Turns out that sheep are smarter than most people realize.
About This Blog
I’m calling it "The Seventh Sense" for now. I’ll see if it grows on me. It may change any day. I’m just that fickle.
I realized that a lot of my ideas had negative words in the title ("can’t" "not" "don’t"), so I stayed away from those.
P.S. Commenter Brett reminded me that I once called this blog "Goldfish Don’t Bounce". Yet another negative phrase.
NAME THIS BLOG!
According to recent estimates, there are 7 million blogs in America, NOT counting sites like MySpace and Xanga.
Of the top 55,000 blogs tracked by TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem, I am ranked at around 15,000. My internal Typepad counter informs me that I get anywhere from 50-100 hits per day, although I suspect that many of those "visits" are from spambots.
One of the nice things about being a not-much-read blogger is that it affords me the liberty to change the blog’s name at will, since the only person who really cares is, well, me.
Small bloggers often change names. Even well known bloggers with large followings have been known to do it. And I have a hankerin’ to do it.
It’s not the first time. I think my first blog attempt (on Blogger) was called "So Anyway" for a month, and then it became "The Way Bricks Don’t". The latter title was from Douglas Adams’ "A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy". He had a wonderful turn of phrase. I believe the full sentence was something like "Her words hung in the air in much the same way that bricks don’t." I just loved that sentence.
After a year or so, I moved to Typepad and chose the name "No, You Can’t Have A Pony" without too much thinking.
I don’t recall why I chose that name — the irreverance of it appealed to me. I still like it, although, in retrospect, I think it is simply too long. Plus, I’m sick of seeing that girl crying.
So I’m toying with the idea of renaming the blog, and changing the look a bit. Any suggestions would be helpful. Here’s kind of what appeals to me:
- I hate cliches. Words like "rant", "thoughts", "musings", etc.
- Preferably, it should have nothing to do with anything I generally write about. And not necessarily reflective of me, either. Kind of like the way that Monty Python’s Flying Circus had nothing to do with a guy named Monty Python, flying, or a circus. The more "out in left field", the better.
- I kind of like the idea of a catch-phrase that has gone out of style: "23 skidoo" or "The Hell You Say". But I’m not married to that.
- My favorite blog name of all that I have seen is "Sadly No" — a short phrase with just a hint of snark.
- Literary references, Latin, etc are all okay, just as long as it’s not pretentious.
- I like funny-sounding words, like "boondoggle", "quagmire" and "smattering"
None of these rules are immutable, except for perhaps the first two.
Off the top of my head, I’ve come up with some examples, all of which appeal to me for reasons beyond my own comprehension. ("Beyond My Own Comprehension", come to think of it, isn’t a bad name either. Actually, same with "Come To Think Of It").
Anyway, you’ll get my drift when you read these examples:
How To Pay For Border Guards
Buried deep in this Washington Post article (in fact, the last paragraph) is this tidbit of news:
The White House said the new budget request by Bush would cover the $750 million-plus Guard deployment, new agents, fences and barriers, five helicopters and two new unmanned surveillance aircraft. The money would be offset by delaying other military purchases, according to the White House.
"Other military purchases" could mean anything, but it’s not hard to assume that some of that $750 in military purchase would have benefitted our soldiers in Iraq (can you say "armor"?) or the over-all War Against Global Islamofascim (or whatever the White House is calling it these days).
So basically, we’re taking money away from The Iraq War and putting it into the War Non-Militarized Thing Against Illegal Mexican Immigration.
It would be nice if we actually spent time and effort going after — you know — bin Laden. But that’s just me talkin’.
Who Are Christians?
Columnist Peggy Noonan is all confused about The Da Vinci Code (the movie):
I do not understand the thinking of a studio that would make, for the amusement of a nation 85% to 90% of whose people identify themselves as Christian, a major movie aimed at attacking the central tenets of that faith, and insulting as poor fools its gulled adherents. Why would Tom Hanks lend his prestige to such a film? Why would Ron Howard?
Are those serious questions?
Um, well, The Da Vinci Code is probably the most staggeringly successful book in decades. Not just in American, but all the world. Is it not conceivable to Peggy that someone in Hollywood just might want to turn the world’s best bestseller into a movie?
Altogther now: D-U-U-U-U-U-H!!
But underneath Peggy’s transparent stupidity lies a more incideous one: the implication that The Da Vinci Code (the movie) will be "offensive" to the 85-90 percent of the population who call themselves "Christian".
This is patently untrue. After all, who bought all those copies of The Da Vinci Code (the book)? Obviously, millions of Christians did. Statistically, they had to.
What Peggy has done is conflate "Christians" with evangelical Christians and/or the Christian right. Sadly, she assumes that all Christians are of the Jerry Falwell/Pat Robertson/James Dobson stripe.
But, of course, that is simply untrue. Evangelical Christians may be the loudest, but they are not the greatest in number. The 85-90 percent of the population who call themselves "Christians" include Catholics (whose church doctrine now rejects creationism), Episcopaleans (whose church pulpits now include homosexuals), and the other more established Protestant churches.
Peggy ought to know better. And it’s time that respectable journalists stop trying to merge the religious doctrines of extremists with the heart-felt and sincere religious beliefs of moderates. You simply can’t lump them all into the same category, just like you can’t assume that all women who believe in equal pay for equal work are "feminists".
Aardwolfs
Harper’s has a good article about what happened to CIA field agents who wrote reports that clashed with the Bush Administration blind optimism:
A number of current and former intelligence officials have told me that the administration’s war on internal dissent has crippled the CIA’s ability to provide realistic assessments from Iraq. “The system of reporting is shut down,” said one person familiar with the situation. “You can’t write anything honest, only fairy tales.”
The New York Times and others have reported that in 2003, the CIA station chief in Baghdad authored several special field reports that offered extremely negative assessments of the situation on the ground in Iraq—assessments that later proved to be accurate. The field reports, known as “Aardwolfs,” were angrily rejected by the White House. Their author—who I’m told was a highly regarded agency veteran named Gerry Meyer—was soon pushed out of the CIA, in part because his reporting angered the See No Evil crowd within the Bush administration. “He was a good guy,” one recently retired CIA official said of Meyer, “well-wired in Baghdad, and he wrote a good report. But any time this administration gets bad news, they say the critics are assholes and defeatists, and off we go down the same path with more pressure on the accelerator.”
In 2004 Meyer was replaced with a new CIA station chief in Baghdad, who that year filed six Aardwolfs, which, sources told me, were collectively as pessimistic about the situation in Iraq as the ones sent by his predecessor. The station chief finished his assignment in December 2004; he was not fired, but according to one source is now “a pariah within the system.” Three other former intelligence officials gave me virtually identical accounts, with one saying the ex–station chief was “treated like shit” and “farmed out.” (I was given the former station chief’s name and current position, but I am not publishing the information because he is still employed by the CIA.)
As has been the case with other people deemed to be insufficiently loyal, the White House went fishing for dirt on the two station chiefs, including information on their political affiliations. “I spent 30 years at the CIA,” said one former official, “and no one was ever interested in knowing whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. That changed with this administration. Now you have loyalty tests.”
The fate of those two station chiefs had a predictable effect. In 2005, I’m told, the Baghdad station chief filed but a single Aardwolf. The report, which one person told me was widely derided within the CIA as “a joke,” asserted that the United States was winning the war despite all evidence to the contrary. It was garbage, but garbage that the Bush administration wanted to hear; at the end of his tour, that Station Chief was given a plum assignment. “This is a time of war,” said one former intelligence official. “Every day American kids are getting killed over there. We need steady, focused reporting [from Baghdad] but no one is willing to speak out since they know they’ll get shot down.”
“The CIA’s ability to speak honestly is gone,” concluded the official, “which is extraordinarily dangerous to our country.”
There’s lots more.
Friday iPod Random Ten
What’s the iPod digging today?
- Sandy – Grease
- Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In – The Fifth Dimension
- A Summer In Ohio – The Last Five Years
- Beast of Burden – Bettle Midler
- Don’t Worry Baby – Beach Boys
- Angry Young Man – Billy Joel
- Babooshka – Kate Bush
- Contact – Rent
- I’m Black/Ain’t Got No – Hair
- Running Up That Hill – Kate Bush
Wow. My iPod is really into "Hair" and Kate Bush this week.
There’s a joke to be made there, but it’s Friday….
The More You Know…
Interesting.
A study done last year shows that the people more opposed to immigration are people who are least exposed to immigrants. Conversely, people who live in areas with lots of immigrants are more positively disposed to them:
The simplest interpretation of this result is that people who rarely see an immigrant can easily scapegoat them for everything wrong in the world. Personal experience doesn’t get in the way of fantasy. But people who actually see immigrants have trouble escaping the fact that immigrants do hard, dirty jobs that few Americans want – at a realistic wage, anyway.
Official English
I honestly hope these people have better things to do than debate whether or not English is America’s "national language" or a "common and unifying language". Either way, the piece of legislation is symbolic, since you can’t enforce anything.
Aren’t there real problems out there that need addressing in real ways, rather than symbolic ones?
Of course, the legislation is just meat for social conservatives and the religious, who are disgruntled that the GOP is not catering to their desires. Politicians seem to think that empty symbolic legislation will appease them and bring them to the polls in November. Sadly, they may be right.
Powerline’s John Hindrocket does his best to defend the importance of the issue:
But the issue is not a trivial one, nor is this just a temporary bowing to "nativist" sentiment, as it will no doubt be portrayed in the MSM. It is absolutely vital that America remain an English-speaking country.
Was there a chance it wouldn’t be, John? Take the tin foil hat off your head.
Right next door, in Canada, we have the starkest possible evidence of the catastrophic consequences of bilingualism.
Not suprisingly, Hindrocket doesn’t inform us what that evidence is. Canada, like any country, has its share of problems, but how much of it can be attributed to bilingualism? Is bilingualism any more destructive than say, a two party government?
I like Bob Harris’s take:
In over two centuries of constant immigration, never once has an official language been important enough to bother with. And in these days of the Internet, massive multilingual communication, and translation tools at our fingertips, never has an official language been less necessary. Not even close.
But it’s an election year. And for about 30% of this country, fear is an emotion that overrides everything else.
Debbie Daniel’s Civil War
Our favorite Renew America pundit, Kaye Grogan, must be on vacation or in rehab, but excitable advertising account executive Debbie Daniel is happy to fill in with breathless outrage on the subject of — what else — immigration.
Her article is entitled "Load Your Guns — Let The Battle Begin", which may sound like hyperbolic rhetoric until you realize that she’s from Central Texas and probably means it.
Either that, or she’s trying to emulate Yosemite Sam.
Anyway, it’s a long article, so we’ll place it below the fold.
The Leak That Could Have Prevented 9/11
The Bush Administration likes to say that national security leaks to the press endanger American security.
This pretty much kills that meme: Ex-New York Times Judith Miller (of Plamegate fame) reveals in an interview that, back in July 2001, an anonymous White House source leaked top-secret NSA intelligence to her that Al Qaida was planning a major attack on the United States.
This is how she tells it:
"The people in the counter-terrorism (CT) office were very worried about attacks here in the United States, and that was, it struck me, another debate in the intelligence community. Because a lot of intelligence people did not believe that Al Qaida had the ability to strike within the United States. The CT people thought they were wrong. But I got the sense at that time that the counter-terrorism people in the White House were viewed as extremist on these views."
"Everyone in Washington was very spun-up in the CT world at that time. I think everybody knew that an attack was coming — everyone who followed this. But you know you can only ‘cry wolf’ within a newspaper or, I imagine, within an intelligence agency, so many times before people start saying there he goes — or there she goes — again!
Why was this information leaked to the press? BECAUSE BUSH WASN’T PAYING ATTENTION!:
"Sometimes, you wonder about why people tell you things and why people … we always wonder why people leak things, but that’s a very common motivation in Washington. I remember once when I was a reporter in Egypt, and someone from the agency gave me very good material on terrorism and local Islamic groups.
"I said, ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you giving this to me?’ and he said, ‘I just can’t get my headquarters to pay attention to me, but I know that if it’s from the New York Times, they’re going to give it a good read and ask me questions about it.’ And there’s also this genuine concern about how, if only the president shared the sense of panic and concern that they did, more would be done to try and protect the country.
Emphasis mine. This, of course, confirms what Richard Clarke and George Tenet have been saying all along — in the summer of 2001, they were running around trying to get the Bush Administration to take seriously all the al Qaeda "chatter" of an impending attack.
But here’s the really bizarre part. WHY DID AL QAEDA WANT TO ATTACK US?
This has been a heavily debated, almost-philosophical issue, and usually the answer (from the Administration, that is) is that they "hate our freedoms" — a wholly incomplete and facile answer if I ever heard one.
Turns out, it’s also (according to Miller) the incorrect answer:
"But I did manage to have a conversation with a source that weekend. The person told me that there was some concern about an intercept that had been picked up. The incident that had gotten everyone’s attention was a conversation between two members of Al Qaida. And they had been talking to one another, supposedly expressing disappointment that the United States had not chosen to retaliate more seriously against what had happened to the Cole. And one Al Qaida operative was overheard saying to the other, ‘Don’t worry; we’re planning something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond.’
"And I was obviously floored by that information. I thought it was a very good story: (1) the source was impeccable; (2) the information was specific, tying Al Qaida operatives to, at least, knowledge of the attack on the Cole; and (3) they were warning that something big was coming, to which the United States would have to respond. This struck me as a major page one-potential story.
"I remember going back to work in New York the next day and meeting with my editor Stephen Engelberg. I was rather excited, as I usually get about information of this kind, and I said, ‘Steve, I think we have a great story. And the story is that two members of Al Qaida overheard on an intercept (and I assumed that it was the National Security Agency, because that’s who does these things) were heard complaining about the lack of American response to the Cole, but also … contemplating what would happen the next time, when there was, as they said, the impending major attack that was being planned. They said this was such a big attack that the U.S. would have to respond.’
Now read that last part again. The terrorists struck us so that we would respond, i.e., bomb the crap out of the Middle East, which would foment anger and hostility toward the United States.
Man, did George bite down hard on that one!
Blogging The Bible
An intrepid (or perhaps bored) writer for Salon, a self-proclaimed "ignoramus" when it comes to matters religious — has decided he’s going to blog the Bible.
So far, he’s doing it in a rather non-snarky, but inqusitive way.
A snippet from Genesis, Chapter 3:
The Lord—not so good at follow-through. In Chapter 2, He is clear as He can be: He commands man not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and bad: "for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die." No wiggle room there. You shall die. But then when Eve and Adam eat the fruit of the tree a few verses later, do they die? Nope. God punishes Eve with "most severe … pangs in childbearing" and curses Adam by making the soil barren. Any parent knows you have to follow through on your threats, or your children will take advantage of you. God makes a vow He can’t keep—or if He did, He would undo all his good work. …You can call this "original sin," but maybe it’s just lax parenting.
Quote Of The Day
President Bush declaring that May 29 (aka "Memorial Day") be known as "a day of prayer for permanent peace" is "just a bit like Charles Manson declaring a mental-health day."