The nonviolence part doesn't include pies

Noticed this interesting piece about a student at a Quaker college who hit a conservative commentator with a pie. I find a few things wrong with this approach:

1. The guy is a commentator, not a policymaker. Hitting someone like this with a pie accomplishes nothing except to say that you think people with different views should be hit with pies.
   
2. Why not something like a sign spelling out your objection? Why, exactly, a pie? Is there a subtext I'm missing?
   
3. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't Quakers supposed to be pacifists? How do they justify using pastry as the projectile of choice in an assault?
   

But the best "protest" quote I've read in a while comes from a story about the (let's be frank) abrasive Ann Coulter. After helping to deliver a heckling at the Kansas University, a protester told a reporter, "We're just not open-minded enough to like Ann Coulter." The organization he represented? The Society of Open-Minded Atheists and Agnostics.

(By the way, I'm not suggesting that only liberal protesters are prone to bouts of ridiculousness; but I don't see a lot of these reports in the press. If there's an example you'd like to forward, please do. I may vote Republican, but I know idiocy comes in all kinds of flavors.)

NB: Read the comments for the response of the contra-Coulter quoter.

Hell no, I won't go

A new set of materials from the UN's Oil-for-Food probe was released today, materials which dig a deeper hole for Secretary-General Annan's son, Kojo. When asked whether this would spark him to resign, Kofi replied "Hell, no." Very diplomatic, sir; and definitely the kind of reply a man without a guilty conscience might make.

I'm no lawyer, but isn't this a case of willful blindness if ever there was one? I mean, after Annan was informed of some shady dealings between his son and Cotecna, he conducted an investigation for possible improprieties which lasted less than one day. That's the action of a man who's afraid he'll find something if he looks too carefully.

Is Annan responsible for his son's actions? Certainly not. Should he have recused himself from this matter and let someone else handle the investigation? Absolutely. What would you have done?

If this looks bad, think what a loss to Karpov in 1975 would have done.

Robert James "Bobby" Fischer, who recently got locked in solitary confinement for punching a guard who refused him a second hard-boiled egg. Really.

Bobby Fischer, once (and to hear him tell it, still) world chess champion, now finds himself, through a series of strange chances, a citizen and resident of Iceland. I have said this before and I stand by it: they can have him.

As an active chess player (patzer), this is a little difficult to bear. The man is clearly a chess genius, an artist of incomparable talent. But like so many great artists, he is also manifestly insane. One has only to read the various tirades on his website to get a taste. Any man who believes the Bekins Moving & Storage company sits at the epicenter of a global conspiracy is not in the mainstream. To say the least.

There has been much commentary about his plight lately, as this collection of articles at ChessBase will attest. Much of it is hand-wringing: Why did the great man fall? How did things come to this? Why should helping out Slobodan Milosevic be so wrong? But most commentators, even the generally sympathetic ones, concede that the man has a box of screws loose--perhaps he needs help, they say. Fine. That's a humanitarian approach. And hell, if he'd wanted to get an apartment in Washington, DC and spout his views loudly, that would also have been fine.

But I was taken by this editorial in Pravda("truth" in Russian), which reads as though the author cut and pasted bits from Bobby's press releases. "Kidnapped in Japan and hounded by Washington for political reasons. Welcome to George W. Bush's version of Freedom and Democracy," it runs. But it should be pointed out that the author also recently referred to Vladimir Putin as "a patriot...[who] stands for, and practices, Democracy."

Ah, yes, that's the Pravda I remember reading...back in the late 1980s.

No, please don't! Not democracy!

Came across this little bit of cheer today: an article about Paul Wolfowitz and the direction he hopes to take as head of the World Bank. The Reuters lead reads:

Paul Wolfowitz, Washington's controversial pick to head the World Bank, has pledged to be an "international civil servant" if confirmed in the job and said he would not to use it as a platform to preach democracy.

No, let's certainly not hear anything about that pernicious bit of American propaganda. Blasted cultural imperialism. Interestingly, the AFP version of the story (and remember this is Agence France-Presse we're talking about) concentrates its intro on what Wolfowitz will try to do, rather than what he will avoid.

Wrestling...

I suppose it is high time to weigh in on the Terri Schiavo situation; indeed, there may not be much time left now that the Supreme Court has declined to hear the case.

OK, I'll admit there was a lengthy bit there, but it was more a series of connected musings rather than a cogent argument. This is true of most of my posts; but I've been thinking: God forbid I find myself in a persistent vegetative state and someone looks to my blog when making medical decisions.

Snapback!

Just an aside: I have intermittently tried to get better at Go, but the computer has until recently been smacking me around (pathetic, if you know anything about the state of Go programming). But aha! Now I am at the point where I am beginning to see...in the above diagram, as white I played 1. ... B1! 2. A1 (knocking out my two stones) ...C1! 3. B1 (again knocking out my C1 stone) ...C1 and I capture all of black's stones in the corner, as they run out of liberties.

Me and the ACLU

I was reading the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal today when I noticed a piece on the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. I'll be up front and say that I've been against this one more or less from the beginning, but things seem to be developing to the point where I'm going to have to (gasp!) agree with the viewpoint of the ACLU.

A little background: in 1998, a Connecticut man named Leo Smith built a website advocating the defeat of then-CT Representative Nancy Johnson. The Federal Election Commission got wind of this and issued an advisory opinion (AO 1998-22, a summary of which is available here in .pdf form) stating that not only should Smith have posted a disclaimer about whether the site was authorized by his candidate, but that his costs for creating and maintaining it amounted to a political contribution. Here's the meat:

The Commission also concludes that—contrary to Mr. Smith’s assertion—there are costs associated with this web site. A portion of the overhead costs could be apportioned to each web site created by Mr. Smith. Those costs include the domain name registration fee, the amount invested in the hardware (computer and peripherals) that created the web site and the utility costs associated with creating and maintaining the site...[he is] required to file independent expenditure reports with the Commission if the total value of the expenditures exceeded $250 in 1998.

OK, this is plenty scary if you ask me. Fast-forward to 2005 and we find the FEC rethinking the issue of Internet commentary. Web speech was specifically exempted (by a 4-2 vote of FEC commissioners) from McCain-Feingold campaign finance controls back in 2002, and its impact on the past election cannot be understated.

So U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's decision in September 2004 (Shays vs. FEC; the whole 157-page opinion may be found here) comes as something of a monkey wrench. She stated, in part, that "The commission's exclusion of Internet communications from the coordinated communications regulation severely undermines" the spirit of McCain-Feingold.

The suit's plaintiffs, Christopher Shays (R-CT) and Marty Meehan (D-MA), hit the appropriate nail in their press release when stating "The bottom line is, the FEC’s interpretation of our law had no basis in the reality of the statute." In short, the FEC was charged with developing guidelines for the implementation of McCain-Feingold, and the court found that those guidelines were faulty.

So where does this leave blogging as it pertains to political communications? In limbo, apparently. Republican commissioners seem to think that while the advisory opinion made in Leo Smith's case would not hold water today, but that there is considerable grey area around who constitutes a "journalist" and what "coordination" with a campaign comprises.

The Democrats' view appears to be that this is being overblown by "partisan scaremongering tactics." But I think it's interesting in this regard to read Dem. FEC commissioner Ellen Weintraub's CNET piece on the subject...there's something about the tone that seems both defensive and slippery, and her "scaremongering" quote doesn't leave me feeling warm and fuzzy.

Will the government step in and determine that my ramblings constitute "coordination" with the GOP? Will the FEC come to my house to see how much yard space my campaign signs are taking up, and develop a "contribution" amount depending on my mortgage? It seems unlikely; but at the same time, it bears watching. Republican or Democrat, we all know the government is capable of doing ridiculous things when it (forgets to) put its mind to it.

Reflections and Meditations

8 November 2005
Well, Technorati has finally gotten around to fixing whatever problem resulted in my blog's remaining fixed at #329,857 for a month...and now I've fallen back to nearly 400k. No big deal, but man was I hoping to move upward for a while. Anyone care to link to me? Please?

On another note, I have finally decided to turn on Blogger's "word verification" feature for comments. Not that I get many, but it's simply depressing to see that I have a comment, only to find an ad for Viagra or mortgage refinancing. So sorry in advance.

14 October 2005
Over the past couple of days I've received somewhere in the range of 90 hits--all related to my posting a link to the Unicef Smurf-bombing video. This even surpasses the flurry of interest that my post about the Huffington Post generated, and far more than what I expected for my post on porn star Mary Carey. The average web reader is, I find, difficult to predict. But I'll take what I can get.

6 October 2005
Feeling the flow again after a period of relative inactivity. And it's nice to feel like I'm not sliding downhill: Technorati as me at #329,857 out of their 19 million tracked blogs, so that's not too bad. I'll do a little dance if I ever get into the to 100k.

15 September 2005
Man, gone almost a month thanks to a catastrophic network collapse here. It feels...weird, but the worst part is that it threw me off my stride. I've been back up for a few days, but it is proving to be difficult getting back into the posting habit. I think it's because of the long, involved writeups that have been developing in my head, and the fear of putting them down in an incomplete form. So instead I think I'll post 'light' for a bit and see if that can jump-start my brain.

27 July 2005
For some weeks, I've been checkind in with Technorati to see where my blog stands. They have a rather obscure "rank" measurement which, until recently, has told me that my blog was something like the 750,000th most popular blog on the internet. Suffice it to say that this was hardly an inspiring number, especially as the number grew larger by a factor of several thousand each day. Yet today I checked it and found that my Technorati rank was in fact now listed as the 428,541st most popular, having been noticed and linked to by a couple of other sites. It is little, very little; but it is something.

17 June 2005
I've been at this for the better part of three months now (at least in its current incarnation, and I must admit to a bit of malaise. I am fulfilling the primary purpose--letting the hot air out of my brain--and even making strides toward the secondary purpose of using the medium as a scratch-pad to formulate and focus policy points from the hazier section of my brain. You may believe something; but when you finally get down to putting it into words, it either stands up or collapses. This, anyway, has been my experience.
       But the malaise seems to grow from the fact that I am toiling in complete obscurity, basically talking to myself. I understand that this is the way of things, and even that my efforts here may in fact contribute to my debating skills elsewhere, but don't we all yearn for a little pat on the back, or perhaps even a slap in the face?
       I had one big moment, when I put up a post about The Huffington Post just as its launch was creating a stir, but since then the counter has been silent. I even used the occasion of porn star Mary Carey's visit to a GOP fundraiser as an excuse to experiment with a post containing the words "porn star," and still nothing.
       Oh well, at this point I'm just whining. I'll keep at it (I do take some pride in cruising through Blogger and seeing how many wrecked and abandoned blogs litter the shoulder of the information superhighway--I bring life!), and I'll even try to stick to my purposes. And if you, hypothetical reader, want to stay or go, that's your own business. Most of what I write fails to see the light of day, and perhaps I need to get used to the idea that Log and Line won't either.

A more verbose introduction

We that have done and thought,
That have thought and done,
Must ramble, and thin out
Like milk spilt on a stone.
W.B. Yeats, “Spilt Milk,” 1933

---

I’ve watched the blogging revolution from the sidelines for some time. Now I’ve decided to get back in the game.

Back in 1997, I launched a small and generally worthless personal website containing favorite links, photos of the kids, and the like—all the standard features. Even my mother stayed away. But one section did elicit a small, but positive, response: my page of (largely political) rants, the place where I exposed the web to the froth that formed atop my stream of consciousness.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, as the page was more of my brain’s pressure-release valve than anything else. I nevertheless plodded along for several years, toiling in relative obscurity, erecting a large mound of opinion and commentary. And then I moved, lost access to my host, and let the thing lapse.

Now, of course, such things are extremely common, their evolution having been aided and abetted by many technological advances. I am having difficulty with this, perhaps for the uncharitable reason that, while I was always a small fish, I swam in a much, much smaller pond. With my return, I do not expect to make a great splash; but I feel a strong need to get my thoughts down on paper (so to speak), and this way seems natural to me.

So I dive once again into the seas of commentary. I therefore offer a few disclaimers. As you may notice, I lean toward what is reflexively called “the right,” though I do not consider myself to be a dogmatist (perhaps I flatter myself here—the judgment is yours). I am in my early 30s, married, Catholic, white, and the father of two young children. If you choose to value or devalue my thoughts based on these data, that’s your problem. I will endeavor to present opinion as opinion and fact as fact, and I will link to external references when I can. And while I can’t promise that this will be the prettiest site out there, I’ll at least try to make it easy on the eyes.

If you want to voice your thoughts on my thoughts, please feel free to do so. I can take criticism and/or abuse like the best of them. If you want to contribute, I welcome your submissions, but I reserve the right to exercise some degree of editorial control. Beyond that, I hope you simply enjoy.

What’s a “Log and Line,” anyway?
In the days prior to the development of an accurate maritime chronometer, ships at sea used a log and line to gauge speed, thus helping to determine the ship’s location. A sailor would heave the “log” (a flat piece of wood that would drag behind the ship) and watch how many knots of rope flew off the reel of line within a specified timeframe. It thus became standard to measure a ship’s speed in knots, a standard that remained in place even after such navigational procedures were no longer necessary.

---

"In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms." --Thomas Mann
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.
W.B. Yeats, “Politics,” 1938

I Have Returned

After something like a five-year absence from blogging (though it certainly wasn't called that back in the old Stethoscope & Stylus days), I now choose to return and reclaim my birthright from all these upstart whippersnappers. Whether I have their stamina is something to be determined. Nevertheless, a pressure valve for my brain can't be all bad, since I tend to explode if not given an appropriate outlet.

Plaudite, amici! For the comedy is just beginning...