In a way that probably carries bigger lessons for us all, I discovered this afternoon (with the help of Evariste, who watched the server while I tried to get connected) that while Thunderbird had in fact updated itself when I launched it this morning, and didn’t work after that…

…that the issue was that my IT guys had locked down the two ports I use for SSL mail this morning. At about the same time.

And I presumed – because after all, it was logical to do so – that the update had caused the problem, rather than some exogenous issue (like overzealous IT staff).

So, what do we all think the lesson here is?

See embarassing update, above…

My copy of Thunderbird just upgraded itself to 1.5.0.10 – and now it won’t download any mail.

I can’t get to the support forums at Mozilla, suggesting that I may not be alone…

So if you haven’t upgraded yet, I’d consider disabling auto upgrade on Thunderbird and waiting to see what (if anything) is going on.

Dean Esmay is taking a stand against Islamophobes. In and of itself, not a bad idea.

But as someone who doesn’t consider himself an Islamophobe, but thinks that questions about the future of Islam – as arguably one of the most powerful religious movements in the world, and as one which both has more temporal power (because it is more tightly tied both to state power and the daily lives of its adherents) than most other religions, and whose future is up for grabs – with one set of grabbers people who really do believe that religious wars are a Good Idea – I think that he is, as I’ve said before, burying his conclusions in his assumptions.

1. The future of Islam matters a lot to all of us. 2. It’s far from certain what the future of Islam will be. And that’s about the only two ‘bright line’ statements on the subject that I’ll sign on to.

As a matter of personal style and belief, I don’t think it’s a good idea to make anyone swear that they believe or don’t believe anything to associate with you. What matters is behavior, not belief, and I’m sad that Dean doesn’t get that.

Peter Bienart has his apologia for his support of the Iraq war in the current TNR.

Obviously it’s something I need to think about and respond carefully to…watch this space.

Update: Bjorn Staerk joins him. Boy, is this gonna be a long post…

I have an Examiner piece up today on ‘The Netroots and the business of American politics‘.

I ask a simple question:

Will the rise of the Internet simply bring us a new clique of political consultants, or transform politics by opening it to the wider citizenry?

I’d love to see an Internet-based politics that really opened the doors … and as a nation, we’d be better off if it came to be. Do Bowers and Kos represent that politics? How will we know?

…comment away…

Reading about Al Gore’s house clicked something into perspective for me.

The basic facts are simple; Gore uses a lot of energy in his 10,000 sf residence. He’s invested in energy-efficiency, but his lifestyle is still energy-lavish.

He’s not alone; many of the leading advocates of environmental propriety have both a Prius and an Escalade, to make an automotive metaphor. The Prius makes them feel good about themselves, while the Escalade is both roomy, comfortable, powerful, and enough of a status object that it meets the intangible needs that cars also seem to have to meet.

Gore’s response is that a) he’s done everything he reasonably can to mitigate his energy use, by

1) Gore’s family has taken numerous steps to reduce the carbon footprint of their private residence, including signing up for 100 percent green power through Green Power Switch, installing solar panels, and using compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy saving technology.

2) Gore has had a consistent position of purchasing carbon offsets to offset the family’s carbon footprint … a concept the right-wing fails to understand. Gore’s office explains:

What Mr. Gore has asked is that every family calculate their carbon footprint and try to reduce it as much as possible. Once they have done so, he then advocates that they purchase offsets, as the Gore’s do, to bring their footprint down to zero.

With due respect, as someone who’s read Amory Lovins for quite some time (‘Soft Energy Paths’ is a favorite book), if you can afford a private jet and a 10,000 foot house, you can afford to do a lot more than just “installing solar panels, and using compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy saving technology” (and yes, I know about Bush’s house in Crawford – that’s not the point here).

First, I’ll ignore the notion that the very wealthy can afford – among other things – the moral righteousness of buying indulgences for their profligate ways – without actually, you know, doing anything that actually pinches to make them less profligate. Things like this lead to guys nailing things to doors, and we all know where that ends up.

Second, I’ll suggest that what it suggests is that to many, environmental righteousness can best be compared to something from the past…

Created in 1783, the Petit Hameau was a mock farm area, complete with farmhouse, dairy, and poultry yard … all areas traditionally associated with women.

When visiting this ersatz farm, Marie Antoinette and her attendants would dress as shepherdesses, and play at milking the cows and tending other docile animals. The farmhouse interior was more opulent, featuring all of the luxuries expected by the Queen and her ladies.

The Petit Hameau was part of the landscape of the “natural” English garden, but it was also a reflection of France’s cultural values on the eve of the Revolution. This artificial nature retreat mirrored the moral values associated with natural simplicity and virtue.

Novelists, playwrights, and moralists encouraged the aristocracy to act their part by giving a helping hand to the deserving poor in well-staged events that would reflect well on them. The poor had a tendency to take the aristocrats to court if they failed in their traditional duties, and they often won their cases.

Sadly, we can’t do that to our current aristocracy…

Look, we own a hybrid (even if the license plate announces that it’s an ‘eco fraud’). We bought it, nakedly, for the convenience of access to HOV lanes (which in crowded Los Angeles is a convenience indeed), as well as because we no longer needed the larger Honda minivan that we’d driven for seven years. If not for the HOV stickers, we probably would have bought a conventional Civic, rather than a hybrid one….but we probably would have bought something like a Civic regardless.

We could afford a lot of cars. But the reality is that I’ve BTDT with automotive ‘prestige’ (impressing the parking valets, as I once said…), and that I genuinely believe that we do all need to reduce our energy footprint in ways that doesn’t imply that we’ll live in fairy-tale rural communities.

Collapsing that make-believe is an important part of dealing with these issues; I’ll give Gore credit for hammering home the point that these issues are serious. Now if we could only get him out of the milking shed long enough to start talking about what we need to do about them.

From Army Times, via Memeorandum:

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

“Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,” one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The Army is showing itself to be colossally inept at managing it’s public perception, but – simply put – to clamp down on what can only be considered an expose is wrong, counterproductive, bound to fail, and damaging to the well-being of the troops – whose conditions will be improved and chain of command held accountable when transparency is held as the highest value.

If this is a matter of ensuring that the chain of command isn’t blindsided, it’s worse. Because of the chain of command isn’t directly aware of the conditions in the facilities they control or use, they should be retired. Immediately.

Kerry Dupont just pointed this Paul Graham essay out to me:

The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn’t always bad?

Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you’re not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.

I feel so much better…but is she trying to tell me something?

So we spent the weekend in San Diego with a TG, Littlest Guy, a dear friend and her two sons, and Middle Guy and his girlfriend who joined us for dinner, along with Col. Foltyn (who I now owe even huger giri to…).

Saturday was small kid day at Legoland, which confirmed my “huh?” comment when I heard that someone was building an amusement park out of Legos…but the kids had a good time, and that meant the adults had a good time. Saturday night was dinner, at one of Foltyn’s pilot hangouts.

Sunday, he gave us a tour of Miramar MCAS, and spent an hour showing three rapt ten year olds (and their equally rapt parents) the aircraft museum there, and then took us out to the flight line to watch the planes.

A World Airways MD-11 had just landed, and as we watched, a line of desert-camouflaged troops walked down the stairs onto the tarmac and briskly walked off the field to waiting buses.

We stayed a long time and watched almost all of them before the kids lost patience and started wondering why TG was teary eyed and we left.

You know I haven’t talked about Dinesh D’Souza’s idiotic book ‘The Enemy At Home’ because I assumed it was so transparently stupid that it would collapse of its own vacuity. His thesis (from the reviews – I don’t have enough time to read all the good books out there, and I’m not burning an afternoon reading this one) is that the conflict between the nutball Islamists and the West is caused by Madonna. No, I’m serious – it’s the claim he makes. From the introduction to his book, as posted on his website:

The left is responsible for 9/11 in the following ways. First, the cultural left has fostered a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies, especially those in the Islamic world, that are being overwhelmed with this culture. In addition, the left is waging an aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family and to promote secular values in non-Western cultures. This campaign has provoked a violent reaction from Muslims who believe that their most cherished beliefs and institutions are under assault. Further, the cultural left has routinely affirmed the most vicious prejudices about American foreign policy held by radical factions in the Muslim world, and then it has emboldened those factions to attack the United States with the firm conviction that “America deserves it” and that they can do so with relative impunity. Absent these conditions, Osama Bin Laden would never have contemplated the 9/11 attacks, nor would the United States today be the target of Islamic radicals throughout the world. Thus when leading figures on the left say, “We made them do this to us,” in a sense they are correct. They are not correct that “America” is to blame. But their statement is true in that their actions and their America are responsible for fostering Islamic anti-Americanism in general and 9/11 in particular.

OK, that’s just historically ignorant, insulting, and stupid. But it’s now being picked up. Some guy named Glenn Beck who is a talking head on CNN (haven’t seen him, still have no TV thankfully) echoed his claims this week, and has been getting picked up in the blogs.

BECK: You know, there’s a new poll out that Muslims, the higher educated Muslims in the Middle East are more likely to be extremists? More and more Muslims now hate us all across the world, and it really has not a lot to do with anything other than our morals.

The things that they were saying about us were true. Our morals are just out the window. We’re a society on the verge of moral collapse. And our promiscuity is of the charts.

Now I don’t think that we should fly airplanes into buildings or behead people because of it, but that’s the prevailing feeling of Muslims in the Middle East. And you know what? They’re right.

Let me a take a moment and explain why this is beyond lame.

“The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs — and she shows all this and does not hide it.”

D’Souza would have to agree, right? He’d see that argument and believe that we needed to push back to an earlier, more virtuous America.

But that quote is about an earlier, more virtuous America. It’s about 1949 Colorado, and it’s from Salman Qutb’s book ‘The America I Have Seen’.

Ironically, Greeley in the middle of the 20th century was a very conservative town, where alcohol was illegal. It was a planned community, founded by Utopian idealists looking to make a garden out of the dry plains north of Denver using irrigation. The founding fathers of Greeley were by all reports temperate, religious and peaceful people.

But Qutb wasn’t convinced. “America in 1949 was not a natural fit for Qutb,” Siegel says. “He was a man of color, and the United States was still largely segregated. He was an Arab — American public opinion favored Israel, which had come into existence just a year before.”

In the college literary magazine, Qutb wrote of his disappointment:

“When we came here to appeal to England for our rights, the world helped England against the justice (sic). When we came here to appeal against Jews, the world helped the Jews against the justice. During the war between Arab and Jews, the world helped the Jews, too.”

Qutb wrote about Greeley in his book, The America I Have Seen. He offered a distorted chronology of American history: “He informed his Arab readers that it began with bloody wars against the Indians, which he claimed were still underway in 1949,” Siegel says. “He wrote that before independence, American colonists pushed Latinos south toward Central America — even though the American colonists themselves had not yet pushed west of the Mississippi… Then came the Revolution, which he called ‘a destructive war led by George Washington.'”

Look, I’m a real believer that we need to rediscover the good in American and Western values, and that a certain philosophical decadence leaves the doors open to bad outcomes. I’m not happy with many things I see in our culture, not so much because they are about promiscuous sex or Bloomsbury languor, but because they divert us from the very real daily work of building and making futures in favor of consuming the present.

But to suggest that the decline in morals in Hollywood in 2001 is why we were attacked is both deeply insulting and immoral because it claims the horrors of 9/11 and what has preceded and followed it as an argument for a callow Puritanism, and ridculous because it is not grounded in anything remotely like historical fact.

I’m not a believer in shutting people up, and good for D’Souza for grabbing his advance and running to the bank, I guess. But this debasement of political argument needs to be backhanded out of the public arena as quickly as possible, and someone needs to bring some disinfectant wipes in to clean up after it.