Apologies to all for going dark.

I’m currently working with a client on an enterprise project, and they’re not excited about my blogging on related issues. Plus I have no time (shoemaker’s children problem). I’m working on that, and hope to be back online soon.
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Abu Mookie (Andrew Exum) has about the best, clearest, explanation of what blogging means to the practice of journalism that I’ve ever seen (and I read most of that stuff):

You want to hasten the end of your industry? Then by all means, keep doing what you’re doing: consider yourself unaccountable and scoff at the blogosphere. Yes, I understand bloggers are changing the newspaper industry in fundamental ways. (Ezra Klein, to use one example, does not blog with the same tradition of objectivity in which the Washington Post’s print journalists report. How that changes the culture of the newsroom, then, is interesting.) But if you think you don’t need to answer to bloggers, some of whom have spent years doing field research or working in Central Asia and now blog as a hobby, the invisible hand of the market is going to find you out. And before you know it, you’ll have taken a buy-out from the New York Times and be teaching creative writing in Maryland. And, let’s face it, probably blogging on the side.

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I missed the speech, but have been bouncing around the responses.

Not only does Kevin Drum hate it, but his commenters hate it. That’s not good news for the President.

(note that I don’t object to flaying BP; from the documents out to date, this wasn’t an ‘act of God’ event, but instead an ‘iceberg? what iceberg? we’re drinking here…’ kind of event. They deserve pretty much all the grief they are going to take and then some.)
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Instapundit and Althouse pick up the ‘smart kids working with their hands stories’; spinoffs of the trend that ‘Shop Class As Soulcraft‘ talks about.

Being me, I think there’s something deeper there. I’m watching both the emerging history of the BP disaster and Obama’s reaction to it with a kind of sick feeling. Thinking about it I realize that this situation – the disastrous performance by a major corporation and the equally disastrous performance by a politician neatly sums up a lot of what I think is wrong with our country and begins to align my compass on what we have to do better – something that makes these degreed artisans a hopeful sign..

It’s the simple matter of the growing disconnect between talking about stuff and actually doing stuff. Note that it’s not just ‘talking’ and ‘doing’; the greatness of the post-Enlightenment West is largely attributed to ‘talking about stuff’ effectively – which let us organize larger and larger groups of people to do bigger and bigger things, and also let smaller and smaller groups do cooler and cooler things. But that effectiveness – that ability to tie words to actions and to the stuff acted on – has seemed to be eroding lately.

We’re becoming a kind of cargo cult nation, swept up in the amazing power of words and brands and theoretical icons, and forgetting that at some level, in some place, those have to take root in the world where you can’t talk your way out of problems, and where people with dirty hands have to actually move the stuff of the world.

We’re becoming Eloi and Morlocks, and as the Eloi become more and more powerful, either the Morlocks get shoved aside, or they, themselves give up and try to live in the world of ethereal things where a well-turned phrase is more valuable than the basic engineering skill needed to drill a hole.

Because, at root, we’re somehow forgetting that the basis of our lives is at some level to drill holes in things (and shape things and make things); we’ve been seduced by the power of making things out of words (software) and forgotten how important the ‘stuff’ of our lives really is. I think there’s a discipline there that keeps all the other things in check (the discipline of stuff) and one of the things that happens to the very rich and very powerful is they get shielded from it to a large extent. Maybe that’s why Lady Di didn’t think it was necessary to wear a seatbelt; when you’ve spent your hole life surrounded by people who bend stuff into whatever you want, the fundamental realities get pretty hazy.

As a nation, we’ve let them get pretty hazy. We made crap cars, and destroyed our industrial base. Now it looks like we’ve drilled a crap well – and had crap plans to deal with the inevitable disasters. Maybe in a generation, when we have smart kids who have become mature artisans again, we can recover.
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Hard for me to watch, but proud as I am scared…

I owe my review of Junger’s ‘War.’

Update: Smart people tell me this is another COP than my son’s, and thus one of his brother platoons…
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You know Jim and I have a history…

…and now, he’s at it again, with a bunch of rich-ass “no bullshit, there I was” talk about – wait for it – his CELL PHONE.

Now, I’ve gotta point out that status-seeking through possessions is kind of lame to begin with. I have a friend who pays more than my mortgage in monthly payments on his hopped-up Turbo Porsche. It’s embarrassing; he won’t drive it anywhere because it might get stolen. But damn, he owns a TURBO PORSCHE. I’m trying to talk him into getting a Prius so he can actually leave the house. So I admit that bragging on owning stuff is a lame characteristic that (we) guys sometimes have.

But Jesus and Mary the weeping Mother of Christ…bragging about your CELL PHONE? That’s like being the kid in fifth grade who brags about his lunchbox.

What next? Talking about how cool your Bluetooth headset is?

Yeah, so your phone ran some missions for you…in your dreams…let me lay some truth down for you Jim, my man…let’s start with infrastructure:

Why on earth does the 4G coverage, of the so called “NOW” network, suck so much. Unless you are right in the middle of a capital city, you’re stuck on 3G with the pitiful 5Gb per month cap.
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They were supposed to have WiMax in Boston late 2008 I believe, then they said, sometime in 2009. Well we are almost halfway through 2010, still no WiMax in Boston.
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The funny thing is, despite the fact that less than 10% of this country is covered by WiMAX, Sprint continues to advertise nationally that it has a 4G network up and running. That’s false advertising, plain and simple. Sprint hasn’t built out any 4G network (and technically speaking, WiMAX is super-3G, not 4G), Clearwire is. And simply put, Sprint claiming to have a 4G network just screams to me that Sprint management lacks integrity in a major way.
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I wonder what Verizon will do when they light up a majority of their LTE network at the end of this year…will they claim to have a 4G network as well? and will they cover at least as many people as Clearwire currently does.

So you got no infrastructure…and you know, amateurs talk technology, pros talk infrastructure.

And that phone…please. What self-respecting guy would have a phone like that? It’s almost as bad as an iPhone, all sleek planes and gentle ergonomic curves.

A man – an old-school man like Walt Kowalski – doesn’t want ergonomic curves. He wants a phone that looks like Craftsman made it. Carved from an unbreakable block, with sharp corners that will gouge your knuckles when you’re emailing tough emails to vendors. No predictive ‘virtual keyboard’ on the screen…a man’s fingers are too battered and calloused to tap daintily on little icons.

Sharp corners, sturdy, a keyboard…sounds like…my Motorola Droid!! And…I’ve got a network that works!! My network works so damn well that I can take my phone to Hiroshima, take pictures, and email them back to Los Alamos. Hellfire that, Jim!!
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I’ve been scarce on the blog front for a while; both this blog and my work blog have suffered badly. Sorry about that – work has been ridiculous (which is a good thing) for the last few months, and I have a client who wouldn’t be happy with me blogging too much about what I’m doing. We’re leaving for three weeks in Japan in a week, and getting work squared away, planning (and budgeting!) for that has been intense.

Plus there’s the malaise…just looking around at the scenes (California, the nation) that interest me – it’s all bad news all the way down.

But BG got Internet, and we’ve had some great chats, and – I’m embarrassed – I look at the fact that he goes to work every day and risks everything when he’s as upset about everything as I am and get pretty deeply ashamed. It’s not like I do much, but throwing the seeds of ideas out there and trying to trigger discussion is what I have and can do. So I need to do it, and – once I get back from Japan, I will. Or maybe even a bit before then.

Right now, I’m thinking about Afghanistan and Vietnam, and while no it isn’t Vietnam, the parallels to the way we’re approaching it are becoming frightening to me.

So I’m thinking about working my way through ‘On Strategy‘ and seeing what maps to what we’re doing today. My gut answer is: a lot.

What to do about it? I honestly don’t know. I know smart people who think we withdraw now, and smart people who (frighteningly) seriously think we withdraw through Tehran.

But we can’t keep doing what we’re doing. We’re spilling blood and treasure and don’t know why or what for.

Here’s Summers quoting Clausewitz:

Not every war need be fought until one side collapses. When the motives and tensions of war are slight we can imagine that the faintest prospect of defeat might be enough to cause one side to yield. If from the very start the other side feels that this is probable, it will obviously concentrate on bringing about this probability rather than take the log way round and totally defeat the enemy.

– On War 1:2

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Godspeed to Brendan and all our sympathy to his parents.

Nevertheless they are heard in the still houses: who has not heard them?
They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.
They say, We were young. We have died. Remember us.
– Archibald McLeash – ‘The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak’

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The attention to detail at a base like Restropo forced a kind of clarity on absolutely everything a soldier did until I came to think of it as a kind of Zen practice: the Zen of not fucking up. It required a high mindfulness because potentially everything had consequences.

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In the civilian world almost nothing has lasting consequences, so you can blunder through life in a kind of daze. You never have to take inventory of the things in your possession and you never have to calculate the ways in which mundane circumstances can play out – can, in fact, kill you. As a result, you lose importance of the importance of things, the gravity of things. Back home mundane details also have the power to destroy you, but the cause and effect are often spread so far apart that you don’t even make the connection; at Restropo, that connection was impossible to ignore.

From “War” by Sebastian Junger. I just finished it and will try and do a review before I travel this weekend. Let’s just say it’s good enough that I need a day or so to process before writing about it.
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If you’re a Californian, and a Democrat, I want to ask for one vote – for Mickey Kaus for U.S. Senate.

It’s gonna be a symbolic vote – Boxer will crush him. But if he gets a decent percent…5 or even 4 percent, given the thinness of his self-managed campaign, it’ll send a message to the Democratic powers-that-be that there’s an audience for a message that isn’t trimmed to suit the institutional powers that own the party.

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