About Time, Really....

The Notion, which was my first blog, died, and has been a music blog since December, does not exist anymore. The Music blog has been renamed Genre Confusion, and all the old Notion posts that were about the same stuff that I write about here have been imported and labelled. So let it be written, so let it be done.

Now they must eat the fruit of their own way, and with their own devices be glutted. -Proverbs 1:31

From Death, Life...

The Notion is Still Dead.




But my new blog, as promised, is just being born. I call it The Essayist, and I expect it to do very well indeed.




Thanks and Merry Christmas, Happy Belated Chanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa, and Happy New Year all around.

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of other things...

Or, Thank y'all for coming, God Bless you, good night...



A few months ago I decided to keep this site going, because I had a remaining few hopes for it. Some of those hopes have worked out (readership is mostly up, I've gained a rank in the Ecosystem), but I'm not satisfied with the site regardless, and I'm not satisfied with the amount of work it's taking to maintain. The pressure of daily blogging is conflicting with work, and I'm not even blogging often enough to bring enough readers to justify it. Too much time and not enough satisfaction is the bottom line.


So, I'm done. This will be my last post. I have the embryo of another site in mind, one more suited to my hopes, but I need a few months off to ponder and get some other things done.

This may seem abrupt, but abrupt has virtues, and it's these I hope to make use of. To those that have read me, even when I wasn't throwing anything up, thanks. To those brave few that have linked me, thanks. I'll leave the site up as is, as an archive, and when I start the new site I'm going to link most of the folks that I've linked already.


Have a pleasant and happy day, and I'll see you when I see you.

Lining up with the Zeitgeist

Or, Damn You, Lucas! DAMN YOU!




When the Star Wars Prequels were first released, I would hear negativity from no man (no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so) about the film's shortcomings. It was Star Wars, dash it all: it had the look, blasters, lightsabers, exotic animals, races, the Force, Yoda, all the elements. All the naysayers were obviously self-absorbed pseudo-intellectuals who couldn't stand the concept of a film becoming popular without the approval of the critics. The nagging doubts within my head took years and another mediocre prequel to release.


But, like I keep saying to the faux-nihilists who fondle themselves while watching Empire Strikes Back and whine about Return of the Jedi, it ain't all bad. As a matter of fact, there are a handful of SW-quality scenes in the prequels. To wit:


1) Underwater Passage to Theed. "There is always a bigger fish," is a great line, and it leads to a nice fun escape for the good guys marred only by the annoying robot with the "To Coruscant...that doesn't compute...Oh, yeah, your under arrest" schtick.


2) Darth Maul vs. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan. Good duel, good backing music, good death. As a matter of fact, any seen with Qui and Obi and lightsabers breathed life into the whole sordid business. The whole last half-hour was undone only by Jar-Jar and young Anakin's unfunny antics.


3) The Incredible Exploding Intro. It was a bit of a surprise that Lucas would choose to literally toss a bomb into what was otherwise a sedately normal space-to-land opening scene. Coming as Attack of the Clones did so soon after 9/11, I literally felt my guts twist. Too bad the intensity wasn't maintained.


4) Coruscant by Rush Hour. Admittedley, this sequence went on about a hair too long. But it still had some nice twists and turns and three-dimensional traffic-pattern action.


5) Obi-Wan and the Skinny People. Say what you will about Lucas, the guy knows how to put great shots together. A whole waterworld populated by ultramodern gray creatures who look like the offspring of Whitley Schreiber's aliens and Elastic Man. Obi-Wan's fight with Jango Fett is the only thing that keeps the early film from boring the audience to death with Anakin/Amidala "love" scenes that have all the smoldering passion of an elderly person with gout.


6) Don't Go Back to Tatooine. Finally, the family relation between the Lars and the Skywalkers is explained. Plus, Anakin kills sandpeople, which is something I've been wanting to see happen for a long time, and Shmi has a damn fine death rattle. The scene where Anakin confesses to his butchery almost doesn't suck either. Almost.


7) Obi-Wan's Retort to his now-captured Apprentice explaining that he'd come to rescue them. Just to underline the fact that as much as we may dislike the prequels, they'd be a thousand times worse were not Ewan McGregor gamely attempting to carry them on his shoulders. He's the only actor I've seen with a solid take on his part (in fairness, his is one of a few characters that are in all six movies, but Vader is a limited resource for portraying a before-the-fall Anakin, and Yoda is only voiced by a human, and Palpatine only has to pull his proverbial moustache).




There are other spots of non-suckage that time will not permit me to explore, but the point is that they are but blips in a vast sea of banal writing and utterly absent directing. Lucas' remaining skill is, as I said, creating great shots; his narrative skills have slipped and his dialogue, creaky at best, has become with a few exceptions howlingly bad.


And his actors get no support in working this material; even Samuel L. Jackson seems neutered by the things he has to say. Anakin Skywalker is supposed to be the main character in these movies, and it appears that Lucas has hardly given any thought to how they're supposed to be portrayed. Consequently, his Anakins range from borderline believable through insipid to downright annoying. And Lucas has managed a feat that, prior to 1999, no red-blooded American male would have thought possible: making Natalie Portman seem boring.




All of the above would be forgivable if Lucas hadn't decided to suck retroactively. Hell, most artist go through periods of mediocrity and drought, and sometimes those droughts are terminal: look what happened to that whiny turd Brando. But Lucas isn't content with tainting our memories, oh no: he's decided to erase them. And the method he's using is the DVD release of the original trilogy.


You see, it's the Special Edition, in which Lucas changes scenes to suit him, such as making Greedo shoot first. But more, it's the Special Special Edition, which brings the prequels into the originals, most notably by adding the hated Gungans to the galaxy-wide celebration at the end of ROTJ, and replacing ROTJ's Anakin, Sebastian Shaw, with the prequels Anakin, pretty-boy Hayden Christianson, in a move with calculations no doubt similar to bringing in N'Sync to play Jedi in AOTC.


Which means that there's no Letterbox way of watching Star Wars as we originally saw it. Which means I'll have to hang on to my VCR to watch the last THX version on VHS. Which means that, as much as I dislike to have to say it, that Lucas is on my list.

Clear...as mud

I used to really enjoy Jon Stewart, and get a real kick out of the Daily Show and its mockery of the media's sensationalism and garbage. Stewart makes a better Daily Show host than Craig Kilborn ever was: nebbishy and self-mocking where Kilborn was snide and above-it-all (not that being snide and above-it-all wasn't funny. But Stewart's funny is far more welcoming). And most of the time Stewart, though an out-and-out Democrat, wasn't so doctrinaire as to ignore the insanity coming from his side of the aisle. I recall just before the start of the Iraq War, Stewart made a point of mocking the conspiracy hippies who opposed the war.


I haven't watched the show once since the spring, but I haven't watched much of any TV since the spring, since I don't have TV (culture rebel am I). But when the opportunity to watch TDS has arisen, I've made a determined effort to avoid it. The politics is wearing on the funny. Mostly this is because sharing a joke requires a shared sense of what is absurd, and Jon and I don't necessarily share that anymore. I can appreciate his technique but still find the end product annoying instead of amusing.


The post-debate commentary I caught at my folks' house over the weekend provides the clearest example. They showed the clip of Kerry saying something to the effect of:

I have always said that Saddam was a threat, and that there was a right way and a wrong way to disarm him. This President chose the wrong way.

To which Steward commented:

Blah-de-blah, there he goes again...wait a minute, that was pretty clear.

And I was left with this warm explosion of "NO IT WASN'T!" inside my head.


Kerry's statement gives us no details as to a) why the President's way is the "wrong way." or b) what the "right way" is, and why it's the "right way." Yet the media fawns all over his performance, as shaking off the "flip-flopper" vibe. But the statement and much of what else he said in the debate was vintage Kerry: trying to be on all sides of the issue. He sounds like he's for war in principle, and he sounds like he's against this particular war, or how it was waged, or how it was declared, or something, and he sounds like he's making a clear statement when he's doing nothing of the kind.


And this is why I avoid debates. They're not just boring, they're empty: two guys trying to put on the show of being presidential without actually revealing anything that might actually change anybody's mind. Kerry has no policy on Iraq, other than Bush did it wrong, and he'll do better because he'll be nicer to the world. And to listen to Bush, you'd be hard pressed to know what he's doing in Iraq, other than not running away.


We know why this is: television is awful at conveying anything other than the immediate. It's a phony alternate to reality. The debates don't gauge anything but which guy acts most presidential when the cameras are on, when 90% of what the POTUS does is off-camera: policy meetings, intelligence briefings, signing executive orders, etc. I want to have the guy who knows what he's doing when its time to push legislation through or make a decision and stick with it. Bush's legislative and foreign policy record have demonstrated to me that he knows how to do that. Nothing Kerry has done (done, not said) has indicated the same.


But his mush is treated as gold, and this gets ignored.

Done for the Week

I'm six different kinds of busy, and the sister's wedding is going to occupy all the rest of the week, so I'm calling it. See you monday.

Look! Over the Hill! It's the UN! We're SAVED!

I begin to wonder if Bush hasn't deliberately gone the multilateral approach in Sudan to demonstrate how completely and utterly useless it is.


Another possibility is that we're a bit busy at present, and need to keep the issue in the eye until we can free up a few divisions.


Boy, it would be nice if somebody else ever took the lead on dealing with this stuff...

In the Trenches

I've been arguing with lefties on the Conservative Punk forums so much these past couple of days that I've hardly blogged. I need to do something about that.


Probably after this weekend, which I'll be spending in New York.


Have a good 'un.

River of Condescension

Drudge links this report on the French PM's warning against letting Turkey into the EU. Jean-Pierre Raffarin said that doing so would "allow a river of Islam into a riverbed of secularism."


Uh-huh.


Let's imagine, just for a moment, that any American leader, any member of the Bush administration or Congress, had warned, even after 9/11, of a "river of Islam" threatening to swamp our precious civil liberties or otherwise undo our culture. Just think, for a minute, about what the reaction would be, both at home and abroad.


I'm waiting to see if one of the two heads of the French government will be subject to anything like that, but I'm not holding my breath.

Coffee and Cigarettes

I first heard of Jim Jarmusch sarcastically, as a throwaway line in one of my less favorite MST3K episodes, Tom Servo noting that a crappy sci-fi film had taken a "distinctly Jarmuschian turn." I had no idea what that meant at the time, but found out later.


My next encounter was reading about the film Coffee and Cigarettes, because someone in one of the slick music mags thought it absolutely adorable that Meg and Jack White of the White Stripes had a scene in it. I was seriously geeked on the White Stripes at the time (still am, truth be told), so I read all about it, sure that I'd never get a chance to actually see the movie.


That'll learn me.


The problem was, I'd become used to the Blair's Video next to the Food Lion I shop at having jack squat for movies. When I returned my copies of Dead Again (Branagh showing remarkable restraint until the cornball final scene), Mulholland Drive (Lynch getting wierd, then wierder, then slap-your-head bizarre), and Repo Man (Alex Cox' inability to sustain a narrative passed off as absurdism, but with a killer soundtrack), I spotted the film, and looked over the cast list, saw the words "Stephen Wright," "Iggy Pop," and "Tom Waits," and proceeded, tremblingly, towards the counter, where I valiantly withstood the clerk's attempt to sign me up for their monthly program.


So there I was, getting off on the Jarmuschian (at last! I get to use that word and not be a poseur!) minimalism whilst my steak cooked, knowing full well that Meg and Jack's scene wouldn't surprise me at all when it showed up. I knew the conversation would be about Tesla and Tesla coils, and that Meg would make a lame joke.


Fool that I was, to doubt the Jarmuschian (hmmm...better backpedal on that term a bit) genius. The scene rocked. Jack was geeky and Meg was coooooool. I laughed, I cried, it was better than Alien 4.


Rest of it was good, too, for being such a simple premise: 11 conversations centering on coffee and cigarettes, all with famous and semi-famous people trying their damndest to be "normal". It wasn't an earth-shattering experience, but I enjoyed the mellow vibe being turned out. I give it two thumbs up. Fine family fun.

Watch Me Surprise You...

...by saying that Jonah Goldberg frankly nails it in his column on NRO today.


That's sarcasm, of course. Me praising Jonah would be about as counterintuitive a move as Morat over at Skeptical Notion praising Atrios or some such. Goldberg is a conservative, and so pretty much am I.


I know this. You know this. I know you know I know you know, etc.


Why, then?


Because I think it points out something very serious about the differences between liberals and conservatives, and why electing our current imperfectly conservative president remains a priority.


Jonah's column, summed up succinctly, says that war is a difficult enterprise. It nearly never goes according to plan. There's always an unexpected factor to contend with. Someone nearly always screws up, and in an ugly and spectacular manner. The enemy nearly always finds a way to disrupt your strategy somewhere along the line. Iraq is no exception.


Now, liberals think this about war, because liberals don't like war, and liberals like the kind of macho confidence that people begin a war with even less. The argument that war is a process of bloody miscalculations is one that liberals are happy to throw into the teeth of both war and machismo.


But conservatives know that the above is true about war, because conservatives read about and study war. One hesitates to generalize, but I think its fair to say that liberals want to know how to avoid war, and conservatives want to know how to win it. Conservatives, being conservatives, know that war is not something that's going to go away as long as humanity has something to argue about, and they also know that humans have a nearly infinite capacity to find things to argue about. Therefore, they want to know how wars are fought and won, what mistakes can be avoided and what mistakes probably can't, so that when war comes they will be ready.


If the above is true, and I think it is, it goes a long way toward explaining why conservatives have been so patient in Iraq and the WoT in general and liberals so changeable and skittish. Since 9/11, conservatives have been the ones saying "this will take years," and "Afghanistan is only the beginning," and "there is still much to do." Liberals, on the other hand, have been declaring quagmire since the first week of the Afghanistan campaign. I don't think this is an accident. Conservatives know that the fortunes of war are mutable, and liberals think anything more difficult than Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland in '36 is the prelude to defeat. They simply don't know any better.


Of course, there is the fact that the WoT is being led by an arguably conservative Republican President. I don't discount this. Were the situation reversed, the paleocons and Buchananites might be a much bigger voice on the right than they are today. But while I can't speak for anybody else, I can say without hesitation that if Al Gore had won in 2000, and if Al Gore had responded to 9/11 by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, by putting Syria, Iran, North Korea, and the PLO on notice that their malfeasance would no longer be tolerated, by following bipartisan recommendations to revamp our intelligence community, then Al Gore would have my vote in 2004. Al Gore being Al Gore, he probably would have went about things differently, but if I saw a serious, aggressive war on terrorism and terrorist states, then I'd have to be really impressed with any challenger before I got rid of him. I believe many in the blogosphere would feel similarly.


There's also the possibility that Al Gore would have made a bunch of threatening noises and done very little. Alternative histories can't be nailed down by definition. But the point is, a centrist Democrat who was willing to take the fight to the enemy might have found a great deal more support on the right than one might think, maybe more support on the right than the left. After all, in England, the Tories have been rock-steady on Iraq since day one.

Watch the Donkey Flail

NEW YORK (AP) - Staking out new ground on Iraq, Sen. John Kerry said Monday he would not have overthrown Saddam Hussein had he been in the White House, and he accused President Bush of "stubborn incompetence," dishonesty and colossal failures of judgment. Bush said Kerry was flip-flopping.




New ground? This is to suggest that there's anything as solid as terra firma in Kerry's utterances, rather than the oozing mush we normally expect from the Empty Senator. Let's see how long he manages to stick to this before switching gears again to a Dean-like "But we're committed."




Less than two years after voting to give Bush authority to invade Iraq, the Democratic candidate said the president had misused that power by rushing to war without the backing of allies, a post-war plan or proper equipment for U.S. troops. "None of which I would have done," Kerry said.




Am I to assume that Kerry is the only guy in the U.S. Senate who was unaware of the fact that Chirac was going to support our operation when hell froze over, and that Schroeder was too busy running on "Bush = Hitler" to consider coming to our help? Or should I simply believe that the guy who voted against the supplementary funding bill for Iraq, then claimed to vote for it, and is now blaming the administration for not funding the war, is an idiot?


Is there anything that will get this silly bastard to stand on his vote?




"Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell," he added.




But typically, you're not only unwilling to put him in that place, you're willing to attack the guy who is, and render him unable to complete his job. So this acknowledgement of Saddam's wickedness serves only as dross for what your real goal is. Spare us.




"But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact:




What you mean "we," Kemo-sabe?




We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure."




Unproven. Please demonstrate that we are less safe than we were on the morning our largest city lost its largest buildings.




Bush hit back from a campaign rally in New Hampshire, interpreting Kerry's comment to mean the Democrat believes U.S. security would be better with Saddam still in power. "He's saying he prefers the stability of a dictatorship to the hope and security of democracy," the Republican incumbent said.



"Today, my opponent continued his pattern of twisting in the wind," Bush said. "He apparently woke up this morning and has now decided, No, we should not have invaded Iraq, after just last month saying he would have voted for force even knowing everything we know today."



Note the dynamic: Bush, the guy that everyone described as a feckless, mumbling blueblood dunce in 2000, is now pointing at his opponent and laughing at him. And unlike the lame "fuzzy math" quip he tried to foist on Gore, this barb has already stuck.




Both candidates addressed partisan crowds, drawing cheers and hoots as they stretched each other's records and rhetoric - mixing facts with political creativity toward the same goal: raising doubts about the other man's credibility.




In addition, both candidates were speaking English and breathing oxygen, although CBS has recently found documentation claiming that Bush is not a carbon-based life form.




Kerry called on Bush to do a much better job rallying allies, training Iraqi security forces, hastening reconstruction plans and ensuring that elections are conducted on time. But his speech was thin on details, with Kerry saying Bush's miscalculations had made solutions harder to come by.




Do you love that? Kerry is trying to pin his indecisiveness on Bush, claiming that the problem of defeating a guerrilla insurgency is apparently so novel and difficult that John Wayne Kerry can't begin to come up with a solution. Well, it's unsurprising. The last time we were trying to do that, Kerry bugged out before he finished his tour.




Bush cited Kerry's four-point plan and dismissed it as proposing "exactly what we're currently doing."




One of these guys is cribbing notes. I'm gonna give the benefit of the doubt to the guy who gets the defense briefings.




With more than 1,000 U.S. troops killed in Iraq, including nearly 900 since Bush declared an end to major combat, with free elections in doubt, reconstruction efforts stalled and violence and kidnappings on the rise, Iraq could be Bush's biggest political liability. Even some Republican senators have begun to publicly second-guess the president's policies.




Fair enough. It's hard to maintain resolve when things look rough. But Bush isn't gonna cut and run, and I don't see that we're at that point yet. Kerry seems to be prepping us to do exactly that.




But Kerry has failed to capitalize thus far, struggling for months to find a clear, consistent way to differentiate his views from those of his Democratic rivals during the primary season and, since the spring, his general election foe in the White House.



Kerry's advisers say they're not sure whether it is too late for the Democrat to make the Iraq critique resonate. Polls show voters favor Bush over Kerry on Iraq and terrorism. The president shines the spotlight on his foreign policy agenda with a visit Tuesday to the United Nations.




So one candidate is proudly displaying his agenda to a world he knows damn well is hostile to it, and one candidate's boys can't come up with anything more forceful than "not sure whether it's too late to make [it] resonate."


Which of these candidates is taking the initiative and running with it?




Kerry said in August that he would have voted in 2002 to give Bush war-making ability, even had he known no weapons of mass destruction would be found. He stood by the vote again Monday, saying the president needed to use the threat of force to "act effectively" against Saddam.



He made a distinction between that vote to grant a president war-making authority and what he himself would have done as commander in chief with such power.



"Yet today, President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way. How can he possibly be serious?" Bush's presidential rival said at New York University.




"Even though I say that, knowing what I know, I would do exactly the same thing in my power as a Senator to authorize military force, it's obviously pig-headed for the President to say that, knowing what he knows, he would to exactly the same thing in ordering military force."


What a schmuck.




"Is he really saying to Americans that if we had known there were no imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to al-Qaida, the United States should have invaded Iraq? My answer is resoundingly no because a commander in chief's first responsibility is to make a wise and responsible decision to keep America safe."




But. What. WOULD. You. DO????????




Kerry called national security "a central issue in this campaign," a bow to the fact that the race is being waged on Bush's terrain.



"Invading Iraq was a crisis of historic proportions and, if we do not change course, there is the prospect of a war with no end in sight," he said.



Kerry used the word "truth" a dozen times to say Bush had dodged it. That doesn't count the number of times he said the president "failed to level" with Americans or misled and confused them. He blamed Bush for "colossal failures of judgment."



"This is stubborn incompetence," he said.




Only if we lose, smart guy. Then it magically becomes world-changing courage. Now ask yourself the question: Can we win? If we can, and you think the President can't, then get off your deity-expletived high-horse and let us in on your strategy. It's go time.




Kerry has sounded more hawkish, as in December when Democratic primary rival Howard Dean said the world was not safer with Saddam out of power. Anybody who believes that, Kerry said, doesn't "have the judgment to be president."



Reading that quote to his GOP crowd on Monday, Bush cracked: "I could not have said it better."




I wonder if Kerry knows that Bush is using his own sound bites from the primary, the time when you're supposed to shore up your party base by getting in bed with the wings, to attack him in the general election, when you're supposed to run to the center. I wonder, if he knows, how he feels about that.




The running mates got into the act, too. "Iraq's a mess," said Democratic Sen. John Edwards, while Vice President Dick Cheney said Kerry offers only "confusion, weakness, uncertainty and indecision."




Couldn't have said it better myself.

Everything Old is New Again

And as The Communists in China start acting like the Manchus, the comparison of Vladimir Putin to Tsar Alexander III is becoming ever more apt, according to this report by Ariel Cohen on TechCentralStation. Amazing, ain't it? One begins to wonder if we're the only place on earth, aside from that constitutional monarchy that hangs out with Europe, that really gives a crap about democracy.


Doubtless non-Americans the world over would find that remark patently offensive. And on further consideration, I know it to be wrong. I think the Eastern Europeans care about democracy very, very much. The Poles, for example, care so much that they have a brigade at work in Iraq.


For most of the rest (musn't forget the Italians), however, I shrug Gallicly.

Bloody Lanes

This old Civil War buff should be flogged before the entire regiment for failing last Friday to mention the 142nd anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, the only major battle of the war to be fought in my home state of Maryland (if you don't count the Rebs' 1864 Monocacy-Silver Spring farce, which I don't), and the bloodiest single day of combat in American history.


That's right, gang, Antietam beats out D-Day by a substantial margin. How bad was it? The Union army dropped 13,000 dead, the Confederates 10,000, all in one day (September 17, 1862). That's right, 23,000 dead men, or 23 times as many as we've lost in Iraq over the course of a year. Just offering some perspective for those ready to run up the white flag.

Sully Wants the Administration to Spend More Money...

...on Iraq. The old rule is proved: on matters that they consider important, everyone's a liberal.

Mandate of Heaven

Anyone with an elementary grasp of Chinese history should feel the warm embrace of familiarity upon reading the AP story on the leadership change in the "People's Republic." Here's what I mean:

Despite repeated orders from Beijing, local officials have balked at orders to cancel major construction and other big spending projects - austerity moves that could cost local jobs and reduce opportunities to line their pockets. Hu and Wen reportedly have been forced to visit Shanghai and other areas to compel obedience in person.

Imperial authority wanes, local warlords wax. Can the dynasty hold on?

I'm Not as Thunk as You Drink I am

Back in college, I got tired of enduring the autumnal round of "My God, college students are Drinking!" stories in the local and national news. So I wrote a piece in the student paper taking adults to task for their hypocrisy, for romanticising their party days in films like "Animal House," but having spitting hissy fits when their kids do likewise.


I'll be honest: as far as I, and just about everyone I knew, was concerned, the drinking age being 21 was a minor inconvenience, easily surmounted. I had liquor just about whenever I wanted it, without bothering about a fake ID. I broke the law, deliberately, repeatedley, and without remorse. I justified this by the old dictum that an absurd law has no binding effect.


This guy (link via The Agitator)suggests that the 21 law is not only absurd, but bad law. Apparently binge-drinking is the result of the 21 Law, because kids wouldn't do this if they could drink in bars. He then claims to be a "charter member of Presidents Against Drunk Driving," which has no web site that shows up on Google, yet has no better solution to the drunk-driving problem than baldly declaring that if we were really worried about that, we'd raise the driving age to 21.


A stupid argument, but here's something worth looking at: according to MADD's own figures, the age group most likely to die in a crash that's due to alchohol is not teenagers or twenty-somethings but those between 31-40. Add to that the fact that the number of highway deaths total has been static since the early 80's and we have to ask: is there a way we can have driver safety and still let 18-year-olds, who can vote, drive, marry, and die for their country, have a beer?

I Don't Wanna Grow Up

Johnny Ramone, who spent his life dressed as a snot-nosed kid in a black leather jacket, has died of an old man's disease, prostate cancer. He was 55.


This is the third Ramone to drop dead in the past three years. Joey's death from lymphoma was Grandly Tragic; everyone who loved the Ramones was sad, and everyone paid tribute to him, and kids rode the albeit brief nostalgia wave to rediscover one of the great American bands. Dee Dee's overdose and death in 2002 was gratuitous and offensive, an act of nihilism that a man his age should have learned to grow beyond.


Today, I just feel empty and sad, for a fellow man's struggle against the grind that wears and wears and beats you down. I can't help feeling like maybe the struggle was doomed. The Ramones were gloriously, obstinately Rock n'Roll, a purity of three-chord-three-minute mojo that many have imitated but few have loved as truly. They battled for twenty years to conquer the Rock world, and could not do it. They inspired thousands, became underground icons, but moved the mainstream hardly at all.


I don't know where I'm going with this, except to say that something sucks about the fact that John Cummings slaved for years and years so that Kurt Cobain could feel bad about himself and become a sacrifice to an ideal ill-defined and breathtakingly juvenile. Somehow the simplicity that the Ramones cherished got turned into a scream at a wall. Maybe that was inevitable, given the times, maybe it's even a healthy forum for the venting of frustrations that otherwise cause the streets to bleed.


I can't tell you, other than I'm utterly frustrated with people's foolishness, and with my own. The longing of the soul for freedom and power, demonstrated so aptly in any Ramones song, seems at once necessary and laughably futile. All that we have, all that we build, one way or another, we eventually lose.


What do we gain?

That's Better

Other must have felt as I do, because there's a bit more war about. Instapundit acknowledged his silence by claiming he was waiting for a report, which is fair enough, and the post deals with some of the issues others have been talking about, like gradualism vs. confrontation, and the possibility that Fallujah will become a chamber pot, as old General Ducrot would put it, after the election.


Little Green Footballs, on the other hand, hasn't had too much war talk, but did link to a possible reconsideration of the War on Terror in the Vatican. Considering the particular Cardinal who used the words "Fourth World War," there may be a sea change afoot in Europe. Maybe.

Umm...Guys?

Or, Didn't You Know There Was a War On?




There's something distinctly odd about the dead silence on Iraq news coming from most of the right-wing blogs. The news does not appear to be good, but only Sully and the lefties, like Skeptical, are saying anything about it. That's not good.


Now on the one hand, it's useful to wait for the fog of battle to lift before making pronouncements. Iraq's been declared a quagmire before, and what appears to be going on may or may not resemble what's actually going on. But nevertheless, not talking about it, not even mentioning the difficulty, makes it that much easier to call we righties unserious about the war, which is a meme we really don't wanna see.


So, great as the CBS meltdown is, let's take a moment amidst slapping each other on the back and take notice of the other problems. If we don't, the public is gonna end up hearing naught but disaster commentary.


Sully links the David Brooks piece defending the administration's "gradualism." Read. Discusss.




UPDATE Iraq the Model thinks that the situation isn't as dire as it appears, that the insurgency isn't as popular in Fallujah as many think. He also thinks that most Iraqis will accept the collateral of cleaning the insurgents out, and that it has to be done, by the forces of the government and/or the coalition, sooner or later. I agree.