[Note: Originally I was going to post this but then re-read it and, while I was satisfied with the concepts, I thought it came across too much as Freshman-in-College sounding…then I realized that was a perfect tone for the internet. No, actually I came across this post by Jonah Goldberg through this rebuttal, that is a continuance of something I wrote about here.
And since this really captured the essence of the disagreement, I thought I’d post it even though it is very long and less than polished. Plus, I wish to use it as a launching off point and will refer back to it often when I talk about some proposed ideas for integrating the two philosophies.]
Never being religious, I can say with certainty that the part of the Bible I’ve heard the most is Corinthians: Epistle 1, Chapter 13. You know, the one that they always say at weddings. The rabble rouser in me would question whether the reading is appropriate at all to weddings as it seems to me to be more about relationship to humanity and spirituality rather than another individual, but I digress.
For my purposes what’s intriguing is “for now we see through a glass darkly,” which is part of a phrase to point out that the mirrored reflection of reality does not capture its true nature, and suggests that accepting the universal love of God is the path to true wisdom. The Tao expounds on this point for many pages with a whole flurry of metaphors.
I want to contrast it with another variation on the theme and that is the story of the blind men and the elephant.
After many years of reading TMV I finally took the plunge and asked to join as a writer, and I’d like to thank Joe for accepting it. I’m sure greasing his palms through the years didn’t hurt and now that he’s successful enough to hang out with celebrities I thought I’d call in the favor. My focus is going to be a little bit different and I want to spend this first post talking about it a bit.
I’ve seen many incarnations of TMV, both in web layout and author makeup. The only person I’m sure has been writing for TMV longer than I’ve read (besides Joe of course) is Holly. My apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten. I’m also one of less than a handful of commenters that still frequents the site from those glory days gone by. I think this is because I approach blog interaction as a sniper: constantly monitoring but having very focused engagements. While snipers have the shortest life on the battlefield, they seem to have the longest in the blogosphere…well and those that have no shortage of fire to breathe. It’s a testament to Joe that he has lasted this long while being both broad and tempered.
So why did I ask to join now? It’s simple, change is in the air! Obama has created a new dawn.
This is the question taken up by Christopher Edley Jr. today in a Washington Post editorial. While most of us would like to see greater participation in the electoral process, Edley wonders if high turnout will cause the election infrastructure to buckle.
Suppose in your neighborhood there are 600 registered voters per machine, while across town there are only 120 per machine. (That’s a 5 to 1 disparity, which is what exists in some places in Virginia today.) On Election Day, your line wraps around the block and looks to be a four-hour wait, while in other areas lines are nonexistent.
This ought to be a crime. It amounts to a “time-tax” on your right to vote, and some of your neighbors will undoubtedly give up and go home. This scenario raises three questions: Nationwide, will it discourage tens of thousands, or untold millions? Which presidential candidate and down-ballot candidates might benefit from this “tax”? And what can be done in the next few days?
This piece brings up the issue of insufficient voting machines in economically distressed and largely minority neighborhoods without raising the bogyman of Republican shenanigans suppressing the Democratic vote. Instead, the focus is on some of the shortcomings in the Help America Vote act of 2002.
Disappointingly, Congress failed to create an explicit and easily enforceable prohibition against grossly disproportionate resource allocations between polling places in the same state or even the same county — the level of government at which, preposterously, we typically finance and administer elections. This localism means that the infrastructure of democracy vies for resources with potholes, parks, sheriffs and firefighting. It also means that locally powerful communities get better service on something that — above all else — is supposed to be scrupulously equal in this country.
It’s a bit late to worry about it now, though the author does recommend some fail-safe strategies such as making sure that paper ballots are available at all precincts and that they be made available as an option at any location where the wait time exceeds 45 minutes. For the future, though, should we see any serious breakdowns next week it may be time to take a fresh look at the HAVA and possibly come up with a way to ensure proper funding across the nation for the electoral infrastructure. At the same time, as we discussed yesterday regarding Georgia, we should also look at Federal law prohibiting states from doing massive voter roll purges without providing sufficient time for the improperly removed voter to challenge the finding. I think we’re doing better than eight years ago, but there is still a vast amount of room for improvement.
As one might imagine, the U.S. election campaign has attracted tremendous attention in Mexico, where people are concerned about migration issues and other border-related topics like narco-trafficking, human smuggling and NAFTA-based bilateral trade of about $300 billion per year.
A few days ago, a meeting of great significance to the United States took place in the Iraqi Holy City of Najaf.
With Iraq on the cusp of signing a historic, long-term security deal with Washington, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sought the approval of that nation’s most powerful man: the reclusive Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
According to this article from Iraq’s Al-Sabaah newspaper, which outlines some of the remaining sore points between the U.S. and Iraq, Prime Minister al-Maliki got what he came for: the imprimatur of the nation’s leading cleric.
In a meeting yesterday that lasted about two hours, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki discussed current developments in the Iraqi arena with religious authority, Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Sistani at Sistani’s residence in Najaf. … Regarding Ayatollah Sistani’s opinion on the agreement, al-Maliki said: “Grand Ayatollah Sistani entrusts Iraqis and their political leaders to decide on what to agree to and rely upon. … he had no objections to anything we achieve through the efforts of Iraq’s officials and institutions, provided that all segments of the Iraqi people participate and that it is constitutional. In addition, he said that it mustn’t be something imposed on the Iraqi people.”
The article also talks of the progress that the Iraqi government believes it has made and upcoming talks between the central government and the Kurds in regard to the Kurdish region’s autonomy.
October 12th, 2008 By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
In a long and serious article on food policy in today’s NYTimes Magazine, Michael Pollan writes that the era of cheap and abundant food is coming to a close. He says the next American president, no matter which man is elected, is going to find that the health of our nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security.
His argument is that, unless we address the industrial food system, we will not be able to make significant progress resolving the three main issues of our day — health care, energy independence and climate change:
Energy Independence:
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.
There is little question that the presidential race will tighten as Election Day approaches. It always does. But absent an apocalyptic event, Barack Obama will cruise across the finish line ahead of John McCain in the most important election since Franklin Roosevelt beat Herbert Hoover in the depths of the Great Depression.
I do not make that cross-generational comparison lightly because in 1932 things were sucky in a way that none of us — excepting a precious few long-lived grandmothers and great uncles — are able to recall.
And while I do not have the chops to predict whether we are on the verge of another depression, it is clear that no one in a position of responsibility — whether they work on Wall Street, in Washington, the City of London or Tokyo — has a clue as to how the global economic conflagration of the vanities can be extinguished since throwing trillions of dollars, euros and yen into the flames in the form of rescue packages has had little effect in restoring confidence in what obviously is a badly-broken economic system.
This brings me to the second presidential debate and the sit-up-in-bed realization (because I happened to be lying down at the time) that even if McCain had the chops and even if Obama had a resume longer than a page and change, the cold fact of the matter is that they have been battling for the privilege of sitting in the cockpit of an airplane that has become aerodynamically unstable, to paraphrase an astute antipodean blogger.
* * * * *
The title of this post is cribbed from “When the Hunter Gets Captured By the Game,” a song that Smokey Robinson wrote for the Marvelettes back when Barack Obama still had training wheels on his bicycle.
“Hunter” seems to be about love, but like many great songs its lyrics have a timeless universality that fit events years in the future that would seem to have nothing to do with it’s surface theme — a romancer who chases someone for the thrill of the hunt only to find that they have become the prey.
That is a pretty close approximation to what has happened to Obama, who is trying to stay on a bicycle of another kind as he pedals toward November 4 and Inauguration Day.
‘THE RETURN OF FAITH’
[Het Parool, The Netherlands]
With finger-pointing over the global financial crisis rapidly spreading, William Waack of Brazil’s O Globo warns that developing countries are in no way shielded from the effects - and that blaming others won’t do a thing to help Brazil or the world emerge from the hole they are in.
“‘Contagion’ suggests that it might be possible to prevent the “disease,” as long as the potential victim remains isolated from the source of infection (in this case, the American economy). That’s pure nonsense, and it’s dangerous, because it overshadows what must be done and delays the adoption of protective measures. … We can dispense with the notion of ‘decoupling.’”
“The more advanced and competitive a national economic system is, the more it will be affected by the crisis. Therefore, it’s Brazil the exporter and innovator which is connected with the global economy that will face the worst consequences. And it is that modern country - industry, agro-business, services and competitive exporters of mineral commodities - that have ensured our prosperity so far. … Schadenfreude, a German word that has been adopted by the Anglo-Saxon press, means to take pleasure in the misfortune of others. The New York Times this Thursday pointed out the fact that many Latin American leaders, among them Chávez [Venezuela], Morales[Bolivia], Correa [Ecuador], Kirchner [Argentina] and Lula [Brazil], allowed themselves be get carried away with schadenfreude in regard to the crisis in the United States. And now, they’re getting carried away with fear. ”
Once again, the inimitable Khadir Taahar has thrown a textual grenade into the Iraqi body politic by suggesting to his readers that - horror of horror - Israel would be a far better friend to Iraq than Iran ever will be.
And as we have pointed out before, how representative Taahar’s views are of the Iraqi population is open to question. But we do know that he is regularly published in this Sunni-leaning Baghdad daily.
“Israel is keen on the success of the American project in Iraq to extend security, stability, reconstruction and progress. Its goals are identical to those of America, and anyone who denies that America wants progress and development in Iraq is absolutely a victim of the polluted and demagogic slogans of the hostile mob that we mentioned before. … For a thousand years we have gotten nothing from Iran but war, death, destruction and interference in Iraqi affairs; throughout history, Iran has been the number one enemy of the Iraqi people.”
It probably won’t come as a surprise that along with the rest of the world, Iraqis who aren’t struggling every moment of the day and night to keep body and soul together are watching the American presidential race with great interest.
The writer, Sati’ Noureddine, doesn’t appear to favor Obama or McCain, says nothing of Palin’s fundamentalist Christian beliefs, and only mentions her daughter’s pregnancy in the context of how Obama allowed an electoral attack opportunity pass him by, for fear of Republican retribution.
Perhaps I’m overdrawing here, but it seems as though what interests this Iraqi author are the strategies and tactics of campaigning in a democracy. From an American point of view, perhaps that is cause for hope.
“She’s the seductress of the American election and her charms are new. Mrs. Sarah Palin retains much of the good looks she was blessed with when she was in her 20s. And she is showing off the rhetorical skills gained since she launched her plan in that state far away at the edge of the world, to move from beauty pageants and sporting contests into political affairs and oil. And now it’s on to the White House.”
“The Democratic Party has made the process of choosing leaders from outside traditional institutions a standard practice. This has been repeated in many presidential, legislative and executive election battles, culminating with Black Democratic candidate Barack Obama, a man whose origins, thinking and religion even today, remain unknown to many Americans. They don’t even know whether or not he drinks beer.”
