I have just spent the better part of the day (in-between phone calls) reading this incredible article in the New Yorker about Saddam's genocide campaign against the Kurds of Northern Iraq, and Iraq's link to al Qaeda. (Linked to by Andrew Sullivan) It is a very long article, but well worth the read. It is sickening that the international community has allowed that creep to stay in power as long as he has. I will offer a few excerpts to give you the idea without having to spend the better part of your day reading it.

Gosden believes it is quite possible that the countries of the West will soon experience chemical- and biological-weapons attacks far more serious and of greater lasting effect than the anthrax incidents of last autumn and the nerve-agent attack on the Tokyo subway system several years ago—that what happened in Kurdistan was only the beginning. "For Saddam's scientists, the Kurds were a test population," she said. "They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations, and the most effective means of delivery."

Increased rates of infertility, he said, are having a profound effect on Kurdish society, which places great importance on large families. "You have men divorcing their wives because they could not give birth, and then marrying again, and then their second wives can't give birth, either," he said. "Still, they don't blame their own problem with spermatogenesis."

Baban told me that the initial results of the Halabja Medical Institute-sponsored survey show abnormally high rates of many diseases. He said that he compared rates of colon cancer in Halabja with those in the city of Chamchamal, which was not attacked with chemical weapons. "We are seeing rates of colon cancer five times higher in Halabja than in Chamchamal," he said.

There are other anomalies as well, Baban said. The rate of miscarriage in Halabja, according to initial survey results, is fourteen times the rate of miscarriage in Chamchamal; rates of infertility among men and women in the affected population are many times higher than normal. "We're finding Hiroshima levels of sterility," he said.

Then, there is the suspicion about snakes. "Have you heard about the snakes?" he asked as we drove. I told him that I had heard rumors. "We don't know if a genetic mutation in the snakes has made them more toxic," Baban went on, "or if the birds that eat the snakes were killed off in the attacks, but there seem to be more snakebites, of greater toxicity, in Halabja now than before."

Baban said that in Halabja "there are more abnormal births than normal ones," and other Kurdish doctors told me that they regularly see children born with neural-tube defects and undescended testes and without anal openings. They are seeing—and they showed me—children born with six or seven toes on each foot, children whose fingers and toes are fused, and children who suffer from leukemia and liver cancer.

Most of the Kurds who were murdered in the Anfal were not killed by poison gas; rather, the genocide was carried out, in large part, in the traditional manner, with roundups at night, mass executions, and anonymous burials. The bodies of most of the victims of the Anfal—mainly men and boys—have never been found.

. . .allegations include charges that Ansar al-Islam (a terrorist group that operates inside Iraq) has received funds directly from Al Qaeda; that the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with Al Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam; that Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992; that a number of Al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam; and that Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan. If these charges are true, it would mean that the relationship between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda is far closer than previously thought.

. . .about ten years ago Saddam underwent something of a battlefield conversion to a fundamentalist brand of Islam. "It was gradual, starting the moment he decided on the invasion of Kuwait," in June of 1990, according to Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert at the University of Haifa. "His calculation was that he needed people in Iraq and the Arab world—as well as God—to be on his side when he invaded. After he invaded, the Islamic rhetorical style became overwhelming"—so overwhelming, Baram continued, that a radical group in Jordan began calling Saddam "the New Caliph Marching from the East." This conversion, cynical though it may be, has opened doors to Saddam in the fundamentalist world. He is now a prime supporter of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and of Hamas, paying families of suicide bombers ten thousand dollars in exchange for their sons' martyrdom. This is part of Saddam's attempt to harness the power of Islamic extremism and direct it against his enemies.

The man they introduced me to the next afternoon was a twenty-nine-year-old Iranian Arab, a smuggler and bandit from the city of Ahvaz. The intelligence officials told me that his most recent employer was bin Laden. When they arrested him, last year, they said, they found a roll of film in his possession. They had the film developed, and the photographs, which they showed me, depicted their prisoner murdering a man with a knife, slicing his ear off and then plunging the knife into the top of the man's head.

One day in 1999, Othman(Osoma bin Laden contact) got a message to Jawad(Al Qaeda smuggler mentioned in the preceeding paragraph), who was then in Iran. He was to smuggle himself across the Iraqi border at Fao, where a car would meet him and take him to a village near Tikrit, the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's clan. Jawad was then taken to a meeting at the house of a man called Luay, whom he described as the son of Saddam's father-in-law, Khayr Allah Talfah. (Professor Baram, who has long followed Saddam's family, later told me he believes that Luay, who is about forty years old, is close to Saddam's inner circle.) At the meeting, with Othman present, Mukhabarat officials instructed Jawad to go to Baghdad, where he was to retrieve several cannisters filled with explosives. Then, he said, he was to arrange to smuggle the explosives into Iran, where they would be used to kill anti-Iraqi activists. After this assignment was completed, Jawad said, he was given a thousand Kalashnikov rifles by Iraqi intelligence and told to smuggle them into Afghanistan.

A year later, there was a new development: Othman told Jawad to smuggle several dozen refrigerator motors into Afghanistan for the Iraqi Mukhabarat; a cannister filled with liquid was attached to each motor. Jawad said that he asked Othman for more information. "I said, 'Othman, what does this contain?' He said, 'My life and your life.' He said they"—the Iraqi agents—"were going to kill us if we didn't do this. That's all I'll say.

"I was given a book of dollars," Jawad went on, meaning ten thousand dollars—a hundred American hundred-dollar bills. "I was told to arrange to smuggle the motors. Othman told me to kill any of the smugglers who helped us once we got there." Vehicles belonging to the Taliban were waiting at the border, and Jawad said that he turned over the liquid-filled refrigerator motors to the Taliban, and then killed the smugglers who had helped him.

I asked (Kurdish Prime Minister) Salih to respond to the criticism, widely aired in the West, that the sanctions have led to the death of thousands of children. "Sanctions don't kill Iraqi children," he said. "The regime kills children."

The Kurds face an institutional disadvantage at the U.N., where, unlike the Palestinians, they have not even been granted official observer status. Salih grew acerbic: "Compare us to other liberation movements around the world. We are very mature. We don't engage in terror. We don't condone extremist nationalist notions that can only burden our people. Please compare what we have achieved in the Kurdistan national-authority areas to the Palestinian national authority of Mr. Arafat. We have spent the last ten years building a secular, democratic society, a civil society. What has he built?"

There is some debate among arms-control experts about exactly when Saddam will have nuclear capabilities. But there is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them soon, and a nuclear-armed Iraq would alter forever the balance of power in the Middle East. "The first thing that occurs to any military planner is force protection," Charles Duelfer told me. "If your assessment of the threat is chemical or biological, you can get individual protective equipment and warning systems. If you think he's going to use a nuclear weapon, where are you going to concentrate your forces?"

There is little doubt what Saddam might do with an atomic bomb or with his stocks of biological and chemical weapons. When I talked about Saddam's past with the medical geneticist Christine Gosden, she said, "Please understand, the Kurds were for practice."

I was driving Wylie home tonight when he says, "It's Dark!"
"Yeah," I said, "That means that it is almost time to go night-night"
The boy bristles, "No, I not go night-night. I not tired."
I replied, "But Wylie, it is so much fun to go night-night. I love going to bed."
The boy gets a smug look on his face, "But Dadoe . . . you sleep in Momma's bed."

The most amazing coincidence happened yesterday. When I got home from work my mom was there waiting for me with two pairs of brand new slacks. She had not read my post, she just loves me!

James Lileks is amazing today. Really amazing. I am not going to reprint an excerpt because you need to click over and read the whole thing.

Ode to my Favorite Pants

Two sizes too big in the waist, two inches too long in the legs. My favorite pants that I have ever owned came from J.C. Penney’s and were not purchased on sale. There were a gift from my momma for Christmas, but she let me pick them out. They were gray, and I might have preferred olive green, but that did not keep them from becoming my favorite pants of all time.

They were big and wide in the legs and pleated in the front which made plenty of room in the crotch. The pleats also made plenty of room in the butt, which is more important. I am bulky in the moneymaker. These fantastic slacks had cuffs folded over at the bottom of the legs that would collect dirt and lint and perhaps even crumbs while I was eating. If I had on sandals, the back side of the cuffs would tuck under my foot, between heel and sandal. If I had on sneakers or my favorite shoes (which are a whole other story) the cuffs at the bottom of the legs would tuck under the heel of my shoes and get walked on.


These were the very definition of comfort. Sliding my legs into them was like putting on a fresh coat of love. My flesh swam around in them all day and was never constricted. I wore them often – at least twice a week, sometimes more – for they made me feel like a man. I rarely dared to place them in the dirty clothes hamper, for who knew when they might return? These pants had to desperately need a washing to get one. If you love someone set them free, you might say? Not me with these fair slacks.

On Sunday mornings I would stand in front of my closet and contemplate, “How many Sundays in a row have I worn these. Have people started to notice? Does that even matter? There would be plenty of time to wash them from Sunday to Sunday. These people do not know that I wore them to work on Monday and Thursday. They are the most comfortable thing I own. I don’t care, I am wearing them.”

Those were the days, the good ole’ days, the days of the Haggar wrinkle free 40x32’s. When I look back on them my mind sees me as thinner, more handsome, smarter, and happier. When I look back on them I see a simpler, more honest time. A time when I was not so scared, not so alone, not so overwhelmed. When I look back on them, I long for them.

I first noticed them wearing out down where they had been walked on. I knew it would happen eventually, but why so soon? This did not seem like a crisis and I ignored it, continuing to wear the pants as if they were brand new and just as stylish and elegant as ever. Soon I noticed that the fraying went all the way around the pants leg. This was very disheartening, for they might not be easily passed off at work or at church any longer. It did not stop me, though. These were my favorite britches I had ever owned. Wearing them was like going home and I would not soon give it up. Perhaps their life could have been extended if at that point I had put them away for extraordinary occasions, but these were not pants that could be retired. These were not pants that would go gentle into the good night. These were rock-and-freaking-roll slacks and they would rather burn out than fade away. I would maintain my strict pants wearing regimen.

It was not long after that. No fabric can stand up indefinitely to the corrosive powers of crotch sweat. One morning I was dressing for work a little disoriented from the long winters nap. I lost my balance and my foot went right through the crotch of my chinos to the floor. There in the dark bedroom I finally had to accept the demise of these perfect britches. I knew they could never be replaced. I knew there was nothing in my closet that would compare. Bent over and pantsless in the twilight, I was overwhelmed. A bleak and lonesome tear slipped down my cheek.

Five glasses of wine a day 'halves risk of second heart attack'

Men who drink wine every day after suffering a heart attack have the risk of having another one cut by half compared with teetotallers, according to a French study.

The study followed 353 men aged between 40 and 60 for four years after their attack as part of a larger investigation aimed at seeing if the Mediterranean diet could prevent further heart problems and strokes.

All the men had suffered heart attacks of a similar level of severity, were taking similar treatments for their condition and led similar lifestyles.

The researchers monitored how much wine each man drank and divided them into groups - teetotal, drinking less than two glasses of wine a day, drinking about two glasses of wine a day and drinking four to five glasses a day.

The research, in the journal of the American Heart Association, Circulation, said that men who drank more than two glasses of wine a day reduced their risk of having another heart attack, a stroke or heart failure by 50 per cent, compared with the non drinkers.

There were 36 of these complications (ie a second heart attack or stroke) among the teetotallers, 34 among men who drank less than two glasses of wine a day, 18 among those who drank about two glasses a day and 16 among the men who drank four or five glasses of wine a day.

Salon has an article this morning detailing the sad world of Christian end-times movies. A world so sad, in fact, that I lost interest after about half of the article. If anyone makes it all the way to the end, tell me what happened. This is the passage that made me change the channel:

The latest van Heerden release, "Deceived," is described in the press kit as inspired by "Contact" and "Seven," but is really closer to the old "Star Trek" episode "The Naked Time." More playful than the dire "Apocalypse" movies, it's set in a deserted observatory (erroneously referred to in the movie as a "space station") where everyone's worst sin emerges. Then a weary-looking Judd Nelson realizes what's going on: SETI@Home, the distributed-computing project for analyzing signals from space, is functioning as no less than Satan's own peer-to-peer AudioGalaxy network.

When a signal arrives with a suspicious duration of 6.66 seconds, the usual archetypal characters from rapture movies have their own plans for it. Louis Gossett Jr., as a power-mad general, wants to control it. A crackpot New Age radio host -- the kind of comic-relief character only found in Christian entertainment -- begins raving about how the signal will "evolve" humans to a "higher consciousness" (evolution frequently appears in these movies in conjunction with madness.) The eyebrow-cocking "dot-com billionaire" wants to sell it, exclaiming: "It'll be the biggest webcast in history!" And the lusty TV reporter, naturally, wants to corrupt Judd.

But when the foxiest lady around, a chaste space scientist and Christian role model (well-toned Michelle Nolden) persuades Nelson that the signal is evil, and thus shouldn't be studied, good wins out. All the un-Christian players who thought they were sophisticated receive comeuppances. The once-proud anchorwoman asks to borrow the Bible. Carl Sagan rolls in his grave.

Hurrah! They figured it out.

With my former optimism for the baseball strike turning to dismay, today I shall prove myself to be an even older fart than anyone (other than Ms. J.) previously thought by discussing the current state of popular music. I caught the last half of the MTV Video Music Awards last night, and then the first few minutes of the replay. That was all I could take. During Jimmy Fallon’s opening number he fell to the ground and James Brown came out to sing to him, “Get up-ah . . . Get on up-ah . . . you gotta’ start the show.” It was all down hill from there. After reflecting on the depressing quagmire of horrible performances last night I have come to the conclusion that the artist with the most influence over today’s pop music scene would have to be Paula Abdul. She was a dancer and good looking, not a singer. In fact it has been alleged that she did not even sing on her records. I think that it is safe to say that she invented the kind of dancing that you see on MTV now, with the artist in the middle flanked by a co-ed group of dancers – all of them doing synchronized jukes and thrusts.

Most of the performers: Eminem, Justin Timberlake, Puffy Puff-Puff Diddio, were introduced as “great entertainers” and not singers or musicians. I don’t think I would agree that they entertained me, certainly not greatly, but I would heartily agree that they are not singers. In the above list of performances, I never heard a single live sound coming from the stage. Not one. Nothing! No live sound. I remember when I was a kid and I loved MTV; yeah most of the pop singers lip-synced, but the rappers would really rap and the talking at the first of the song would not be lip-synced. Last night, there was not a single sound during most of the performances that was not from tape. It was shameless. They did not even try to fool anyone. I do not know why they even insult us with the prop-mic. It obviously does not work, the performers did not even say, “thank you” at the end of the song. At least we were not forced to watch the spectacle of Britney Spears constantly adjusting her fake headset mic as if she is trying to get better reception.

The new rule is that you can not have a performance at the MTV awards now without elaborate sets, blinding lighting displays, constant pyrotechnic explosions, and 250 people on the stage. Each year they try to outdo the last. I think that Puff the Magic Diddy’s performance was the most obnoxious display of excess I have ever seen, with hundres of dancers, people with pogo shoes doing flips, extras shuffling in and out, people swinging by on trapeze, more rappers and fakers coming out and lip-syncing. They will do anything to try to distract people from the reality that none of these people are singing! They even went so far as to shoot the entire show with some kind of choppy, effected look to further distract the viewers. This is supposedly a show about awarding great musical performances, yet there is not a single bit of music being performed. At least most of them did not have a band up there pantomiming. I think Justin Timberlake was the only one to pull that one.

There were some performances that were live. I did not get to see The Boss perform with the E-Street Band, but I am sure they were live and awesome. He always is. As a matter of fact, he is entirely too classy of a performer for the disgraceful load of garbage that was most of the rest of the show. Sheryl Crow played piano and sang a nice tune. She is always good, especially when you do not have to listen to her live band which is mediocre at best. A band called The Hives played. I have never heard of them, but they looked like they were doing an impression of the Stones from 1964 doing an impression of the Ramones from 1976. They were entertaining and performed their own music live, even if they were not particularly talented. They were immediately followed by a group called The Vines, who sounded like a neo-Nirvana clone; the lead singer had a black eye and they were loud and they smashed their shit at the end of the song.







But the highlight of the night, the moment that will live in infamy, was the surprise performance from Guns and F-ing Roses at the end of the show. When Jimmy Fallon came out in the skull GNR shirt from the 80’s and started whistling Patience, I almost lost it. They played Welcome to the Jungle, they played some crappy new song with lots of synth and a drum loop, and then they played Paradise City. The only original members left in the band are Axl and Izzy, but they are certainly the most important ones as Izzy wrote all of the music and Axl the lyrics. The other musicians are all hired guns; they can all play very well and they all look very disturbing. Axl never sounded better live than he did last night. (But again, in the 80’s he never resorted to lip-syncing, even when he could not even approximate the vocals on the album.) All in all, it rocked, but was not enough to restore my faith in Rock and Roll.













Non-musical highlights include:










Britney Spears gave Michael Jackson a birthday cake and unable to avoid acting like a freak, he gave an acceptance speech from notes as if he had just been awarded the Nobel Weirdo Prize. His speech included the exclamation, “David Blaine, your magic is real and I believe in you!”




























Diamond Dave Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar presented the Best Rock Video award. Dave has a wig that has been fashioned to look just like his hair did in 1980. Sammy looks a whole lot like Mark Currey with blonde hair, but that is just my opinion.























Can you tell that Brandi is a nursing mother of a newborn?



















As depressing as the show was, and it positively moved me to anger, I will watch again next year. I have to. It is the only time all year that I catch up on what is going on in pop. Although I am an old man, I do not want to be out of the loop altogether. But the reason I will always watch the video music awards is that I love to get mad and bitch about the state of the music business. I love to point out how horrible they are and how fake and unholy and without redeeming quality the whole thing is. It makes me feel superior.

A city in Minnesota places a tax on rainwater.

CNN reports that 70,000 Austrailians identified their religion as "Jedi" in the government census last year. Jonah Goldberg points out that it is better than marking "Unitarian"

Master economist Larry Kudlow has an piece on NRO concerning the economics of the baseball strike. While Keith Olbermann reports this morning that the two sides are close to an agreement, Mr. Kudlow makes it very plain who you should be rooting for.

Today's threatened baseball strike is all about the Yankees and their great success. The baseball owners, guilty of class-warfare thinking, would love to take actions that would severely damage the great Yankee franchise. In the process, they would also cripple the standing of the game and the game's players.

Owners want a new revenue-sharing plan that allegedly would take more money from the rich teams and redistribute it to the poor ones. They would also institute an unbelievable 50 percent luxury tax on teams with high payrolls.

Step back a moment and think about this. In today's soft economy, if anyone in Washington proposed a 50 percent tax on luxuries the general public would instantly label them out of their minds. Yet the owners carry on with just such a tax-the-rich campaign. It's a scheme that would make Al Gore blush.

In so doing, the owners would do to the baseball economy what a similar luxury tax would do to the gross domestic product of the United States. They'd cripple it. Don't forget that George Bush the elder raised a luxury tax in 1990 that doomed his presidency and made a mild recession even worse. Instead of sticking it to the rich, the tax threw millions of blue-collar workers — those who produced the goods and services qualifying as luxuries — out of jobs. Major League Baseball players are dead right to oppose this crazy plan and the owners are completely wrong to favor it.

More, if anyone cares to look at the facts, the rich teams they would tax frequently fail. Yes, the New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves have dominated the game in the last decade, but that's a result of good management on the field and in the front office. Plenty of other "rich teams" have fared poorly.

Think of the major-media-market Los Angeles Dodgers. Or the Boston Red Sox. Or the other perennial losers in prime locations like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago. The Cubs and the White Sox fail miserably each year, but it's the owners and management — and not the Yankees — who are to blame. The Cubs, in particular, report poor economic performance. But that's a sham. The team's excess revenues are upstreamed to the Tribune Company, which owns the Cubs, rather than back into the team.

League-wide, teams use phony accounting that would make former Enron executives proud. They depreciate stadium-related assets although the taxpayers financed the stadiums. They use phony accounting for minor-league team expenses. And they never open their books for full disclosure — the exact same sin that has sent many corporate CEOs to jail.

Why should poorly managed teams be subsidized in the first place? When sinking companies in Japan and elsewhere in the Pacific Rim were subsidized the economists labeled it industrial targeting. In baseball, it's nothing more than crony capitalism.

And since when does America punish success? Taxing success will generate less of it, both for the Yankees and the other teams. For example, when the Yankees go on the road they routinely draw crowds much larger than the home team usually brings to their ballpark. In places like Tampa Bay and Chicago, Yankee magic rubs off on all concerned, including local TV viewers and radio listeners. That the poorer franchises don't build on this success is not the fault of the Yankees. Blaming the Yankees in this way is akin to blaming rich Americans for injecting capital in start-up businesses that in turn create new jobs and greater wealth.

A dearth of taxes is not what ails baseball, but the selfishness of owners. They'd prefer to pick the pockets of players and fans than let poorly managed teams go under. If the baseball economy were based on free-market capitalist principles, poorly-run teams would indeed go under — and rightly so.

Salon.com has an interview with Steve Earle this morning. A few excerpts:

Steve Earle on Poetry:

It's like bluegrass. Deciding to be a poet is a hardcore decision. It's saying, "I'm going to do something that's really hard, that I'll never master, and that will never make me a fucking dime." Bluegrass and poetry have a lot in common.

On Spirituality:

I'd be a really bad Buddhist. I really hate to kill things now but I don't mind that other people kill them so I can eat them. I think it would be really hard on me to get that introspective. My spirituality boils down to that there is a God, and it ain't me. That's what's important for me to remember.

Our attempts to be God are where we fuck up. When we start trying to control shit or control the illusion that we control things, it's bad. The vast majority of times I still want to control everything and I wear myself out and then I have these moments where I'm able to literally let it go and those are the best times.

On Baseball:

It sounds weird but ballparks are the most tranquil structures human beings have ever built. For me, more than any church, more than anything else. I'm a huge Yankees fan. I was 6 years old in 1961 and that's what you got on TV in Texas was the Yankees. But I'll go to any ballpark, it doesn't matter. We have a triple-A team in Nashville and I go a lot. I can walk in and it happens almost immediately. As soon as I get to the top of the steps and see the green, I start feeling better. The shape of the fields, the colors, everything about 'em, I love 'em.

On Texas and Patriotism:

It's funny about Texas. I'll always be a Texan because there's no cure for it. Probably if there was, I'd take it. There are a lot of things about Texas that really bother me and more each time I go back. . . . I'll always be a Texan and I'll always be an American. I may not always live in the U.S., but I'll always be an American. The government can't decide whether I'm an American or not.

Keith Olbermann gives a day by day forecast for the baseball strike that is somewhat encouraging. He sees as a worst case scenario about nine days of strike, and seems to think that the strike will likely be avoided. His reasoning, bankers calling in loans to the owners that they can not pay without baseball games to generate revenue. Here is his play by play for Thursday:

Thursday, Aug. 29, 2002: Sometime on this day the owners -- probably still clinging to the $107 million mark for the luxury tax threshold for all four years of the deal -- will suddenly instruct their mouthpieces to push it up in at least the final three years. If their creditors, TV partners and sponsors have scared them enough, the offer will be sufficient for the players to say yes and to announce a tentative settlement in time for Peter Jennings to nod sagely about it.

If the owners present a lukewarm offer that Don Fehr still thinks he can finesse in short order, some kind of public announcement or leakage of "positive signs," will be made by 6 p.m. EDT. This is pure logistics: Players have to know whether to travel to the cities in which their new weekend series will begin the next day. The union has never sent players into the air to get to games unless it expects those games to be played.


There remains a 50-50 chance that despite all the exterior pressure, all the fear of cataclysmic revenue collapse and ownership financial fatalities, management will still be belligerent. In that event, talks will break off by dinnertime or by midevening at the latest, and the strike will begin at the end of the Tampa Bay at Anaheim game, around 12:30 a.m.

Simple rule of thumb here: If they haven't broken off talks and announced a strike by 7 or 8 p.m., they've probably got a deal, or at worst, are about to get one.

Interview with Myself

For RHET 3316


1. In your family or among your friends, whom do you consider to be the most influential person in your life? Why?

The person who has had the most profound effect on my outlook would have to be the boy, Wylie Allman Greer. He has taught me more about patience, respect, and how to deal with other people than anything else I have done. He has shown me a picture of God’s love for us. He amazes me with his capacity for learning and his natural sense of compassion.

2. What is the best advice that you ever received? How did it change your life?

I read in one of my wife’s magazines last week, “If you can’t fix it, forget it.” I thought this to be something I could really use, but I have not put it in to practice enough yet for it to make any difference. The problem that I am going to have is that I will stress myself out trying to prove that there is some way I can fix it.

3. What type of music, movies, or other entertainment do you like best? Who are your favorite performers and why?

I tend to prefer performances where the artists are allowed room to improvise and/or the piece is captured live. This is true for all of the performing arts. I like Jazz, Bluegrass, and Improvisational rock (My son’s middle name is Allman). My favorite movie makers are The Cohen Brothers and David Mammet.

4. If you could have dinner with any three persons, living or dead, who would they be? Why would these be your choices?

It would be impossible to pick just three and it is a lot more fun to make up several dinner parties of people whose conversations you would like to eavesdrop on. I would cook the food and keep the wineglasses full and stand in a corner and listen.
Calvin Coolidge, C.S. Lewis, and William F. Buckley.
Condoleezza Rice, Germaine Greer, and Sojourner Truth.
P.J. O’Rourke, Christopher Buckley, and Dennis Miller.
John Calvin, Billy Graham, and the Apostle Paul.

5. Realistically, what do you think that you’ll be doing – or what would you like to be doing – ten years from now?

I see myself freelance writing for webzines and periodicals from an office in my house. Perhaps I could publish a book here and there. My sweet wife will be running a successful decorating business from an office in our house. I would like another kid or two running around trying to distract us from working. In a dream world I would also have a recording studio in my back yard where I could hang out with my buddy Dan in the evenings and a shack on a river somewhere where my family could spend the weekends.

6. What is the one thing that you would like to change about yourself? Why?

I wish I could go back and talk to myself when I was about fifteen. First I would convince myself to get a GED and go to college as soon as possible. Then I would tell myself what I want to major in and what I enjoy doing in life, because this took me ten years of floundering to figure out. Basically I would cut out all of the wasted time and ensure that I would not find myself with a family and a mortgage, locked into a job that ruins my day and having to both go to school and work full time. Do I have any regrets? Damn right.

Dave Shiflett on the Sex in St. Patrick's scandal.

Most Virginians, at the very least, are taught early on that there are some things you just don't do in church. You can snooze, but you never snore. Your mind can wander, but you must keep your hands to yourself. You can go in drunk, but don't complain if the parson singles you out as the Devil's Spawn and someone picks your pocket.

And you certainly don't go into church for a poke. That's true even if you're married and the place is empty. You might take a tumble in the graveyard but it had better be a very dark night and you'd better leave the place just as you left it. One goes to church on Sunday, as the old saying goes, to beg that Saturday night's wild oats experience a divinely directed crop failure.

Check out this article on faith by Condoleezza Rice in the Washington times. If she is not Bush’s running mate in ’04, it will be a shame. Can you imagine a Rice/Powell ticket in ’08? Wouldn’t that just be pee in the cheerios of the political left!

When I first moved to California in 1981 to join the faculty at Stanford, there were a lot of years when I was not attending church regularly. I was traveling a lot. I was a specialist in international politics, so I was always traveling abroad. I was always in another time zone. One Sunday I was in the Lucky's Supermarket not very far from my house — I will never forget — among the spices and an African-American man walked up to me and said he was buying some things for his church picnic. And he said, "Do you play the piano by any chance?"
I said, "Yes." They said they were looking for someone to play the piano at church. It was a little African-American church right in the center of Palo Alto. A Baptist church. So I started playing for that church. That got me regularly back into churchgoing. I don't play gospel very well — I play Brahms — and you know how black ministers will start a song and the musicians will pick it up? I had no idea what I was doing and so I called my mother, who had played for Baptist churches.
"Mother," I said, "they just start. How am I supposed to do this?" She said, "Honey, play in C and they'll come back to you." And that's true. If you play in C, people will come back. I tell that story because I thought to myself, "My goodness, God has a long reach." I mean, in the Lucky's Supermarket on a Sunday morning.

I noticed that commenting has been unavailable for a few days now. I finally got an opportunity yesterday afternoon to go to the site that I use for this service, netcomments.co.uk, and see what the deal was. Looks like they do not exist any more. This is a real drag. I guess I am going to have to find another hosting service.

I realize that I am going to have to admit that I read a gossip column to share the following. Amy Reiter reports:

I'm actually starting to feel a little sorry for Britney Spears. The pop princess, trying to take a little time away from the spotlight, has nevertheless fallen victim to a couple of Montreal radio pranksters. According to the Canadian Press, a radio duo who call themselves the Masked Avengers dialed up Britney, told her they were Celine Dion and invited her to perform a duet -- "Let's Make a Hole in One" -- with Tiger Woods at a bogus charity event. Spears gushingly accepted.

Now I realize that nobody who reads this blog loves baseball as much as I do, and I further realize that none of my friends and family who love baseball read this blog. That is not going to keep me from discussing the forecast work stoppage and what a dishonest load of bunk that it is. It is so frustrating how none of the fans seems to know what the issues are, and none of the players or owners seem to be honest about what is going on. Once again, Allen Barra seems to have the best take on it. I apologize for quoting so much of the article, but it really is the only sorce that I have been able to locate that tells the dern truth about what is going on.

Though the economics-impaired writers and commentators covering the negotiations don't seem to understand it, so-called revenue sharing is not and never has been Bud Selig's primary motive. If the owners simply wanted to share more revenue, they'd have gone to the players and said: "Let us share X amount of dollars, and we will guarantee you that that money will go to players' salaries instead of into our pockets." But of course they haven't done that.

The fans and so-called small-market cities have been driven to a fever pitch by the commissioner's carefully calculated rhetoric regarding revenue sharing. They honestly believe that the selfishness and greed of a few owners (almost all of them it seems, with the name Steinbrenner) are keeping them from a big nest of golden eggs and that Bud's war against the players is going to get them their share of these golden eggs. They're right about the first part: The big-market owners are greedy and they are sitting on golden eggs. But the small-market owners are dead wrong if they think Commissioner Bud's plan is going to get them some of those eggs.

Apparently what is going on is that Bud the Dud wants to raise the so called “Luxury Tax” to fifty percent. The luxury tax is assessed any time a team exceeds its payroll limit. The Tax is currently twenty percent and is placed in a pool that goes to the teams with the lowest revenue. The problem is, if the tax were raised to fifty percent, no one would be able to afford to go over their payroll limit, and no one would. This would not distribute more money to the poorer teams and it would not distribute better players to the poorer teams, it would only serve to keep player salaries down.

Now I am not going to try to convince anyone that the players are not getting paid enough, but it is obvious that the players are getting paid what the market will bear. If the owners could not afford to pay the players as much as they are paying them they would not offer them such expensive contracts. Back to Mr. Berra:

For instance, there was a photo in the New York Times last Tuesday, Aug. 20, which showed a banner from Pittsburgh Pirates fans: "Better a Strike Than Five More Years of Yankee $tranglehold." One would like to point out that it hasn't been the Yankees oppressing the Pittsburgh Pirates the last two years, but the leading team in their own league, the Arizona Diamondbacks. One would also like to point out the principal reason the Pirates are a small-market team has to do not with the success of the New York Yankees but with the decline of the U.S. steel industry. No, forget all that. What I'd really like to say to the Pittsburgh fans with the banner is: "We're sorry in New York that you suck so much," but let that pass.

This is another example of how uneducated the fans are about this. Just look at your history books. Free agency started in 1976. If you look at the years before that when player salaries were often moderate to low compared to almost any other profession, will you discover that a different team won the World Series every year? Get Real! Baseball is a sport of dynasties. It is one of the things that make it great. The greatest fans in baseball are the ones that eternally root for the Cubs or the Red Sox, two large market teams that have not won a Series in any of their current fan’s lifetimes.

Also can you imagine Major League Baseball in a world where there was no good reason to hate the Yankees and Steinbrenner? Over to you, Allen:

One dummy who is, is San Diego Padres' John Moores. "If the players strike," he says, "I'll be prepared to sit out a season. I'm not going to be part of a crazy system where we have to keep raising ticket prices." Moores is either a dummy or he's blatantly dishonest. He knows very well that the players' salaries don't have a damn thing to do with the price of tickets, a figure that is dictated entirely by supply and demand, and that if the players went back to the salaries of 1976 (the first year of free agency), he wouldn't lower the price of a ticket to a Padres game by so much as one nickel. (They don't pay the players in college football or basketball games, but college ticket prices rival those of the pros.)

Did you hear what he said? ”They don't pay the players in college football or basketball games, but college ticket prices rival those of the pros.” Again, this is simple economics. Ticket prices are what the market will bear. Player salaries are what the market will bear. It cost just as much to go to a Arkansas Razorback football game as it does to go to a Texas Rangers Baseball game, and perhaps even more. Does anyone really think that if all of the Major League players started volunteering their skills and playing for free, the owners would knock ticket prices down to two dollars each?

The reason Moores is a dummy is because he is willing (or at least he says he's willing) to lose a season to support a plan that, if it succeeds, will almost certainly give him less money than the one in place but will greatly benefit the teams who are economically advantaged, such as his giant neighbor slightly to the north, Rupert Murdoch in Los Angeles. When is it going to occur to owners like Moores that their enemies are not the players but the commissioner and the handful of powerful owners who keep leading them down the path of disaster?

Why, in short, don't John Moores and his fellow small-market owners threaten to sit out the season if Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and a handful of others don't come up with a fairer system of dividing the revenue before it even reaches the players? In other words, why don't the small-market owners simply strike against the big-market owners? It's the biggest mystery in this whole sordid mess, because if the small-market owners are desperate enough to go to war, why not go to a war they can win? The Players' Association has never been beaten; the commissioner and the big-market owners have been beaten every time out. I know who I'd choose to fight

Major League baseball can be saved, but a strike would kill it.
Three easy moves that would vastly improve the future of baseball:
1) Remove the anti-trust exemption.
2) Immediately remove Bud Selig from the office of the commissioner and put him in prison on trumped up charges. (OK, that last part would not help baseball, but would make a lot of people happy)
3) Make a new rule that the Commissioner of Baseball may not be a current or former owner, and must be a former baseball player, even in the amateur ranks. I don’t think that Bud Selig ever even played Tee Ball. He was too busy dressing up in three piece suits and turning the neighborhood kids against each other.