Kurdo’s World has an excellent series of posts on the situation in Mosul. See here, here, and here. He’s reporting that there’s been ethnically-motivated violence there against Kurds by the insurgents.
Particularly interesting is this map which Kurdo has annotated to show the areas being defended by Kurdish pesh-marga and the areas being held by Arab insurgents.
Gen. Colin Powell has announced his intention to leave his post as Secretary of State as soon as a suitable replacement can be confirmed. From CNN:
WASHINGTON (CNN) — U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has submitted his resignation to President Bush, the White House said on Monday.
Powell is the most prominent of four Cabinet officials whose resignations will be announced Monday, sources told CNN.
The others will be Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Education Secretary Rod Paige and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, the sources said.
The Moderate Voice is maintaining a good rundown of reactions from around the blogosphere.
I’m sure that speculations on a possible replacement will soon be buzzing around the blogosphere. I, for one, would like to see the country move more in the direction of an American foreign policy rather than a Republican or Democratic foreign policy. At least offering the top job at State to a prominent Democrat with strong foreign policy credentials would be a move in the right direction. Joe Biden, long-time senator from the state of Delaware, would be a good pick, in my opinion. Would Biden take the job? Not if he has any sense. But it would be a statesmanlike move and not beyond the realm of possibility at this stage of Biden’s career.
UPDATE: ABC News is reporting that Condoleeza Rice will be named to replace Powell. Frankly, I don’t think that Ms. Rice has the gravitas for the job and her professional training as a Soviet specialist will only be somewhat useful (although it will be nice to have a SecState who actually understands Russian). But she has been loyal and it’s clear that President Bush values loyalty very highly. I’m not surprised but I am a little disappointed.
Today is my mom’s birthday. That’s her over there. She always was a snappy dresser. In this photo I suspect that she’s standing in front of a theater where she and her parents were working. I’ve written about her before. She was born, well, several years ago in Springfield, Missouri. Probably almost literally in a trunk since her parents were on the road at the time. She was the first person in her family ever to graduate from high school. She graduated from college and eventually got an advanced degree. She spent a good deal of her professional career as a remedial reading teacher in some of the toughest schools in inner city St. Louis. After my dad died young leaving her with five children, she saw that each of them got a college education. All five got their college degrees, are still alive, married, no divorces. That’s a pretty good track record. She’s still the toughest, wisest, most loving, most interesting, and most honest person I know. And the most fun to be with. Happy Birthday, Momma!
I haven’t posted anything about the battle for Fallujah because I don’t think that I have much meaningful to contribute. Probably the best coverage of the situation in the blogosphere is on Winds of Change. They’re updating the information there on a continuous basis so check back frequently. You can get on-site information from Kevin Sites.
There are two Iraqi bloggers that I know of in Mosul: Aunt Najma of A Star from Mosul and Ibrahim Khalil of Iraq Today. A relative of Aunt Najma’s has been killed in the fighting. Her post is pretty heart-rending. Stop by and offer her some words of consolation. Ibrahim Khalil has some interesting facts, semi-facts, and analysis. I think he’s representing what people there think pretty well.
Greyhawk is also reporting from Mosul.
There’s an interesting comment thread going on at Michael J. Totten’s place. In the post he conjectures that part of the problem that the Democratic Party has in being taken seriously no issues of foreign policy and national security is that Democrats just aren’t interested in issues of foreign policy and national security:
“These kinds of problems are self-reinforcing. The fewer intellectuals there are on the left who study military history and strategy, the less likely any otherwise left-minded person who is interested in such things will want or be able to work with or for liberals and Democrats. What has been happening is a nation-wide brain-drain from the left to the right – at least in certain areas.
I have a sinking feeling things will remain this way in the future to the horizon. Come on, Dems. Prove me wrong, would you please?”
In the ensuing comments thread there are quite a few interesting ideas being thrown around. Pro, con, and otherwise.
I expressed my own opinion in the comments thread. The underlying problem is a generational one. So many of the movers and shakers of the Democratic Party came of age in the 1960’s, many owing their involvement in politics to the protest movements of the time. Until they pass from the scene I doubt that real change in the party’s attitudes toward foreign policy and defense are likely.
The Carnival of the Dogs over at Mickey’s Musings is a weekly selection of links to pictures and posts with canine subjects. This week she’s linked to my post down below on Mira.
While I was making my shopping rounds today one of the stores I went into was Walgreens. From reading the Iraqi bloggers I know that tomorrow is Eid ul-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan. On a whim I went over to the greeting cards section to see if their were any Eid cards there—indeed there were quite a few. In addition there were cards for a holiday about which I knew nothing whatsoever: Diwali. I assumed it was a Hindu festival which turned out to be correct. I’ve now learned it’s called the Festival of Lights.
Every culture has a harvest festival. It’s part of our common human experience.
I haven’t told you yet about Mira, the youngest member of our pack. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I don’t have a picture I really like of her yet. The picture up above there was taken shortly after Mira came to us more than a year ago by the folks at the Chalet Nursery. They were so taken by her that they had this picture up on their web site for a while. Mira’s out for her first shopping trip with my wife and, as you can see, it had been a pretty grueling experience.
The second reason is what do you say about a nineteen-month-old junior? Is there anything cuter than a Samoyed puppy? The world is their oyster and well they know it. Full of adventures to have and dogs to play with and people to love. Mira was the first-born of a litter of ten and one of three to survive. She and her surviving sisters fought with all their mights to life and it was touch-and-go there for a while. That’s why we’ve called her Kendara’s Mirabile Dictu—Latin for “wondrous to relate”. And she is, indeed, wondrous. She is a very loving girl.
Edgar Rice Burroughs’s work is largely unknown now except through the Tarzan movies and a few other—mostly terrible—movie dramatizations which don’t really represent his stories very well. None of the movie Tarzans are really much like Burroughs’s Lord of the Jungle. But he, along with his fellow Chicagoan L. Frank Baum, was one of America’s foremost fantasists.
Burroughs has some problems. He wasn’t above plagiarizing plots (The Mad King) or settings and characters (A Princess of Mars). There are racist themes in his work, all nationalities are portrayed in stereotypes, he’s jingoistic, and his ideas of history, science, and language are, shall we say, sketchy.
But he was a great story-teller. And, remarkably, it wasn’t unusual for him to base his stories around interesting philosophical ideas. The core idea of Tarzan is a discussion of the nature vs. nurture question. One of my favorite of Burroughs’s works, The Monster Men, is an exploration of the creation of artificial human life. Do artificially created humans have souls?
And his novel The Land That Time Forgot is a riff on a famous saying of the German biologist Ernest Haeckel: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. Or, said another way, the development of the individual organism repeats the development of the species.
The Land That Time Forgot takes place on the hidden island of Caspak where Haeckel’s statement is literally true. Individuals make their way up Caspak’s magic river, beginning as single-celled organisms, mutating progressively into multi-celled organisms, fish, amphibians, reptiles, rodents, and on up the evolutionary ladder to become primitive ape-men and, eventually, human beings. Like all Burroughs novels The Land That Time Forgot and its two sequels have beautiful damsels in distress, dashing (usually American) heroes, threatening brutes, and high adventure.
The latest Carnival of the Recipes is now available. This week it’s hosted by Michael of The Common Virtue. A good place to start shopping for Thanksgiving recipes.
