I wonder how those who have used these tactics will take being on the receiving end of them. I suspect they won’t have the emotional maturity to handle it well.

We are finally closing on the purchase of our new house today. It has been a long and sometimes unpleasant process, culminating yesterday with a confrotation between us and the salesman that got me more angry than I can recall being in years.

That will be all behind us this afternoon, though, and then we get to enjoy the happy chaos of moving into a new house.

This is just wrong…

Happy birthday, Marcie, I hope you have a good one.

Not only is forty-two the answer to life, the universe, and everything, it is how old I turn today. I have survived forty-two trips around the sun, but this last one was among the most tumultuous of them all.

One year ago, I lived in France, and on my birthday my father was admitted to the hospital because of a problem he had with his intestines. Two weeks later we discover it was a recurrence of his cancer, but moved from his bladder to other parts of his body. Six weeks after that I was on a plane back to the United States, having made the fastest repatriation of anyone in my company.

I have moved three times this year, and in two weeks I will be moving a fourth time, into a house I hope I will live in for many years.

My father died this last December; I saw him pass at 3:00AM on the day after Christmas after a long night vigil.

Throughout this year, there have been days I wished would never end, and nights when my demons were raging and would not be drowned out no matter how much Scotch nor how loud the music.

I have gained much in my life, but I also have lost much, I have had joys both public and private, and sorrows known to many and things to mourn that I keep to myself.

I married for the second and last time this last July, on the beach in Florida with rain clouds all around us but a hole in the storm overhead; ironically enough, this event bookended a decade that began with my divorce in July of 1996, ten years of immense change in my life and in myself.

During that decade I transformed myself from someone I did not like to someone I feel I can be proud of, although I am still human, and I still make human mistakes, both egregious and minor resulting in actions that I regret and am ashamed of.

In the course of my divorce, I discovered that I was not a person I respected, not someone who could look back upon his life with pride, so I set out to change that.

I set out to destroy myself.

While it is often described as “deconstruction� it is really destruction, a subtle word does not fully encompass the magnitude, difficulty, or effect of the task, and minimization does more harm than good.

Creation arises out of destruction, and more often than not the new cannot be built until the old is swept away.

I needed to create a new me, someone I respected and trusted, for if you cannot respect and trust yourself, what do you have other than nothing?

I was lost, and even the trite tripe that passes for wisdom on the Internet affected me in those early days nearly a decade past. I continue to discover the tripe is not so trite.

I’ve learned-that you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is be someone who can be loved. The rest is up to them.

I’ve learned-that it takes years to build up trust and only seconds to destroy it.

I’ve learned-that it’s not what you have in your life but who you have in your life that counts.

I’ve learned-that no matter how much I care, some people just don’t care back.

I’ve learned-that you can do something in an instant that will give you heartache for life.

I’ve learned-that you should always leave loved ones with loving words. It may be the last time you see them.

I’ve learned-that you can keep going long after you can’t.

I’ve learned-that we are responsible for what we do, no matter how we feel.

I’ve learned-that either you control your attitude or it controls you.

I’ve learned- that heroes are the people who do what has to be done when it needs to be done, regardless of the consequences.

I’ve learned- that sometimes when I’m angry I have the right to be angry, but that doesn’t give me the right to be cruel.

I’ve learned-that maturity has more to do with what types of experiences you’ve had and what you’ve learned from them and less to do with how many birthdays you’ve celebrated.

I’ve learned- that no matter how good a friend is, they’re going to hurt you every once in a while and you must forgive them for that.

I’ve learned- that it isn’t always enough to be forgiven by others. Sometimes you have to learn to forgive yourself.

I’ve learned- that no matter how bad your heart is broken the world doesn’t stop for your grief.

I’ve learned-that our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we are responsible for who we become.

I’ve learned-that just because two people argue, it doesn’t mean they don’t love each other and just because they don’t argue, it doesn’t mean they do.

I’ve learned- that we don’t have to change friends if we understand that friends change.

I’ve learned-that you shouldn’t be so eager to find out a secret. It could change your life forever.

I’ve learned-that two people can look at the exact same thing and see something totally different.

I’ve learned-that your life can be changed in a matter of hours by people that don’t even know you.

I’ve learned-that even when you think that you have no more to give, when a friend cries out to you, you will find the strength to help.

I’ve learned- that credentials on the wall do not make you a decent human being.

I’ve learned-that it’s hard to determine where to draw the line between being nice and not hurting people’s feelings and standing up for what you believe.

And the hardest lesson of this year:

I’ve learned-that the people you care about most in life are taken from you too soon.

Forty-two, it may be the answer to life, the universe, and everything to some. To me, it now means something different, both happy and sad, wistful and joyful, a year that had more than 365 days of events.

Technorati Tags: personal

Well…

A senior U.S. diplomat said the United States had shown “arrogance” and “stupidity” in Iraq but was now ready to talk with any group except Al-Qaida in Iraq to facilitate national reconciliation.

In an interview with Al-Jazeera television aired late Saturday, Alberto Fernandez, director of public diplomacy in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department offered an unusually candid assessment of America’s war in Iraq.

“We tried to do our best but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in Iraq,” he said.

Now, let’s see, was it Clinton in charge, or Bush….

Do the math.

The headlines read, “President Bush to consult with generals on Iraq strategy.”

Excuse me, but I have a question.

Hasn’t the Bush administration been claiming all along that they are giving the generals everything requested and are in constant contact with them?

Something is rotten here.

The consequences of the recent passage of the Military Commissions Act are exactly what I have been writing about for years when I say that those we label “the terrorists” cannot defeat us, they can only cause us to defeat ourselves.

We are now firmly on that path to self-defeat, and ultimate oblivion. Just ask the Romans…

Beginning of the end of America

SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, ‘Countdown’
MSNBC
Updated: 1 hour, 57 minutes ago

We have lived as if in a trance.

We have lived as people in fear.

And now—our rights and our freedoms in peril—we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.

Therefore, tonight have we truly become the inheritors of our American legacy.

For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

We have been here before—and we have been here before led here—by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.

We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use those acts to jail newspaper editors.

American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote about America.

We have been here when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as “Hyphenated Americans,” most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.

American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said about America.

And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans while his man in charge, General DeWitt, told Congress: “It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen—he is still a Japanese.”

American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the choices they or their ancestors had made about coming to America.

Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And each was a betrayal of that for which the president who advocated them claimed to be fighting.

Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.

Many of the very people Wilson silenced survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900,000 votes, though his presidential campaign was conducted entirely from his jail cell.

And Roosevelt’s internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States to the citizens of the United States whose lives it ruined.

The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

In times of fright, we have been only human.

We have let Roosevelt’s “fear of fear itself” overtake us.

We have listened to the little voice inside that has said, “the wolf is at the door; this will be temporary; this will be precise; this too shall pass.”

We have accepted that the only way to stop the terrorists is to let the government become just a little bit like the terrorists.

Just the way we once accepted that the only way to stop the Soviets was to let the government become just a little bit like the Soviets.

Or substitute the Japanese.

Or the Germans.

Or the Socialists.

Or the Anarchists.

Or the Immigrants.

Or the British.

Or the Aliens.

The most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And, always, always wrong.

“With the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?”

Wise words.

And ironic ones, Mr. Bush.

Your own, of course, yesterday, in signing the Military Commissions Act.

You spoke so much more than you know, Sir.

Sadly—of course—the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously was you.

We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

But even within this history we have not before codified the poisoning of habeas corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.

You, sir, have now befouled that spring.

You, sir, have now given us chaos and called it order.

You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom.

For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And — again, Mr. Bush — all of them, wrong.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has said it is unacceptable to compare anything this country has ever done to anything the terrorists have ever done.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who has insisted again that “the United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our values” and who has said it with a straight face while the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison and the stories of Waterboarding figuratively fade in and out, around him.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens “unlawful enemy combatants” and ship them somewhere—anywhere — but may now, if he so decides, declare you an “unlawful enemy combatant” and ship you somewhere - anywhere.

And if you think this hyperbole or hysteria, ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was president or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was president or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was president.

And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an “unlawful enemy combatant”—exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney general is going to help you?

This President now has his blank check.

He lied to get it.

He lied as he received it.

Is there any reason to even hope he has not lied about how he intends to use it nor who he intends to use it against?

“These military commissions will provide a fair trial,” you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush, “in which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney and can hear all the evidence against them.”

“Presumed innocent,” Mr. Bush?

The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain “serious mental and physical trauma” in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.

“Access to an attorney,” Mr. Bush?

Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.

“Hearing all the evidence,” Mr. Bush?

The Military Commissions Act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.

Your words are lies, Sir.

They are lies that imperil us all.

“One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks,” you told us yesterday, “said he hoped the attacks would be the beginning of the end of America.”

That terrorist, sir, could only hope.

Not his actions, nor the actions of a ceaseless line of terrorists (real or imagined), could measure up to what you have wrought.

Habeas corpus? Gone.

The Geneva Conventions? Optional.

The moral force we shined outwards to the world as an eternal beacon, and inwards at ourselves as an eternal protection? Snuffed out.

These things you have done, Mr. Bush, they would be “the beginning of the end of America.”

And did it even occur to you once, sir — somewhere in amidst those eight separate, gruesome, intentional, terroristic invocations of the horrors of 9/11 — that with only a little further shift in this world we now know—just a touch more repudiation of all of that for which our patriots died — did it ever occur to you once that in just 27 months and two days from now when you leave office, some irresponsible future president and a “competent tribunal” of lackeys would be entitled, by the actions of your own hand, to declare the status of “unlawful enemy combatant” for — and convene a Military Commission to try — not John Walker Lindh, but George Walker Bush?

For the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And doubtless, Sir, all of them—as always—wrong.

© 2006 MSNBC Interactive

Do your own fucking math, I’m tired of doing it for you. Just ask the Romans, if you are willing to do a small bit of reading of history…

At lunch today I was asked by an old friend if I considered Austin “home” now. Most people when they talk about the trips they typically take on the holidays say, “I’m going home to visit my parents,” but I do not. Of course, I didn’t feel I fit in where I grew up in northern Mississippi even when I was living there. Now, after having lived in three other cities in the United States along with a stint in France, I connect even less to the residents of the area, many of who live less than ten miles from the house where they grew up.

Strangely enough, even with this feeling of disconnection, I have been listening more to the music of the region, early Elvis, Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, music that for me evokes the culture that my family was embedded in, especially the farmers, who lived in their own brand of Southern Gothic. The music raises memories of long dark nights so humid the air seemed more suitable for fish to breathe than people, and yet despite the humidity, the dust thrown up by the passage of cars down a dirt road and hanging in the air sucked all the moisture out of the mouth, causing one to smack lips together in a vain effort to relieve the arid feeling. It was on those nights I discovered my love of astronomy, when I saw the Milky Way draw its lazy glow across the sky.

This past December, my father was buried in a cemetery in Covington, Tennessee, only a few miles from the farm where I spent those seemingly endless nights. Covington is a town that despite its proximity to Memphis has not yet been engulfed by the development that clings like dust to the spiderweb roads emanating from every city, and at the funeral for my Dad I lost count of the people who said they remembered me as a little boy on that farm in the summers. Then the conversation would turn to stories of my grandfather and his close relatives, illustrating for me in no uncertain terms how embedded in the area my family still is even thirty years after my grandfather died. I could feel the weight of the history, but it still is not home to me.

For even though the environment helped form who I became, it never felt comfortable or safe, especially when people were involved. For many, there’s no place like home, for me there was no place that felt like a home.

Through no action or fault of my parents, I could hardly wait for the time when I would move away from where I grew up, unknowing that what I sought would not be found elsewhere. Over the years, in the different places with the different people I have found some level of accommodation, a mode de vie, but I never found that place that was comfortable.

For me, it seems that the answer to the question posed by my friend, where is “home” for me, is the answer that I gave flippantly at the time. The old saying is that “home is where the heart is,” but for me home is between my ears, and I take it with me, from Memphis to Phoenix to Portland to Austin to Grenoble and back to Austin.

Technorati Tags: personal, South, Southern gothic, Southern Gothic

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
   -John F. Kennedy

…to my regret, first-hand, that even though it was in a trite email “to be forwarded” this is all too true:

I’ve learned - that you can do something in an instant that will give you heartache for life.

Perhaps the lesson will stick one day, despite all the missed opportunities I have had to learn it.

A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top.
   -Unknown

I have been called wise more than once, but I think I am merely better than most at concealing my foolishness…

The best relationship is one where your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

Time Passes unhindered. When we make mistakes, we cannot turn back the clock and try again. All we can do is use the present well.

Given human beings’ love of truth, justice, peace and freedom, creating a better, more compassionate world is a genuine possibility. The potential is there.

   -Dali Lama

…what you do out of fear, even when you don’t know at the time you are serving your fears.

Historically, it always depends on whether we make decisions out of fear or out of convictions. When we make them out of fear, we’re rarely proud of them a hundred years later.
   -Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, US Navy

I have received the great compliment of several requests to post more often at another weblog where I write, The Moderate Voice. Unfortunately, I’m very distracted right now by a number of things and am having a difficult time concentrating for writing.

To add to the distractions, today I have developed a nosebleed that will not stop.

Not good.

North Korea has announced it performed a test of a nuclear bomb.

The world is going to Hell, and the accelerator pedal has now been floored.

Here I am with no handbasket… and almost no hope left.

So, now we have a supposed “reverend” of a Christian denomination trying to assert that Congressman Foley was “tricked” into engaging in the inappropriate communication with young men.

When does partisanship become something beyond imagination, beyond acceptable, beyond the pale?

Apparently, it no longer becomes beyond what some conceive of as decent, or even rational.

…when satire becomes TOO easy?

THINK about it, if you have the moral and intellectual courage to watch and to think.

And then we move to what should be beyond outrage to the incredible, again watch the entire segment and THINK FOR YOURSELF:

As I requested, please think for yourself.

Take away the shephard and the sheep will follow wolves.
   -Michael Wikoff

It has been a while since I have posted anything thoughtful or even remotely original. I wish I could say it was entirely due to changes in my life-circumstances, with my new wife, new children, and new priorities, but I cannot attribute my lack of commentary entirely to other priorities. While they are important, these other priorities have not ruled my life exclusively. I did indeed have the choice to write when and if I needed to. I simply have not chosen to because I have been too exhausted, and not solely due to family issues.

I have continued to read other weblogs daily, and although I discover as time passes that more self-described right-wingers are finally recognizing the tendencies of the current administration that I pointed out two years ago, I find no joy in this trend.

Why?

For one, the fact that it has taken literally two years to arrive at the realization that the Bush administration is so incompetent it puts our nation at risk, two years for people whom I regarded as rational despite having differing political views, those such as the Commissar of The Politburo Diktat (now version 2.0, possibly relating to his conversion from a purely partisan viewpoint to one aimed at what is best for the nation, as I have held all along despite being named partisan even though I didn’t follow lockstep with ANY party), and the delay has discouraged me, notwithstanding the conversions at this late date.

Another reason I am losing hope is those who have not recognized that we are on the wrong path. There is a minority, troublingly large, who still support the actions of the administration to the bitter end, those such as the bloggers at Power Line who desperately seek to find some partisan explanation for the lack of action in the Foley/Congressional Page matter that they can lay at the feet of the Democratic Party, despite the abundance of evidence of the implicit approval of the Republican leadership of the Congress. These, the willfully blind, are now completely ignoring the deteriorating situation in Iraq, formerly the apple of their eyes, instead expressing positively orgasmic pleasure in the deaths of supposed “terrorists” who are not attacking the US because we are “defeating them over there,” despite the fact that they were not terrorists BEFORE we occupied “over there…”

So, where does a rational commentator go, especially when their time is compressed and consumed by more immediate matters related to family?

What does a rational commentator do when the allure of non-partisan computer games like the various versions of Starfleet Command appeal far more than any seemingly futile attempt to persuade towards rationality those who have abandoned even a pretence of logical thought?

My answer?

It has certainly not been to attempt a useless exercise in posting to persuade, since it seems that no one even tries to think outside their partisan box any more.

While it may not seem the case to those who read my weblog regularly, I do indeed try to think outside my own preconceptions. In my work I have come to be known as “Jack the project killer” because I tend to recommend the termination of projects I have been put in charge of, even if it seems “career limiting” according to semi-cynical parlance.

Why?

Because I evaluate each program with an eye towards cost versus benefit, with each side of the equation aimed towards the needs of the company and not my personal preferences. My very ruthlessness towards these evaluations has gained me credibility when I either recommend or advise against any project.

I refuse to apply the logic of dreams to attractive concepts, despite the allure of the possibilities that the ideas promote among the dreamers.

There is a balance that needs to be found between the dreamers and those of a more practical bent to make at least part of the dreams reality, and my role to date has been to pull the concepts of the dreamers to something that can indeed be accomplished rather than something that can only be conceived.

Such seems to be my curse, because that which I foresaw two years ago has become a reality today so obvious that even those among the most fervent whom I would label as “right-wingers to the end” have begun to acknowledge that the current nominally right-wing administration and Congressional leadership has not delivered or even really tried to deliver anything close to the “right-wing” agenda.

So, what should I write about?

Those unpersuaded will remain so, those who are becoming disenchanted already have far more reason to be so than I could ever present to them.

I have tried in the past three years of my blogging to provide a non-partisan view that was indeed biased towards my own philosophy, which was not aligned with any party.

For my efforts, I have been labeled many things, whether right-wing, left-wing, liberal, or conservative, all the labels were inadequate to encompass my views, yet despite the arrows hurled by those not capable of conceiving of anything beyond the simple-minded dichotomy of viewpoints that I abandoned three decades ago when I was 12 years old, I have persisted, because I refuse to succumb to the logic of dreams that fulfills wishful thinking and makes absurd arguments plausible.

It must be nice to perceive the world in black-and-white terms, but I cannot do so because I see the “nuances” that were anathema to the Bush administration and its cheerleaders until the most recent intelligence estimate caused them to perceive that presenting the subtleties to be of political advantage. Nuances and subtleties may not satisfy the primal urge for vengeance and visceral fulfillment, but they are necessary conditions to understand how to gain the ultimate victory over our enemies.

Our failure to understand will be our undoing, just as the Romans labeling those they refused to make the effort to understand as “barbarians” set them on the path of decline.

The parallels are obvious to those willing to truly step outside their own canalized methods of thought, but it takes the “hard work” that George W. Bush referred to when he was campaigning for winning a second term as President of the United States.

Perhaps you should consider doing that “hard work” of thinking about the ramifications of our current policies, what could arise if those policies change, and what the long term results could be.

All I ask is that you think for yourself and not follow those who use the logic of dreams.