back from salt mines

well it does not look as though the war is going to end in the proverbial week or two, and my work which was not under control is now in much better shape, and it was either blog or clean the house, so...hello.

I am still not writing about the war. You should still go to The Agonist for that.

I keep thinking about Burke's (and others') disparaging of "me too" blogs, which seem/feel like the most natural kind to write, his point being that reading multiple weblogs that all pretty much point to the same old (or new) stuff - without adding significant value via original commentary - is a poor use of the reader's time.

And a whole lot of that does go on - which hearkens back to Who's your audience / What's the point of your weblog - if your blog is to be a summary of the most worthwhile web reading you've run across lately, there'll be a whole lot of commonality between weblogs. And since you don't (necessarily) know what else your reader is reading, you hate to omit these links. Plus weblog aggregators like Daypop or Technorati(?) are creating a new function of weblogs, as a gauge of popular opinion, which makes putting the links up on your weblog a form of "voting" for what you consider to be the important news of the day. (a function which will presumably soon be exploited and ruined by the morally challenged, who don't care what value they destroy if they can benefit)

And yet you do not wish to waste your multiple-blog-reader's time.

I think the solution is to still include those links but not to devote a lot of time or page space to them, or to quoting them at length, unless you have something new to say-- or if you have particular reason to believe that your readers have not seen it before.

With that said, here's my roundup for a mix of best and least-propagated of the web for a while --

• Best: Josh Marshall in Washington Monthly on the true aims of this war
  
• via Dan Gillmor a while back, Steve Kirsch on The six key lessons of 911
  
• The incestuous amplification that occurs when your decision-making is done within a group of people selected because they think like you do.
  
• Perspective from Agape, a vertical ("...Vertical prayer is private, directed upward toward heaven..." ) Christian's weblog, on the film and book "The Quiet American": (can't find the 3/15 post anymore, hence the quote)

  Greene was a serious Catholic, and this is only incidentally about Americans and Vietnam. It's essentially about the hell that happens when people try to force history in the proper direction "by any means necessary." Michael Caine's character is an adulterer, a dope fiend, a lazy reporter, and worse. But he doesn't arrange for setting off a plastic bomb that slaughters a streetful of innocent people. It takes a high-minded idealist to do that.

  
  
• "In God we trust" first appeared on paper money in 1946
  
• best of British overheard on the war is this:
  

  Soldier in Umm Qasr who has just heard Geoff Hoon's remark that the Iraqi city is similar to Southampton: "He's either never been to Southampton, or he's never been to Umm Qasr." Whereupon his colleague in arms says: "There's no beer, no prostitutes and people are shooting at us. It's more like Portsmouth."

  
  
• Saddam's bad taste may kill him -- another reason to think twice before widening and re-paving the historic streets of Nevada City. :-)
  
• Journalism "Posterior of the Pack" award winner for fairness and balance:

  ...Most of the pompous would-be "human shields" have already run home crying to their cushy gas-guzzling lives in Europe and North America...

  
  
• ...which brings to mind this Neal Stephenson quote via Electrolite, the Lois Weisberg of weblogs:

  For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.

must stop now. filth and squalor are calling.