Far South of I-10

I just read the this excerpt of a speech by Barack Obama on instapundit http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0409250111sep25,1,7098310.story?coll=chi-news-hed "U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama suggested Friday that the United States one day might have to launch surgical missile strikes into Iran and Pakistan to keep extremists from getting control of nuclear bombs. . . . Obama said that violent Islamic extremists are a vastly different brand of foe than was the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they must be treated differently. "With the Soviet Union, you did get the sense that they were operating on a model that we could comprehend in terms of, they don't want to be blown up, we don't want to be blown up, so you do game theory and calculate ways to contain," Obama said. "I think there are certain elements within the Islamic world right now that don't make those same calculations ."" Which to me sounds like the old Sting song ...

I was just watching CNN at the gym while I staggered along on the treadmill. Surprisingly, CNN tore CBS a new asshole, pointing out how poor a job of fact checking that CBS did, and even worse that there were connections to the Kerry campaign. Since I've been watching this subject on the blogosphere since the first day when LGF posted one of the forgeries in question with the same document typed in word, I thought, "this is like having front row seats at a train wreck". I happened to see this issue from the beginning, when most people in the U.S. are just getting the straight network line from the Media, suddenly CNN and ABC have turned and are chewing the heck out of CBS. Then I realized a bettter metaphor is one of those times in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, where I'm just mellowly sipping a 40 ounce beer on Bourbon street when some beautiful blonde flashes her tits at me and I didn't have to distribute a single bead. I just got a free show.

I took a seminar at LSU that tried to explain what were the causes and history of the Isreali-Palestinian conflict. We spent approximately 1/3 of that reading about and discussing the mythology of the conflict, with the big Isreali myth being that all the Palestinians had abandoned their homes on the eve of the 1948 war to create free fire zones for the Arab armies so that the Isrealis could be exterminated. The Palestinian myth being that the Isrealis forcibly evicted all the Palestinians to steal the country of Palestine and rename it Isreal. There is a tiny kernal of fact in both of these myths, but neither myth represents Truth. Truth observed by an impartial observer (Ed. God, or CBS news?) I didn't study hard enough so that I can remember what the exact sequence of events was 56 years ago, but that class did open my eyes to relative truth, or truth depending on the viewpoint of the observer. That skewed reality due to viewpoint is apparently even worse when the ...

Testing, Testing, Test12, checksound, check I've spent enough time reading blogs that I thought I should finally write one. Maybe this will just be a place for me to post links to keep track of good articles instead of cluttering up my favorites in explorer with links to articles that prove my worldview. Or maybe a place to post pictures of my dog in various forms of repose, that being the only pictures we have of her, since all she does is repose. Or maybe mis-spelled hemingwayesque drivel that will spill onto my keyboard like a new orleans style roast beef po-boy sandwich, drip, drip dripping until my letter keys are all stuck and I have to pound out numeric messages in straight ascii, ranting and raving until my little Columbian girl has to say " oh baby just you shut your mouth". Anyway, we'll see.