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February 29, 2004

Onto Haiti

 by Jeremy

The Yankee Imperial death machine is now going into Haiti. Idea for for bumper sticker:

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 01:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

An Oddball on the Island of Misfit Toys

 by Jeremy

I thought I was breaking all the rules of blogging in my unapologetically over-indulgent post on Lord Buckley. I turns out it's all been done before, by Moe Lane. At least my post was on the Nazz (misspelled it last time) and his was on Lanky Link. And I thought I was the original bad boy. Being part of a posse is better though.

By the way it's not possible to overstate how hilarious the Obsidian Wings mascot is:

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 12:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 28, 2004

Time to breathe a sigh of relief (I think)

 by Jeremy

I have a gut feeling that this is extremely good news for the future of Iraq. I've been scared to death of what a handover of power in June was going to look like (via Roger Simon). While it sounded like a good idea to get the soldiers home sooner, it sounds like a better idea for their heroism not to have been in vain. But see Roger's observations on the journalistic myth of perception.

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 07:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Seduction of the Irritable

 by Jeremy

UPDATE (5/31/2007): The FDA has apparently taken Zelnorm off the market. You might be able to buy it here, though as of this writing the site is out of stock; I don't know if that's because they are no longer able to sell it or if it's because people are clamoring to buy it and they are simply sold out. I disclaim any responsibility for anything that happens to you if you order the stuff from this source, though I have been quite happy with another gastric motility drug (Motilium) I've bought through that site for my gastroparesis.

My gastroparesis (not severe) has been acting up these past couple of weeks. I've been eyeing a box of organic onion rings in our freezer with quiet longing, vowing that one day I will consume them. And what do I see while sitting down to an evening of television and a therapeutic can of diet Coke? This blatant gastrointestinal pornography:

I will not rest until people have been made to answer for this shameless breach of broadcasting decorum. I am going to write to congress and have them fire people and ban a few broadcasters over this. What most offends me is that there's no way these duodenal debutantes are the real deal. If any one of these women has ever actually taken Zelnorm I'll eat my breakfast. How do I know? Let's just say I have a certain radar for this kind of thing. These women are faking gastric disorders just for the glamour, and I find that offensive. I took Zelnorm after my gastroenterologist, with a shrug and an understated warning, wrote me a prescription. I took it for a day during which I did not feel like showing my perky little tummy to strangers. I spent a lot of time in the littlest magazine room moaning and praying (clue: I'm an atheist). Moral: take Zelnorm if you need the intestinal action, but if you don't, don't. (Isn't there a saying about an irresistable force and an immovable object?)

By the way, if I could have found anything to rhyme with "gaydar" or "metrosexual" it would have been so cool, but alas no. There's nothing gastroenterological you can put in front of "dar" or behind "metro" that has the ring of wit.

You know, something's just occuring to me. I'm not one to miss a plot and I think I see what's going on here. The pharmaceutical industry is anticipating a product tie-in here (I'm half serious).

PS: I'm sorry for this whole post. But I feel better now.

PPS: If anyone plans to stage a digestive system version of Godspell, hire this guy...

- Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 01:17 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

The Hitch on the Naz a la Gibson via Dr. Norm

 by Jeremy

I haven't seen the movie and I don't plan to. It's not because I'm a Jewish-inflected atheist, or because violent movies make me ill. It's because the bad vibes I've been getting about this movie are being echoed by a growing number of people whose opinions I respect. But that Christopher Hitchens has a way with words: why dump a tub full of epithets like "anti-Semitism" onto a brush fire like this when a few swats of the purple handkerchief will have the thing out in a jiffy (via Norman Geras)

"whatever the Bible may say, the Roman authorities in Jerusalem were not minor officials in a Jewish empire, compelled to obey the orders of a gang of bloodthirsty rabbis."

And in fact one wonders whether the bible really does say that.

-Jeremy

Postscript: Jeff Jarvis saw the movie and reports -- if I follow correctly -- that were one to know about Christianity only what one sees in Gibson's Passion, Atheism and/or Judaism would make much more sense. I'm not sure where that would leave me. Rosicrucianism...I could always fall back on that. But for those wondering what or who the hell the "Naz" refers to, it refers to Lord Buckley, the one person whose passion might have the power to turn me Christian if I listened to his rap on Jesus over and over (if I could find my old LP...I'm going to have to break down and buy the CD).

The postscriptum that wags the dog:

I managed to find a full transcription of the Naz (here's a sound bite) -- so let the exorcism begin:

The Nazz Richard "Lord" Buckley, 1906-1960

Now, I look at all you cats and kitties out there
a whippin' and a wailin' and a jumpin' up and down
and suckin' up all that fine juice and pattin' each other on the back
and a hippin' each other who the greatest cat in the world is.
Mr. Malenkov,
Mr. Talenkov,
Mr. Eisenhower,
Mr. Whoozerwheezer,
Mr. Whiserwhooser,
Mr. Woodhill,
Mr. Beachhill,
an' Mr. Churchill,
and all them other hills gonna get you straight,
and if they can't get you straight
they know a cat that knows a cat who'll straighten you.
But I'm gonna put a cat on you
was the coolest, grooviest, swingin'est, wailin'est,
strongest, swingin'est cat that ever stomped on this jumpin' green sphere.
And they called this here cat "The Nazz."
He was a carpenter kittie.
Now, The Nazz was the kind of a cat that come on so cool
and so groovey and so with-it
that when he laid it down,
WHA-BOM, it stayed there.
Naturally all the rest of the cats said, "Man, look at that cat wail!
He's wailin' up a storm up there. Hey, I'm tellin' ya,
he layin' it down right, he..."
"Get off my back, Jack! What's the matter with you?
I'm tryin' to dig what the cat's puttin' down!"
They're pushin' The Nazz to dig his miracle lick.
And The Nazz say, "Cool, babies.
Tell ya' what I'm gonna do.
I ain't gonna take two, four six, eight of you cats,
but I'm gonna take all twelve of you studs
and straighten you all at the same time."
Say, "You cats look like you pretty hip."
He say, "You buddy with me."
So The Nazz and his buddies was goofin' off down the boulevard one day
and they run into a little cat with a bent frame.
So The Nazz look at this little cat with the bent frame
and he say, "What's the matter wit' you, baby?"
Little cat with the bent frame he said, "My frame is bent, Nazz."
Say, "It's been bent from in front."
So The Nazz look at the little cat with a bent frame
and he put the golden eyes of love on this here little kittie
and he look right down into the window of the little cat's soul
and he say to the little cat, he say, "Straighten!"
Rooom - Boom!
Unbent that little cat like an arrow.
And everybody's jumpin' up and down
sayin' "Look what The Nazz put on that boy!"
"You dug him before. Redig him now!"
Everyone's talkin' about The Nazz.
What a great cat he was.
How he swung with the glory of love.
How he straighten out the squares.
How he stomp into the money changin' carts
and kicked the short change all over the place
and knockin' the corners off the squares.
How he put it down to the one cat, dug it.
Didn't dig it.
Put it down twice, dug it.
Didn't dig it.
Put it down a third time, dug it.
Boom!
Walked away with his eyes buggin out in the air bumpin' into everybody.
And they're pullin' on The Nazz's coat tail.
They want him to sign the autograph.
They want him to do a gig here, do a gig there,
play the radio, play the video.
He can't make all that jazz!
Like I 'splained to you he's a carpenter kitty, got his own lick.
But when he know he should go and show and blow,
and can't go cause he got too much strain on him,
straightenin' out the squares,
he sends a couple of these cats that he's hippin'.
So came a little sixty-cent gig one day,
and The Nazz was in a bind,
and he put it on a couple of his boys.
He say, "Boys, take care of that for me, would ya?"
And they say, "You take it off your wig, Nazz, we'll cool it."
And they started out to straighten it out for The Nazz.
And they got about half way to where they were goin'
and they came to a little old twenty-cent pool of water
and they got right in the pool of water with the boat
and all of a sudden, Blam!,
the lightnin' flashin' and the thunder roarin'
and the boat is goin' up and down
and these poor cats figured every minute gonna be their last
and one cat look up and.... here come The Nazz!
Cool as anyone you see.
Right across the water.
Stompin'
And there was a little cat on board, I think his name was Jude.
He say, "Hey, Nazz, can I make it out there witcha?"
And The Nazz say, "Make it, Jude!"
Old Jude went stompin' off that boat,
took four steps,
dropped his whole cart,
and the Nazz had to stash him back on board.
So The Nazz say, "Say, what seem to be troublin' you boys?"
He say, "You hittin' on that S.O.S.in' bell pretty hard.
You gonna bend that bell, knockin' on it like that."
One of the cats say, " 'What seems to be troublin' ya?!?!'
Can't ya see the storm's goin'
and the lightnin' flashin'
and the thunder roarin'...?"
And The Nazz say, "I told you to stay cool, didn't I, babies?"
To the people who don't know what it means to believe,
to "stay cool" is to be,
to have the sweet fragrance of serenity rock ya' away.
So now everybody's talkin' about The Nazz.
Oh, this beautiful, swingin' man.
How he's settin' the country on fire with great sparks of great love
like a swingin' non-stop satellite goin' through all the lands
and valleys and puttin' down the scene with such beauty
and such power and such charm
that there are now sparks seventy-five feet long shootin' out of the grapevine
and they now got five thousand of these little cats and kitties
in The Nazz's home town, where the cat live, lookin' to get straight.
Well, he knows he can't straighten them there.
It's too small a place to want to hang everybody up.
So The Nazz backed away a little bit
and he look at these cats and these kitties
and he say, "Come on, babies. Let's cut on out down the pike."
And there went The Nazz.
And these five thousand cats and kitties are stompin' up a storm.
Behind them there's a great love river of joy.
It's goin' like a great chain through these gorgeous cats and kitties
as they're swingin' along on the beat of the Nazz
and the birds are flyin' on one side
and singin' love songs to these cats and kitties
and there's a great jubilee of love.
And The Nazz talkin' about how pretty the hour, how pretty the flower,
how pretty you, how pretty me, how pretty the tree.
Nazz had them pretty eyes.
He wanted everybody to see with pretty eyes and see how pretty it was.
And they're havin' such a glorious swingin' time
that before you know it they were forty-two miles out of town
and ain't nobody got the foist biscuit.
So The Nazz look at them cats and kitties
and he say, "You hungry, ain't ya, babies?"
And the cats say, "Yea, Nazz."
Say, "We was diggin' so hard on what you was puttin' down
we didn't pre-pare." Say, "We goofed."
So The Nazz say, "Well we gotta take it easy here.
We wouldn't want to go ahead and order up something
you might not like, would we."
And they said, "Sweet double hipness, you put it down and we'll pick it up."
And the Nazz step away a little bit. And he put a glorious sound of love on.
He said, "Oh, sweet swingin' flowers of the field."
And they said, "Oh, great non-stop singular song to beauty."
And he said, "Stomp upon the terra." They did.
He said, "Lift your miracle the body." The body went up.
He said, "Lift your arms." The arms went up.
He said, "Higher." They went higher.
He said, "DIG INFINITY!" And they dug it!
And when they did, Whap!, there was a flash of thunder
and they looked in one hand was a great, big, stuffed, sweet, swingin', smoked fish.
And in the other a long, gone, crazy loaf
of that southern, home-made, honey-tastin', sweet bread.
Why, these poor cats flipped!
The Nazz never did nothin' simple.
When He laid it,
He laid it.
[Sings:] When the saints......Sweet Lord.
Let me hip you to something!
When you make Love make it!
Oh! Some of you brothers and sisters.
Hold outs!

Posted by Jeremy at 12:12 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 26, 2004

Typepad slowdown

 by Jeremy

Cara and I apologize to those who've tried to get onto this blog over past day or two and found it either infuriatingly slow or entirely non-responsive. Typepad evidently had a server hard drive blow out on them and though they claim to have replaced it several hours ago it seems slow again. On the positive side, if one of the drives that used to contain this blog fried on them and the blog was not tottally lunched and continued to -- sort of -- be available at all, then I'd say that reflects well on Typepad and it certainly makes me feel safer about the permanence of our archives (though you can bet your ass I'm going to be backing it all up tomorrow).

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 09:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 25, 2004

Another stab at it

 by Jeremy

Is it dishonest to harvest a comment and make a post out of it? Well then slap the cuffs on me my brothers and sisters, because that's I what I'm going to do...

One of the commenters on Cara's latest post challenged us to explain what Iraq had to do with the war on terror. I posted a response (Cara was worried about a job interview at the time) and it consumed all my blogging juice, so I'm putting it up here today (with just a few typos corrected but no links added -- I'll try and add the links later):

* * *

I don't presume to answer for Cara, but I thought I'd offer a word or two. First, I felt exactly the same way when I first heard a war with Iraq being tossed around as an option back in 2001. I wanted to strangle Wolfowitz, I remember. But then I started reading Christopher Hitchens and, while I never let one person's opinion alter my own, I found most of the things he was writing were supported by other things I started reading. First, Hitchens pointed out that Iraq was heading for an implosion, war or not, and thus instability in Iraq was not a choice of "if" but of when, how much and with what countervailing influence. The other thing was the notion that the Al Qaeda attacks on 9/11 were not isolated acts, that in fact there had and has been a civil war simmering in the Muslim/Arab world between pan Arabic-Nationalists like the Baathist regime, Islamo-fascists like Al Qaeda (and unfortunately many others) and the gravitional pull of young people in Muslim and Arab countries toward a more open, liberal society eager to join the international community (and, unavoidably, to allow a superficial, secular American culture to seep into their lives).

I found this echoed in some essays by Salman Rushdie, in the writings of a handful of Iraqi exiles (whose writing I found on opendemocracy.net and more recently on the Iraqi blogs) and in the writings of Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, and in my own reading of history and current events during these consciousness-altering few years.

The bottom line is that the U.S. has had a history of blocking Muslims and Arabs from entering the "Western" good old boys network because we made a nice profit off of their suffering (though the U.S. did not invent that suffering). 9/11 resonated, I believe, with people like Wolfowitz who had already had the view for more than two decades that the Arab/Muslim world was headed for a tectonic shift and that a vacuum would open that the most ugly, totalitarian elements would struggle to fill. Al Qaeda decided not to wait for implosions to occur -- they felt they could foment an anti-enlightenment revolution by starting some sort of world war. Thankfully they are grandiose fanatics whose bizarre visions for world domination will not succeed. The question is simply how many people will they kill through terrorism and subjugate through Sharia law before ultimately failing.

It's known that Saddam toyed with the Palestinian crisis by financing suicide attacks in one of the oldest games in the book whereby the corrupt leaders of neighboring Arab countries use the Palestinian people as pawns to fuel their own power.

I don't remember which speech it was but Bush himself actually said that 60 years or more or propping up corrupt regimes in the Middle East has been a dismal failure. I'm sure he was just mouthing the words of Wolfowitz and company, but I think he believes that point of view. And that's the key: both the Baathist horror show and 9/11 were symptoms of that old policy of client-state imperialism where the Western powers opposed democratization, installed and propped up dictators in order to keep a grizzly sort of balance in the Arab world and to keep the oil flowing -- the real blood-for-oil as Hitchens puts it. 9/11 confirmed an already old suspicion that the balance had long since started tipping dangerously toward crisis, hence the fact that Bush, Wolfowitz, Clinton and others would have discussed taking out Saddam and Bin Laden before 9/11 but then had to ask themselves why they had not taken either more seriously, instead of waiting until the unthinkable already happened. And so that's what I think the Bush administration's motives were toward Iraq, whether you agree or not, that we couldn't wait for a similar process to play out with respect to Iraq, that it was better to do it now then wait until the world agree it had to be done, becuase it would take another genocidal attack on the Kurds or Shias or against the U.S. for that kind of consensus to happen, especially since France and Russia were not ready to let the blood-for-oil end just yet.

I respect the fact that you might disagree with much or all of this -- I just wanted to flesh out the notion that, though Saddam was not behind 9/11, the two are part of the same bigger picture.

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 11:28 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

February 22, 2004

Bin Laden surrounded?

 by Jeremy

Maybe, maybe not. It would be nice to wake up to find they've got the bastard, though I'd settle for just knowing they've got a lock on his location. Via Vodkapundit...

UPDATE: Well, my only email news alert this morning is telling me that Ralph Nader is running for president, so I guess I didn't get my wish re: above (I had a feeling Nader was going to run, though).

Posted by Jeremy at 03:39 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

February 19, 2004

Dear Friends

 by Cara

Here's a letter to anti-war friends everywhere, inspired by Paul Berman and Johann Hari.

Dear Friends,

You are against the war and have strong negative angry feelings about the president.

I understand this as I was 'anti-war' for most of my life. I protested at Westover Air Force Base on a cold February night at the start of the first Gulf War. I was always against the Vietnam War. And as for the conflicts during Clinton's presidency that resulted from the fall of the Soviet Union, genocide and all, well, I knew they were 'messy' civil war situations so mostly I tried not to think about it.

Now I support the current war and, though I also had strong negative feelings for the president after he was first elected, I have, post 9/11, come to see his leadership as strong and his 'war on terror', which includes the war in Iraq, as a real and sincere effort to defend this country from bona-fide aggressors.

So why is it that you see this so differently? I have been thinking, and writing, about this phenomenon, the obvious split of the left between pro and anti-war camps, since 9/11. I really think it comes down to certain assumptions we hold that we are or are not aware of, general assumptions about the world and human nature, assumptions that were once considered loose guidelines but I believe have rigidified into dogma, as well as specific assumptions about current issues.

First, I'd like to expand on what Johann Hari wrote recently about this split. He put this in a very concise way. He said that each camp comes from legitimate leftist traditions. He said the current anti-war camp comes from the anti-colonialist tradition:

"This sees America as the world's leading colonial power, and attacks upon it as part of a just anti-colonial struggle (although specific tactics like targeting civilians are usually identified as questionable). September 11th was created by US colonialism; the remedy is to dismantle US colonialism. The Left's place, in this conception, is clearly on the side of the victims of the imperial power. This is the tradition that the Stop the War Coalition has clearly drawn on, and it is best articulated today by John Pilger, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, and Gore Vidal.

The second is the anti-fascist tradition, stretching to the Spanish Civil War and beyond... The antifascist left sees fascism as the prime evil in human affairs, and prioritizes alliances against fascism even if that necessitates siding with, say, Donald Rumsfeld...People of the left like Christopher Hitchens, David Aaranovitch, and Nick Cohen see al-Quadea as a fascist movement which opposes all the Left's goals: equality, feminism, human rights, freedom...That is why I use the term 'Islamofascism': it conceptualizes al-Quadea as a threat to the Left, as well as to American civilians, and condenses all these arguments into one neat term. It reminds everyone that al-Quadea are not protestors against Vietnam or in favour of Kyoto; they are fascists and therefore embody the ultimate evil."

To me, it comes down to which of these things, US colonialism or blatant fascism, you see as more dangerous to the world.

To me, blatant fascism, whether theocratic or secular in nature, is always the bigger danger to the world because blatant fascism, by definition, is always the most extreme, racist and brutal form of unfettered colonialism going. Colonialists can engage in outright brutality, and have in the past, but these days, the kind of US colonialism that folks complain about has more to do with anger at McDonalds, Hollywood and Coke taking over culturally, and economically, than with anything else. US colonialism does not stone to death or behead female adulterers and homosexuals, Islamofascism does. US colonialism never offered rape rooms and tree shredders as officially sanctioned punishments for those who voice disagreement with the government, Baathist fascism did.

Colonialism is not necessarily fascist but fascism is always imperialist. True fascists always try to take over as much territory as they can and have no qualms about who or how many they need to outright kill or torture in order to get there.

Now, onto those assumptions.

The first big assumption I'll start off with is a bit more specific than the others and is the one I consider to be the gate-keeper assumption. If you can't get past this one, there's not much point in going on.

On the news one day a Dean supporter was asked about the anger that was behind so much support for anti-war Howard Dean. I was struck by what this guy said topped his list. He said that the anger started with the fact that Bush stole the last election and he did not consider him to be the legitimate president. Then he went on to talk about the war. People are still under the mistaken impression that Bush literally stole the election and this myth serves to continually fuel irrational anger, skew and filter certain information almost out of existence. There were several independent election investigations done after the election and all, including the very leftist Nation magazine, concluded that there were in fact not enough uncounted ballots to elect Gore. Please friends, unless you can prove it, unless you can enlighten us all with real concrete evidence, then, however difficult, you must face this fact or be relegated to the fringe who think the moon landing was faked.

For me, September 11th tested the real world mettle of many assumptions I held; it caused me to re-evaluate ideas that I really didn't even know I held until faced with this situation. It also made me realize that a lot of these ideas were in fact just assumptions, or hopes, and were not proven scientific truths.

One such assumption is the Tabula Rasa, or the idea that we are all born a blank slate. It is this idea that is generally, in the everyday world, interpreted as 'human nature is basically good'. This seems to me to be the basis of leftist thought in general and the idea that helps to justify the Socialist ideal that there's always a rational explanation for bad behavior, and their explanation is essentially that oppression and economic hardship are responsible for violence and criminality. The overall message is this: 'the system', colonial capitalism with all its inequities, is more responsible for violence and criminality than the criminals themselves, and if everyone had all they needed and were treated well, there'd be no real problems left. I never realized how much naïve credence I'd, unconsciously, given to this truly utopian idea until 9/11 brought it into my consciousness, and forced me to look at it head on. This is the grand daddy assumption that justifies and lays the foundation for so many others. This is the idea that leads to this line of thought: 'Why do they hate us? We (the US system) must've done something terrible for them to have killed 3,000 of us. The root causes of this are obviously the past foreign policy sins of the US so we'd better change and behave ourselves from now on in the world; then and only then will there be peace in the world.' And this line of thought also has several hidden implied assumptions. One is that the US, as the worlds only 'superpower', completely controls the whole world all the time so therefore whatever goes wrong is always the fault of the US. The US is granted almost omnipotent status here and this leads to ideas that state the US knows everything and can do anything when it wants to and therefore the capture of Sadaam was well planned and orchestrated to benefit Bush the most, etc. How could it possibly be our fault if we didn't control everything, right? One assumption justifies another.

Another hidden assumption stemming from ''the system' is to blame' is the idea of moral equivalence, which, ironically, really means applying completely different standards of judgement to analogous situations only because one situation involves people who are viewed as being more victimized by 'the system'. This is why the left is eerily silent when it comes to, say, Islamist Honor killings of women, but would be marching in justified outrage if white American men started bludgeoning their 'promiscuous' daughters to death in order to save the family honor as their 'religion' dictates. After 9/11, I came to recognize this not as tolerance, but as hypocrisy and amorality dressed up as tolerance; and sympathy for the terrorists as desperate victims of 'the system' begins to over-ride sympathy for those actually murdered. I believe this ultimately leads to an attitude that ignores or even dehumanizes the victims of terror in favor of sympathy for the terrorists. Ian Buruma calls this moral racism:

"When Indians kill Muslims, or Africans kill Africans, or Arabs kill Arabs, western pundits pretend not to notice, or find historical explanations, or blame the scars of colonialism. But if white men, whether they are Americans, Europeans, South Africans or Israelis harm people of colour, hell is raised."

Way back when, the prevailing traditional idea was that individuals are born into original sin, meaning people are born bad and have to learn, through religion, to be good. The revolutionary idea that people are born good and must learn to be bad was a definite improvement over the oppression of original sin. But this revolutionary idea, this unproven idea, has itself rigidified into a worldview that has become like a literal mirror image of the rigid black and white world it sought to free us from. And all of these assumptions, in one way or another, to me, serve to hinder the internal free flow of information so important to objectivity and truth, assumptions that prevented me, I'm embarassed to say, from really facing the genocidal facts concerning those 'messy' civil wars under Clinton's watch. I just never realized how many roadblocks these assumptions had left in my head. September 11th pretty much blew my roadblocks away. September 12th left me with concrete facts of rubble and human dust. It was then that I understood the importance of facts over utopian assumptions; facts lead to the truth, utopia leads nowhere, and when you assume...

-Cara

Posted by Cara at 01:46 AM | Comments (41) | TrackBack

February 15, 2004

The Tandy Indicator: Good News for the Economy

 by Jeremy

I hate when the clerks in stores like Radio Shack, or auto parts and hardware stores ask me if they can help me find anything. When this happens to you, I advise you to decline. They will tell you you can't put a 12 volt bulb in a 6 volt lamp when you know perfectly well that you can; it will just be dimmer. And maybe you want it dimmer because you want to use it as a reading light that won't annoy your wife as you read the collected short stories of Vladimir Nabokov at 3 in the morning while she's trying to sleep next to you. You could try saying to the clerk "well, it probably will work, it'll just be dimmer, which is what I want" but he will either say "Yeah but...the bulb says 12 volts and this old one you brought in says 6 volts" or he will try to sell you a bunch of parts -- "you'll want this voltage variable IC power supply, this linear potentiometer with midpoint detent and on/off switch, and I recommend going with a high intensity LED, and you can etch your own circuit board..."

The two forms of "assistance" described above are equivalent in that they will make you unhappy and angry and leave you unsatisfied and bitter, but they differ completely as indicators of the state of the economy. When times are good, Radio Shack clerks -- and hardware clerks, and auto parts clerks -- are lousy because the good ones can get better jobs. When the economy is in the crapper, then you start to get over-qualified people -- MIT grads, downsized engineers, former nuclear experts from Pakistan -- helping you find your little light bulbs. I've gotten some annoyingly expert advice in these kinds of stores these past couple of years and that has made sense, since the job market has been tough. But today I tried to purchase a headlamp for my car and the guy -- who insisted on using the term "dome light" which I knew to be incorrect -- couldn't help me. He said they had none in stock, meaning no dome lights. I didn't have the energy to say, "you don't know what you're talking about -- this is not exactly rocket science" so I walked away disappointed. But then I realized, "wait a second -- it's not rocket science, which means this guy is not a rocket scientist. He doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't really know about cars, per se. The economy must be getting better!" It made me feel good and I thought I'd share it with you.

Disclaimer: This blog post should in no way be taken to suggest that Radio Shack, the Tandy corporation, Aubuchon Hardware, True Value, Ace, Pep Boys, Hapco, or any other company offers anything other than exemplary service by fully qualified, courteous service professionals.

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 06:40 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

When you issue a fatwa, do if for good not for evil

 by Jeremy

Zeyad reports:

Several Iraqi Muslim clerics, from both the Sunni and Shi'ite sects, issued a collective fatwa against inter-Iraqi violence, asssasinations, and terrorist attacks.

If there are any powerful Muslim clerics in the Middle East who actually care about the lives and interests of Palestinians, other than as pawns in the cold blooded machinations of terror brokers, they might issue this sort of fatwa against the terrorism in Israel. This is the sort of awakening of Arab and Muslim self-determination that the Islamo-fascists are at war against; I think they are going to lose.

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 05:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 12, 2004

Remembrance of Future Past

 by Cara

Listening to the President's speech about black market networks selling nuclear info, materials, equipment, etc...I'm reminded of my 10th grade social studies class discussions about the then current hostage situation in Iran. I remember my teacher, Mr. Conlee, an obvious liberal no less, talking about the terrorists and saying that it was only a matter of time before terrorist groups "got the bomb". He said that this would be worse than our situation with the Soviets; the delicate balance of power of mutually assured destruction simply wouldn't exist with terrorists as they would have no qualms about nuking us first and asking questions later. This eerily mirrored almost exactly what the president said yesterday in his speech, "In the Cold War, Americans lived under the threat of weapons of mass destruction, but believed that deterrents made those weapons a last resort. What has changed in the 21st century is that, in the hands of terrorists, weapons of mass destruction would be a first resort". I remember the rhetorical question Mr. Conlee posed, 'How will we deal with this?', clinging to the air in tense silence, everyone looking around, fear and worry on our 10th grade faces. Mr. Conlee, realizing how much he'd just spooked us all, ended the painful silence by assuring us it would probably be "decades before that happened" and by then, we'd hopefully have some kind of experts or technology around to help us solve the problem.

Let's face it; we all grew up on a steady diet of sci-fi mad-man/terrorist doomsday tales as well as real life news stories of hi-jackings and hostage takings. We all knew Mr. Conlee was right, that it really was only a matter of time before real life terrorists got their hands on the concrete means to blackmail the world and we all knew that we didn't want to have to think about it either. That was for the experts in the future to do.

Well, my classmates, that future is now and, like it or not, we elected those 'experts' who now fill the hot seats of the Bush administration -- that village of the damned-if-they-do and much-more-damned-if-they-don't.

It would be so comforting to think this problem is still far away in the future. But 9/11 showed us that it is not.

And I think it would actually be reassuring to think of 9/11 as a fluke, the one time price of our 'bad behavior' and to solve it all we need do is behave nicer in the world, and the world will love us back. This would mean that it really is completely within our control, that we really aren't at the mercy of fanatics with nukes after all, that we can ultimately control the fanatics by changing our own behavior, by walking on the arbitrary eggshell landmines of mad tyrants' whims. (Why did the Taliban, allied with Al Quaeda, demolish the ancient Bhuddha statues, and film it for the world to see, if it's only about our own bad behavior?) No, this is pure post-modern naivete, delusion and denial.

There are certain realities in life that we cannot just "re-frame" away.

And, to my friends on the 'left', our tye dye security blankets, peace buttons and sixties slogans will not help us here. We just can't solve this one by flashing a peace sign, no matter how warm and fuzzy it makes us feel. And we can't solve it either by only blaming our own country's sins while turning a blind eye to the terrorists themselves.

We will not solve this by pouring all our anger onto Bush. And we cannot solve this by 'killing them (the terrorists) with kindness' because you can never kill, or even stop, a psycho-path with kindness; kindness only eggs them on. People without conscience are psycho-paths, and it's people without conscience who specifically target and murder innocent people. Good people do not stand by and let this happen if they can help it. And good people don't divert attention away from the victims of mass murder by showing us all the ways the terrorists are the bigger victims. No one in their right mind would ever obsess over and appease poor victimized Charles Manson and his gang's fascistically religious targeted slayings of innocent people and ignore those murdered. Besides the organizational funding and massive scale, tell me, what the hell is the difference? Why is it so hard to see evil for what it is when it involves non-western psycho-paths? The hysterical insistence of holding different moral standards for different cultures has disintegrated from cultural diversity to moral racism, plain and simple. That line of thinking goes something like this: 'We could never hold (those) diverse people to our (pure) standards, now could we, for that would be intolerant of us'. And this is, besides being blatantly dishonest, simply the newest sanctioned and most insidious form of elitism and racism going. And those on the far right and left have both been guilty here.

When the west does bad things it's bad, and when everyone else does bad things it's also just as bad. Same standards folks, or you're practicing hypocrisy and moral racism. It's time to realize that it's not just the 'experts' sitting in those hot seats. A dirty bomb will not discriminate between a pro-war vs. anti-war American, and neither will an Islamist terrorist.

So, what do you think, where does all this leave liberal Mr. Conlee? Remember, he gave us an insight back in 1979 that echoes Bush's present words exactly. Was Mr. Conlee duped too?

- Cara

Posted by Cara at 05:02 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

It's South Korea, Not North Korea.

 by Jeremy

I checked three or four times. It says South, not North. And that's good. It means the difference between a disturbing yet fascinating breakthrough in medical sciene vs. "The Boys From Brazil."

And perhaps we finally have a controversy-about-which-both-presidential-candidates-basically-agree that will trump all other controversies-about-which-both-presidential-candidates-basically-agree. Here again we have another issue so hotly devisive it will be a defining issue of the presidential debates:

"And you oppose gay marriage!"

"Well you do too, don't you?"

"Uh...yeah."

"If re-elected, I would ban human cloning!"

"Uh...me too."

(I'm not saying Kerry and Bush are exactly the same, jut that Viet Nam seems to be the only issue on which you begin to get some genuine dramatic tension. Too bad that issue is completely irrelevant. And come to think of it: "You protested against that war!" "Well you're a critic of that war too." "Uh...that's true." "But you managed to avoid combat duty." "But you rebuked your combat role by throwing away your medals. You'd have advised me to do anything I could to avoid active duty, if I'd asked you." "Uh...that's true." )

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 10:24 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 10, 2004

Guantanamo: The Whole World is Watching

 by Jeremy

Former Afghan prisoners of Guantanamo are talking -- they will not be silenced. Let no one claim not to have known what went on behind the barbed wire fences under the watch of our American soldiers (via Randal Robinson):

"They gave me a good time in Cuba. They were very nice to me, giving me English lessons...the Americans were so nice to me. They gave me good food with fruit and water for ablutions and prayer..."

...

"They treated us well. We had enough food. I didn't mind [being detained] because they took my old clothes and gave me new clothes..."

When one person is given nice fruit and English lessons, the whole world is given nice fruit and English lessons. When will this administration see that all it has wrought is the birth of yet another generation of clean clothes wearing, fruit eating, English speaking Muslim youth.

A serious aside: I'm not one to deny that Guantanamo needs to come under scrutiny. One of the people quoted above was the famous 14 year old prisoner who goes on to say that 14 months of his life were taken away from him and that U.S. authorities failed to notify his family that he was O.K. But one U.S. official puts some context on the kids at Guantanamo:

The official said last week that one of the three boys had told of being conscripted into an anti-American militia group; a second said that he was abducted by the Taliban and forced to train and fight; while the third was studying in an extremist mosque and captured while preparing to obtain weapons.

One wonders how much of this boy's life would have be taken away from him had he not been taken into custody by U.S. troops.

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 11:25 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 09, 2004

Moral Racism and the Silver Star

 by Jeremy

Though I have featured John Kerry on these pages a number of times lately, I have neglected to mention another person whose chest has had a silver star pinned to it more recently. This would, of course, be Janet Jackson. I had not thought the whole boob stunt was worth blogging about, but something bloggable just occurred to me: the fact that this controversy has nothing to do with race has some important racial implications. There used to be an unwritten rule (hmm...maybe it actually was written) that, while you couldn't look at pictures of white women's boobs in polite society, it would be reasonably ok to look at black women's boobs since they naturally walk around that way in Africa and places like that. This was a kind of racist, conservative cultural relativism. The flap over the Jackson boob has proven that this rule is no longer on the books. That has to be some kind of progress, I think.

A similar kind of old patronizing racism -- in this case of a more deadly variety -- has not yet died. This, in the words of Israeli philosopher, Avishai Margalit (via Ian Buruma via (via Mick Hartley (via Socialism in an Age of Waiting))) is "moral racism." Buruma explains:

"When Indians kill Muslims, or Africans kill Africans, or Arabs kill Arabs, western pundits pretend not to notice, or find historical explanations, or blame the scars of colonialism. But if white men, whether they are Americans, Europeans, South Africans or Israelis harm people of colour, hell is raised."

I don't think this matter can be settled by a Jackson family strip tease, but someone's got to get through to people on this one. It's a relic of the past and it must die.

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 01:59 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

My prediction for the 2004 presidential race

 by Jeremy

This will be the year that hundreds of thousands of swing voters will not realize who they're going to vote for until they are standing in the booth. Something about the musty smell of that heavy red-white-and-blue curtain, the bead of sweat rolling down the forehead into the eye, the squeak of sneaker soles on the gymnasium floor, the infinite solitude of those fifty four cubic feet of American democracy will wake one up, will make one see things differently. There will be a vast scourge of voting in earnest and not wanting to talk about it to pollsters afterwards. This will help Kerry a little and Bush a lot. The result will be that the polls will show a tight race but Bush will prevail comfortably in the end. Chads will hang in darkened rooms -- limp, powerless, forgotten. Uh...but then again, who knows -- I may one day deny having meant any of this.

Footnote: Voting booth volume is my own estimate and, of course, does not take into account the wide variety of voting apparatus across the country. If shopping for a voting booth, check here for an economical model with the aforementioned red-white-and-blue curtain.

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 01:15 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 08, 2004

Fast Food Imperialism

 by Jeremy

When a certain variety of opponents of the war in Iraq prognosticate on the evil specter of fast food restaurants opening in Iraq, I will confess it goes over my head. I can understand the other warnings about the abolition of the bill of rights, the rounding up of Arabs and dissidents in concentration camps, the rise in America of a fascist police state far worse than the world has ever seen...because, though lavishly absurd, these fantastic visions of doom would indeed be very, very bad were they to happen. But McDonald's? Pizza Hut? I have never understood what all the fuss ought to be about. Zeyad, however, describes a fast food joint in Basrah that is making me rethink this...

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 11:24 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Caption Contest Results

 by Jeremy

Our panel of judges has come up with its favorite entries from last week's Kerry caption contest. Thanks to everyone who entered and by all means keep them coming. I'll update this list if more winning lines make it over the transom. Weird or missing apostrophes or quotation marks are the fault of my hasty programming and do not necessarily reflect the grammatical intentions of the entrants.

Meanwhile, the winning entries are these (oddly, my entry happens to be among them):

scott h.

dan truly

Patrick S Lasswell

Jeremy

Bernard

dan truly #2

Larry

James

Apologies to all entrants for the annoying technical idiosyncrasies. I'll have to get my team of programmers back to work.

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 03:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 04, 2004

Notes On WMD and Bullshitting

 by Jeremy

• A common anti-war assertion is that Saddam was nowhere near having nukes, that indeed you're an imperialist dupe if you believe the Bush administration thought so either.
• Saddam was evidently trying to buy longish range Rodong missiles from North Korea under the belief that he could get the missiles and be OK with the U.N. and he'd worry about the payloads when he really needed to (it's easy enough to slap together a crapload of mustard gas and other bathtub-caliber WMDs at the last minute)
• Pakistan was happily peddling Nukes to Iran, Libya and North Korea (I'm sure they'd never sell them to a bad country like Iraq though)
• Kim Jong Il told Saddam it was no go on the Rodongs because things were getting too hot, what with the U.S. invasion coming down the pike and all that.
• Had things not gotten so hot with the impending imperialist-dog threat from the U.S., not only might the Rodongs have been forthcoming, but the nuclear gravy train emanating from Pakistan might have passed from Kim to Saddam unimpeded. We will never know for sure.

There seems to be ample justification for declaring the war a success on the basis of WMDs -- if one insists on judging it on that basis alone -- because of, not in spite of, the lack of good information about the behavior of the above nations named. It has been shown that Saddam misled the U.N. inspectors as to whether or not he had WMDs. Given the shenanigans outlined above, this kind of obfuscation is damned dangerous.

I'll undermine this post with an anecdote about a juggler: One of the people I used to juggle with in Washington Square Park back in the 80's (he was a performer, I was an aspiring amateur) entered JFK airport where he was to catch a plane to France (or was it Japan?) to juggle in a show he was invited to participate in. This was back in 1984 or so. He had blithely tossed into his duffle bag -- in addition to the clubs, balls, rings, and torches -- a machete, a sickle and a hatchet. Now, we've since learned that airport security ought to have been better, but you'll be pleased to know they at least questioned him about this stuff. He said, "oh those are just juggling props. Between you and me, they've been dulled so I don't cut myself; they're completely harmless." They were ready to wave him through, he said, but to a juggler/comedian the possibility of a punchline is a tension that cannot be ignored -- when the itch comes, it must be scratched, to hell with the consequences. Already regretting it, he heard himself add: "but the bomb in my suitcase is another story." They of course detained him for hours. I think they should not have let him on the plane at all. And these days they probably would not have. The point of this Reader's Digest anecdote, I guess, is that bullshitting officials about things that can kill masses of people is itself a dangerous act.

Coda: It was my friend's misfortune not to have had a prior record of serial killings, or he might have been able to get Ramsey Clark to sue the airport and A.N.S.W.E.R. to stage a rally on his behalf.

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 10:34 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Stockholm Syndrome Re-visited

 by Cara

Thank you, Dr. Helen Smith , via Professor GlennReynolds, for reviving my faith in the objectivity of the field of psychology. In November I wrote a post called Re-examining Stockholm Syndrome where I asked if anyone had written about this before: how the response of post-9/11 frenzied "anti-war left", in general, looked very much like a sort of diluted form of Stockholm Syndrome. I ended the post by saying, "I wish there was a psychologist with an advanced degree whose objectivity I could trust enough to ask about all of this. Unfortunately, I fear that many within the 'therapeutic community', at least many that I've come in contact with these days, may have fallen victim to it themselves."

Finally, a psychologist who isn't lost in relativism, who refuses to worship at the sacred alter of 'more self-esteem is always the answer', and I find, lo and behold, she's the Insta-Wife, right there under my blognose the whole time! Roger Simon has quite a thoughtful post on this as well.

Dr. Helen Smith, in her TCS essay on the new book by David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, brilliantly connects more dots. Here are some highlights (bold and most italics mine):

"In a Clintonian sort of approach, some Americans seem to believe that if we can "feel our enemies' pain," then we will be on the path to enlightenment and peace. This belief could not be further from the truth. In my private practice, I don't work with terrorists but I do work with violent people. I used to believe (as many of my colleagues still do) that empathizing with my patients and increasing their self-esteem would help them on the path to self-actualization. Of course, for some anxiety-ridden patients who need faith in themselves, the technique of empathy and support works. However, for those patients with serious violent tendencies, just the opposite is true. With those patients, I've found that setting clear boundaries and making judgments about their immoral behavior works like a charm.

Those patients who threatened me backed down only when I got up in their face and told them forcefully to stop -- the slightest hint of fear or intimidation (or sympathy!) on my part was met with increased threats. In the real world of private practice, confronting real murderers, I learned to act in ways that were different from what I had been taught in graduate school.

Unfortunately, there are still those in the ivory tower who have not learned this valuable lesson. They continue to believe that to humanize and to empathize with violent students, professors, and terrorists is the only way to treat those who wish to do them harm. In fact, however, the old saw "give them an inch and they'll take a mile" applies. Without clear boundaries, and a sense of consequences, their behavior will spiral out of control until they injure themselves and others."

Amen. Within the walls of a psychiatric facility that often treats violent forensic patients, the safety net of boundaries and consequences, along with the more obvious psychiatric treatments, are what the therapeutic milieu is all about; reflecting reality and maintaining that safety net was a huge part of my job as a counselor working just such a unit. And the legacy of this work history of mine may be part of the reason why this 'leftist/relativist' tendency to tolerate and appease violent behavior, at least those with who are perceived by the 'left' as underdogs of some kind, continually sticks in my craw. I believe this misguided tendency has seeped unnoticed and unchallenged into the mainstream as well.

I witnessed this blatantly and first hand in the 'lefty' collective I was once a member of. A worsening spiral of outrageous behavior, that no one (but stupid me) dared do anything about, culminated one day with a hole in the wall. (No, see, she's a "pacifist", so it's okay.) There was absolutely no official collective policy that dealt with discipline problems of any kind; I was told by a senior member that "there were no behavior problems, only miscommunications". In utopia maybe. There was no disciplinary system, only a committee to talk through these 'miscommunications'. I had no back up what so ever as heads everywhere dove for the sand. But, not to fear, there were equal opportunity episodes for all who dared to take turns filling the chaos vacuum! There was the time another member, a fidgety guy with a clear history of belligerent, erratic, moody, behavior along with those bizarre gratuitous drug references he'd throw out now and then, declared one day "Wow, this is the second time I almost burned my apartment down!" Fires not withstanding, I was told that this (even though he openly spoke of this at work) was his private business only. I was supposed to just ignore this stuff, but couldn't and was chastised for trying to deal with it. The overall enabling message was clear, 'don't upset the bullies, do feel bad for them, and above all, never criticize them' (no free speech here). Haven of workers' rights? Essentially, those with the most intimidating 'behavior problems' ruled the day. I feel lucky I never witnessed things escalate to these levels (below)...Dr. Smith on the perils of ignoring/appeasing violent tendencies:

"As a recent study of mine indicates, university administrators often think that angry, violent students and faculty can be placated if they are understood and given what they ask for -- just like terrorists. But in recent university shootings, just the opposite happened.

Valery Fabrikant was a mechanical engineering professor at Concordia University in Canada who, after being denied tenure, murdered four of his colleagues. Apparently, the professor's rudeness and disruptive behavior had started a good ten years before he opened fire on his colleagues. He even boasted to others that he planned to shoot various professors and take hostages -- but instead of being disciplined or fired for this outrageous behavior, he was promoted and given raises. Many of the faculty were too frightened or impotent to take action against Mr. Fabrikant. One of the senior members of the engineering department even insisted that "giving Fabrikant what he wanted would bring out the best in him." (Dr. Smith's italics) Instead of acting to subdue his anger, giving in to his demands time and time again encouraged him to act in more and more outrageous ways, and eventually sent him on a killing spree.

In a similar case at the Appalachian Law School in 2002, a student by the name of Peter Odighizuwa murdered three and wounded three others before being subdued at gunpoint by his fellow students. Dean L. Anthony Sutin had helped Odighizuwa get into law school and even allowed him back in after he had flunked out the first time. Sutin and the school helped him get a loan, and to buy a car and a computer. Odighizuwa was known for his belligerent manner and threats to harm others. But in the academic world where nonviolence and understanding are believed to work wonders, no one bothered to tell Odighizuwa that his behavior was unacceptable. Once he flunked a second time, he was told he had to go, but instead he took the lives of some of the people who had helped him the most."

Here was the kicker for me:

"In our attempt to be overly-tolerant and empathetic, we start to identify too much with the enemy (very much like those suffering from Stockholm syndrome) and start to dehumanize the victims of terror." Surely, the victims of 9/11 deserve more from us than that. As do the potential victims who might be saved by a more realistic, and less "nurturing," approach." -- Dr. Helen Smith, forensic psychologist

- Cara

Posted by Cara at 08:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

And There's Kerry All Presidential and Shit

 by Jeremy

We saw him chatting with Hannity and Colmes last night: he could not have been more glowingly respectful and pleasant if he'd been talking to the parents of a girl he was dating. It seems that Kerry is now bound by some cosmic presidentifying force, a spell cast by some kingmaking wizard from Neptune whose head is all glass bubble and brain and in whose grip Kerry is powerless to resist. But I'm now thinking he was bit of an Eddie Haskell, which I suppose means I had an inkling that he's aware he's been a little naughty but he wants us to know he's really a nice guy. Bush's war record? Hey, not a campaign issue. Edwards as running mate? Dean and Clark as washroom attendants? Listen, it's not appropriate to talk that way about my friends, whom I repspect since they are still viable candidates. And all like that.

Interestingly, Ken Osmond, who played Eddie Haskell in "Leave it to Beaver," went on to become an L.A. cop for many years, working vice and narcotics, among other things. And Osmond, like Kerry, had a deadly brush with heroism that might (are you listening, Kerry) make him viable as a running mate:

Where Are They Now: He became a cop, an LAPD cop and he was shot 3 times while in pursuit of a suspect. His assailant was about to put a final cap in his ass to finish him off when his partner clubbed the guy with his empty revolver. After that episode (no pun) he battled depression, which was exacerbated by a rumour circulating that he really grew up to become porn star John Holmes (he didn't). Another Urban Legend had him grow up to become Alice Cooper (also not so).

Today he is a vintage car enthusiast and real estate investor. His stock broker is none other than Leave it Beaver co-star, Lumpy (the jabbering idiot guy).

By the way, if you think this post is what Jarvis means by an "issues blog" please let me know so I can keep 'em coming.

-Jeremy

Posted by Jeremy at 08:52 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 02, 2004

(UPDATED) We're Back... And we have a groovy caption contest!

 by Jeremy

UPDATE: THE RESULTS ARE IN...(UPDATE #2: no longer available)

Hello Friends,
Sorry for the absence of several days. Cara and I have been working on other things that couldn't wait, one of which involves some meatball web programming I'm doing for a website we're planning. It turns out, I learned this weekend, that you can add text to images on the fly using the PHP scripting language, but I'll spare the details. The upshot is...real-time image blogging! (or something like that). My first experiment with this is in the form of the "caption this photo" contest you see below. Click the picture and you will be taken to a page where you can add a witty caption. The caption will be secretly sent to a vault at the "Who Knew" headquarters but it will also be stylishly added to a copy of the image that you can download for your own use (no one else will see it).

I will choose the wittiest slogans and post them along with the names of the authors (alas, the resulting public adulation will be your only prize).

Here's a thought: If I'd had the nerve, I could have set this up so that each person's slogan would be added to the image below for all the world to see, changing only when the next person added a slogan. That would be true image blogging, but I've got to think through the implications first. Food for thought though, isn't it?

-Jeremy

P.S. Apologies to Rami Salami whose image I pilfered. I will have to take it down, I suppose, if he doesn't appreciate the free publicity.

Posted by Jeremy at 12:21 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack