Leadership in Houston

Bill White, the mayor of Houston, today talking about commandeering facilities that have events booked said, ' ... if it entails someone suing us, well, OK, sue us and explain why money is more important than lives ...'. This is the new Gulianni, perhaps even a new presidential contender, if he chooses. White certainly demonstrated leadership today in Houston with words that ring clear as a bell about what's to be done, who will do it and why. White's statements and actions stand in stark contrast to the vague mealy mouthed rhetoric of the national leadership in Washington D. C. today, and stand in even starker contrast to Dubya's remarks at the NOLA airport today which were just so much sound bite and little else. It would be nice. even if you didn't agree with his policies and actions, to have a leader in national office who is as forthcoming and clear as Mr White was today.


Marketplace has done an exemplary job in covering all aspects of the Katrina disaster and well deserves a listen from anyone who wants a balanced and broad view of the situation.



The complete report from today

Friday, September 02, 2005, Marketplace

Quote of the day:"If we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?" asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican.



News Source of the day:NewsPath

Have a great Labor Day Holiday! About one million Amercians will not! Send money now for relief! See you back here, Tuesday 6 September 2005

Iraqianna, New Iraqoleans, truly deplorable

Iraqianna, New Iraqoleans, that's what it looks like today. Truly deplorable, that is the only way to characterize the situation in New Orleans.  A fine historic city and what once was a vibrant modern city has been reduced to absolute anarchy beyond my wildest nightmares of civil collapse. Although it would be nice to place all the blame on the national administration in Washington D. C., and much of the blame likely belongs there, it appears that the city, the county and the state all simply failed to make even the most simple prudent plans or preparations for the current situation.  Compared to New York City after 9/11 and Florida after last year's storms the situation in NOLA is nothing less than deplorable.  The State of Texas much to its credit has responded promptly and in a highly organized way to take in and take care of massive numbers of refugees from Louisiana.  It all is a truly sad situation that will reverberate through our national history and the lives of millions along the Gulf Coast for decades to come.  All I can do is send money for now.  But come the midterm elections I will not forget these issues or the issues to come and I encourage everyone to do the same, send money and pay attention.  Help and do not forget.

Apoptosis and other hot links

I want to write about the wrongness of our course in Iraq but every time I start the topics and subtopics just seem to branch out endlessly in front of me. Fortunately, a friend wrote a very focused short piece a few days ago, "Wide of the Mark" at Daily Blague which has encouraged me not to abandon the idea entirely. As with most things I'm having trouble finishing I set the Iraq idea aside and started on something else. A search on "hubbert peak theory oil and gas" led to some very nice articles, but the best thing that turned up was Google Scholar. Google is good for news, views and products but most of the time it really falls down on science issues, very little useful material is returned. I'd been wanting to explore the idea of nicotine as cancer trigger for months but had not had much success and had set the idea aside until I got to a better medical library in Nashville later this year. Using Google Scholar on "nicotine cancer trigger" brought up a cellular biology term I just barely remembered, apoptosis, and also reminded me that I might better search on "nicotine carcenogensis genotoxcity" which was very productive and led to the very nice, recent and complete article, "Nicotine: Potentially a Multifunctional Carcinogen?" which gives a very satisfying answer to the general question of whether nicotine can trigger and promote cancer. Going back to apoptosis on regular Google we found "Apoptosis: Dance of Death" at Cells Alive. What a wonderful site Cells Alive is. I think going to school and/or doing research is a lot more fun now that it was thirty five or forty years ago, it's certainly more attractive. Seems like there was a war on then too. The war in Iraq is not like the war in Viet Nam, except for people dying, it will not respond to the same methods of protest as during my time in graduate school years ago. But it still needs to come to an end and needs to change its course soon. We definitely need to change the politicians soon also. Nothing like a little research in tetratogenicity of nicotine to focus ones mind, eh? Now, I wonder is teratogen an outdated term, is genotoxic a variant or a synonym?

Resonance

At the tender age of fourteen I asked my High School French teacher, Alex Cason, who was Belgian, if the way particular languages were structured influenced the way people thought, if by the very nature of the language a French speaker, a Russian speaker - Alex was also my Russian teacher - and an English speaker might simply form different concepts in thinking about the same topic purely as a result of their individual languages, at the time we were reading All About Language by Mario Pei. Alex dismissed my question as irrelevant and we moved on. Now, nearly better than four decades later the dismissal still stings, but I have the beginnings of an answer that seems to indicate that my question might have had some merit.

Without sharing certain attitudes towards the things around us, sharing a sense of relevance and responding in similar ways, communication would be impossible. It is important, for instance, that nearly all of us agree nearly all the time on what colors things are. Such agreement is part of our concept of color, Wittgenstein suggests. Regularity of the use of such concepts and agreement in their application is part of language, not a logically necessary precondition of it. We cannot separate the life in which there is such agreement from our concept of color. Imagine a different form or way of life and you imagine a different language with different concepts, different rules and a different logic.

This raises the question of the relation between language and forms or ways of life.

Gently lifted from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 6. Rules and Private Language

A dear friend once commented decades ago about my distinct lack of learning in Liberal Arts, "that a good liberal arts education would have added so much resonance to your life". Now nearly in my sixth decade a little resonance is coming around. Perhaps, it is never too late to learn, but this late in life, resonance comes with a distinct feeling of embarrassment at having known Wittgenstein's name for years but little else.

Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife

A friend writes today,

American Christianity: An Oxymoron?

It is very difficult for me to write about something that hasn't taught me something. To learn something new is to reconfigure the brain, if only slightly, and for me there is something about the process that creates a compulsion to write. No such compulsion was born of reading Bill McKibben's piece, in Harper's, "The Christian Paradox." Sure, there were a few little things that I learned from it, such as the dandy finding that

Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. [!!!!!]

That's how the essay begins. -read more-

There is hope, as long as we have Andy and RJ.

NORTH KOREA MOVES ONE MILLION CLONED CATS TO BORDER WITH SOUTH,Angry Kim Jong-Il Retaliates for Seoul’s Dog Cloning

One day after South Korean scientists announced that they had successfully cloned a dog, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il denounced the cloning procedure as “an act of provocation” and immediately moved one million cloned cats to the border with the South.
-read more from Andy-

Golfing For Cats
Patricia Storms has raised a very interesting question at Booklust. Can readers be divided into "men" and "women" simply by what they read? Behind the obvious thrust of the question - are there subjects that interest men but not women, and vice versa, and how important are these subjects to readers overall - lies the issue of authority. Do people read what they're supposed to read? I have only to frame the question to generate the answer, but it should be borne in mind that, until some strange moment in the past seventy to a hundred years, nobody read anything unless it was authorized or - small difference - forbidden. And authority is still with us. Only now it flows from cool people who have excited our envy, not from greybeards in ivory towers.
-read more from RJ-

Cleaning up ...

A friend has written recently at Daily Blague about cleaning up.

"Team Vacation"
"Team Vacation Advances"
"Team Vacation Crests"
"Team Vacation Collapses"

I have my own physical, read that real world, disaster to attack myself and it's in the house not a storage room. And, I doubt that I will be brave enough to photograph my disastrous circumstances and publish them here with comments. But, my friend's effort did push me towards some long neglected virtual cleaning up. Perhaps fifty seven thousand files are a few too many for a 4Gb drive although there is still about 1Gb free. Finding things has become a bit of a problem even with nice tools like Google's desktop search. Three levels of folder directories in Favorites and My Documents and files that date back to 1998 is some real virtual clutter.

We reorganize and purge on, but it's slow going sometimes, moments of nostalgia, checking to see if old links are still active, and just plain 'what the devil is this?' moments impede progress. When the physical house has become inordinately cluttered in the past I have on occasion moved all the clutter to the garage or a storage room and then moved it back into the house a box at a time culling, discarding and rearranging as I go. Seemed like a good approach in the virtual world but it has proven otherwise. Beware! Power users will have no trouble locating the Favorites folder in the Windows subdirectory and simply moving the lot from under drivename:\windows\favorites to a new folder like drivename:\windows\favorites\oldlist. The procedure works, perhaps a bit slowly, but it works. However, and this is a big however, this massive file move creates thousands of dangling file references, "invalid paths" they're called, in the registry which slows the machine down, way down. My registry cleaner burps on the first thousand dangling file references and requires that they be cleaned out before proceeding again. Deletions, massive deletions, will likely cause the same problem.

With a fast new machine, a Pentium IV, and a big drive, one ten times my size, a 40Gb, or an 80Gb, or one of the mammoth 120Gb drives, the problem may not raise its ugly head right away, but it's there lurking in the background for you one day. Solutions? I'm not sure I have any good ones. Don't save so much stuff, that's always good. Do periodic housekeeping and move the old stuff to off-line storage like CD's or DVD's, that's good too and should actually be taken care of with proper periodic backups. If you're saying backups to yourself now and your facial expression is much like that of a calf at a new gate, we need to talk. If you don't know what a calf at a new gate looks like, we really need to talk. All of this brings to mind the idea that nothing is permanent or at least not much is permanently relevant in a Favorites folder. The best solution at the moment seems to be exporting the Favorites as a whole or portions of the Favorites to an HTML file which can be accessed fairly easily through the browser. The HTML Favorites list, however, is in chronological entry order and there is no clean way to sort it. Aren't you just overjoyed to know all this now? Probably all this belongs on Byte Butcher, maybe we'll move it, maybe not. And, so we come to the end of another session of very enjoyable typing. Ciao. EOF

Thorn in the side of authority

The Administration and the Fury
If William Faulkner were writing on the Bush White House
By Sam Apple

Down the hall, under the chandelier, I could see them talking. They were walking toward me and Dick s face was white, and he stopped and gave a piece of paper to Rummy, and Rummy looked at the piece of paper and shook his head. He gave the paper back to Dick and Dick shook his head. They disappeared and then they were standing right next to me.

“Georgie's going to walk down to the Oval Office with me,” Dick said.

“I just hope you got him all good and ready this time,” Rummy said.

-read more-


Spoof of Bush Wins Faux Faulkner Contest
By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS
Associated Press Writer

JACKSON, Miss. — A scathing parody that likens President Bush to the "idiot" in William Faulkner's novel "The Sound and the Fury" has won this year's Faulkner write-alike contest — and touched off a literary spat.

Organizers of the Faux Faulkner competition are accusing Hemispheres, the United Airlines magazine that has sponsored the contest for six years, of playing politics by not putting Sam Apple's "The Administration and the Fury" in its print edition — only on its Web site.

-read more-

Our sincere thanks to Don, an old friend and long time thorn in the side of authority, for these wonderful links.

Writing and Pleasure

Recent pleasures from Outer Life

Texas

N.B.

The Book

Ce n'est pas ma façon de penser.

Last night the kids got Flight of the Phoenix and I rented Almost Peaceful, Un Monde Presque Paisible, a recent French film set in Paris in the days immediately after WWII. Flight of the Phoenix was a bad "B" movie in the original and the current remake is a faithful copy in every stylistic respect.

I rented Almost Peaceful not so much because of any particular interest in French movies but simply because the jacket description looked interesting. It proved out so well on the first viewing last night that I'll do it again tonight.

The last good American movie I've seen was The Hours. It's refreshing to see a different cinemagraphic and directorial style after so much Hollywood material with the kids in the theater and on the DVD.

Some adults at home were put off by the occasional nudity and what they termed a cavalier attitude toward marital infidelity and prostitution that they thought was totally incredible for any surviving Parisian Jew immediately after the War. I thought it all rang very true.

I particularly liked the exposition and resolution of a theme that dealt with the fear of feelings that might lead to marital infidelity. A writer, posing as a tailor to make ends meet, has an interesting scene with an anti-Semite police inspector that might take you by surprise.

The color was magnificent. Bright, warm and primary but not overpowering.

What really caught my eye was the use of still frames as leads into and departures from scenes. Not stills that dissolve into motion or motion that dissolves into a still. Just still frames and then motion that is connected visually and thematically, but not merged. Fun! Crisp! New, maybe, you tell me.

Clotilde Cornau caught my eye. What a cutie she is with red hair.

Unlike Spanish or Russian movies where I can catch the occasional complete phrase, sometimes even an entire group of sentences, here I get just a word every now and then. You'll have to tell me how it is to your ear, if you take any time with it.

It might just be time to start talks instead of wars.

A friend wrote how the events in London yesterday had turned his day into shards and how it is time to start talking to Islamic leaders. Another responded that the current situation in Iraq is in keeping with centuries of economic self interest in the West where currently we have no leaders and that America was intent on speading democracy.

Can democracy be spread or is it just smoke to cover other agendas?

If it can be spread, the methods we've seen so far aren't working.

One of the basic principles of leadership is to lead by example.

What example has the developed world shown the resource rich underdeveloped world over the last hundred years, and particularly oil rich countries in the last sixty or so years? Is the current situation any surprise? Where has the developed western world led the rest of the world?

There are no real leaders in developed countries and it is a two edged sword that cuts to the heart of the neo-con nonsense since there are also no good examples either for undeveloped countries to follow in terms of national aspirations other than ubridled consumerism.

For leaders we substitute spokesmen who serve up spin and ideology instead of inspiring rhetoric and firm principle. For cooperation, encouragement and support we substitute rigid foreign policy, hideously one sided economic development programs and domination, by military occupation if necessary.

Some offer that it is a capitalist conspiracy to dominate the world that causes all the trouble and others cite moral decadence as exemplified in culture and business.

Some posit an Islamic conspiracy that causes all the trouble with its roots in a flawed fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.

It would be nice for all sides if it were a conspiracy, then perhaps the conspirators could be identified and defeated and at least one side would be victorious.

Value systems are not conspiracies. Value systems that are broadly shared and deeply ingrained in a society are not defeated by war, they are only suppressed, unless the war is a war of annihilation.

The developed world no longer seems to have the will nor the taste for effective warfare, to kill and kill again with such ferocity and scope that the enemy no longer resists.

War is killing and lots of it. Appeals to such civilities as the Geneva Conventions and definitions of combatants and noncombatants only cloud the issue, war is taking the gloves off, life or death, losing or winning by any means. Rules of procedure are purely strategic not moral, restraint enters only when both sides are equally or nearly equally capable of atrocity.

Value systems are not subject to declarations of war.

War on Terrorism has a nice ring to it, but that's all it is, just sound, hollow sound, no substance.

So unless your up for a bloodbath it just might be time to rethink the current situation, perhaps war is not an appropriate answer.

An answer implies a question. Maybe the wrong questions got the wrong answers.

Could the questions have been, 'What do we do if the Saudis fall, where can we insert troops in the Middle East, where can we get boots on the ground now to protect our oil interests when the Saudis fall?' Nah, no one could be that dumb. 'Can we fake major maintenance requirements to shut down huge power plants so that we can drive up the price of electricity and make more money? Can we do this cheaply, you know draw the troop strength down from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands quickly after occupation so that it doesn't cost so much? Can I rent a Greek island for my wife's birthday party, where would I get the money? Do we really need all those armored vehicles?' Don't be silly, no one would ask questions like that.

Maybe, just maybe, the United States should examine its relationship with Saudi Arabia, specifically the hideous economic development and military hardware programs that serve little purpose other than to enrich, beyond all reasonable expectation in some cases, the Saudi Royal Family at the expense of the bulk of the Saudi population and to recycle petro dollars back to United States and other Western business interests. Maybe the Brits and the rest of the G8 folks could think along similar lines productively for a number of other countries, as well.

The brutally simple economics of commodity markets which have been distorted in the world oil market until recently by western oil companies and governments will come more to the fore everyday. There is no longer enough excess oil production capacity in the world, nor the real prospect of any significant excess capacity, to prevent simple market forces from coming into play, especially with exponentially increasing demand in China and South Asia.

Maybe the questions should be, 'How are we going to replace oil as an energy source? Which countries are best able to implement high technology replacement options now so that other countries can continue to use low technology oil energy solutions until high technology solutions become broadly available? Can we bridge the gap with nuclear, solar, wind, or other energy sources? Can we envision a world society that is less energy dependent, not just oil energy reduction but overall energy reduction? How can food stuffs, pharmaceuticals and health care services be more evenly distributed across the world? Can we find equitable ways, both in large and small groups, to deal with each other in ways that tend to reduce rather than increase tensions and disputes? Is there an alternative to consumerism on a grand scale?'

It might just be time to start talks instead of wars.

Independence Day

A discussion has begun on The Daily Blague under today's post Independence Day about the war.

Also, see today's post on Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:.

An extensive list of articles about the war is archived on The New Yorker with many by George Packer and Seymour Hersh.

Some of Packer's best would be

“The Home Front” from the issue of 2005-07-04 which is not yet available on line, but an interview about the article is available, "Sons and Soldiers", on line.

Also, another recent article from the The New Yorker, "Testing Ground", In the Shiite south, Islamists and secularists struggle over Iraq’s future, from the Issue of 2005-02-28, is well worth reading.

Additionally, from Mother Jones May/June 2004 Issue, "The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged", another Packer piece worth the read.

And finally, Packer on blogs and the war on NPR's The Connection from May of 2004. ( RealPlayer, opens in a new window )

That should be enough to read, hear and ponder on one day. And, a great day it is, Independence Day. The ability to post this material is a testament to the strength of the American system of government despite what many of us might consider it's recent terrible missteps in Iraq. Enjoy the 4th, and get ready for the 4th of November in 2008 and don't forget the midterms next year.

A great leap forward

Don't you really want to read this book, sure you do?

Bill Gray in Mao II says:

"Do you know why I believe in the novel? It's a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy."

If you read Franzen's The Corrections you need to read DeLillo's Underworld and then perhaps MaoII.

DeLillo, interestingly, when talking about writers says,

"I write to find out how much I know. The act of writing for me is a concentrated form of thought.",

and

"Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals."

DeLillo's books are widely available.

More ice in your drink, sir?

Climate of Man
The New Yorker
by Elizabeth Kolbert

In three parts 25 April, 2 May and 9 May 2005

• Part I Disappearing islands
• Part II The curse of Akkad.
• Part III What can be done?

Required reading on climate change for anyone who might think that nothing is really going on or that somehow the science might still fuzzy.

Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC)

How will BRAC affect you? Follow the money. The most interesting trail is provided by contractors, for example, GMH Communities Trust is a publicly-traded Maryland real estate investment trust (REIT). Today almost every on base service from garbage pickup to weapons repair including housing, police protection - but oddly not yet fire proctection - and a host of other services that until about 1980 were provided by civilian employees and military personnel are now provided by contractors. And, from GMH's press releases there seems to be enough money to keep the investors interested.

Additional current BRAC information can be found at:

Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC), from Global Security, a private information machine.

Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC), a USGovt DOD site.

U.S. Department of Defense Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) FAQ, another USGovt DOD site.

The usual suspects from Google "BRAC site:dod.gov"

And, even more of the usual suspects from Google "BRAC"

Enjoy!

Metacritic

Metacritic, very nice within its limited scope which is essentially current marketing. A searchable collection of links to critical reviews for film, books, music, etc. taken from most major national newpapers and periodicals.

Sort of like a Manufacturer's New Products Section from a trade rag with collected reviews. An intersting idea. I wonder how they market on the other end to the film, book, and other consumer media producers?

A nice place to go when the children ask, 'Can we go see Kicking and Screaming?' It's not likely to retrieve the 1995 movie of the same name, and neither Eraser Head nor Pink Flamingos show up on Metacritic.

For the real reviews the best site is still The New Yorker Film File which collects nearly two thousand short reviews of films released from 1990 to the present.

Attention ETF Aficionados

Information Management Network Presents

Super Bowl of Indexing

December 4-7, 2005 * Scottsdale, AZ

Who am I, Moveable Type?

A friend writes in Anonymity "I daresay that anonymous bloggers have other reasons for keeping their identities to themselves."

Now, if only I can figure out how to post pictures to my blog, perhaps I'll identify myself to the blogosphere, but for now we'll hide behind the email address, which is explicit enough, and the blogspot veil. Putting out a decent post each day, much less creating an attractive setting to post in, is just a bit more work than most people might realize. The technical burden alone for novices is fairly tall, especially for the geek types like myself who want to focus on the HTML instead of the content.

I've become fond of opening links in new windows, a nice touch I think since it keeps the original page in place. However, I notice when I write a comment with "target=" inside an "href=" on a Moveable Type blog the "target=" phrase is striped out by Moveable Type. When you look at the Moveable Type preview source code the "href=" phrases don't have the "target=", it's just gone. Anybody have a clue how to overcome this? The eBlog engine here swallows my "target=" phrases just fine and they work putting up a new window with the link.

Beard to beard

Reading along in Miss Gostery's Guide under Links and Permalinks I found rebarbative used to characterize Permalinks and realized someone had learned entirely too much French. I shouldn't complain though rebarbative led me to the AskOxford site and a wonderful compliation of dicitonaries, OneLook.

Fwd: All that's fit to Fwd:

Well, almost all that's fit to forward. The burden is large, the connection is slow, and time is short. But, we include here what we can, and we encourage you to do the same.

Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:, that's the site where we have moved all the Fwd: material. You'll find the same link at the top of the right hand side bar under Features.

Post away.

Enjoy!