we both recalled having regular family meals, as children, of ham hocks, navy beans, sliced purple onions, chow-chow and, of course, cornbread. All this is generally served with chilled buttermilk, ice water or sweet tea, your choice and sometimes you have all three yourself in the course of the meal. I can't recall in detail all that we talked about standing in the parking lot for nearly three hours but it ranged from the best routes around the traffic in the major areas of congestion to parenting practices.

Now after a mile and half round trip by foot along the Turkey Creek Greenway to the Wal-Mart Super Center I'm blessedly back in my air conditioned truck where the air is down in the high seventies and relatively dry, outside at five this evening it is still in the high nineties and even though the NWS shows the relative humidity at under fifty percent it's still seems "wet" outside to me. Perhaps lumping my week's supply of groceries back to the truck just made me work a little harder than usual or it is just damp along Turkey Creek. You don't realize what a half gallon of milk, eight packs of yogurt, a half gallon of orange juice, a half pound of pepper cheese, a pound of crackers, two rolls of paper towels, a half dozen bananas, four apples and a few other odds and ends really weighs until you pack it three quarters of a mile over the blazing asphalt back to your house. Now it's time to attend to some tedious financial issues just like last year at this time. And then, naptime until about six local time tomorrow morning when I'll set out to cover the last six miles to my destination. Living in forty eight square feet is interesting especially when you realize that you have to get a bed, first and foremost, into that six by eight foot area. But the adjoining office is only a single pace away and it's a spacious thirty two square feet, four by eight feet, with a very nice picture window view on three sides, high up where you can see what's going on. Three years off the road and now a full year back on the road. Yes, I'm back.

What Really Matters

Did you ever want somebody back?
Not necessarily
in the way
that you might have had them before?
And, this is really sorry language , this had
this verbal talisman of possession.
But anyway, let's just suppose
that you want to revive a relationship
with somebody.

And,
so you start to chat 'em up
and maybe even direct them to
right here.
Well, if you're here,
this is where you're supposed to be.

Did I wound you?
Uh huh.
Deeply?
Yaep.
Am I sorry?
Uh huh.
Does that change anything?
Nope.

But, what's important,
I think,
is that somehow
my behavior
can demonstrate to you,
hopefully over an extended period of time,
that the faith and trust that you once placed in me was not misguided.
And,
that within whatever limits you would like to set for any further interaction,
I am prepared, as well as committed,
to perform.
Perform to your satisfaction.

And, that's
what really matters.

Dreaming of Connections

Reading in Julian Barnes's "The Past Conditional" in this week's The New Yorker

Perhaps Grandpa would have taken his celestial pipe out of his mouth, given me an uncharacteristic wink, and murmured complicitly, "I once knew a very nice girl called Mabel."

I'm drawn back to a novel which takes the same imagery to begin as Barnes uses to close

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

and I wonder if that is a good enough reason to remember Jailbird and Vonnegut, wonder if such a connection is of any value, wonder if I shouldn't be able to place Kurt is some larger context and in some more particular relationship to the larger cannon of writing that is thought to be important. Then I think, "What the Hell, self abuse is good enough." Especially after having read Oran Pamuk talking about writers

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

in "My Father's Suitcase" just a few pages later in the same issue of The New Yorker. Perhaps it is all self abuse, innumerable writers pleasuring themselves spewing their words out on page after page in medium after medium.

If as I heard WFB say once eyeing the stopwatch at the top of his clipboard while interviewing an author, "If an unexamined life is not worth living then certainly I'm a corpse." and knowing fullwell that WFB intensely examines his life and that he's just not telling anyone about it, perhaps not even himself, then perhaps writers are no more or less alive or worthwhile than others they just live and measure worth differently. Thinking now about how the NOW, the current moment, is the point of tangency between God and Man, the best taste of the infinite that can be had, I settle back into the hot water of my bath, open the tap for a bit more and read Pamuk's paragraph again thinking of the writers I know, RJK, Migs, Elisabeth and Vito Esterno wondering how writers might be like painters. If writers are painters, then I am a house painter, eh? Or perhaps a madman scraping a bit of color off everyone else's canvass and saving it on my pallette for some grand canvass of my own, a grand canvass which has as yet not even a charcoal cartoon.

Yo soy un conductor, yo soy un viejo Tejano gringo puro. ¿Y, yo soy un pinturista? No se.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be looking for a place to park my truck in Chicago as close to the Dan Ryan and West 51st St as possible until I can get it unloaded at eight o'clock Tuesday morning and all this will be a dream.

Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood.

... non-state actors like the Hezbo crowd and al-Qaida have no interest in graduating to statehood. They've got bigger fish to fry. If you're interested in establishing a global caliphate, getting a U.N. seat and an Olympic team only gets in the way. The "sovereign" state is of use to such groups merely as a base of operations, as Afghanistan was and Lebanon is. They act locally but they think globally.

And that indifference to the state can be contagious. Lebanon's Christians may think of themselves as "Lebanese," but most of Hezbollah's Shiite constituency don't. Western analysts talk hopefully of fierce differences between Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Persian, but it's interesting to note the numbers of young Sunni men in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere in recent weeks who've decided that Iran's (Shiite) President Ahmadinejad and his (Shiite) Hezbo proxies are the new cool kids in town. During the '90s, we grew used to the idea that "non-state actors" meant a terrorist group, with maybe a few hundred activists, a few thousand supporters. What if entire populations are being transformed into "non-state actors"? Not terrorists, by any means, but at the very minimum entirely indifferent to the state of which they're nominally citizens.

Hence that statistic: Seven percent of British Muslims consider their primary identity to be British, 81 percent consider it to be Muslim. By comparison, in the most populous Muslim nation on the planet, 39 percent of Muslim Indonesians consider themselves Indonesian first, 36 percent consider themselves Muslim first. For more than four years now, I've been writing about a phenomenon I first encountered in the Muslim ghettoes of the Netherlands, Belgium and other European countries in the spring of 2002: Second- and third-generation European Muslims feel far more fiercely Islamic than their parents and grandparents.

That's the issue: Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood.

-read more-

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST, August 13, 2006

Think well, write well, it's always worth your time.

Think well, write well, it's always worth your time.  Tony Blair must have an outstanding group of researchers and speech writers. In speaking recently about the current conflict in Lebanon Blair said in part

It is still possible even now to come out of this crisis with a better long-term prospect for the cause of moderation in the Middle East succeeding. But it would be absurd not to face up to the immediate damage to that cause which has been done.

We will continue to do all we can to halt the hostilities. But once that has happened, we must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us. There is an arc of extremism now stretching across the Middle East and touching, with increasing definition, countries far outside that region.

To defeat it will need an alliance of moderation, that paints a different future in which Muslim, Jew and Christian; Arab and Western; wealthy and developing nations can make progress in peace and harmony with each other. My argument to you today is this: We will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even-handed, fair and just in our application of those values to the world.

The point is this. This is war, but of a completely unconventional kind.

9/11 in the US, 7/7 in the UK, 11/3 in Madrid, the countless terrorist attacks in countries as disparate as Indonesia or Algeria, what is now happening in Afghanistan and in Indonesia, the continuing conflict in Lebanon and Palestine, it is all part of the same thing. What are the values that govern the future of the world? Are they those of tolerance, freedom, respect for difference and diversity or those of reaction, division and hatred? My point is that this war can't be won in a conventional way. It can only be won by showing that our values are stronger, better and more just, more fair than the alternative. Doing this, however, requires us to change dramatically the focus of our policy.

Unless we reappraise our strategy, unless we revitalize the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade, and in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win. And this is a battle we must win.

What is happening today out in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and beyond is an elemental struggle about the values that will shape our future.

It is in part a struggle between what I will call Reactionary Islam and Moderate, Mainstream Islam. But its implications go far wider. We are fighting a war, but not just against terrorism but about how the world should govern itself in the early 21st century, about global values.

The root causes of the current crisis are supremely indicative of this. Ever since September 11th, the US has embarked on a policy of intervention in order to protect its and our future security. Hence Afghanistan. Hence Iraq. Hence the broader Middle East initiative in support of moves towards democracy in the Arab world.

The point about these interventions, however, military and otherwise, is that they were not just about changing regimes but changing the values systems governing the nations concerned. The banner was not actually "regime change," it was "values change." What we have done therefore in intervening in this way is far more momentous than possibly we appreciated at the time.   -read more-

The British prime minister delivered this speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on August 1.

A speech well worth anyone's time to read and ponder.