Billmon has a soul-searching post up, provoked by the first post in months from Iraqi blogger Riverbend which is in itself a vital read. His post reflects on our moral responsibility for the depth of the carnage in Iraq, which is what I want to talk about for a second:

I opposed the invasion -- and the regime that launched it -- but I didn't do everything I could have done. Very few did. We may have put our words and our wallets on the line, but not our bodies. Not when it might have made a difference. In the end, we were all good little Germans.

I also opposed the invasion, but I want to point out the logical and moral trap that comes from "you can always do more." It's true. You can always do more, but you can't always win.

Let's take Billmon's point that we didn't "lay our bodies on the line" seriously. Let's assume that the 2.5M or so people who protested here in the US were all ready to throw down. Would lying down in traffic have stopped the war? Would a mass hunger strike? Would violent resistance?

I'm pessimistic about all those options. The only way to imagine Bush not being able to launch that war would be to re-imagine the last 12 years of political history, starting with how the aftermath of the first Persian Gulf war went down, and the lessons learned there. The truth is I have no doubt that at zero-hour, or even in the Summer of 2002, mass resistence from 2.5 million Americans wouldn't have stopped the war. In fact, it may have deeply worsened the situation.

At that time, it could have led to mass arrests, and those arrests would likely have been applauded by enough people. Political leaders would have been pressed to denounce the resistance. It would have made the vaguely fascist overtones of 2006 America look like the summer of love.

Got to the season finale for Project Runway on the re-run tonight. It's been a household institution all summer. I like that neck-tatted Jeffery won. He wasn't my favorite early on, but as he got to be less prickly I liked him more.

Michael was who we were all rooting for, but his stuff just wasn't executed at the same level as everyone elses.

I also liked how they opened up everyone's lives a bit more. That Jeffery was a junkie isn't surprising, but it's a real thing. Oolie is from East Germany? Cramazing! I'm sure she'll do great in the future. You could see that everyone wanted to make money w/her.

And speaking of money, how much do you think Laura's apartment costs? What does her strange Einstein-looking hubby do? I'm sure the answers are out there; maybe someday I'll look.

Anyway, this show is I think one of the best-executed of all the reality programs. It seamlessly weaves trashy drama with personal career development and big-name product placement, and it's effective because it doesn't pretend to be what it's not, or hide what it is.

Ok, enough talking about TV. I'll write about Lost whever I watch that too. Flipping away from consumption to production, my todo list is ever growing:

• Post about Vagabond Opera show: gypsy good times, del-arte kids, sarah's secret door and how it makes you feel like an arcata insider, petas and moonshine, dancing a stomp.
• Post three or four think-pieces on my work blog.
• Start creating election-time video. I want to do Ross Perot, but me; mainly talking to millenials about millenials and getting that whole revolutionary spirit going again.
• Working on my new theme for the site, documenting the Rebel Unicorn.

That's the short list too.

Just a note for something I've been meaning to post for a while.

There's lots of news items now about how the Dow is cracking 12,000 and it's a record high, which is true. Many in left blogostan point out that means we're now just coming out of a six year slump (or in the case of the Nasdaq, still trying to claw our way back) which is also true.

Something I've heard very few people remark about is how stock indexes are totally shitty as a lone indicator of how "good" the economy is doing. Basically, it's the corporate equivalent to counting up the value of all your baseball cards.

Why isn't this a terribly good metric? Well, for one, it's a fantasy yardstick, entirely based on perceeved value. For two, it's relation to real wealth (how good folks are doing) only connects at the top end of the income spectrum. High stock values mean good ROI for your investment portfoloio. Oh, you don't have a portfolio? Funny, neither do I.

Which isn't to say that the DOW is meaningless, but as compared to, say, average wages, aggreagate totals of things produced, bought, sold, and mean/median household income, it's not terrifically indicative on how the economy is for American citizens.

This is one of the reasons I'm confused that Democrats don't hit back on the Bush/GOP line that "the economy is thriving." Stocks are up, yeah, but what the fuck does that really mean in terms of the kitchen table economy? Increasingly, not very much.

Vagabond Opera show was fffantastic. I now crave a friday-night booking at the 330 club so we can really do it up right. More on that later. For now, I give you a link. It's about politics, but I'm linking because it's a great piece of Gonzo Jounrnalism from a fellow traveller:

Matt Stoller rides "The Debate Train to Crazy-Town".

Truly, he must have been visited -- just for a minute -- by the ghost of HST, spiritual godfather to all bloggers.

If you're into or curious about Net Neutrality, Watch Bill Moyers tonight. His show will include a live (east coast) debate between Lying Telco Shill Mike McCurry and Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press.

McCurry was truly scurrelous the one time I saw him in a debate, back in May at the Personal Democracy Forum. Like, maddening. By the end I was heckling from the crowd. I don't know how Ben Scott is, but I've been pretty disappointed that none of the reps on our side can seem to make a convincing argument that doesn't get lost in legal or technical mumbo jumbo.

It's fucking simple: do you want the future of the internet in the US to be up to individual people, or up to huge, monopolistic, slothful corporations?

Sadly, this is an issue with very little public profile, so it will likely be decided internally by congress, which gives the edge to the corporations and their sweet sweet campaign contributions.

Anyway, the show's at 10, but I won't watch it. Just get my blood pressure up, and anyway I'll be at the Vagabond Opera show down at Humbrews.

Made a return trip to the gym yesterday evening, after nearly a month of being lax and slacky. This was following a day of working at the the coffeeshop in town, so without any bike ride to warm up with I started on the recumbant cycle for 10 mins, then moved through a pretty standard weight circult (chest, arms, shoulders, chest, back, arms) in about 45 minutes, and finished with another 15 minutes on the stand-up cycle.

I generally don't use the stand-up because in my experience they're kind of uncomfortable relative to the recumbant, but the Community Pool isn't the highest-quality gym in the world and their recumbant doesn't let you make the ride harder. The practical outcome is that in order to get much of a workout you have to push 100+ rpms for a while. On the other hand, the stand-up cycle has a great set of longhorn bars, which let you stretch out forward while you proj, which is sort of what my body wants to do after the weights: a sort of cyclists child's pose to close it out. Worked good.

About midway through I felt like I was going to die, likely a result of stirring up my lymph system, which has been fighting a cold since my weekend in NYC. This happens when I don't ride for a while too: I get a pounding sensation in my face centered around the sinuses after the first big uphill, and then it fades. Next time I ride, assuming that's within the week, it's much less sharp, or gone alltogether.

So today we have the soreness, and tomorrow we'll go back.

Tomorrow we'll also see the Vagabond Opera, which my oldest friend Robin is in. Should be good times down at humbrews.

Just a plug for my comrade Samuel Taylor's Blog. He's a kid I met from Minneapolis through MFA who I fucking love. His blog is rad; talking about his journey toward becoming a professional actor, as well as politics and his own brand of anarcho-christian philosophy (St. Francis style). You can't beat that. Makes me wish I was 22 again.

i took a tour of some of the women in my life from the past four years, recycling old quasi-relationships into new and interesting sculpture-shapes. that was a head trip. rekindled dead coals, found friendship, offended people, made bonds, dodged bullets and generally made mistakes: sort of a condensed version of the real thing. i haven’t been a particularly responsible or exemplary lover over the past four years, but i have tried, and i hope i’ve been as enjoyable and nourishing to my exes and quasi-exes as they have universally been to me - even the ones that didn’t work out so well. ladies, you drive me batshit insane in the best possible ways.

Plenty more where that came from.

I'll definitely be trying to recruit him into the Rebel Unicorn cabal as soon as I can.

Saw today on slashdot that Sun Microsystems is working on a datacenter in a box. Google's been rumored to have a similar plan.

The idea is simple and smart: you take a shipping container and retrofit it with racks, HVAC, security and networking/electic cables, then you drop it on some dark fiber line, throw in a grip of servers and you've got a local datacenter. Build a national nodal network; give a city blazing-fast access to content via local caching; the possibilities are many.

Back in the 90s, at my first tech job, we were working on plans for stuff like this. It was a wild and shady outfit: the bosses played fast and loose and smoked tons of pot, but they had a vision and a few talented people (not me: I was just a young padwan learner at the time) and for a little while they even had money (of which I got none). But it all went up in a puff of bad management, shoddy/nonexistant planning, and a double-dose of being a decade ahead of your time. C'est la vie.

Anyway, at the time we were calling the concept "Microproperty" and the idea was that there would be all sorts of buisness for geographically localized data services. This was before the Big Bells broke the backs of the so-called CLECs (Competative Local Exchange Carriers -- smaller business that were supposed to be able to compete w/the likes of Verizon), so the initial applications were around telephony. There were also plans for all sorts of verticals: cable tv, electricity, even goods and services. It was a nice dream for world domination, but sadly world domination doesn't usually work out and this was no exception.

Some quick hits for ya:

The word of God on the topic of blogging, which is a mixed bag but fantastically interesting. Social networks are the devil. (credit: samuel)

Quote of the Morning:

"[I am] the only one on this stage who has a tough policy. I want to build the walls. I want to make sure there is no road to residency. I am the son of a legal immigrant. There are people today who attempted to come here as legal immigrants and died. Now we’ve got people flooding into this nation for no other reason than they want a better life for themselves...

That's 4%-polling Republican candidate for CT-Sen Alan Schlesigner, who came out swinging in last nights debate vs. upstart Democrat Ned Lamont and GOP-backed Independent Joementum (the Republicans ditched Schlesigner for Joe when Ned beat his ass the Democratic primary).

The dynamics of American Facism... I think the best bit is at the end. Classic fascism is really a kind of reactionary modernism -- industrial mass society, one-to-many communication, etc, combined with reactionary and xenophobic politics -- whereas in our particular moment we are witnessing something far more insidious and strange: reactionary post-modernism. How else can one explain the break between the organized Right-wing in the US and what they disdainfully call "the reality-based community."

An idea who's time has come:

And this is the brilliance -- it is a conversation starter, and the conversation that it begins will be a vital one that you might not otherwise have had about the importance of a Democratic majority. The conversation might begin, "Hey, so you decided to grow out your moustache, eh?" or "Couldn't help but notice you're lookin' like a slovenly idiot nowadays, what's that about?" But from there, the answer immediately turns the conversation to your explanation -- they will laugh, it will be a fun conversation, and yet by the time you're finished you will have had exactly the kind of person-to-person contact that is so valued by campaigns everywhere, and perhaps the person who so admired your 'stache will now be much more inclined to vote, to volunteer, or to support your local Dem candidate. And, as noted in #1, the whole process was hilarious.