Turntables

The girlfriend is a big fan of Barack Obama. I’m not there yet, but two short pieces I read tonight are making me start to think twice about 2008. In the end, I’m pretty sure she’ll be right. She’s good like that.

First, Jerome Armstrong writes: “Obama is going to be very strong in Iowa and is visiting NH this weekend. On the political blogs, he’s in the top tier, but his support among the youth is far and away ahead of anyone (just look at Facebook).” What if the impact of the youth vote in ‘08 isn’t the turnout itself, but how youth drive visibility and viability through Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace?

Second, in a New York Magazine feature that otherwise seems hopelessly out of date in its discussions of George Allen and John Warner as potential candidates, “People are just as apt to express their admiration around him as they are to flutter. I keep thinking of what a woman told him after the town hall meeting in Effingham: ‘I read your book about your father. I read the whole thing.’” Who was the last politician capable enough to write a book - or two - that people read because they wanted to read it?

It’s a different direction for politics. Therefore it takes a little getting used to. But I want to believe, so I’m going to go accept the invitation that has been sitting in my Facebook inbox for a month or two to the Obama in ‘08 group. Let’s see what happens.

This is Joseph Conrad’s story of Mr. Verloc, an uninspired associate of the anarchist underground in London and equally uninspired informant for the London police department.

“For obviously one does not revolt against the advantages and opportunities of that state, but against the price which must be paid for the same in coin of accepted morality, self-restraint, and toil. The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly. There are natures, too, to whose sense of justice the price exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable. Those are the fanatics.”

Conrad is an exceptional narrator and writes with a black humor about terrorism and espionage. The undertones of his contemporary social mores make for jarring reading at moments, especially concerning the role of husband and wife. Overall, it’s a recommended read.

Baseball cards are cool again? I’ll join the crowd of aging twenty- and thirty-somethings reminiscent for their childhood. Here’s my contribution: the 1978 Paul Molitor rookie card.

I longed for this card for years. It was always the first card I looked up in a new edition of Beckett’s. Finally, I spent $20 to get it, blowing weeks and weeks of savings. It was worth every penny.

The June issue of The Economist (06/29/2006) also chimes in on the Mexican election, which hopefully will be resolved honestly. (I’m not necessarily against street protests if that’s what will demand honesty).

There are reasons why a switch to the left might be good for Mexico. Mr Fox and his predecessors have wrongly assumed that what is good for favoured individual capitalists is good for capitalism. It is hard to disagree when Mr López Obrador rails against such privilege, or against the inequity in NAFTA that requires Mexico to allow tariff-free entry to heavily subsidised American maize.

I want to continue thinking more about a coherent liberal foreign policy toward Latin America. While the conservative policy is focused on Miami and cocaleros, I imagine a real agenda that would guarantee equitable trade relations, enforce labor and environmental standards, begin to solve bottom-of-the-pyramid health, and more.

The Economist (06/29/06): “Expertise helps foundations take calculated risks—as an entrepreneur might and as governments rarely do well—and achieve the economies of scale that make as much difference in charitable work as in any other sphere of life.”

The leaders of the Gates Foundation are quickly becoming experts in global health, especially diseases in poor countries. Apparently the Rockefeller Foundation was an expert on dwarf wheat (?) and penicillin. No comment - it’s just what I am thinking about.

I want to save this quote before the NY Times puts the article it into the archives:

Mr. Buffett was scathing yesterday in describing his feelings about estate taxes, which the Bush administration is trying to kill. The ability of rich men to pass on “dynastic wealth” to their grandchildren is offensive to the American tradition of meritocracy, he said.

He gets particularly upset at his country club, he said, hearing members complain about welfare mothers getting food stamps “while they are trying to leave their children a more-than-lifetime-supply of food stamps and are substituting a trust officer for a welfare officer.”

What a fantastic way of putting it.

For the record: YouTube will be what brings soccer into the US mainstream. Every week, if not every day, clips from the best games from around the world are listed as among the most viewed. It shows to the US an exciting game in the Sports Center-esque format that we are used to.

Here is AC Milan v. Barcelona, with Ronaldihno as ridiculous as usual:

And here is another great video. There’s something about this that makes me like it even more:

Just do it. Celebrate free will. (emphasis added):

There is no question that Morales’s appearance needs some work, but preferably something that can be interpreted as neither disrespectful nor as submissive. Indeed, when I next write about Evo Morales, I hope not to talk about his clothes but rather about what he has done to help his struggling nation.

Link (Washington Post)

It is almost 3 AM. There is something about that hour. There is some siren song barely whispered by night incarnate and that song promises a quiet soul and a peaceful mind. It promises that through the wisp of fatigue will come repose and it will be good. It promises too muses who come to dance and sway as fingers click silently on the 3 AM keyboard. And I follow with the innocence of a child their steps, to believe for just one moment … but one moment replayed over and over again … that I too can dance with the night spirit. Oh, what a moment! Only under the 3 AM shroud does exuberance spill forth with such raucous silence.

I just added Resurrection to my Wish List:

“It is not love in the abstract that counts. Men have loved a cause as they have loved a woman. They have loved the brotherhood, the workers, the poor, the oppressed - but they have not loved [humanity]; they have not loved the least of these. They have not loved “personally.” It is hard to love. It is the hardest thing in the world, naturally speaking. Have you ever read Tolstoy’s Resurrection? He tells of political prisoners in a long prison train, enduring chains and persecution for the love of their brothers, ignoring those same brothers on the long trek to Siberia. It is never the brothers right next to us, but the brothers in the abstract that are easy to love.”

Dorothy Day, social activist and founder of the Catholic Worker movement. Nov. 29 was the 25th anniversary of Day’s death.

Link