Over-Celling

When the woman in the Toyota Highlander drifted into my lane this morning, she apparently inhabited a Japanese-designed Cartesian monad, with her cell phone as the only source of sensory input. According to some recent research using a driving simulator, cell phone users are about as impaired as drivers with 0.08% blood alcohol levels. Some studies have reached similar conclusions. The literature has convinced state legislatures to restrict or regulate cell phone use while driving. Much as I would like to agree with the findings, I can’t do it. It seems far-fetched to me, judging by the number of people I see using cell phones while driving, that they constitute a hazard equal to an equivalent number of drunk drivers. The legislation is unwarranted.

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Chicagoboyz fans are remarkably loyal. In this image a hard-core blog reader who has sold his car to pay for a new computer and DSL line commutes home from work.

Traveling the Far East with Lord Curzon

In the last few months, I have found myself reading and enjoying what I think of as a “family” of blogs. First, there is Thomas Barnett’s blog, wherein he covers his own travels and doings, promoting his vision of the Core and Gap and how to shrink the latter by expanding the former, through enterprise resilience and development in a box amongst other means. Barnett has a small selection of blogs on his blogroll, among which the ChicagoBoyz are honored to have a place (due I think primarily to this and this). A few of these blogs have been engaged in something like a polymorphous, attenuated and elaborated conversation with Barnett, and with each other, which is greater than the sum of its parts. In particular, I would mention Mark Safranski’s excellent ZenPundit, the unique TDAXP, Coming Anarchy, and in a somewhat more distant orbit, the distressing future visions purveyed at Global Guerillas, as well as T.M. Lutas of Flit(tm) (and sometimes – though I wish more often – of ChicagoBoyz as well). These guys comment on each others’ blogs, pour forth frequent and high quality posts, about Barnett’s theories, about globalization, Fourth Generation Warfare, John Boyd and his OODA loop, political and military trends worldwide, and all kinds of other cool stuff, including abstruse topics, obscure people, and acronyms and terminology I barely understand. (In light of my own recent and near-total blog exhaustion, I am heartened and amazed at the quantity and quality from these guys.) Dan from TDAXP in particular has these posts with amazing charts and graphics, e.g. this one entitled “Secret Warriors Walk without Rhythm, Won’t Attract the Worm”. Dan’s posts often go plunging over the edge of my capacity to comprehend, but are still interesting.

Though it is hard to pick, the Coming Anarchy blog is probably my favorite, though is a damned near-run thing. It features three pseudonymous authors, who go by the names of distinguished Victorian men of letters and men of action, Curzon, Chirol and Younghusband. I get a kick out of this Neo-Victorian tone, which reminds me of my favorite recent SF book, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book) (source of the word “Anglosphere”, btw), and it appeals to my own retro-Victorian Anglophilia.

(Speaking of martial Victoriana check out this incredibly good version of Men of Harlech, sung by the Royal Regiment of Wales’ Band on the 120th anniversary of the battle of Rorke’s Drift, recorded in the church at Rorke’s Drift. From here.)

Coming Anarchy is named after The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War by Robert D. Kaplan of the same name. Kaplan is the source of their motto: “Speak Victorian, Think Pagan”, and is something of a patron saint of their blog. The Coming Anarchy team focuses on what might be called “strategic geography”. And in the footsteps of their hero, Kaplan, they go to remote places and report their findings.

Curzon recently had a a post introducing an excellent travelogue through Vietnam, China and Japan. This travelogue is a true labor of love, with many photos and even ambient sound from the various locations. This is journey very much worth traveling along with namesake of the erstwhile Viceroy of India. Bravo, Curzon.

Check it out.

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The Supreme Court’s Interpretive Dance

In HAMDAN v. RUMSFELD, the left-leaning members of the Court have shown their usual talent for ignoring both the plain meaning of the Geneva Convention and 50 years of precedent. Their “creative interpretation” is so egregious I think I’ll do some fisking. Here are links to the decision [PDF] and to Geneva Convention IV if you want to double-check me. (All page numbers for the PDF refer to the logical page number, i.e., the page number in the PDF itself.)

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