I’ve been here before. Here in a metaphorical sense more than a physical reality. I spent nearly 12 months in 1995 and 1996 gearing up for a deployment to Bosnia/Herzegovina. You’ll recall the chaos and near anarchy that ruled the Balkans for the good part of 5 years. Slaughter, mayhem, torture, rape, genocide, all happening right at Europe’s back door.

When I finally did deploy, I went by myself rather than with the 20 person team I trained with. As a newly promoted Sergeant, I was to take charge of a liaison team representing the American forces in a Nordic/Polish battalion in Doboj, Bosnia. We were a four man team with extreme autonomy. We ran the mission the way we saw fit. As long as the higher-ups in Tuzla got their daily reports, we were left alone.

By the time we got there (about 3 months after the Dayton Peace Accords were signed, effectively ending the conflict) things had pretty much died down to a nice dull roar. Though I was never shot at, our team would go to sleep every night to the sound of automatic gunfire off in the distance. Occasionally a large explosion would occur nearby, prompting us to get into a convoy to investigate. I have pictures lying around here somewhere of a blown-up bridge. We arrived on the scene minutes after it happened.

That’s not to say there weren’t moments of sheer terror. When two Serbian MIGS buzzed our camp so close I could see the pilots in their cockpits, I was almost sure it was the end for me as I was caught out in the open, walking from the barracks to my office. Apparently that was a game the Serbian air force liked to play. That particular incident locked half the country down and communiques were sent assuring those in charge that if that were to occur again, said planes would be blown from the sky.

Doom gripped me twice more with its icy fingers during my stay. Once, while convoying from Doboj to Tuzla, we were waved over by a Swedish soldier to provide assistance to a young woman who stepped on a landmine. By the time we walked up to the scene, a very large and angry crowd had gathered, looking upon the two dismembered bodies and one (amazingly) slightly injured woman the landmine had claimed. One tends not to process these horrendous events as they are happening, as you’re too busy just reacting. Reacting to the decapitated body of what looked like a young man in his twenties and his friend/brother/cousin? lying still next to him, peaceful in death, no obvious injuries. The sharp and stunning contrast between the two was what struck at me. They were a literal false dichotomy.

This fantastic juxtaposition was so unnerving to me, so curious, so odd that I failed to notice an ugly turn in the crowd around me. They began to look upon us with accusing eyes. They shrieked and hollered and gestured threateningly. No one took charge, the leadership around me was frozen in uncertainly. Someone attempted to assist the poor woman with her wound but was violently rebuffed. Though we had weapons, we were outnumbered at least ten to one. Finally, a Bosnian linguist from our group spoke up. Whatever he said assuaged the crowd long enough for us to get back into our convoy and drive on.

Youthful swagger got the best of me the next time doom and I met. I volunteered for a foot patrol of the demilitarized zone that served to separate the Serbian and Muslim populations in Bosnia. To this day I have no idea why I did this. I have never experienced that crushing feeling of loneliness at that level since. We were an 8 man squad, roaming about with no immediate support or heavy weapons. You cannot imagine to what extent your senses spike in a situation like that. It’s literally exhausting.

Between the moments of sheer excitement and utter boredom, there was the absurd and bizarre. On New Years Eve 1997, I found myself in the square of our camp watching and listening to the reverie surrounding us. In this case, the celebration consisted of the Bosnians shooting automatic weapons/anti aircraft weapons into the sky. The arch of the tracers was an amazing thing to behold. Literally tens of thousands of rounds curving above us, leaving a trail of bright green and red as the prosperous burned off each one. Accentuate that with the occasional grenade/RPG explosion and you have yourself one hell of a celebration. I’ll never understand, to my dying day, why I was outside watching all of this happen. Though it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, it was, and still remains the most dangerous and asininely stupid things I have ever done.

We had a nice rivalry with our foreign partners, namely the Finns, Poles, Swedes, Nords and Danes. Once, I was able to procure a plastic viking helmet with horns. After a briefing I was able to entertain our counterparts with a complete Swedish Chef imitation. Now, in my humble opinion, I do a pretty good Swedish Chef. But, in this case, the Swedes were more bemused than amused at the attempt. More than anything, they wanted me to know that “Swedes don’t talk like that. We don’t go around saying Bork Bork Bork”. Win one for the Americans, I say.

There’s so much more to mention about my experiences in Bosnia and what I’ve learned afterwords. And, this brings me back to my original point. I’ve been here before. Now that I find myself ramping up for a stint in Afghanistan, Bosnia is more and more on my mind. I’m older, now. Thirteen years have passed. I have two daughters to think of. Demise weighs heavier on the mind at 37 than it did at 23.

I’m also no longer part of the military structure. I’m a civilian, now. I have no idea how that will affect my experiences.

And yet, this time, technology is on my side. I’ll have daily internet connectivity, assuring a steady stream of communication between me and family/friends. I hear Skype is the big thing over there. Also, I have an iPod full of so much music/movies/TV shows, I’ll never get through them in a four month period.

So, yeah, these are the things I’m thinking of. I’ve been here before. I wonder if I’ll be here again somewhere down the road. In a metaphorical sense, of course. . . . Read more!

Because I’m unable to fall asleep (I drank a large Diet Coke a few hours ago), here, in no particular order, are the top five places I’d like to travel to in the future:

1. The Gobi Desert. Specifically the part of the desert that resides in Mongolia. I’m thinking a 10-14 day visit would be required to get everything in that I’d want to do, including a camel trek through a portion of it. Of course, a couple of days in Ulan Bator, the capital city of Mongolia, would be in order.

2. Xinjiang, China. I’ve been to mainland China twice, now, and with the exception of the Three Gorges Damn area, this is the part of China I yearn to visit the most. The area is dominated by the Uyghur nationality, and the Uyghur language (a Turkic language) is predominately spoken there. The capital city, Urumchi, has the distinct honor of being the farthest city from any ocean in the world.

3. Tokyo, Japan. Ever since I first saw the Karate Kid way back in the day, going to Japan has been a dream of mine. Though, my reasons for wanting to go have matured since then, it is just as exciting to think about it now as it was in my early teens.

There are two things that I’d like to do while in Tokyo: Climb Mt. Fuji to witness the rising sun, and participate in a few Aikido lessons at the Aikikai World Aikido Foundation.

4. The Falkland Islands/South Georgia/Antarctica. This is probably the most ambitious and potentially most expensive item on my list. But, you’ve really gone places if you’ve made it to Antarctica.

5. The Baltic States, which includes Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. And, of course, a quick jump up to Finland would also be on the itinerary.

So, yeah, five locations I’d like to visit. I’ll be lucky if I can complete one of them. I’ll be completely blessed if I can get two. Anymore than that and I’ll be completely satisfied with life.

Someone over at Metafilter.com has composed a rather long list of music videos directed by Michel Gondry.

Some of the music may not be to your liking, but the video work is striking. If I ever do get a nice video camera and start working in that medium, Gondry, as well as the extremely talented Terrence Malick will certainly serve as an inspiration. . . . Read more!

Well, it’s been confirmed; I’m on my way to Afghanistan for a four month stay. I’ll be leaving early September and coming back early January.

I’ll be writing a great deal about my experiences, but since most of it will be targeted towards the people I work with/for, I will be maintaining a separate blog here. Though, if the subject matter isn’t too technical, I’ll be doing quite a bit of cross-posting right here on good ole’ Shrubbloggers.

So, my first step? Learn the Dari alphabet.

By now most of the world knows of both Farrah Fawcett’s and Michael Jackson’s demise. Of course, I didn’t know either of them, though I knew of them in varying degrees. My fascination with both wore off many, many years ago. Somewhere between 6th grade and my Freshman year in high school.

I can clearly predict that there will be unceasing media coverage of both deaths/family reactions/public reaction/interment/memorials, ad infinitum. I can also clearly predict that (other than what I see online) I will not be participating.

It’s what I’ve been seeing online so far that bemuses me. Comment after comment after comment saying: “Michael Jackson and his family are in my prayers”.

Wouldn’t a simple, “Michael Jackson, R.I.P.” suffice? What does it really mean to “be in someone’s prayers”? Don’t get me wrong; if, God forbid, something happened to a family member of mine and a close friend/relative assured me that I was in their prayers, well, I would be thankful, my lack of faith not withstanding.

But, we’re not close friends or family members of either Michael or Farrah. We’re vastly more emotionally detached. We don’t have to fumble for awkward words to say to the bereaved. And, quite frankly, they’re not listening anyway. We can simply say, “Wow, I’ll miss that they’re not around”.

So, really, piling on one after the other, saying “you’re in my prayers”; well, isn’t that just a tad narcissistic and assuming? Isn’t it just a bit too…personal?

I’m just saying….

Beck, wunderkind musician/songwriter of the past two decades, is covering one of the most influential albums of the late 20th century: . . . Read more!

Pinyin News is a blog I follow almost religiously. Though the subject matter is highly specialized (the romanization of Chinese characters in the country of Taiwan), it fascinates me.

If you are at all interested in orthography or the problems of transliteration vs. translation in any language, you should check it out. The fellow that runs the site is knowledgeable and at times pretty witty. I’m not in agreement with some of his linguistic opinions, but he does a good job of backing them all up with rational arguments.

Disclaimer: I speak a bit of Chinese and have been to Taiwan. You should go, too!

Bob Herbert’s recent op-ed is a study in both willful ignorance and cognitive dissonance.

Titled, A Threat We Can’t Ignore, Mr. Herbert attempts to conflate the recent shooting in D.C. to an imaginary, wide-spread, right-wing hate movement. Not only does he do a fantastically poor job of it, he brings up the specter of Waco to attempt to drive his point home.

There was a wave of right-wing craziness along those lines during the Clinton administration. Four federal agents were killed and 16 others wounded in 1993 during an attempt to serve a search warrant at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Tex., where a stockpile of illegal machine guns had been amassed. The subsequent siege ended disastrously with a raging fire in which scores of people were killed.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another goes like this: Nearly 80 people were immolated when a government tank began smashing walls in while spraying vast amounts of CS gas into the compound which quite probably started the resulting fire. Agents then held back firetrucks a few miles off while women and children burned to death inside. There is speculation that several children died from severe muscle contortions resulting from an overdose of CS gas.

That’s the end result. What Mr. Herbert fails to mention (and what he most certainly knows, as it is one of the most well documented legal cases in recent history), is that the search warrant was obtained on information known to be false. The ATF knew it had no basis to enter the compound so it invented the now infamous “meth lab” and “child abuse” stories. And, to add insult to injury, though they may well have had an arsenal of weapons, only one was deemed illegal.

Mr. Herbert continues:

In the aftermath of Waco, the N.R.A. did its typically hysterical, fear-mongering thing. In a fund-raising letter in the spring of 1995, LaPierre wrote: “Jack-booted government thugs [have] more power to take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us. …”

I’m not much for hyperbole, but, really, I can’t see anything wrong with the above. For, who else but government (any government) has such a monopoly on that kind of power?

Here’s what people like Mr. Herbert completely fail to understand. The overwhelmingly vast majority of gun owners in this country are peaceful, law-abiding people who just want to be left alone. The evidence is, well, self evident. There are millions upon millions of privately owned handguns/rifles/shotguns, hell even machine guns in this country; and yet, we are not living in some Balkanized hell-hole where snipers are taking a whack at us every time we try to catch the train.

Mr. Herbert continues:

The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported a resurgence of right-wing hate groups in the U.S. since Mr. Obama was elected president. Gun craziness of all kinds, including the passage of local laws making it easier to own and conceal weapons, is on the rise. Hate-filled Web sites are calling attention to the fact that the U.S. has a black president and that his chief of staff is Jewish.

When the state of Missouri passed a concealed carry law several years ago, we heard rhetoric like this all the time. Gun control advocates were certain that the streets would be running with blood. Amazingly, this hasn’t happened. In fact, the Missouri crime rate has kept at a steady pace since, with crime rising in some years and falling in others. Nobody is shooting it out down by the Arch.

And, this allows me to segue into another columnist with some of the same complaints.

On June 11th, Bonnie Erbe of U.S. News and World Report suggests that we Round Up Hate-Promoters Now, Before Any More Holocaust Museum Attacks.

How do we round them up? No answer. Who do we round up? No answer. Who will be in charge of rounding them up? No answer. How does this pass Constitutional muster? No answer. Who watches the watchers? No answer. What is defined as “hate speech”? No answer. Will these people be provided a trial? No answer. What will be the charges levied? No answer.

This is a ridiculously stupid position to take. What happens when the reins of power shift from Democrats to Republicans and they start using this awesome power to detain those they don’t like? No answer. Stupid. Stupid and insipid.

Mr. Herbert and Ms. Erbe epically fail in thinking things through to their logical conclusions. You want more right-wing violence in this country? The sure fire way of getting it is to start rounding them up and taking away their guns. Any half-intelligent person understands the laws of unintended consequences.

Let me make this clear. I stand outside of any structured political party. I’m not a Republican, nor am I a Democrat. I have “liberal leanings” on some issues and “conservative leanings” on others. Saying that, I completely understand the trepidation many gun-owners in this country have towards their government. These are well informed and educated people. When they see things like Waco go down, they tend to take notice. When they see a government cover-up in the aftermath of events like Waco, they start to get prepared.

Take that for what it is. My advice? Leave these people alone. Conflating a couple of maladjusted, unfortunate souls with the entire gun owning/conservative population makes as little sense as blaming all “illegal” immigrants when one breaks the law. These are outliers. Be smart, treat them as such.

Further reading:

Using Waco “Blowback” to Suppress Dissent
More on Bonnie Erbe
The Brown Scare of ‘09
The Agitator’s take on all of this

My friend Timo Virkkala has a nice, brief post up about Twitter over at his place.

I’ve avoided the Twitter phenomenon since its inception. I never really bothered to understand its merits. As another friend of mine stated when I asked if he used it, “Isn’t that for teenaged girls?”.

Well, yeah, maybe. But, recent world events have given me pause and another chance to take a look at the Twitter revolution. There is clear evidence that though confused and nebulous, a mass of people using Twitter on the ground, as events unfold serves as a much better information pipeline than slow, bureaucratic television stations or newspapers.

Granted, you’re not going to get anything in depth, but if you pay attention and have the capacity for it, you may be able to filter out the chaos and form an over-arching story.

I’ve also found that Twitter serves as a nice little “RSS feed”. I only have a limited time per day to cull the internet for what interests me. Now, half the work is done for me by friends and contacts.

So, I guess I’m finally on-board. You can follow me here.

Viva la revolucion!

• The city of Bozeman, Montana backs down from asking city job applicants for their Facebook/Myspace/blog passwords. I’m sure the unwanted national attention the city received had something to do with it. I wonder if anyone will be fired over this? I further wonder who in their right mind thought this was a good idea.


• Pixar consistently produces some of the best animation ever created. They are also one hell of a class act.


• Science Fiction author, Charles Platt, goes undercover at Walmart. Not surprisingly (to me, anyway) what he finds is a place completely at odds with the Brave New World-esque nightmare unions and anti-capitalists have been feeding us for the past 20 years.


• The ACLU is suing the TSA over Steve Bierfeldt’s detention and harassment. His crime? Carrying money and a copy of the U.S. Constitution (and being a Ron Paul supporter). His only saving grace? He recorded the incident.


• Best Detention Slip…Ever.

Listen, I realize how easy it is to devolve into a rant when one owns a blog. I’ve spewed forth my fair share of vitriol on these very pages. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. A good rant can be cleansing. It serves as a visceral outlet. But, they do tend to get old, especially when one doesn’t have the energy to put their heart into it.

But, a rant does serve one concrete purpose. Once it’s up, it’s up, baby. In today’s digital age, a blog post can almost be assured to live on in perpetuity.

That said, I’d like to introduce the world to Suzanne Lukas, the state of Maine’s School Area District 6 Superintendent.

Go ahead, hit the link…drink it in.

Suzanne Lukas refused to hand student Justin Denney his diploma after he bowed to the crowd and blew a kiss to his mother. I know, I know…there has to be more to the story, right? Nope. Watch the video for yourself.

Pathetic, Suzanne Lukas. Downright pathetic.

The story continues to say that at least one student was escorted out of the auditorium by the police for having a beach ball. He was told he could leave or be arrested. Wow! A beach ball. Good on ya, Barney Fife. I seem to recall shenanigans like this going down at my high school graduation. Amazingly enough, we all lived through it. If there were police present, they didn’t act like pansy assed, power tripping megalomaniacs. And, our Superintendent didn’t completely show his ass in front of thousands of people.

As I stated in a previous post, there’s a cup of pencils somewhere with Suzanne Lukas’s name on it, just waiting to get sold on some street corner.

Lord, save us from principals and superintendents.

I inadvertently left my phone at work on Tuesday night, and tonight I left my 10-inch netbook. So, I pulled out my slowly-falling-apart laptop once I got home, which I hadn’t used in weeks, and at 15.5 inches it now seems comically oversized — kind of like Edith Ann’s rocking chair.

It can be inconvenient at times using such a small display as a matter of course, but now that I’ve gotten used to it, the lightness, portability, and easy handling of the smaller-sized model easily win out for most of the situations in which I want to use a computer at home. I can’t do much in the way of cutting-edge gaming or video editing on a netbook — but I’ve never been much of a gamer, and at any rate, I have a fancy new Power Mac at work for CPU-intensive tasks that are actually productive. In the meantime, most of the time, I’m sold on the sheer usefulness of tiny, tiny computers.

Toward the end of Letterman on Wednesday night, a band named St. Vincent started playing: . . . Read more!

Steve Ball, guitar protégé of Brian Eno’s old pal Robert Fripp, has developed his own music for airports: . . . Read more!

The A.V. Club tackles my favorite movie, Trust, as part of its “New Cult Canon” film review series. Here’s a nice excerpt:

It should be said up front that Trust, aside from any deeper emotional or thematic underpinnings, is flat-out funny much of the time. And it’s often absurd and melancholy simultaneously, like when news of Maria’s situation literally kills her father, or when her hilarious stereotype of a jock boyfriend breaks up with her without pausing in his training regimen. There’s something sad and funny, too, about Maria’s older sister Peg (a young, superb Edie Falco), a hard-living divorcée who also lives at home, and whose mother considers her damaged enough to make a better partner for Matthew than Maria, the less-spoiled daughter. Hartley also has fun noodling with archetypes: One subplot has Maria searching for a businessman who will come off the Long Island commuter train wearing a trenchcoat and smoking a pipe; it turns out that description fits all businessmen.

Though such deadpan absurdities are a longstanding element of Hartley’s work, they’re also the albatross that hangs over his lesser films, because it can be hard to see the sincerity and depth behind them. Yet that’s never the case with Trust, which speaks to Shelly and Donovan’s wonderful chemistry and the touching way Hartley ties their tenuous romance with their desperate need for rehabilitation and change.

Later:

Respect + admiration + trust = love. Only Hartley would attempt to devise some sort of metric to quantify a feeling as intangible as love; one critic, I can’t recall who, suggested that Hartley’s scripts were so hermetic and rigidly plotted that it’s as if they were written on graph paper. But while his films definitely give the impression of being fully worked out well before the cameras roll, that doesn’t necessarily condemn the end results to being stale and overly calculated.

Indeed. I’ve heard similar complaints about filmmakers like the Coen Brothers and Stanley Kubrick over the years. I mean, I like the loose improvisational styles of, say, Godard or Altman as much as anybody — but this “cold, calculated” charge has never seemed to me like a drawback for any movie I’ve ever seen.

Trey Gunn, one of my favorite musicians, explains the trouble he’s having learning a new piece of repertoire for an upcoming series of performances:

This “three-piece suit and a poison pen” of a tune has some of the most challenging rhythms I have ever attempted. The musical worlds that I move comfortably in, all have four, or occasionally three, subdivisions to the beat. The bars could be composed of any numbers of beats - 5, 8, 9, 13, etc… - but each of those beats are broken up in to four small pulses. This is extremely common in even the most complicated of rock and world music rhythms. All of the King Crimson material (except for the short bass break in Lark’s Tongue II - which is five to the pulse) is based on four, or the odd three, pulses to the beat. All of my solo material is based on four small pulses. All of the music that I listen to from Iran, Egypt, Eastern Europe and Africa is based on either four or three to the beat.

However this track, “Austin Powers” leaves this concept behind and the small subdivisions of the beat are mutated beyond this “norm”. One beat is divided in four, the next one in six, the next in 7, then one in five, then the next into 7. Sometimes these subdivisions even include rests on the first note — leaving you hanging off a cliff for a short split in time.

After a couple of illustrative audio samples: . . . Read more!

Why do I do it? Some high school English teacher with an axe to grind has started filling Show-Me Daily with rancor and intimations of institutional bias — as though he thinks nobody could possibly reach the conclusions we publish unless somebody paid us to doctor the research. But I know what we do is accurate, to a fault, and it’s obvious he’s a crank that nobody will take seriously. Still, I keep responding — even though his comments all follow posts I didn’t write. Check it out:

How to Compete With Charters

Education, Not Regulation

Answers to Charter School Criticism

Professional Licensing: A First-Person Perspective

Another Reduction in Government Lobbying

The guy devotes his comments to ad hominem attacks to such an absurd degree that he reminds me of this Onion article.

In other work-related news, I have a piece in the latest issue of Atlas Highlights. Yay.

Update: I’ll keep adding adding links to blog entries that this guy has commented on. He’s pretty entertaining.

A few days ago, an old friend of mine from Portland posted to Facebook that he “Never wants to see an lol again” — so I’ve developed a new acronym that is destined to take the world of texters and script kiddies by storm: AAGHEMM. It stands for: “An Audible Guffaw Has Escaped My Maw.”

Pass it on PLS, PPL.

One of my bestest pals in the world, Travers, is in a new band — Electric Desert. Go check ‘em out on MySpace and Facebook, where you can also hear some of their music. Here’s a nice shot of Travers in action.

Also, below the jump, I’ve embedded a couple of audience-cam YouTube videos from their show last night in Chicago. . . . Read more!

As Memorial Day draws to a close, it occurs to me that it would be a good time to repost something here that I wrote nearly a year ago for Show-Me Daily, the blog I maintain as part of my day job with the Show-Me Institute. The entry stems from a trip that Justin and I took to Kansas City, during which we visited several historical sites marking and commemorating Missouri’s Mormon War:

Every Memorial Day that I can recall while I grew up in Portland, Ore., we went to visit my mom’s parents’ resting place. After moving away, first for college and later for work, I got out of the habit of visiting family members’ graves on Memorial Day. There just weren’t any within driving distance.

Now that I’m living in Missouri, it’s a little easier — my great-great-great-great grandpa is buried about an hour and a half northeast of Kansas City, lying at the bottom of an abandoned well with several other people after they were all murdered. Although I visited the site in March, and had considered going there again over the Memorial Day weekend, a nasty bug has laid me out for the past few days … and the rain would have been a dealbreaker anyway — my car didn’t handle so well on the muddy back roads last time.

I did, however, spend some time on Monday thinking about the value of civil society. Because we live in a country largely founded on principles of freedom, tolerance, and the rule of law, people with wildly different cultures, backgrounds, and belief systems can live comfortably together in the same communities. And although from time to time tragic incidents may occur — like the one that killed one of my progenitors, and drove several others out of Missouri — they are by far the exception rather than the rule. There are places in the world where this sort of organized persecution and violent purging happens all the time.

Ultimately, this is one of the most important historical innovations of the United States — despite our differences, for the most part we all manage to live and work together in peace.

Most of my periodic trips to Kansas City are work-related, and timing generally doesn’t permit me to stay for much sightseeing. I almost went back this weekend, to see They Might Be Giants and visit a few of the places I didn’t see last time, but found that I had plenty to keep me occupied here at home. I’ll head back again soon, though.