I know there’s always something
We have to go through
That has some deeper meaning
Right now I just can’t say
I know there’s a lesson in here somewhere
I’m gonna think a lot about it later
Right now I’m miles away
Blog
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Dishonest or just dumb?
An article in today’s NY Times caught my eye: “FCC Planning Rules to Open Cable Market” says that the FCC has laid the legal groundwork to re-regulate the cable industry. It struck me because this is quite atypical for the FCC and for the Bush administration in general. Apparently, in the Cable Communications Act of 1984, Congress empowered the FCC to act once the cable industry matured to a certain size: “at such time as cable systems with 36 or more activated channels are available to 70 percent of households within the United States and are subscribed to by 70 percent of the households to which such systems are available, the Commission may promulgate any additional rules necessary to provide diversity of information sources.” (http://www.publicaccess.org/cableact.html)
Predictably, now that that point has been reached and surpassed, the cable industry is whining about the burdens the FCC may impose. But to do it, they apparently need to distort not just policy but basic math as well.
More below the fold.
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Recycled: What’s So Wrong About Military Tribunals, Anyway?
Another piece written some time ago (circa 2002 January) that reads chillingly a propos today. This was written before the series of judicial rebukes to the President’s overreaching constitutional “doctrine” of unlimited executive power. Sadly, those rebukes have not rendered the points raised moot.
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Waterboarding
I don’t like me-too blogs but every once in awhile, someone writes on a topic in a way that exactly captures my own feeling, a way that I could never match, much less trump. This piece by Joe Galloway is one such.
My God, how did we come to a point when Senators and Representatives of the United States Congress cannot seem to comprehend what “torture” is? Seven years ago, I would never have believe we could fall so far so quickly — and I fancied myself a student of history and a cynical observer of human nature.
I weep for my Republic. I truly do.
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Recycled: Just Wrong
Long before this blog, I kept an equally-erratic literary journal called A Voice in the Wilderness. And while nothing written there was particularly world-shattering, I don’t want it to get lost in the mists of cyberspace. So to do my part to save the planet, I’m going to recycle and reuse that content, putting the save-worthy stuff here on Mongrel Dogs. Today we start with a piece written in reaction to an op-ed in the Washington Post written by one Victoria Toensing, on 2002 September 23, about the then-nascent Bush policy of secret detention and arbitrary arrest. Sadly it’s five years later and we are five years deeper into the pit, the cause of liberty even more undermined by its alleged defenders.
The piece is reproduced below the fold.
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Alternate History: The Speech that Wasn’t
In preparing my second Convocation speech, I spent most of the summer at a loss. Once I had changed apartments, I sat down in earnest. Eventually, I ended up jettisoning my original effort and producing the speech as given. But in case you wonder what could have been, below I’ll post the speech I nearly gave. There are two caveats:
- I shamelessly cannibalized this for any rhetoric I thought actually worked, so the actual speech and this one overlap somewhat.
- I abandoned this and never finished editing or, indeed, writing it. So the thing given is unpolished and the quality comparatively low.
Without further hedging, let me give you the Speech that Wasn’t.
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Faith in an Age of Fear
Today the Hun School had its second annual Convocation to commence the year. As the current holder of the Distinguished Faculty Endowed Chair, it fell to me to present a speech. (I did this last year, too; you can find that speech online.) The text of this second speech can be found below the fold.
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Old nuggets
Anyone checking the frequency of blogging for this site need not be told that I am not a natural diarist. I keep trying to start a regular compilation of my thought but never quite get in the habit. I have a journal I’ve carted from DC to Stanford to Bensalem to Princeton. With my recent move still unfolding in slow motion in my new apartment, I came across that book, which I have not touched since (at latest) 1998.
Only two pages have any writing, dating from late 1992(!) with the interesting heading “Thoughts on Teaching”. Since that means that those two pages were, in some way, the progenitor of these blog entries — that this little blue notebook is the ur-Mongrel Dogs, I thought it appropriate to record them here, before ditching the book that’s been dogging me for fifteen years.
More below the fold.
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Worrisome Phrase
In reading this AP News story on the upcoming speech by the President, I came across the following:
Bush and his senior advisers are likely to hear the initial thinking from Ryan Crocker, Bush’s envoy in Baghdad
[emphasis added]Isn’t Ryan Crocker the accredited ambassador to Iraq? Confirmed and empowered, one would hope, by the United States Senate? He’s not some office flunky that Bush sent over to Iraq for a look-see. He’s the full-time diplomatic representative (to an allegedly sovereign nation) of the United States of America, not of George W. Bush. Talk about your imperial presidencies! It’s about as bad as when Bush himself said, of Rumsfeld,
Good. He’s done a heck of a job. He’s conducted two wars, and at the same time is out to transfer my military from a military that was constructed for the post-Cold War to one that is going to be constructed to fight terrorism.
Ominous phrases, both.
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Another propaganda poster
As has been usual, this is another exhortation to “Work to Win”. My “study” of WWI and WWII posters indicates that almost all fell into the “Work harder” or “Buy more bonds” categories. True to form, this poster says, “Victory up here… begins down here“. Overhead are a Retro Rocketship and a DV snub fighter. On the ground, in a vaguely-factory-ish compound, is another Retro Rocketship. It’s not so easy to make clear that this one is being assembled or worked on. I put in a forklift and a repair bot, as well as a guy welding something to the periscope hatch. (He’s hard to see, on the top of the ship.) Actually, I had to go find models for almost everything, as I didn’t have a lot of industrial nick-nacks lying around.
