Blogito, Ergo Sum
by Gregg Calkins
6 December 2006, a soggy Wednesday
Headline news for the NYTimes this morning, top of the page:
Iraq Panel Presents Its Report to Bush
The president said he would take the Iraq Study Group’s ideas “very seriously” and move in “a timely fashion” to reshape policy.
Since I'm the last guy in the world to have seen it, he said, a timely fashion for me is going to be around 2009 or so.
I love the NYT, they are so predictable. They quoted Kissinger again as having said that "a clear-cut military victory was no longer achievable".
We all know that isn't what Kissinger said, of course...what's that? We don't all know and that's what the NYT is counting on? Oh. Silly me. Well, at least all of MY readers know better. Just in case...
"If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," he told the British Broadcasting Corp.
Bolding mine, of course. Kissinger's point, which has been selectively and very deliberately ignored, is that the political processes of the democracies aren't going to allow the necessary time, because democracies have short attention-spans.
Alas, jihadists do not suffer from that weakness.
Oh, by the way, read the Kissinger quote again. Did he say it was "no longer achievable"?
In fact, the entire misquote is spun so badly that, guess what...the New York Times doesn't even quote him! They just TELL YOU what he said!
They are very cute, that way, and they fool a lot of people with the technique. If Kissinger ever caught the misrepresentation and cared enough to correct it, they'd print the correction on the bottom of page D16. Next month.
However, this is an item I can believe:
Hearing from a lot of new friends lately? You know, the ones that write “It’s me, Esmeralda,” and tip you off to an obscure stock that is “poised to explode” or a great deal on prescription drugs.
You’re not the only one. Spam is back — in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone’s minds. In the last six months, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.
Our RACSA e-mail address was worse than that. Fortunately, knock wood, our new ICE address is much, much better. But I figure it's only a matter of time...
However, just to show you how effective the anti-spam industry is, my Norton puts messages into its SPAM folder even when they come from Carol and others I have previously specifically told it are NOT spam.
Mehran Sabbaghian, a network engineer at the Sacramento Web hosting company Lanset America, said that last month a sudden Internet-wide increase in spam clogged his firm’s servers so badly that the delivery of regular e-mail to customers was delayed by hours.
To relieve the pressure, the company took the drastic step of blocking all messages from several countries in Europe, Latin America and Africa, where much of the spam was originating.
Unfortunately, that meant mail from us! RACSA is a notorious spammer. And at the moment I don't seem to be able to send mail to AOL or COMCAST addresses.
Spammers have effectively foiled the first strategy — analyzing the reputation of the sender — by conscripting vast networks of computers belonging to users who unknowingly downloaded viruses and other rogue programs. The infected computers begin sending out spam without the knowledge of their owners. Secure Computing, an antispam company in San Jose, Calif., reports that 250,000 new computers are captured and added to these spam “botnets” each day.
Now that should capture your attention, if they haven't already captured your computer.
Apparently the Congressional Black Caucus is out to re-make America, and this is one of their goals:
Mr. Cleaver said his top priority will be to push for
an end to state election laws that require voters to present state-issued
identification to vote, an issue that will be taken up by his CBC
colleague, the next chairman of the House Administration Committee, Rep.
Juanita Millender-McDonald of California.
"Congressman Ike Skelton who lives in my metropolitan area couldn't
vote because he showed up at the polls and didn't have a driver's license
-- Ike has polio and can't use his arms and has no need for a license,"
Mr. Cleaver said, adding, "That kind of foolishness has to stop."
One wonders exactly how many voters there are who were similarly affected. One also wonders how Mr Skelton ever rents a DVD.
Enough of the Baker Boys and their report, THIS is the one I'm waiting for!
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for wiping Israel off the map and expressed doubts about the Holocaust. Yesterday, Iran's foreign ministry said it will hold a two-day international conference next week on the Holocaust to examine the event without any "preconceived ideas."
It should be very interesting reading.
evening
For those of you seeking interesting reading here, and reading this Costa Rica personal section as the only part of it, Carol got on my case this morning about what I wrote last night and as a result I think maybe I didn't explain myself too well. Astounding, but I guess it happens.
Anyhow, Carol said it sounded like I was complaining, a "poor me" explanation of why I find myself where I do right now instead of the places I had planned...or chosen...or 'wanted'.
For Tony and maybe even the dogs, who may be reading this someday and somewhen, a la Simak, that wasn't what I meant. I'm not unhappy or dissatisfied with where I am, at least not inordinately so, not in any way that is unusual to the normal human condition, I was trying to categorize myself according to the lady's system and finding none of them fit very well.
As I explained to Carol, somewhat defensively, what I was trying to say was that it seemed to me that I fell into the category of the guy to whom things seemingly just happened and he then adapted to fit himself to them rather than the other way around. I'm not defining this as being a good thing, or bad, or indifferent, more like just acknowledging a fact. Like the Tao says, the water flows around the rock.
My best friend, at one time, was a guy named Seghini, an Irish-Italian from a not-so-good section of New York City. He married my wife at a time when I really didn't want to get divorced from her, but that's a long story and aside from my point, so if either one of them reads this then I want to tell them I understand why they did what they did and have long since forgiven them and accepted my own role in what happened to us. Bob was a very fun guy, I loved him, and one day he came back to me to recount a meeting he had just had with his major professor about his own future. While waiting for the prof to show up he, ah, just happened to glance at the prof's calendar on his desk.
On it, an hour had been blocked out with the label "plan next 10 years".
Bob came back and reported this to me…he was incredulous. Imagine the very idea of someone thinking they could plan ahead for the next ten years!
We were younger then, of course, ten years was like an eternity, but even so I've had occasion to remember that story many stimes since then.. Go ahead, grab a year out of your life, any year, doesn't matter...then try to write down a plan for what would have been your next ten years if you had written it then, and compare it with what actually happened to you.
I was trying to tell Carol that one of my earliest plans, before I even met her, had been to be a drunken beach bum on a tropical island, with no wives or cares or homes or dogs or children, Thoreau-squared in a better climate, maybe Gauguin-cubed if only I could paint and thus get girls to take off their tops in the name of great art, although I suppose if I selected my tropical island carefully enough they would all come that way as a matter of course. And Farrah Fawcett would show up occasionally, don't forget, straight from Charlie's Angels. (The only movie star I have ever loved more than Farrah was Jean Simmons, and I still have a hard time thinking about her. I loved Jean Simmons with a totally illogical emotion. With Farrah, by comparison, it was completely logical.)
Anyhow, where was I? Oh, yes, my list. Ten years ago from now it was late 1996. Carol was there by that time (another person who just sort of mysteriously appeared in my life, but if that story ever gets told then she has to be the one who tells it), we already had Costa Rica in mind and plans in progress, but other than that virtually nothing today is as I envisioned it being ten years ago. Almost nothing.
My page, had I written those plans down, would have shown me living on the beach, supported by the income from an investment we had made here in Costa Rica, alone with Carol and our two cats. The property would be at least ten acres or more, surrounded by forest (jungle?) and without a neighbor in sight. The house would have been on top of a small cliff, with steps down to the water, and an ocean view.
Now if you take this to mean that I am unhappy because things have not turned out as I planned, that wouldn’t be correct. What I was trying to say, in line with the lady's definition and assignment of categories to people, was to recognize that I've come to realize that perhaps I am not the kind of person who MAKES things happen but the person TO WHOM things happen and then he makes the best of the situation afterwards.
Even my two business partnerships weren't my idea to begin with, not something I planned ahead for and put on my "things to do" list.
(Carol, on the other hand, did just the opposite, she tells me. She sat down and actually made a specific list of the things she wanted before she even met me. And she says she got all of them, too!)
Some day Tony may read this, even if nobody else does besides my proof-reader. Tony, I did not think it was sensible for me, at my age, to become your missing Papa. My plan was to find the perfect alternative Papa for you. (I have, after all, good reason for believing that I'm not really the best role model for the job.) However, the way things worked out to disrupt that particular plan, completely beyond our control, there did not seem to be any better choice available, so I became your Papa for better or for worse.
For better or for worse, I AM your Papa now. History is history, over and done with. I love you intensely, you ARE my son as far as I am concerned, and I will fight the entire world for you.
And I'm not the least bit unhappy about it. Things I planned ten years ago were based on the things I knew ten years ago, that's what you have to remember. With any luck at all, you learn new things as time goes by.
Today is today, you are today, here is today, we are all today.
Okay, maybe I'll go back a week… We did not celebrate a traditional Thanksgiving this year, turkey and all the trimmings, but I did take a few private moments to reflect upon everything I had for which I am thankful, and it turned out to be quite a long list.
So I decided to work from the other end. At the top was losing my own Papa, how I wish he would be here for Tony's first Christmas. After that, though, everything else seemed miraculously reduced to the level of only annoyances, little bumps in the road.
A long time ago I read a book (at the request of one of my stranger girlfriends who might even be reading this now) which said things like "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear" and that in order for some things to happen to you, you first had to be open to the universe in which they could. In those days I thought that rather a lot of mystical nonsense but today I'm not so sure. Especially when I look back on the long list of good things which just seemed to happen to me all on their own, without--or even despite--my "planning" them.
Shakespeare knew. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."