A year gone now, looking back at that terrible news.
Rick had six months to live when I took this photo of him in June of 2008.
January 30, 2010
Rick, Lost, January 2009
A year gone now, looking back at that terrible news.
Rick had six months to live when I took this photo of him in June of 2008.
January 21, 2010
The Truth Untold vs. the Told Untruth
"I had myself been prime minister in the first Gulf war and I knew when I said something I was utterly certain that it was correct, and I said less than I knew," he said.
"I assumed the same thing had happened and on that basis I supported reluctantly the second Iraq war."
— John Major, former British Prime Minister, quoted in the Guardian, Jan 2, 2010
Mr. Major suggests that you wouldn't have found all the facts from what he was willing to let on in public at the time of the first gulf war. Being politic, he reserved some facts from what he was saying. Mr. Blair, contrarily, publicly suggested what couldn't be found in the facts at all.
Mr. Major suggests that he had a lot of verified information, not all of which he divulged in public, when he spoke as Prime Minister during the Gulf War. This is a testable proposition. A skim through the archives would quickly establish how much of the information claimed as verified by Mr. Major was actually verifiable in the event, and alternately, how much of it remains on inspection unverifiable or provably false.
Inevitably some portion of what Mr. Major knew at the time was the product of the sort of fundamentally weightless chatter forever emerging from Britain's military and diplomatic bureaucracy by institutional imperative, the sort of constantly offered muttering of what's politic to report that bubbles up to any PM's ear in confluence with any utterly certain facts on offer.
He, Major, doled out a subset of this avowedly true information ("I said less than I knew") when it came time to remark on the subject of the Gulf War, and assumed that Tony Blair, when speaking during the runup to the later invasion of Iraq, was operating under the same constraint, saying less than he knew to be true, but conforming his remarks to some urevealed verifiable something or other, not publicly contradicting that withheld yet verifiable something, or affirming some something that could not be found anywhere at all among the said and unsaid facts of the matter.
Mr. Blair's public statements surfed along on a forceful wave of potentially false but for the moment unprovably false rhetoric, stealing along on the imaginary axis bound by the magnitude of the existential threat posed to, e.g., oh, let's say Cyprus, by an arsenal of inexistent, potent chemical and biological and intercontinental weapons of destruction said to belong to evil Sadaam Hussein by Mr. Blair.
Mr. Blair willingly suggested many many things during the runup to the invasion of Iraq based on facts not in evidence, which, had they been true facts, rather than false suppositions, might have been used plausibly enough to justify the increasing militancy of his rhetoric, but which, being only potentially verifiably true or false as he spoke of them (and in the event proven thoroughly false), did nothing to advance the argument that it was ever truly a good idea to invade Iraq, however much his words advanced the actual invasion itself, which of course was the admitted reason for his rhetoric in the first place.
I'm pretty sure Mr. Major's statements, however circumspect at the time, were all in for the Gulf War. Functionally, they served precisely the same end as Mr. Blair's; each committed Britain to enlist in a major Middle Eastern military action being shopped by the US, delivering Britain's congenitally far-flung military into action when time came to war in the gulf or invade Iraq with that same famous verve, professionalism and alacrity recognized as hallmarks of British military adventurism down the ages.
January 20, 2010
Heavy Weather
National Weather Service Alert For Santa Cruz County, 2p.m. Jan. 20, 2010:
TORNADO WARNING:
"IF NO SHELTER IS AVAILABLE...LIE FLAT IN THE NEAREST DITCH OR OTHER LOW SPOT AND COVER YOUR HEAD WITH YOUR HANDS."
I was planning on doing that anyhow after the Mass. Senate result.
January 19, 2010
Hot Stove
A few years years ago the members of a House Periodic Committee on High Dudgeon chaired by Tom Davis (R-Va.) called ballplayers and executives of Major League Baseball before it to go over all the accumulating evidence that ballplayers had been for some time freely conditioning themselves for the season-long rigors of baseball at the highest level with really sophisticated chemical concoctions, concoctions whose dissemination, for their recognized ill effects, had long been legally constrained by hopeful laws strictly regulating their handling, laws passed by that very house of congress!
!
In 1993, twelve years before Rep. Davis gavelled his hearing to order, the FBI had rounded up a bunch of people around the country who were in fact freely distributing these supposedly restricted chemicals to athletes of all kinds, and found looking into the thing that professional ballplayers at all levels were regular customers. The FBI gathered baseball names named by nabbed distributors. Mark McGwire's name was one of those names named, of course. In his appearance before Davis's committee twelve years later, McGwire curtly elided his past, relying on what must be the celebrated ballplayer's constitutional right when called before Congress to insist on talking about something else instead.
"I'm not here to talk about that, Congressman."
"[sputter] Yes you are!"
"No, I'm not here to talk about the past."
"You are too!"
"Nope."
"[Chair, dryly] The gentleman's time has expired…"
McGwire's absurd yet effective tactic kept him from having to say anything, true or not, about what he'd been up to without explictly taking the Fifth Amendment or perjuring himself right there in public. The tactic's effectiveness was restricted almost completely to the confines of the committee room, however. Outside, McGwire's performance before the committee was roundly ridiculed, and whatever fondness for the man may have lingered from the storied 1998 season when he and Sammy Sosa chased and then surpassed Babe Ruth's and then Roger Maris's single season home run record, curdled quickly following his appearance.
The realization that the grand celebrated chase of the two of them had been fueled by exactly those chemicals that were now the focus of the high dudgeon of the subcommittee brought a sneer to the lip of even the most circumspect follower of the game.
In 1993, at the time of the FBI crackdown, there were no workplace rules in place in Major League Baseball banning these newest concoctions, and Mark McGwire was one of any number of ballplayers known to be evangelizing for some remarkably effective chemical or other. The one he long championed was nicknamed "andro," (a substance unbanned even as late as 1998) which McGwire couldn't stop going on about at the time.
Belatedly perhaps, in angling for a job as hitting instructor with the St. Louis Cardinals ballclub (managed by Tony La Russa, whose continuing role in enabling McGwire's career in both Oakland and St. Louis is well understood), McGwire, perhaps as a condition prior to employment insisted on by La Russa himself, admitted publicly to doing what he had previously only been known to espouse publicly. He too had used the proscribed stuff himself, he said, straightforwardly enough.
Say in public as much of the uncomfortable truth as you can bear. This is the first step in the Rehabilitative Move of the Fallen Celebrity, which practiced motion we've all had chance to witness countless times. Mark McGwire fessed up to as much as he could in step one. However, when pressed on the question of exactly how much of the stupendous length of each of those remarkably many home runs he'd hit had been obtained as a direct result of a forbidden regimen of performance enhancing drugs, McGwire concluded that none of that length had been so affected, that the performance enhancing drugs he'd long espoused and used were false drugs in that respect, at least far as actual performance goes. As a counterargument to McGwire it is maintained by almost everybody else that performance enhancing drugs do too enhance performance. It remains to be seen whether those supporting this argument bother to press the point with McGwire, whose visit to hitting instructor purgatory in St. Louis may yet otherwise help serve to cleanse his self-stained name.
!
In 1993, twelve years before Rep. Davis gavelled his hearing to order, the FBI had rounded up a bunch of people around the country who were in fact freely distributing these supposedly restricted chemicals to athletes of all kinds, and found looking into the thing that professional ballplayers at all levels were regular customers. The FBI gathered baseball names named by nabbed distributors. Mark McGwire's name was one of those names named, of course. In his appearance before Davis's committee twelve years later, McGwire curtly elided his past, relying on what must be the celebrated ballplayer's constitutional right when called before Congress to insist on talking about something else instead.
"I'm not here to talk about that, Congressman."
"[sputter] Yes you are!"
"No, I'm not here to talk about the past."
"You are too!"
"Nope."
"[Chair, dryly] The gentleman's time has expired…"
McGwire's absurd yet effective tactic kept him from having to say anything, true or not, about what he'd been up to without explictly taking the Fifth Amendment or perjuring himself right there in public. The tactic's effectiveness was restricted almost completely to the confines of the committee room, however. Outside, McGwire's performance before the committee was roundly ridiculed, and whatever fondness for the man may have lingered from the storied 1998 season when he and Sammy Sosa chased and then surpassed Babe Ruth's and then Roger Maris's single season home run record, curdled quickly following his appearance.
The realization that the grand celebrated chase of the two of them had been fueled by exactly those chemicals that were now the focus of the high dudgeon of the subcommittee brought a sneer to the lip of even the most circumspect follower of the game.
In 1993, at the time of the FBI crackdown, there were no workplace rules in place in Major League Baseball banning these newest concoctions, and Mark McGwire was one of any number of ballplayers known to be evangelizing for some remarkably effective chemical or other. The one he long championed was nicknamed "andro," (a substance unbanned even as late as 1998) which McGwire couldn't stop going on about at the time.
Belatedly perhaps, in angling for a job as hitting instructor with the St. Louis Cardinals ballclub (managed by Tony La Russa, whose continuing role in enabling McGwire's career in both Oakland and St. Louis is well understood), McGwire, perhaps as a condition prior to employment insisted on by La Russa himself, admitted publicly to doing what he had previously only been known to espouse publicly. He too had used the proscribed stuff himself, he said, straightforwardly enough.
Say in public as much of the uncomfortable truth as you can bear. This is the first step in the Rehabilitative Move of the Fallen Celebrity, which practiced motion we've all had chance to witness countless times. Mark McGwire fessed up to as much as he could in step one. However, when pressed on the question of exactly how much of the stupendous length of each of those remarkably many home runs he'd hit had been obtained as a direct result of a forbidden regimen of performance enhancing drugs, McGwire concluded that none of that length had been so affected, that the performance enhancing drugs he'd long espoused and used were false drugs in that respect, at least far as actual performance goes. As a counterargument to McGwire it is maintained by almost everybody else that performance enhancing drugs do too enhance performance. It remains to be seen whether those supporting this argument bother to press the point with McGwire, whose visit to hitting instructor purgatory in St. Louis may yet otherwise help serve to cleanse his self-stained name.
January 18, 2010
January 17, 2010
On the uncredited claim of the wangus from Wikipedia
The name of this fortress was derived from the Gothic word "wangus" and describes cutting down trees in an acorn forest.[citation needed]
Claiming the wangus capable of cutting down an oak is one of the oldest tropes of civil discourse. Sure it must have traveled to the Baltic ear frequently enough back in the times, this sort of boast, whether pronounced concisely "wangus" or gone on about at such greater length as might be deemed suitable to the characteristic path of just that sort of talk when engrossed in the occasion which requires it.
[There's no citation for the word wangus in the given dictionary around here, bedraggled bearer of the burden of the 200,000 or so words most commonly taken to be English back when it was first bound — a large, somewhat dated sample of the language, in other words: hardly the whole of it by now. There's just no citeable basis for talk of wangus there. That will have to come from somewhere else: the actually rather than potentially self-correcting part of the internet, justifying what in other respects is the very model of the marvelous sentence from Wikipedia. This is not to say that I don't see the utility of Goths or anyone else forbidding the arbitrary logging of oaks in their area in an effort to preserve the bounty of freely available acorns, and can easily imagine a history in which a whole bunch of sloganeering to that effect boiled down to shouting "wangus" across the political divide.]
January 04, 2010
January 03, 2010
Twenty-Ten
Implacably reliable sources reveal that the new year is to be referred to as Twenty Ten, not Two Thousand Ten or Two Thousand and Ten, as some might have it. It's not too early to fall in with the crowd on this, is what I'm saying.
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