Ordinary woman

When I read about the amazing courage of ordinary women, it is both humbling and inspiring. Here is a story from Devilstower at Daily Kos:

Here, let me tell you a story of someone I knew. Someone who made her life so light that in comparison I might as well be living under a rock.
She worked with me a few years ago, at a time when our office was going through one of its regular interludes of pointless but frenetic activity. In the midst of hundreds of people hurrying to "reform business processes" or "transform the supply chain," she was a Zen breeze. She came, and she went, with remarkably little "stuff." No house, no car, next to no furniture in her small apartment.
While the rest of us fretted about where we would work when this company recovered from its bout of mania, she was pondering a question of another sort: what were the lives of women like around the world? Not glamorous women in metropolitan hot spots, but ordinary women in ordinary lives. What did they think? What did they feel? What did they hope for?
So one day, she walked away from the job, reduced everything she owned to the contents of one small backpack, and went to find out.
She went first to Haiti. She shared a night in a hotel there with a woman from France who had won a ticket to anywhere in the world, and picked Port au Prince from a map because it was in the Caribbean and the name sounded pretty. Then she spent six weeks living with a family in a ramshackle home on a muddy slope. She helped with the chores, played with the children, attended a wedding, spent the long nights talking, and left with a larger family than she'd had when she arrived.
She repeated this experience In Macedonia at a time when eating dinner outside meant seeing the flash of bombs falling in the distance. She crossed China on a train where her ticket didn't allow her to sit down, clutching a piece of paper that had an address she could neither read nor say. She lived with families in Moscow, in Delhi, and Phenom Phen. She greeted the new year at the temples of Angkor Wat. My favorite picture of her is one in which she is defiantly removing her headscarf in front of a huge painting of the Ayatollah Khomeini on the streets of Tehran.
If all this sounds like the indulgence of a wealthy American, let me hurry on to the end of the trip. Eventually, she came to Africa and by train, and car, and on foot, found herself in Zimbabwe. The arrangements she'd made to stay with a family there fell through, but at a time when the country was in turmoil and even diplomats were being removed for their safety, she didn't leave. Instead, she took a job working at an orphanage. There she worked with the older kids, the ones no longer babies, the ones who at two or three still could not walk because they'd never had a chance to try.
Most of the children she worked with were thought to have AIDS. It was assumed that their short lives would involve only a crib and a coffin. It was also thought that, after so long without contact, these children would never be able to love. But when she looked at one young boy, she thought she saw a spark. She thought he has suffering from hunger and neglect, but only from hunger and neglect. She thought he was something special. The more she worked with him, the more she thought he was an amazing survivor in a terrible place. She took him from his crib and into the sunshine. She taught him to walk, play, and love. And she loved him in return.
She asked to adopt the child, but was refused. Zimbabwean law was strict on allowing adoptions by foreigners. So she stayed in Zimbabwe. Stayed long enough to apply for citizenship. Stayed long enough to badger the courts into agreement. Stayed until she won her adoption and got her child.
Then, in the dark of night, she took her new child in her arms and like thousands of other refugees fleeing violence and starvation in Zimbabwe, she walked across the border.
I've only seen the child once. He was laughing as he ran around a park in St. Louis, deliriously excited by water tumbling from a fountain. She looked just the same after all her journeys. Slender and beautiful, with blue jeans and a backpack, a half smile on her face as she watched her son. Just the same as I remembered when I would see her sitting on a park bench at lunchtime, reading Walden, or a Kurt Vonnegut novel.
They're in the United States now. She has an ordinary job again and a child to raise, but I'd bet that her life is not heavier, not even by a gram. She went to discover something about the lives of women, and she found it.

Amateur Hour

Chet says about the US election punditry:

...these stupid high school metaphors don't tell us anything useful. All they tell us is that the author of them has no imagination and a questionable level of emotional maturity. If this is really what counts as substantive political discussion in the United States (and it is), then the country is in bigger trouble than can be easily fathomed.
Punditry was never a real profession. Now it has ceased even to be a craft.

Life is just so much easier when you don't work at it.

Great line of the day

Echidne talking about Kos' crashing the gate comparison:

Kos is right that both parties would prefer to ignore certain segments of their core supporters. Where the Huckabee comparison fails, though, is in what those segments desire from their respective parties. As far as I can tell, the Evangelists would like to change the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to reflect a theocracy, whereas the [progressive] gate-crashers tend to want to preserve the First Amendment and the other amendments which are on the way to the garbage chute right now. It's sort of sarcastic that the conservative stance is taken by the progressives and the radical stance by the conservatives.

Emphasis mine.

Hold that tiger

Take a look at the Comments to the Globe and Mail story on the Tiger Team -- about two-thirds don't have much respect for the knee-jerk "situational security" rationale, including several who note how hypocritical the Harper government is about supposedly being more "open", and others asking how Canadians are supposed to be supportive of extending the Afghanistan mission when the military are roadblocking information about it.
And here's a funny one:

What more do we need to know about the maturity and mentality of our 'professional' military bureaucrats, when from the pathetically isolated wells of their cubicles, they start calling themselves the 'Tiger Team', to deal with lawful Freedom of Information requests from presumably members of the 'Gazelle Team' they are supposed to be serving.

Edwards

I think the real story of the Iowa caucuses is how well Edwards did. And I hope he takes it all -- he would win the presidential election without mussing his hair!

Great line of the day

From Josh Marshall:

I guess people may have various reasons why they don't want Barack Obama to win the nomination. But there's one reason that wins out. If he wins it'll be years before Chris Matthews shuts up about Obama being a man of Third World.

At least he won't have Hilary to kick around anymore.

Above average drivers

Well, we may think our looks are about average, but I guess 8 out of 10 of us think we are above average drivers!
Me too, of course.
I discovered us above average drivers even have our own website where we can complain about how the other two drive! I found more information here about what makes a good driver -- I liked this guideline, based on one of the comments on this site:

Here’s a quick way to judge a careful, sensible street driver: how often do you NEED to brake hard?
If you have to brake hard either you did something wrong or you failed to anticipate somebody else's mistake.

And this whole discussion reminds me of a classic joke:

I'd rather die like my grandfather did, peacefully in his sleep, rather than screaming in terror like his passengers.

Air safety must be a lot worse than we thought

One can only conclude that air safety must be a lot worse than anybody realized.
Not only did NASA release its survey of airline pilots talking about safety problems on the afternoon of New Year's Eve, it also posted the report as dozens of pdf files, then it held a telephone press conference right at the time the report was posted so that reporters couldn't even skim the material first. And finally, the Globe reports that "NASA did not provide documentation on how to use its data, nor did it provide keys to unlock the cryptic codes used in the dataset."
In all, there are so many problems in the way this report was written and released that either this is the worst report ever produced or someone is trying to bury some bad news here. The Globe reports that

Earlier characterizations from people who have seen the results said they would show that events like near-collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than previously recognized. Such information could not be gleaned from the 16,208 pages posted by NASA on its Web site, however, because of the way it was presented. The data was based on interviews with about 8,000 pilots per year from 2001 until the end of 2004. . . .
Pilots were asked how many times they encountered safety incidents in flight and on the ground, such as near-collisions, equipment failure, runway interference, trouble communicating with the tower and unruly passengers.

I think its another example of how nobody connected with the Bush administration ever wants to do anything that will annoy companies, in this case the airlines. But seeing NASA's hysteria and paranoia over this survey, the results must be bad, really bad.

Great line of the day

From a commenter to the Huffington Post's photo of a buff 73-year-old Giorgio Armani in a Speedo:

Americans would do to almost anything to be fit, except eat well and exercise.

Bipartisanship

Shorter Digby:

Let's not bicker and argue over who killed who.

Paying protection in Iraq

Nice little country you've got here, General Petraeus. Be a shame if something were to happen to it . . .
Dahr Jamail says that a more peaceful Iraq has been achieved by paying what could basically be described as protection money to the former resistance fighters:

Late in 2007, the U.S. military began paying monthly wages of 300 dollars to former militants, calling them now "concerned local citizens."

This explains some of the odd terminology I have been reading in the Associated Press and AFP cutlines for recent photos from Iraq:


Here are "security volunteers" checking vehicles entering the primarily Sunni Azamiyah neighborhood of north Baghdad, Iraq on Sunday, Dec. 23.


This AFP photo describes "A Sunni Arab awakening member" as he patrols a market in Baghdad's al-Adhamiyah district, 08 December 2007.


And here is a "concerned local citizen" standing guard over a weapons trafficking suspect during a joint patrol with U.S. and Iraqi troops in Hawr Rajab, a predominantly Sunni area of southern Baghdad, Iraq in this Oct. 9, 2007 file photo.
But it isn't going to be a permanent situation, oh no. The idea is that these "volunteers" are going to be disbanded just as soon as the security situation in Iraq allows it. Jamal continues:

While this policy has cut violence in al-Anbar, it has also increased political divisions between the dominant Shia political party and the Sunnis – the majority of these "concerned citizens" being paid are Sunni Muslims. Prime Minister Maliki has said these "concerned local citizens" will never be part of the government's security apparatus, which is predominantly composed of members of various Shia militias.

Its a civil war waiting to happen.

Synchronized Ironing

Is there anything that people won't turn into a sport? This is from the Extreme Ironing website, which a commenter on TRex linked to.

Nobody expected...

The hallmark of the Bush administration is its blundering approach to international affairs, an elephant swinging through a china shop and then wondering why things are getting broken.
And its catch phrase is "Nobody expected..." . Like 14-year-olds, the Bushies don't think they are subject to the normal rules of cause and effect, so the reasons for adverse events must be mysterious and unfathomable. In Bush World, nobody expected Bin Laden would attack the US and nobody expected planes to be used to fly into buildings and nobody expected that North Korea would develop nuclear weapons and nobody expected that Saddam didn't have any weapons and nobody expected Iraq to fight back and nobody expected Hezbollah to prevail in Lebannon and nobody expected Hamas to win the Palestinian elections -- even though some knowledgeable people did expect exactly these things, only the Bush administration was determined not to listen to them, its fingers stuck into its ears saying nah-nah-nah-nah.
And wait for it, within a few days we'll hear Condi say that "nobody expected" Bhutto to be assassinated....
As outlined in this Washington Post article, it was the US government who decided that Bhutto should return to Pakistan to be "elected" as their Prime Minister, so that Musharraf could stay on as President, so they could both run the country together and maintain its pro-US tilt -- even though Bhutto and Musharraf hated each other. But somehow, in some mystical and unknowable way, this odd couple was going to create stability in Pakistan, and it was all going to work out just fine because that's the way the Bush administration wanted it to work and it had all these diplomats and statesmen buzzing hither and thither around the world setting up meetings and working out deals and negotiating agreements.
So of course it can't be the Bush administration's fault that Bhutto got assassinated, oh no:

Xenia Dormandy, former National Security Council expert on South Asia now at Harvard University's Belfer Center, said U.S. meddling is not to blame for Bhutto's death. "It is very clear the United States encouraged" an agreement, she said, "but U.S. policy is in no way responsible for what happened. I don't think we could have played it differently."

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Christmas dog blogging

Here's our labrador, Chillou -- I love how he lies with his paw tucked under. And I love how expressive his eyebrows can be.
It's hard to get a photo of him, because whenever I line up the camera, he leaps at it -- so I have to sneak in and catch him unawares, which makes for some pretty poor photos, usually.
This photo is a few months old -- he has lost some weight since. Labs are such chow hounds.

Great line of the day

TRex, formerly of Firedoglake, now has his own blog, and thank heavens I don't have go to FDL anymore to read him.
I suspect TRex will be visiting my place frequently in the Great Line category. Here's his brisk put-down of the know-nothing pundits who pontificate without bothering to do any research first*:

... But that’s our exalted pundit class. A bunch of know-nothing nitwits coasting toward retirement and spewing swill that’s the media equivalent of air-flavored cotton candy. Truly, people like Matthews and Joe Klein were built for a more politically agnostic time, when there weren’t people like us out here ready to turn on a dime and immediately give the lie to their fact-free pronouncements. The research isn’t that hard, but apparently, it’s more than these empty suits can be bothered to do.
Joe Klein recently announced his 2007 “Political Courage Awards”, which is kind of like Britney Spears announcing her 2007 Hygiene and Sobriety Awards.

*Yes, yes, I know EXACTLY what you are thinking, but at least my heart is pure and I'm not getting paid multiple thousands a month to write this blog and ...