Meeting Michael Totten

I met Michael Totten this afternoon - for the first, and, I hope, not the last time. Judith at Kesher Talk had invited me to join the NYC LiberalHawks mailing list, and (with disarming naivete) suggested I start a similar group here in Portland, perhaps beginning with MJT. I promised her I would see what I could do, not having the heart to inform her that Portland is not quite, exactly, precisely, New York City.

Michael was kind enough to respond to my invitation, saying that he didn't know of anyone else besides himself and his friend Sean LaFreniere, but would I like to get together for coffee some time? So we met this afternoon, for some two and a half hours, at World Cup Coffee on 18th and Glisan.

Michael is an energetic, articulate speaker. He talked about his awakening to the sickness of leftism in the wake of 9/11 - "it took me one week". Recalling the thrill of his college protest days, he grinned - "I was a moonbat!" We talked about how intoxicating the college experience or the youth counterculture can be for a young person escaping the confines of an upbringing in small-town Oregon, suburban Connecticut, or anyplace else. He pointed out how important it is for young adults to have that kind of intellectual and cultural stimulation.

Both of us share a certain sense of social alienation in being pro-Bush liberals in an anti-Bush environment. I guess I'm fortunate here because I've only been living in Portland five years and I don't have a lifetime of ties to the Northwest; so it's a little easier for me to decide I can do as I damn well please. (In a particularly defiant period last fall, I took to wearing my BUSH/CHENEY '04 sweatshirt to places like Whole Foods and Powell's Books.) And after comparing experiences, we found that the reactions from our friends to our "coming out" as Bush supporters were generally much less hostile than the worries conjured up by our imaginations would have had us believe. (Now, you have to understand that Michael is no lightweight.) To this day, the only overtly hostile reaction I've gotten was from the woman (an anthropology professor, no less!) who walked out on a date, flinging twenty dollars on the table and proclaiming, "I don't eat with people who vote for Bush!"

The internet is great, but it's no subsitute for meeting people in real life and having face-to-face conversations. I think it's especially important for pro-freedom folks to be assertive about their beliefs in social circles whenever possible - remember, whatever inconveniences you or I might face, it's nothing compared to what the brave dissidents in the Middle East are risking by speaking out. And, as I said to Michael, we base a lot of our judgments on the cues we pick up in face-to-face interaction; so expressing our views in person is often more effective than writing them electronically. And as the protesters in Lebanon have shown, there's power in numbers. So I'm looking forward to that meeting with Portland's pro-freedom, pro-Bush liberals.

All three of us.

Update

Blogger has been slow today - that is, even more than usual - and I wasn't able to post at all for most of the day. However, I wasn't lost for stimulating conversation, because I did get to meet Michael Totten this afternoon - an event that deserves, and will get, its own post.

My project for the next week is to get a handle on capacitance and inductance (my textbook helpfully explains that they're analogous to the spring and the block, respectively, of an oscillating mechanical system) in time for Thursday's final. After that, the focus shifts to polishing my computer skills and looking for work.

As for this blog, which is now almost a year old, I've been pondering setting up some kind of posting schedule so that I can better balance my time between blogging and ... uh, whatever it is that exists outside of blogging.

New Afghan Blog

Hat tip: Iraq the Model.

Waheed is the name behind Afghan Warrior, "Afghanistan's First Blog". Waheed is a 20-year-old guy who works for the US Army as an interpreter. In his debut post, he talks about the ANA (Afghan National Army) and about how things have changed since the fall of the Taliban. Go check out his blog - and mark it on your browser.

Protestors Surprise Prince Charles

Protests greet Prince Charles in New Zealand. During a recent visit to New Zealand, Prince Charles was confronted by bare-breasted women protesters. According to the article at This Is London, 'Two women launched a topless protest against Prince Charles during a walkabout in New Zealand. They took Royal security by surprise as they removed their tops within view of the prince in Wellington. One woman, 22-year-old HanaPlant, stood on a wall yards from where Charles was meeting the crowds outside the city hall. As he approached. she took her top off and started shouting "Shame on you, death to the monarchy". On her stomach were slogans including "Get your colonial hands off my breasts". Within seconds two uniformed police officers tried to cover her and she was led away in handcuffs. Minutes later a second woman, Holly Emma Goldman, staged a similar protest even closer to the prince.'

Guns don't shoot people. Cats do.

Just your typical cat-shoots-man story.

IKEA's Quandary

Reality trumps satire.

OSLO, Norway (Reuters) - Swedish home furnishings giant IKEA is guilty of sex discrimination by showing only men putting together furniture in its instruction manuals, Norway's prime minister says.

IKEA, which has more than 200 stores in 32 nations, fears it might offend Muslims by depicting women assembling everything from cupboards to beds. Its manuals show only men or cartoon figures whose sex is unclear. ...

Read the whole article here. And take a moment to reflect on the wisdom of Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik's words.

New to Blogroll

Portland's own Sean La Freniere. Thanks to Michael Totten (via e-mail).

John Bolton

Just as it looked like George W. Bush might be nudging toward multilateralism, he goes and appoints John Bolton as his ambassador to the United Nations. There could be no clearer sign that the contempt for the international organization, which was such a prominent feature of Bush's first term, will extend into his second term with still greater force and eloquence.

Thank G-d.

I can't improve on the title of this Slate piece by Fred Kaplan; neither could Our House, to whom the proverbial hat tip. Go read all of John Bolton's qualifications ... and join me, won't you, in hoping that he goes on to p*** off the UN just as much as he has Fred Kaplan.

Wrongly Imprisoned, Free At Last

With ten dollars in his pocket, an innocent man in Louisiana becam a free man after 24 years in the infamous Angola prison. DNA evidence freed him. From the Chicago Tribune, via Yahoo:

In May 1981, when Michael Williams was 16, a jury here rejected his claim of innocence, deliberating for less than an hour before convicting him of the savage beating and sexual assault of his math tutor.

Arrested, tried and convicted in just three months, Williams was sentenced to hard labor for life with no possibility for parole and dispatched to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, one of the nation's most notorious and deadly prisons.

At times the institution lived up to its reputation. In one incident, Williams said, he was stabbed 16 times.

Now, nearly 24 years after his arrest, independent DNA tests by three laboratories, including the Louisiana state crime lab, show what Williams has long contended: He is not the man who committed the crime. ...

Read the whole horrifying story here:
Jailed 24 years, freed by DNA

(Hat tip: Discarded Lies.)

Academic Bias Strikes Again

Don't miss this piece by Joel Mowbray in the Washington Examiner:

In academia today, "academic freedom" protects those who compare the 9/11 victims to Nazi higher ups, but it does not cover a professor with the temerity to challenge the beliefs of Muslim students in a single encounter which constituted, in the words of his boss, an "assault on their dignity."

That's the story of Thomas Klocek, a part-time adjunct professor at DePaul University, who happened to be on the wrong side of the political correctness fence.

With no current income and facing the possibility of losing the health insurance he desperately needs for a serious kidney condition, he has decided to go public with his fight. ...

Read the rest at the link. Hat tip: LiberalHawks.

Random Page Titles

You, too, can create random page titles. (If I can do it, anybody can.) Just follow these simple instructions.

Credits: Melissa Etheridge, The Indigo Girls, Sheryl Crow, Juliet Wyers, Joan Armatrading, Cris Williamson, Kirtana, k.d. lang.

Update

I'm nearing the end of the semester for my Physics class - the final's Thursday of next week. Blogging will be intermittent through then, while I enhance my understanding of capacitance, inductance, and ferromagnetism. (How many angels can dance in the enclosed area of an inducting coil ... ?)

Browser wars. I'm trying really hard to get excited about Firefox. Yup, I know it's got all kinds of advantages from a security standpoint. And I'll probably appreciate it better after I get finished transferring all my 250+ bookmarks over from Safari - as far as I can tell, there's no way to import them en masse. Functionally, I don't know that I see that much difference: I like that all the formatting buttons work in Firefox, but I generally get along fine with a clipboard full of blank tags. Then again, I'm still quite fond of the AOL for Windows browser - every time I blog from my PC, I find myself thinking, "Dang! This is easy!" And I get tired of those messages that say "Safari Can't Find the Server with Both Hands and a Hunting Dog." (I think Mac is a good product, but I've never shared the unreserved admiration for it that Apple cultists possess.) Now if AOL could only add some drop-down toolbar menus like Safari and FF.

Who comes up with those ads for LowerMyBills.com? Do they actually believe they're going to get business that way? The long pig swarming with flies is bad enough. But the gingerbread man giving a sperm sample is really more than I can take.