Terra Incognita

Oh, I went where the Gods are, and I have seen the Dawn

Where Beauty and the Muses and the Seven Reasons dwell,

And I saw Hope accoutered with a lantern and a horn

Whose clarion and rays reach the inner rings of hell.

Oh, I was in the storehouse of the jewels of the dew

And the laughter of the motion of the windblown grass,

The mystery of morning and its music, and the hue

Of the petals of the roses when the rain-clouds pass.

And so I know who Hope is and why she never sleeps,

And seven of the secrets that are jewels on her breast;

I stood within the silence of the Garden that she keeps,

Where flowers fill the footprints that her sandals pressed;

And I know the springs of laughter, for I trod the Middle

Way,

Where sympathies are sign-posts and the merry Gods the

Guides;

I have been where Hope is Ruler and evolving realms

obey;

I know the Secret Nearness where the Ancient Wisdom

hides.

-Talbot Mundy, “Om”, chapter 26

Arlen Specter will run for Senate from Pennsylvania in 2010 as a Democrat.  He’ll be facing a Republican challenger (most likely Pat Toomey) that he would’ve faced in a Republican primary challenge when he was a Republican.  Well, Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak will challenge Specter in a Democratic primary challenge.  Covering this would be fun.

Fred Reed is one of the few characters left in journalism (Christopher Hitchens is another, and Matt Taibbi’s got the right attitude) and laments that journalism has been made polite, recounting some of his memories of the more interesting characters of old.

Carl Hiaasen writes an op/ed in the Miami Herald about why we should send the inmates in Guantanamo Bay to U. S. Prisons.   It argues that the prisons are much more secure (nobody’s escaped from them) and the fear that these guys might convert other inmates isn’t persuasive because the other inmates will never get out of prison ever.   So what’s the fear?

Pakistan and India, with U. S. Prodding, are sharing intelligence on extremists, the first time the two countries (who have gone to war with each other four times) are doing so.  Specifically, they are sharing intelligence on Lashkar-e-Taiba, the extremist group behind the Mumbai attacks and Baitullah Mehsud, the extremist who is thought to be the man behind the assasination of Benazir Bhutto.

Meanwhile, one of the big reasons why the Taliban and its allies are not winning the hearts and minds of Pakistanis is because most of Pakistan is Sufi, and the militants believe that Sufism is heresy and have blown up Sufi shrines.

George Carlin called himself an “old fuck” in his last stand-up special.  Donald Mills prefers “crabby old fart” and names his blog that.  He spends a lot of time complaining about goddamn teenagers and what’s wrong with the kids today.  Funny stuff.

Michigan’s Governor and a potential Supreme Court pick for Obama.  She’s got all the things that Obama said he wanted in a nominee, like real world experience and knowledge of the constitution.  Plus there’s additional reporting by Karen Cullota (yay!)

Andrew Lycett was writing a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle. In this piece, he tries to reconcile how Doyle, who was a doctor and whose most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, was always rational yet Doyle embraced spiritualism towards the end of his life.

Doyle believed in the Cottingley fairies, believed that he could communicate with the dead.  He was also a neighbor of Charles Dawson, the man who presented Piltdown man to the scientific establishment as the missing link between apes and humans (it was a fraud).  Doyle also grew furious at Harry Houdini for exposing various psychic mediums as frauds.

And yet, Sherlock Holmes is the apex of the rational being.  He solves his cases deductively using the presented evidence.

Lycett implies that it may have been Doyle’s willingness to fight for an underdog, like when he investigated George Edalji, a British-Indian man who had been imprisoned for sending obscene anonymous letters and horse slashing.  As a result of Doyle’s findings, Edalji was exonerated.  Spiritualism, too, was rife with fraud and mediums were prosecuted for witchcraft.

What would James Randi say about all this?

Good journalism.  Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay did critical reporting on the run up to the war in Iraq when they worked in Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau.  They do the same thing here with Cheney’s speech the other day that all the pundits are talking about.