GuysBlog

For what is likely to be the only time in my life, an album I bought as soon as it was available has been voted “Best Country Album” of the year. The Dixie Chicks took five Grammy awards last night:

• Record of the year - “Not Ready to Make Nice”
• Album of the year - “Taking the Long Way”
• Song of the year - “Not Ready to Make Nice”
• Country album - “Taking the Long Way”
• Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal - “Not Ready to Make Nice”

That disc, along with Dar Williams’ 2005 disc “My Better Self” and the new Norah Jones disc “Not Too Late” is spending a lot of time in my CD player and on my MP3 player.

"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear." 
                    Edmund Burke

"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be
trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a
great fear."
                    Bertrand Russell

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.

Michael Crichton

John Perry Barlow

• was graduated from Wesleyan U. in 1969 with High Honors in comparative religion.
• owned and operated a large cattle ranch in WY for 17 years.
• wrote songs for the Grateful Dead from ‘70 to ‘95.
• co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is its Vice-Chair.
• has been a Berkman Fellow at the Harvard Law School Berkman Center for Internet & Society since ‘98.
• was busted at San Francisco Airport in September, 2003 and has finally gone public with a statement about his experiences with the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (and its local contractor, Covenant Aviation Security) vs the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The defendant’s checked baggage alarmed as it passed through an explosive detection system. As a result, TSA contract screener _____ conducted a hand search of the luggage to resolve the alarm. During the course of the additional screening of the defendant’s luggage, batteries, wires, and Ibuprofen bottle were discovered.  Upon further inspection of the items, marijuana was found in the Ibuprofen bottle.

Back in the early 1960s, I became a fan of The Clancy Brothers.  Tom and Paddy Clancy from Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Eire, had come to the US in the late 40s and rambled through a variety of jobs before going into theatre.  When their younger brother, Liam, and a buddy of his, Tommy Makem joined them, a musical phenomenon was born. Recording first  on their own "Tradition" label, and later for Columbia, they delivered quite a series of albums of (mostly) Irish folk music.  Over the years the act was manned by a variety of Clancy kin, with and without Tommy Makem.  Later, Liam and Tommy did a few albums of their own.

On their "The Makem & Clancy Collection" (Shanachie, #52001, 1990) they included an Eric Bogle song.  He called it "No Man’s Land."  They called it ‘Willie McBride."  The lyrics are available in various versions but this site quotes it pretty much as I hear them singing it. 

Willie McBride    or    No Man’s Land

Well, how do you do, Private William McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
And I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the dead heroes in 1916,
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

[chorus]
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they sound the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o’er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

…
And I can’t help but wonder, now Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you "The Cause?"
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it’s all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

[chorus]

That site includes some other songs of a military vocation, including another of Eric’s: "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda," about the survivors of a WWI battle on the coast of Turkey.

. . .
How well I remember that terrible day
When our blood stained the sand and the water
And how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter.
Johnny Turk he was ready
Oh he primed himself well.
He rained us with bullets,
And he showered us with shell.
And in five minutes flat,
We were all blown to hell
Nearly blew us back home to Australia.
.  .  .

Today, let us remember all the veterans, of wars declared and merely "authorized."

[Department of deja vu] In USA Today for October 27, 2004, Kevin Maney’s Technology column takes us back….

The highlights:

There was another election season, back in 1952, when a presidential contest seemed too close to call, America worried it was vulnerable to attack, and a single company dominated computing.

…

The Republican candidate was Dwight Eisenhower. The Democrat, Adlai Stevenson. Polls showed them in a dead heat.

…

By 8:30 p.m. ET — long before news organizations of the era knew national election outcomes — Univac spit out a startling prediction. It said Eisenhower would get 438 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 93 — a landslide victory. Because every poll had said the race would be tight, CBS didn’t believe the computer and refused to air the prediction.

…

In fact, the official count ended up being 442 electoral votes for Eisenhower and 89 for Stevenson. Univac had been off by less than 1%. It had missed the popular vote results by only 3%. Considering that the Univac had 5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that’s pretty impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing power.

…

(more…)

The following sequence of quotes appeared this morning on a mailing list to which I subscribe–I added the links:

“I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his
own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who
denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present
opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.”

– Thomas Paine, 1783

“Free speech exercised both individually and through a free press, is
a necessity in any country where people are themselves free.”

– Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

“The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.”

– Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people
what they do not want to hear.”

– George Orwell, 1945

“Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional
rights, we are weakening our own claim to them.”

– Dwight David Eisenhower, 1963

“What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not
that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant.”

– Robert F. Kennedy, 1964

“Go f*** yourself.”

– Dick Cheney, 2004 Alternate link

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And, of course, the entrepreneurs are moving in with T-shirts and stuff.

According to Government Computer News | GCN.com: The Internet is dead.

Causes of death include: Phishing, Spam, Spyware, Advertising, and URL redirection.

“The Internet is survived by wholly private networks and e-mail systems. ”

No services are planned.

In like a dimwit, out like a light.

We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Having lost sight of our objectives, we redoubled our efforts.

Now is the time for all good men to come to.

I am a progressive. I am very concerned about the way our federal government has seized upon the tragedy of September 11, 2001 to trample our civil liberties. In a column in the Arizona Republic’s “Plugged In,” Earl de Berge has laid out what I consider a conservative position that I can whole-heartedly support.

Mr. de Berge updates the rallying cry “Don’t tread on me!” to “Don’t snoop on us.”

I do hope that true progressives and true conservatives can join to remove, or at the very least revise, the Patriot Act to restore our civil liberties.