The torch is not yet about to be passed... My Boomer parents were offended by my post on Boomer Politicos and my eagerness for their generation to give up their claim on the Whitehouse and throw itself into the dustbin of political history.

To be fair, by 2008, we'll only have had 16 years of Boomer presidents, and the WWII generation had 32 years (JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I).

So I guess I'd settle for 8 years of Hillary and then 8 years of Al Gore, who will have by that time been awarded an Academy Award, a Nobel Prize, and possibly sainthood.

But I'd still like to see President Obama.  ¶ 10:55 PM 0 comments

  Prokofiev in the playground? At a party on Friday, my 4 year-old daughter walks up the piano, sits down, and starts plinking the middle keys and says "Here are some children walking through the woods."

Then she hits a the lowest note she can reach a couple of times and says "Here comes a bear."

So needless to say, I immediately downloaded Peter and the Wolf for her from iTunes, and she listened to it five times this weekend.

Of course, we amended it to reassure her that the wolf has an operation at the zoo to remove the duck, last heard plaintively quacking away inside the wolf's stomach.  ¶ 10:45 PM 0 comments

  There are no ironists in nurseries Judd Apatow in the NYT: "My way of dealing with the world has always been to make fun of it and observe it but not take part in it...That’s how I became a writer. But when you have kids, suddenly you have to be part of things. It leads almost to a breakdown because your whole defense mechanism is now really destructive."  ¶ 9:57 PM 0 comments

  It was called "The Enlightenment" Maybe I should change the name of this blog to "David Brooks is a tool."

Today's gem comes from an article about how semi-skeptical Catholics are doing well economically and how some combo of rationalism and faith is the best way to get through life.

"The problem is nobody is ever going to write a book sketching out the full
quasi-religious recipe for life. The message “God is Great” appeals to billions.
Hitchens rides the best-seller list with “God is Not Great.” Nobody wants to
read a book called “God is Right Most of the Time.”

Wasn't that the whole point of the Englightenment?

  ¶ 5:03 PM 0 comments

  The "insurgent advantage" will continue to destroy us...unless we aren't there Yet another brilliant analysis from David Brooks in today's NYT, The Insurgent Advantage. Reviewing a book on the new decentralized insurgent paradigm, Brooks goes over the reasons that adaptable decentralized insurgencies are so darn hard to beat, and warns that they will destablize future Bushs, Blairs, and Olmerts.

Of course, what he entirely fails to mention is that these types of insurgencies depend entirely on a basically supportive subject population to act within. So yes, colonialism is doomed. But strikes by insurgents against the "homeland" (9/11, 7/7) do not destablize governments any more than strategic bombing encourages popular revolt against repressive regimes.

By linking anti-colonial "insurgencies" and terrorist acts at home, Brooks and his intellectual mentors/puppetmasters/whatever conflate two distinct military strategies. The first, which will always work, is to make the cost of occupation too high for the occupiers. The second, which will never work, is to effect regime change in a country by scaring the population from outside.

Duh.  ¶ 7:24 AM 0 comments

  Boomer Politicos While I've been dreaming of a a post-boomer political discourse under President Obama, the French have just elected their first boomer president, fifteen years after the US, ten years after the UK, nine years after Germany (if you count Schroeder, born in '44) and seven years after Russia (Groovy Vlad, born in '52). Japan just elected its first official one in 2003 (Koizumi was born in '42, Abe in '54) and Italy's still waiting for one.

Can America be the first of the G-8 to elect a post-boomer leader?  ¶ 11:02 PM 0 comments

  Best Spam Subject Line in a While "You Each Verbose"

Which is, ironically, a very terse way to describe all three people in my family...  ¶ 10:40 PM 0 comments