born live love die

I don’t know that much about Iran, and I wish I knew more.  I have known Iranians who were great people, and I have known some who practiced, “I thought he was going to hit me, so I hit him back first.”

There’s a great article in Newsweek about Iran.  It is long and it is hard to find a clip that seems to sum it up.  There is this one:

After Obama videotaped a Persian New Year’s message for the Iranian people, reiterating his offer of unconditional talks, most Western commentators interpreted Khamenei’s lengthy and defiant response as a slap in the face. But what would have been most significant to any Iranian listening was a passage at the very end of the speech, when Khamenei said, “If you change, our behavior will also change.” Iran’s supreme authority had never before used the word “change” in such a context, for up until now the Islamic Republic’s position has been that there is nothing objectionable about its behavior. If the Obama administration truly wants to forge a new relationship with Iran, it will have to learn to hear the things Iranians are saying to them, whether it be the Supreme Leader or the rifle-toting Sadoughi.

Dealing with these civilizations is tricky.  Our temptation is to put it all on the face, and go with a simple interpretation of everything that is said and done.  But these are civilizations that have existed for thousands of years and one needs to listen, not for what we want to hear, but for what they are saying.

Read it here.

TBogg should have his own show.

The other day Hip-Hop Happenin’ Michael Steele  went Full Metal Nat Turner and declared that from now on he’s not taking shit from “the man” and from this day forward, well,  things are going to change. And, by change, he obviously meant recycling the famous LBJ daisy ad to attempt to scare the bejeebers out of simple hard-working white folks like himself.

Say it, TBogg, say it!

Via Frank Rich, we get word that GQ is publishing some pics about the Iraq war.  GQ, nee Gentlemen’s Quarterly, is a Conde Naste magazine.  The website is style.com.  And they have something that the investigative press does not.  What a concept.

What they have are pictures of the coversheets sent by Donald Rumsfeld to George Bush.  The coversheets were for briefings of the highest classification and with very limited distribution.  But what is remarkable are the Bible quotes on them.  Rumsfeld sent coversheets with Biblical quotes to a President who thought he was doing God’s work.  Here are the first two:

March 17, 2003:

Quote: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for me?” “Here am I Lord, send me.”  Isaiah 6:8

Picture: Soldiers in battlegear, praying.

March 19, 2003:

Quote: If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast, O LORD.  Psalm 139:9-10

Picture: Launch deck of an aircraft carrier, crewman in the foreground, F-18 in the background, and it looks like some smoke from a just completed launch.

The pictures are in a Flash module, so they can not be extracted; you’ll need to go to the GQ site to see them.

GQ pictures link

Frank Rich.

I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.

Read his column now.

JMan stands with his fourth grade buddies, tall, straight, calm, with his hands in his pockets.  I walk up to him and he seems so small.  I put a hand on his  shoulder and he turns around, delighted to see me.  He hugs me, and says “Uppity!”.  He wants me to pick him up.  I’m a little surprised, but pick him up, over my head.  His lean body is strong and stiff in my arms as he holds himself rigid and I think he would actually like to be higher.  I think about working on that with him.  I’m 6’4″, so I can get him a long ways off the ground.  He looks around with a big smile on his face.

I let the kids show me how much affection they want in public.  I never demand hugs.  I am there if they want a hug though.  I put him back down and start to reach into my pocket for a quarter. Friday is popcorn day at school and a bag is a quarter.  He holds out his hand and I slap hands with him, leaving a quarter gleaming in the sun on his pale palm.

Dahlia, the word you are looking for is ‘evil’.  Lindsey Graham is evil.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina loves the law. Nuts about it. We know this because he tells us this many, many times at this morning’s Senate subcommittee hearing on “What Went Wrong: Torture and the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration.” We know he loves the law because he says “[t]he fact that we embrace the rule of law is a strength” and that “the only way is to operate within the law,” and he says these things mere seconds after he explains that in the desperate days after 9/11, when the lawyers were crafting legal arguments to legalize conduct that was illegal, they did so because “they saw law as a nicety we couldn’t afford.“

And he’s a dick.

The bit about Ms. Prejean has gotten old, but this bit of narcissism deserves some comment.  To recap, she stood up for old-fashioned thats-how-God-wants-it man and woman marriage at some beauty pageant.  She didn’t win.  Conservativistas are cranked about it.

She was on Brother Jim Dobson’s radio show and there was this exchange between her and JimDob.

Dobson: Why did you give the answer you did with regard to the affirmation of marriage?

Prejean: . . . I felt as though Satan was trying to tempt me in asking me this question. And then God was in my head and in my heart saying, “Do not compromise this. You need to stand up for me and you need to share with all these people . . . you need to witness to them and you need to show that you’re not willing to compromise that for this title of Miss USA.”

So, God wants you to put on a little white bikini and witness to the people?  I guess God wanted you to get a boob job too?  Personally, I think if God told you to get a boob job, he also told you to make them bigger.  Because we all know how God loves big boobs.  It’s right there in Genesis, look it up.

I’m sure she has a whole suitcase of these things packed so she can go witness for Jesus.  Praise God.

Slate has a good article about Utah and the Mormon church.

What’s the matter with Utah? The most Republican state in the nation is drifting to the left. In the last few months, Gov. Jon Huntsman, a Republican and a practicing Mormon, has come out in favor of civil unions for gays and repeated his support for government action on global warming. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled state legislature has liberalized Utah’s notoriously arcane alcohol laws. The punishment for this apostasy has been record-high approval ratings—for both governor and legislature.

What is the matter?  Maybe science.

Part of the reason for the LDS Church’s reticence may be that with an approval rating of 84 percent, Huntsman is the most popular Mormon politician in the country. His name has been floated as a possible presidential candidate in 2012, and David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, has named him as a potentially formidable opponent. He’s recently struck moderate positions on immigration (he spoke approvingly of Reagan’s 1987 amnesty for illegal immigrants) and climate change (“We cannot become the anti-science party and succeed,” he told Politico), and he joined a cap-and-trade initiative that has him teamed up with four Canadian provinces to help reduce emissions.

One of the issues for the Mormons is the veracity of their scriptures.  The Book of the Mormon, which is supposed to be treated as historically accurate, is being shown to have a lot of problems with that accuracy.  The book describes the movement of people that we know from genetics to not possibly be true.  See also this link.

Maybe there is a generation of LDS members who like the church, but want it to reflect better the times in which they live.  Democracy in action, baby.

This is good stuff.

An English chemist has found the hidden gateway to the RNA world, the chemical milieu from which the first forms of life are thought to have emerged on earth some 3.8 billion years ago.

He has solved a problem that for 20 years has thwarted researchers trying to understand the origin of life — how the building blocks of RNA, called nucleotides, could have spontaneously assembled themselves in the conditions of the primitive earth. The discovery, if correct, should set researchers on the right track to solving many other mysteries about the origin of life. It will also mean that for the first time a plausible explanation exists for how an information-carrying biological molecule could have emerged through natural processes from chemicals on the primitive earth.

According to an article in Scientific American, exposure of certain compounds in sea water to rocks caused molecules to form and align themselves with the crystalline structure of the rocks.  The compounds could be oriented to form molecules that were very much like nucleotides.

I have been emailing with an old friend and he said he had been reading here.  He asked, “When did you turn into such a bleeding heart liberal?”  I responded that I didn’t think of myself as a bleeding heart liberal, but rather a throbbing gristle liberal.

I’m alive, I pumping and while you can chew on me and spit me out, I’m not going to deflate.

I was dreaming and I heard a voice say clearly to me, “Turn on the light”.  I awoke with a start.  I tried to lie still and figure out where I was.

Bed.  Which bed?  I tried to map the shadows I could see to the dream I had been having.  My bed.

As I pulled myself further out of my dreamland, I tried to listen to for prowlers.  Nothing.  My pulse was up a bunch and there was no way I was going back to sleep.  Time check, 3:57.

I remembered what it was like when the kids were small.  The least sound from them and I would be awake.  It was  as if my auditory alertness level was turned up when I was sleeping.  I would go into their room and find them not quite awake  yet, maybe from a bad dream.  Maybe it happens only during REM sleep.

The voice I heard was something I generated internally.  It registered as if it were a person speaking to me.  I started thinking about schizophrenics and the voices they hear.  Is this what it is like, but only when they are awake?

I was dreaming about being in a church building that had been converted to other uses.  I was sitting next to my late friend, Jim Smith, and we were waiting for something to start.  I was riffing on songs, hymns, as sung by Elvis.  I would sing a few bars and then say, “I could sing that.”  and Jim would crack up.  Elvis recorded a lot of hymns.  He had to keep recording because he got no songwriting royalties.