Your Humble Blogger is hitting the road soon—sooner than I expected, actually, as evidently Virginians cannot function in temperatures below zero Celsius. So, although it is just possible I will be able to post a note or two over the next two weeks, the odds are that it’ll be quiet here until January 8th or so.
In the meantime, discuss amongst yourselves. Oh, and before I go:
- The great and powerful John Scalzi writes that he is trying to convince a skeptical friend that the ACLU does have Christian lawyers. I know at least a few of you Gentle Readers are church-goers, and it’s possible some of y’all are lawyers; if you happen to know any Christians who work as attorneys for the ACLU, ask them to head on over to the Whatever, and they can (1) do a little PR for an organization that needs it, and (b) spark a donation to their employer, which can’t be bad.
- It’s time once again for The Untied Way.
- The AP is reporting that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will be out July 16, although the Scholastic site still says that no publication date has been announced. Whether or no, there’s no need to start standing on line just yet.
- In other no-publication-date news, it appears that James Morrow has found a publisher for The Last Witchfinder. I am more excited about that than I am about the Harry Potter, as it happens. He’s taken the book to Morrow, but it won’t be out until 2006.
- Happy new year!
Re: The Untied Way, I tend not to favor giving directly to beggars. As he notes, yes, they may use it for food, shelter, clothing, but they also may use it for drugs, alcohol, and other things they’d be better off not having. These people have clearly shown that money management is not their forte, and there’s no reason to believe that they will put my money to good use.
On the other hand, I do believe in helping those in need, which is why I give to causes that will provide help to them. When I give to a charity, I can (usually) find out exactly what my money is being used for, and know that it’s going to provide something helpful, rather than being thrown away.
V, in case you don’t get a chance to read my LJ, this post was made thinking of you & Chris, among others:
Alec Steffen of WorldChanging interviewed Prof. Thomas P.M. Barnett, Senior Strategic Researcher at the U.S. Naval War College.
It’s long, but a really interesting read, spanning globalization, military and police, environmental isses, role of UN and perception of UN, different metaphors for perceiving the world… : http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001778.html
They also have a link to Barnett’s weblog
the things i see missing in the interview all deal with how “the gap” came to be as it is. barnett seems naive. how does he figure that “the core”/”empire”/”us” manipulated and abused the extractive countries as long as we have, without purpose? can “the core” really afford to integrate “the gap,” raising its energy and raw materials costs in the process?
in particular his description of bin laden’s goals pissed me off. bin laden’s main complaint is not about a glass ceiling, it’s about how we’ve made the former ottoman empire into a prison: we and the british built the walls, we have corrupted or overthrown one set of administrators after another, and while (ostensibly) hunting for commies we helped murder or jail everybody who wanted democracy.
it seems obvious at the moment that the USA is losing touch with reality – one imagines one can see the bottom of the bottomless well of cash – our credit is pretty bad. one imagines one can see an end to overproduction, through some drop in american buying power. one imagines considerable, inevitable environmental and economic pain. even more clearly, we can’t shoot our way out of any of this. in fact we may be shooting our way into it, right?
no matter the circumstances i can’t picture businesses lining up to turn over control of their raw materials to people who might, by popular demand in a legitimate vote, nationalize industries that we own and operate for a tidy profit – even if that makes good economic sense for everybody our people would still fight it on ideological grounds. we are currently engaged in buying out state-run businesses everywhere, having manipulated the current owners into incredible debt. what meaningful power will “the gap” have if all its saleable items already belong to “the core”?
it’s a vision of global administration that seems like it could work, but it’s a utopian vision of economic relations.
I’m delighted to hear that Morrow’s The Last Witchfinder will be published. His readings from an early draft of that book and some other materials have been the highlights of ReaderCon over the past several years.