BlaiseP's blog

Rosedown Plantation, St. Francisville.

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There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery. - George Washington

 

Propped up in bed one night, falling asleep I watched a locally produced program about Rosedown Plantation. The research was good and the staff seemed to have a clue.

 

 

Baton Rouge to Morgan City

Phoenix to Lafayette.

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As promised, the tale of my journey.

 

By the time we'd packed my life up into my Rodeo, it was already 10. Six lanes per side of AZ 60 becomes a two-lane road as we enter the Superstition Mountains. C shoots out the window, her iPod playing modern country.

The Battle of Platitudes: Obama’s speech

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Battle is a timeworn metaphor best used to describe actual warfare.  Particularly bad examples are “War on Terror”  “Mother of all battles” and the host of battle metaphors used in sports.   Obama is not at war with the oil spill.  For all his writing skills, Obama has failed to capture the moment.   There is no fighting this oil spill.  There is no capturing the leaking oil.  The solution to the oil spill is more akin to surgery and intensive care.   

Stephen Hawking: Science will win because it works.

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Stephen Hawking has done more to bring the universe into focus than perhaps any scientist in history.  While Albert Einstein became a caricature of himself, often blustering about how God Does Not Throw Dice, Hawking quietly (and correctly ) replied:  "Not only does God throw dice, he throws them where he cannot see them"  Hawking gets a lot of fawning press asking many irrevant questions, but this squib on abcnews made me smile.

The Tongues of Billions: John Perry Barlow at Personal Democracy Forum

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1648:  Treaty of WestphaliaThe deluge of information available on the Web has made the country ungovernable, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry

The Circumcised Dog: the life and times of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra.

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Jabra Ibrahim Jabra is born to a Syriac Orthodox family in Bethlehem in 1919, into a strange amalgam of cultures, speaking the language of Jesus Christ. He would become the finest ambassador of his time between the Arabic and European worlds. Novelist, poet, translator, sculptor, painter, art collector, playwright, critic -- his talent, politesse and erudition crossed all boundaries. He represented a more hopeful world, a world that is gone: a world which will not soon return.

The Tragedy of Henry Clay

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The latest Weekly Standard features a squib by Fred Barnes titled: He’s No Henry Clay: The president’s aversion to compromise.

Obama has succumbed to the temptation of large majorities. The lopsided Democratic margins—59-41 in the Senate, 254-177 (four vacancies) in the House—allowed him to win approval of his health care plan without making a single meaningful concession to Republicans. And he’s pursuing a partisan, no-compromise strategy with his remaining initiatives this year.

This approach is politically risky. On health care, Obama not only spurned Republicans, but also defied public opinion. By compromising, he surely would have wound up with a more popular bill. As it is, Obama-care is the target of a drive to repeal it. Repeal now outpolls the bill itself, 54 to 38 percent.

Barnes has mustered up a marvellous example. It works rather better than he wishes.

Full of Sound and Fury: Karzai's Blame Game

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The bursts of angry rhetoric come in quick succession, like the thunderclaps of spring storms. These days, it's difficult to recall that President Hamid Karzai was once hailed by the West as a silver-tongued statesman and an unquestioned ally.

The Afghan leader's incendiary public statements have left even some of those who are close to him wondering: How much of the anti-Western sentiment he has voiced in the last week is genuine, and how much of it is political theater, calibrated for domestic consumption?

"With Karzai, you never know," said Ramazan Bashardost, an Afghan lawmaker who unsuccessfully ran against him in last summer's turbulent presidential election. "He says one thing in the morning, and another in the afternoon. And he might mean both of them."

What if this is all so much farting and hissing for the benefit of the public, especially the Taliban? Karzai, like most politicians, only utters something when it serves his best interests.

Unhinged: the Laudantes attacks Tom Hanks.

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Précis: Tom Hanks has been lionized in Time Magazine as America's Historian . He has also become the latest target of Right Wing anger for remarks concerning American racist attitudes directed against the Japanese during WW2. Here is what Hanks said:

“Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

Honor is rare enough among today's Conservatives. So few of them served in war. The wars they've fought have not gone well and their historians fallen into disrepute for rah-rahing those wars. It has all been seen before.

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