Author: lux

A Long Strange Trip

What does it say about America that Newt Gingrich is now considered a wingnut that we can live with? Or so Ezra at Pandagon thinks:

So what do you do when you take on the throne and lose? Well some, like Lucifer, found a realm of eternal damnation and torture others for eternity. Others read a lot of spy novels and review so obsessively they crack Amazon’s Top 500. Newt Gingrich is the latter.

As an addendum on Gingrich, he’s an interesting case in the discussion Matt Stolelr and I have been having. As radical and poisonous as anyone our polity has ever been, he also presided over a GOP obsessed with policy. While the current group (DeLay, et al) have his bile they possess none of his wonkishness nor relative honesty about their agenda. To say this shows how far we’ve fallen, but Newt was the sort of wingnut I could live with. At least he stood for something beyond partisan politics and attempted to engage legislation in a meaningful way.

I checked Newt’s review list on Amazon – the man has pretty lousy taste in spy novels.

An Idea Worth Considering

Here’s an idea worth considering: Replace the Pledge of Allegance with the Preamble of the Consitution.

The Preamble, which I like many others of my generation memorized thanks to Schoolhouse Rock, is not written as a stand-alone piece of langauge and doesn’t have the same patriotic ‘punch’ that the Pleage does. But looking at it as an alternative to the debate over “under God” is a very good idea and I hope it changes the argument some.

Coffee Worth Drinking

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while now, but with the recent increase in my site’s traffic this is a good time to finally post about some coffee that people I know are helping to bring to the USA.

The company is called Cafe Cosa. According to the website, their Q’Tal Tarrazu coffee is 100% single-origin Tarrazu coffee from Costa Rica. I’m by no means a coffee expert, but it’s good stuff. Strong but not bitter. Worth a try.

Check out their website and give the coffee a try!

No Wonder

SF Gate columnist Carol Lloyd does an interesting article on Burning Man from a city planning perspective.

One factoid that stuck out:

the nonprofit organization that sponsors the event has 20 full-time employees, a Department of Public Works, a DMV (Department of Mutant Vehicles), a tech department, a media department, an infirmary and an airport.

No wonder tickets have gotten so expensive.

The Fog Of War

I finally got around to watching The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara yesterday.

All I can say is, wow. Anyone who doesn’t think our situation in Iraq today is not similar to the situation in Vietnam needs to see this. It’s oh so clear that the people running this country have not learned a damn thing in the ensuing 40 years. Some of the things LBJ said in 1964 (according to the movie) could just have easily come out of GW Bush’s mouth. I’ve blogged previously about how Rumsfeld has channeled McNamara.

One point McNamara made that stands out in my memory was about the huge culture gap between the US and Vietnam, and its resulting problems. He more or less said, “we though we were fighting the Cold War. They (the Vietnamese) thought they were fighting a civil war”. This was contrasted sharply in the movie with how the Cuban Missile Crisis was handled, where McNamara describes how the US players put themselves into the Soviet shoes and thought through how to resolve the crisis and save face on both sides.

With Vietnam, LBJ is quoted as saying they didn’t know what was going on in Vietnam as they got into the war, except that they knew they had to win the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese. “We need to be able to guarantee their security” was another phrase I jotted down as I watched. The parallels with today are so obvious it’s not even funny.

McNamara paints himself now as someone who had grave reservations about Vietnam but ran the war as best he could out of loyalty, until finally he found himself disagreeing with LBJ so strongly he had to go. Whether that’s really how it was, I don’t know. And although he was pushed rather strongly by the filmmakers, he refused to say whether he regretted what he did as Secretary of Defense or explain why, if he felt the war was wrong, he would not speak out against it after he left government service. he sys he has his reasons, but doesn’t say what they are.

All in all, for history or political buffs, it’s well worth renting. In the additional materials on the DVD are several clips not included in the movie. One was the famous 1964 ‘girl with dasies/nuclear bomb’ commercial LBJ used. I’d read about it many times but never seen it. I sat there slackjawed as it played out – it is amazingly powerful.