Something a tad bit different [UPDATE]

probably like many of you, i read multiple articles and blog posts from multiple sources on a daily basis... however, as i'm sure you've noticed, i average only 1-2 posts a day on this blog and occasionally skip days altogether, a distinct departure from the first 4+ years of the blog when i tended to concentrate more on volume than quality... now, generally speaking, the only posts that make it on the blog concern things that strike a particular chord with me, usually because certain items tend to fit into the massive mental picture puzzle i'm trying to assemble in a seemingly endless quest to figure out what the hell is REALLY going on...

anywayz...

the "tad bit different" something i'm initiating here is to post links to things i've come across in my day's reading that i think might be worthwhile to share with others but don't quite grab me enough to bother putting up a dedicated post... i'm not going to do anything as mundane as trying to highlight the day's news (there's plenty of outlets for that), just the things i think might add depth and meaning to the larger picture which, as i admitted above, i continue to struggle to piece together... also, i'm not going to promise to do this every day either... some days there just might not be anything notable going on ("notable" from MY perspective, that is), some days there might be too MUCH going on and i might be drowning in gloom, and other days i just might not feel like working that hard...

so, for starters...

the always-thinking and usually spot-on glenn greenwald looks at more of our so-called news media's subservience to the propaganda of our government and its controlling elites and, in a separate post, exposes more of the blatant hypocrisy of our leaders in dealing with "terrorists"...

if i come across more during the day, i might be moved to post updates...

[UPDATE]

nothing new in the fact that our government pathologically lies to its citizens but worth reading nonetheless...

p.s. thanks to faithful reader, mettle, for his repeated votes of confidence (see comments)...

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I'm having trouble facing the news of a new year

yaknowhutimean...?

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Bloggus Interruptus

due to temporarily overwhelming disgust, frustration and nausea...

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Just so's ya know

yes, my last post was on saturday and, yes, it's now wednesday in both afghanistan and the u.s. (afghanistan is 11 1/2 hours ahead of u.s. pacific time and 8 1/2 hours ahead of u.s. eastern time), and, yes, i haven't put up a post yet this week...

why this shocking dereliction of duty...?

simple... there's absolutely nothing out there that's grabbed my attention... yeah, there's the usual run of depressing crap oozing out from all quarters and, yeah, our boy obama's been making some decent speeches, but no meat, ifyaknowhutimean... let's get some REAL changes, POSITIVE changes, whaddaya say...! my patience is about gone...

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One of THOSE days...

i'm looking for something uplifting and all i see is the usual sobering crap...

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It's been one heckuva busy day

it's not often that i don't get posts up because i simply don't have time... usually it due to one of three other things - burn-out over the constant stream of nauseating news, no news worth posting, or i'm stuck in an airplane somewhere at 35,000 feet... today was unusual in that i was on a dead run from early 'til late, and i'm so worn out at the moment, i just don't have the energy to post... maybe jim or brother tim will be moved to jump in but i'm just going to have to say good night (and, yes, i realize the day is just getting underway in the u.s.)...

chauuuuuuuu y abrazos a todos...

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150,000

approximately one hour ago, the hit counter for this site clicked over to 150,000... yeah, i know... that's a relatively tiny number compared to the biggies, but, then again, i've never done what was necessary to take this humble weblog to that level... i realized early on that i had to speak with my own voice and was simply not willing to alter that for the sake of readership... so, what you see here, in company with my fellow bloggers, is what you get... if you like it, great... if you don't, that's ok too... anyway, for those who have been around for most of the ride so far, thanks... for those of you just jumping onboard, welcome... and, for those of you who couldn't care less, hey... i can get behind that...

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The "And, yes, I DO take it personally" radio show

some of you may remember that, a while back, i did a show on internet radio that originated out of buenos aires called "cruisin' the blogs..." i don't know what i was thinking, but i had it scheduled for an hour, monday through friday, and, combined with my work and travel, the schedule was a killer... i did it several times live from bulgaria, macedonia, and the u.s., in addition to broadcasting from argentina, and i also pre-recorded segments as mp3's and emailed them in... the segments were also available as podcasts for download...

well, anywayz...

i decided to give it another try, altho' this time, i'm being considerably more sensible about the time involved, plus i discovered a new venue, blog talk radio, that is perhaps the slickest, people-powered, community internet radio option i've yet run across... i'm doing a fifteen-minute segment every thursday at 8 a.m., pacific time, and the show is archived on the site for later listening and/or downloading...

among the features of the site are live chat and guest call-in... i'd like to invite any of the regular readers and my co-bloggers as well to drop by... assuming that listeners increase, i may consider expanding the time and, in any case, would like to add a guest host... if you've got a few minutes to spare, take a listen and tell me what you think... you can access the site quickly by clicking on the blue blog talk radio box in the right-hand column or through the links above...

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Blog awards: Army of Dude

edger put up this post on docudharma supporting a blog award for army of dude, a REAL military blog from a REAL iraq soldier... i'm offering it here not only because it's honest and touching, it's also genuine as hell, and causes me waves of deja vu from my own experience in vietnam...

It looks like Iraq veteran Alex, who wrote The Real Deal as his response to Rush Limbaugh calling veterans opposed to the war "phony soldiers", has a pretty good shot at winning the 2007 Weblog Award for Best Military Blog.

The Real Deal:

When I was a kid I watched Rush with my dad every morning when he was still on TV and always found him pretty funny and clever. Over the years I didn't have a very concrete opinion about him, I just knew him as the kooky conservative radio host who defended Bush at every turn (and hey, so did I). What did Rush and I have to lose when the war in Iraq started in 2003? I didn't have any family in the military, and all my friends were too young to even enlist. Why not go kick the sh*t out of a country, as long as someone else was doing it?

This was the last time Rush and I would agree on the war, so here's my opinion of you, Rush: you're as smart, selfless and courageous as I was as a 17 year old high school senior.

You make a good point that people who joined the military during the war knew they were going and shouldn't be against it. As I've seen since I joined in 2004, everyone in the military is gung ho to a certain extent, at least in the beginning of their career. I was part of a large group of new guys who got to a unit that just got back from a year long deployment. After our hazing sessions became less and less frequent in the following months, we listened to the stories all of them were telling, of vicious firefights and rescue missions. We all wanted to do our part, we all wanted to get some too. We were going to see what it was like to take a life. Too bad Rush missed his chance to do so, or maybe he'd be singing a different tune.
...

As a phony civilian hoping to be a phony soldier, I tried to enlist in the military after I graduated high school in 2003.
...

Speaking of phony soldiers, I wanted to show Rush a few that I know: {click link above for all of Alex's pictures}

This is Chevy in Baghdad. Brian Chevalier was going to reenlist but decided against it before he was killed on March 14 during our first mission in Baqubah. His phony life was celebrated in a phony memorial where everyone who knew him cried phony tears. A phony American flag draped over his phony coffin when his body came home. It was presented to his phony mother and phony daughter.

I would be in awe if I ever met a real life soldier, and not a phony one like Bill, Matt or Brian Chevalier. Thank you, Rush Limbaugh, for telling me the difference. I hope your ass is ok.

You can vote for Alex here. Help him win the award. He deserves it.  His blog is Army of Dude.

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Another whine from a blog-challenged reporter

check this out...

Blogs: All the noise that fits
The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters.

By Michael Skube
August 19, 2007

[...]

The blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined.

[...]

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, whose popular blog Daily Kos has been a force among antiwar activists, cautioned bloggers last week "to avoid the right-wing acronym MSM." It implied, after all, that bloggers were on the fringe. To the contrary, he wrote, "we are representatives of the mainstream, and the country is embracing what we're selling."

Moulitsas foresees bloggers becoming the watchdogs that watch the watchdog: "We need to keep the media honest, but as an institution, it's important that they exist and do their job well." The tone is telling: breezy, confident, self-congratulatory. Subtly, it implies bloggers have all the liberties of a traditional journalist but few of the obligations.

[...]

The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background -- these would not seem to be a blogger's trademarks.

But they are, more often than not, trademarks of the kind of journalism that makes a difference. And if there is anything bloggers want more than an audience, it's knowing they are making a difference in politics. They are, to give them their due, changing what is euphemistically called the national "conversation." But what is the nature of that change? Does it deepen our understanding? Does it broaden our perspective?

[...]

The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.

i rarely choose to post about either the blogosphere or bloggers and i don't very often take a bead on journalists, other than to excerpt what i believe to be their relevant (and, occasionally, outrageous) work... but i can't let this one lie...

my first reaction...? arrogance... my second reaction...? elitism... my third reaction...? ignorance...

i can only speak for myself, but it would be completely impossible for me to be as informed as i am (take a leap of faith with me here) were it not for blogs... yeah, sure, there's opinion galore, sometimes little in the way of fact-checking, plenty of irreverence, strong emotion, harsh invective, vulgar obscenity and occasionally outright slander... there's also a ton of unfiltered perspectives, unsanitized viewpoints and heartfelt stories from and about ordinary people that illuminate what's going on in the country and the world in ways unobtainable elsewhere... over and above that, there's an increasing amount of very good investigative reporting, offering information dug up from sources that reporters on a newspaper or magazine payroll might never have uncovered... none of this is to even mention, of course, that one of the many reasons the blogosphere has exploded is that many of THOSE goddam reporters haven't been doing their job...

but ya know what, and this is what mr. elite reporters-vs.-bloggers skube entirely misses...? 90% of the truly great journalistic reporting that i read, i get pointed to by bloggers... thanks to bloggers, i find that i consistently read sources i didn't even know existed and/or would never have had the time or patience to dig out for myself...

one other thing he misses, and this may be the biggest one of all... reporters are increasingly turning to blogs as a far more direct and complete way to tell their stories, and bloggers are increasingly moving into traditional journalism as a way to reach more readers... mr. whiney-pants skube, firmly stuck in a pre-blogosphere mindset, insists on framing an either-or situation, when, in reality, it's both-and... the blogosphere and its wonderful platform, the internet, is transforming global dialog and truly allowing, for the first time in history, EVERYONE not only to be informed but to take part...

bite me, mr. skube...

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"Getting blogs"

atrios offers a fairly lucid view...

Left of center blogs filled various connected vacuums which were created by a triangulating-against-itself-Democratic party, a media with a "no liberals on TV or radio" rule, and the post-9/11 media prostration to the Bush administration and its complete abdication of its responsibility with respect to the Iraq war, all of which followed its campaign 2000 prostration to the Bush candidacy. Overall what blogs have been able to do is create an unfolding political narrative which has been largely absent elsewhere. Sometimes it's about emphasizing different things, sometimes it's about combating DC conventional wisdom, sometimes it's about highlighting things which are being ignored. But taken all together it's about telling the story of politics in a different way.

While there are other elements - fundraising, various types of activism, etc... - day to day the power of the blogosphere is that it offers up a competing version of political reality, in opposition to the Russert/Matthews/Dowd version and in opposition to the Limbaugh/Hannity/Fox News/Heritage Foundation version.

speaking entirely for myself, yes, i do see myself offering up "a competing version of political reality..." however, even more than that, maintaining this blog day after day helps me keep a grasp on my OWN reality... the mere act of putting up a post requires me to visit, read, absorb, digest, and, via my own mental processes, regurgitate a spectrum of current events selected on the basis of what i believe to be the most meaningful in the context of today... i can't sit on the sidelines and pretend that i know what's going on or that my opinions are static... one of the most fundamental elements of my life is to continue to learn and grow... blogging facilitates that as well or better than anything i have ever done... besides, there's always the anonymous commenter to keep me humble...

What a bunch of BS this blog is !!
cchas | 04.28.07 - 2:02 pm | #

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Please, please, I beg of you!

no more about ann coulter... the amount of bandwidth that woman has sucked up in the last 24 hours is unconscionable... we complain over the media's obsession with anna nicole and then we go and do the same thing with someone who, in her own twisted way, is equally unworthy of any attention, much less the time spent blogging...

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Edwards, Pandagon, Shakespeare's Sister, campaigns, and bloggers

i find this to be a very insightful analysis...

The fight was not so much about religion or online obscenity as power. The netroots are the most aggressive, ascendant force in progressive politics, wielding more members, money and media impact than most liberal organizations. In the 2006 election cycle, MoveOn alone spent more than every other liberal political action committee except the prochoice EMILY's List. According to the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, online donors gave Kerry $82 million in 2004, and Democrats expect much more in 2008. (Bush pulled only $14 million from the web.) And now top bloggers--like Jerome Armstrong, Markos Moulitsas and Glenn Greenwald--have hundreds of thousands of readers, successful books and a bully pulpit in print and broadcast media.

Republicans cannot stop the donations or pressure the media into ignoring liberal bloggers. Instead, the GOP has tried to drive a wedge between Democratic leaders and the netroots by attacking bloggers--and their readers--as an extreme vitriolic embarrassment. During the midterms, the Republican National Committee repeatedly attacked Democratic candidates for accepting netroots donations and working with bloggers, even distributing a six-page "research" brief maligning Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos.

[...]

"On our blogs, we all say things that might offend someone. Truth is, in life--in bars, in restaurants, in offices, on the phone--we all do that, only now there is...a permanent record," wrote Jeff Jarvis, director of CUNY's interactive journalism program, about the Edwards affair. When campaigns hire bloggers, he explained, they empower people who talk "without the veils of spin and PR and plastic discretion that politicians must learn." Yet the very skills that make a good blogger--provoking people with passionate, authentic opinions--are considered a handicap on the campaign trail.

[...]

In the end, campaigns prefer discipline over authenticity, and many bloggers do not. So Democrats should focus on tapping bloggers' energy while managing their passion--and disregard the self-serving complaints of their opponents.

what i crave from a candidate is an authentic voice, a voice "without the veils of spin and pr and plastic discretion..." reading this, i was reminded of why i was sucked back into actually caring about a political candidate when i first heard howard dean... authenticity is what is missing... i can't define it precisely, but i know it when i hear it...

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Let's celebrate the demise of the "old ways"

- QUOTATION OF THE DAY -

"This is all being made up as we go along. It is difficult to apply the old ways campaigns were run in late 20th century to this new wide-open citizen-led politics."

- SIMON ROSENBERG, of the New Democrat Network, on politicians' use of the Internet.

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