Final thoughts on three months in Afghanistan

by Connor O’Steen

I’m sitting on the roof of a hotel in Istanbul, looking at the Hagia Sophia and thinking about my flight tomorrow (and the following day): Istanbul-Heathrow-Seattle-Chicago, at which point I drag myself to the University of Chicago on the Blue Line at 5:30 on the morning of the 23rd. Self-pity aside, I’m also thinking about an appropriate way to wrap up the summer.

Maybe this is the best place to go over some of my impressions about a few of Afghanistan’s problems. I can’t possibly claim these ideas as solely mine; Marnie (PARSA’s director) was tremendously patient going over what she’s learned from working there, and a lot of what I say here is something I’ve picked up from her. Full Story »

Fifty-one years ago this morning, if you stood on the steps of Little Rock High School, you could hear the angry white mob chant “Two, four, six, eight; we don’t want to integrate!”.

Arkansas’ Governor Orval Faubus was taking a stand against the Supreme Court ruling that ordered all United States public schools to racially integrate and sent the state’s National Guard to block the entrance to the school for the black students. Twenty days later on this date President Eisenhower broke the blockade and sent in the 101st Airborne Division to escort the nine students inside. Here is a short but great documentary of what happened during that month. Full Story »

Ahoy, me hearties, it’s been a long seven years since Dave Barry talked up Talk Like a Pirate Day to land lubbers in every port in the land. Today is the day when you bilge rats sailin’ around these virtual seas gotta speak up yer pirate talk, and smartly too!

What started as a small pirate band has swollen like a gangrenous foot before the peg’s attached and swept the sea lanes around the world. This year there’s pirates taking over online comics, Twitter, games like World of Warcraft and Second Live, social news site Reddit, even children’s shows (Captain Feathersword, of course!).

If yer not up to talkin’ like a pirate without some aid, there’s some good pirate talk here, and if yer lookin’ for a place to play yer hornpipe, or to join yer fellow talkin’ pirates in dancing to one, check out all the festivities around the world. Aye, and if yer lucky, NEXT year the pirates will party near you if they aren’t this year. Or you can set your sails to the wind for the nearest port and pub and start a party yerself!

So get to it smartly!

Aye Aye!

Few pieces of music have the historic weight and significance of “Miserere mei, Deus“. It was composed by Gregorio Allegri in the 1630’s for the Vatican. And there it stayed for over 125 years. Full Story »

Y’know, these days, so many people with so many different motives are trying to tell me in so many ways what the “truth†is that I wonder whether I’d recognize a “truth” — any “truth” at all.

I give up. I’ve collapsed under the oppressing weight of lies, prevarications, deceits, “policy adjustments,†rhetoric, no-longer-operative statements, attack ads, Perino-isms, cunningly packaged spin, and Rovian stump speeches with the rhetorical content equivalent to the unflushed contents of a toilet bowl.

Would someone please make possession of a Teleprompter a federal crime, punishable by listening to Rush Limbaugh 24/7 for life? Or Al Franken, for that matter? Can we stop the incessant harangue so reminiscent of “Father Knows Best” or, in the event Sarah Palin is speaking, “Mother Knows Best”? Or Hillary or Bill: “We Know Best”?
Full Story »

Last night we watched the Final Cut of Blade Runner again, and if you don’t have this package I can’t recommend it highly enough. 25 years on, Ridley Scott was able to finally re-craft the film as he wanted it originally, and the result is a stunning achievement. Scott has been one of our greatest directors for a very long time, but this may be his finest moment to date.

This viewing (probably my 35th or 40th - I lost count a long time ago) got me to thinking, all over again, about how little the film was acknowledged at the time of its release. Full Story »

We’re fond of calling our great rock stars poets. Dylan is a poet. Springsteen is a poet. John Lennon was a poet. Jim Morrison (*gag*) was a poet. And so on. Certainly the first three (have) produced some marvelous words, but as a poet - forgive me if I call myself a “real” poet here - I’ve never quite been willing to accord their work the status of poetry. This isn’t necessarily a slam - their work isn’t architecture, either. Full Story »

One of the more common arguments you hear from global heating deniers and skeptics is that the urban heat island effect is causing global temperature measurements to look a lot hotter than they actually are. This is such a powerful argument because there is some truth to it - when you plop down a new road or build a town around what used to be a rural National Weather Service temperature monitoring station, there’s going to be a major uptick in the temperature that station measures. Skeptics like Anthony Watts of Wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com have spent a great deal of time documenting situations where new roads, new construction, even the addition of an asphalt walkway to a gas grill could be responsible for spurious temperature readings out of weather stations. However, the argument that global heating is all a misunderstanding of the urban heat island effect took a hit recently with the release of a new study that finds temperatures measured in established cities trend nearly identically to rural temperatures. Full Story »

Isn’t it ludicrous even to ask such a question? Apparently not, in the presidential race of 2008.

I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks absorbing and reflecting on the drama of the conventions. I got so whupped up alongside the head with the Palin pick, followed by incredulity at the delirious embrace by her party, that I’m only just now managing to mobilize some reactions. One of the strongest is that I don’t want – and we don’t need – “just a regular Joe – or Jane†– at the helm of this nation, whether as president or vice president. Full Story »

Bitch, please. This isn’t Cosmo, and never mind how I can come up with four or five of those titles right off the top of my head. These are a few simple, surprisingly little-known facts about feminists that I’ve put together as a service to the astonishingly large number of people who toss the “f” bomb around without a clue as to its meaning, its history or how asinine they sound.  Ignorance may be bliss, but idiots get on my last nerve, so let’s start with a helpful definition.

“Feminism (here we go) is a discourse that involves (endlessly variable) movements, theories and philosophies (immensely important though often migraine-inducing) which are concerned with the issue of gender (and sex, because, hey, biology exists) difference (if that’s not too divisive), advocate equality (or equity, or parity, or some therapeutic ball-busting) for women , and campaign for (and argue about) women’s (or womyn’s, or humyn’s (I didn’t make that up)) rights and interests (including women of any color, any religion, and any orientation, but expect all estrogen hell to break loose if anyone says the words “class†or “race”).” *

So much for helpful. How about “women are human?” Let’s go with that… Full Story »

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I’m a recent addition to the S&R line-up since my first guest appearance at the DNC, and I hope I can run with these clever, yappy dogs. I’ve been worried that I’m not enough of a pitbull – unlike Sam, whose ‘reality check’ radar functions more forcefully than mine, or Brian, whose critical slant isn’t compromised by pesky emotions. I, on the other hand, found myself inspired by the multitude of earnest political conversations buzzing around Denver last week (even while ABC reporters were getting arrested trying to unveil connections between lobbyists, big money and Dem lawmakers), and moved deeply while listening to Barack Obama energize 80,000 people inside Denver’s football stadium last Thursday night.

I felt like I’d been to church. Full Story »

… I have no doubt she would be getting roundly condemned by the Republicans, and especially conservative evangelicals, about her “poor choices” — and her daughter’s. Since when did the “values voters” crowd decide to rally behind not just a working mom, but one with so many competing family concerns? They would be vilifying her if she were Obama’s VP pick, accusing her of neglecting her large family, her special-needs child, and her teenage daughter who would clearly prompt the question, ‘if she can’t keep things in order at home, how can she run the country?’ Full Story »

Over the years, I’ve found that my ability to put my feelings on the shelf has served me well. The distance and perspective that this ability gives me is part of what makes me such a good engineer and, I like to think, a reasonably skilled journalist. But last Thursday, and every day since, I’ve been left wondering if this skill has cost me more than I realized. Full Story »

I know, I know, you’re probably all DNCed out by now, what with all our coverage and the traditional media coverage. But we had something like ten correspondents around the DNC all week, and some of them have been so busy covering events that they’ve barely had a chance to actually report on what they attended. As an example, I only just finished blogging on Monday’s events last night before the big speech, and I’ve got between six and ten posts from Tuesday’s Rocky Mountain Roundtable alone, never mind a great interview that will take probably multiple posts as well.

There’s a lot of stories to tell still from the DNC. We’ll get them out to you soon, and thanks for reading.

While awareness and externalities were memes in the Green Constitutional Congress, they weren’t the only ones. For that matter, neither was the most important one. Bruce Mau made that abundantly clear with his repetition of a single phrase in every question he asked by way of introduction to the panelists’ monologues: “Can we imagine…” Imagination was the defining meme of the Green Constitutional Congress, and it ran through the content of every monologue in some way. Full Story »

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I was walking up the 16th Street Mall this morning when I got stopped by a man offering me a small newspaper called the Denver Voice. It’s a paper written in large part by the homeless, about the homeless, and sold on the streets of Denver by the homeless. For a suggested donation of $1.00, I got a metaphorical smack upside the head, and an article inside the the Voice brought made it smart even more. I hadn’t even noticed, and my lack of noticing was something unusual. Downtown Denver is missing something.

Where are the homeless? Full Story »

From what I can tell on this morning’s news, it looks like the mainstream press did an admirable job of ignoring one of yesterday’s three biggest events at the DNC: the spontaneous, peaceful march by 3000-4000 demonstrators, led by Rage Against the Machine and an assemblage of uniformed veterans against the war, on Pepsi Center and the DNC.

I’ll come back and editorialize later - bet your sweet ass on that - but for now let’s just allow yesterday’s Tent State march on the DNC speak for itself. Full Story »

What is it with these wild, out-of-control visitors to the Gulf Coast bearing German names? First we had Katrina, three years ago tomorrow; now Gustav is threatening an unwelcome arrival. But we still haven’t gotten Katrina’s mess cleaned up, 1,095 days after she roared through and forgot to turn the water off. Miles of inundated neighborhoods in New Orleans still lie in empty ruins; residents are still stuck breathing formaldehyde in FEMA trailers; crime engendered by a rising homeless rate is still rising. It’s still a disaster.

Enter the Bergevin Brothers. Full Story »