Sacrifice: It Just Looks Better on Others

White House hopeful John Edwards has apparently decided that you need to start carrying your weight:

"Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards told a labor group he would ask Americans to make a big sacrifice: their sport utility vehicles. The former North Carolina senator told a forum by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, yesterday he thinks Americans are willing to sacrifice. Edwards says Americans should be asked to drive more fuel efficient vehicles. He says he would ask them to give up SUVs."

No word yet on what he wants you do with your 28,000 square foot mansion and all the energy that it takes to power it. Oh wait, nevermind,.. that's his. So it's cool.

What Happens in Nashville...

... Gets turned into a country song and told to millions of hicks worldwide.

I'm sorry, that wasn't very nice-- the rest of the world doesn't listen to that stuff. So yeah, this humble-og has been decidely unburled lately, and for that I do apologize. As you can see we went to Nashville for a little while to help a friend move, so it's in that spirit that I'll drop a couple of my favorite Nash-related things:

--Dave Ramsey
--Varsity Internship Program
--George Grant
--David Dark
--Boots

As for David Dark, he recently wrote a piece on Arcade Fire for Books & Culture that I thought was a good read. And he's a fan of Tom Waits, so you can trust his opinion.

He Who Endures to the End Shall Be Saved

Kind friends, I hope you will celebrate with me today as it is the 4 year anniversary of the completion of my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine. It probably goes without saying that it was an amazing experience, and half a decade on I still don't know how to adequately summarize it. (Indeed, in pure "joy is in the journey" fashion, I never journaled about my Katahdin summiting or attempted to pen meta-thoughts on the walk, because I knew I could do justice to neither.) So, though I won't wax philosophical about it all, I will bust out some dirty stats:

(10) Bear sightings

(26) Snakes, (1) face-to-face after tripping over a rock

(2,175.5) Miles hiked, from Springer Mountain Georgia to Mount Katahdin Maine

(1) Bout with Giardia

(6) Days off because of it

(0) Linear inches of official white-blazed trail skipped

(28) Days of rain in May

(dozens) Shin splints, cuts, scrapes, bruises, etc.

(40) Miles on Mothers Day, to get to the next town to call Mom

(10:15) The time at night I arrived there

(9) Days of hiking with my dad

(1) Psycho threatening to bash people with tent poles in the Maine woods

(100,000+) White-blaze route markers passed. Kissing the very last one in the photo above

(4) Pairs of shoes

(10lbs) Weight of backpack-- including everything except food and water

(6,000) Calories consumed per day

(1) Magical, life changing moment in Front Royal, Va (although unbeknownst to me at the time)

(14) State lines crossed

(many) Homesick nights

(100s) Of friends made

(1) Textbook anti-lightning positions assumed

(5,000,000) Steps

($2,500) Dollars spent on food, occasional hostels, more food, etc.

(3) Weak moments of truly hoping to break my leg so I could go home without being a quitter

(10) Days spent just chillaxin' somewhere

(1) Large peperonni pizza, easily consumed, whenever I could find a Pizza Hut

(loads) Of instances of Trail Magic-- displays of charity towards hikers by townspeople

(1) Times serendipitously receiving Trail Magic from a former hiker who'd received it from me years before

(1) Online photojournal in the works

(100s) More stories

(1) Heck of a time.

To borrow from St. John, writing under the influence of the Holy Spirit-- "There are also many other things that [happened on that Blessed Path]. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written."

They Put the UN in Funeral

"Four years, 200,000 dead and two million displaced people later, the United Nations has finally authorized a peacekeeping contingent for Sudan's Darfur region. Good intentions and eternal hope aside, this latest mission looks ready-made to continue the U.N.'s sorry record on stopping Genocide.
The 26,000 troops-- a combination of the current 7,000-strong African Union force and a new U.N. brigade-- will be stretched to cover an area the size of France. But the bigger handicap of the "hybrid" force is its mandate, watered down by China and Russia, which blocked tougher action. This is what happens when "consensus" is given higher priority than achieving actual security on the ground.
The resolution approved Tuesday by a unanimous vote of the Security Council goes out of its way to respect Sudanese sovereignty. Fine as that goes, except that Khartoum has consistently invoked "sovereignty" to prevent peacekeepers from interfering in the mass murder of Darfur's black Africans. The composition of the force itself will be done "in consultation" with Sudan, which has insisted that it stay strictly African-- a limitation that, if accepted, would ensure that troops will be difficult to mobilize. African countries have hesitated to fill out the ranks of other African Union missions, and the first troop offers yesterday came from France, Denmark and Indonesia.
In any case, the troops' ability to use force will be severely limited by another concession to Sudan. The soldiers will not be allowed to seize weapons from the government-supported Janjaweed killers, the Darfur rebels fighting against Khartoum, or other wandering thugs toting guns. Instead, they will "monitor whether any arms or related material are present in Darfur." If they find any? Oh well.
The resolution also removes sticks to get Sudan to cease hostilities and let the U.N. troops and humanitarian groups do their work. As originally worded, backsliding would have triggered the threat of sanctions. No more. China's ambassador to the U.N., Wang Guangya, said the resolution was intended to "authorize the launch of a hybrid operation, rather than exert pressure or impose sanctions," according to a U.N.'s summary of delegations' statements. More accurately, the resolution is intended to suggest the U.N. is finally doing something about Darfur and thus shield China from growing criticism that it is protecting Khartoum. In the 1990s slaughterhouses of Rwanda and Bosnia, the road to genocide was paved by U.N. peacekeepers. Blue helmets armed with weak mandates stood by powerless or were even exploited by the ethnic cleansers to enable their killing sprees. After watching nearly a million Rwandans murdered in 1994, the West realized that the U.N. mission in Bosnia was also doomed to failure. NATO countries finally stepped in to stop Bosnia's war with the credible use of force and diplomatic pressure.
Now the same U.N. mistakes may be repeated in Sudan. Khartoum won't tolerate a potent force in the absence of outside pressure-- and China and Russia won't permit the U.N. to apply that pressure. Liberal moralists calling on the world to "do something" in Sudan while also putting faith in the U.N. above all else need to face up to this contradiction. Otherwise, there will be more Rwandas, and Darfurs."
--Wall Street Journal Editorial, August 2, 2007

Burly and Banks

He Is the Good Shepherd

1The word of the LORD came to me: 2"Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds
of Israel; prophesy, and say to them, even to the shepherds, Thus says the Lord
GOD: Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not
shepherds feed the sheep? 3You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool,
you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. 4The weak you have
not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound
up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and
with force and harshness you have ruled them. 5So they were scattered, because
there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts. 6My sheep
were scattered; they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. My
sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek
for them.

--Ezekiel 34:1-6

1"Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the
sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a
robber. 2But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. 3To him the
gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name
and leads them out. 4When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them,
and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. 5A stranger they will not
follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of
strangers." 6This figure of speech Jesus used with them, but they did not
understand what he was saying to them.

7So Jesus again said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep.

8All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to
them. 9I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in
and out and find pasture. 10The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.
I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. 11I am the good shepherd.
The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 12He who is a hired hand and
not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the
sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 13He flees
because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. 14I am the good
shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, 15just as the Father knows me and

I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.

--St. John 10:1-15

Rawls, Rawls, Rawls Your Boat

From James Taranto's Best of the Web:

"Another letter to the editor in Saturday's Journal struck us as relevant to this debate. It came from Bruce Paulsen of New York (first letter; links for WSJ.com subscribers):

David Lewis Schaefer's opinion piece on John Rawls ("Justice and
Inequality," July 23) reminded me of an epiphany I had in college in the
late '70s. Then, as now, social justice and inequality were big topics on
campus. The conventional wisdom was that Rawls was right, that his nemesis
Robert Nozick was wrong and that "justice as fairness" was the goal to be
pursued. I proudly carried my thick, dog-eared copy of Rawls's "A Theory of
Justice" under my arm.

Then, in an ethics class taught by a well-known professor, I was asked
to write a paper on the lifeboat scenario--a thought experiment involving an
overcrowded lifeboat entering a storm, where it is clear that not all will
survive. A dedicated Rawlsian at the time, I decided to apply his theories to
the assigned situation. But no matter how I construed them, his theories kept
leading me to the conclusion that the only "fair" result was that everyone in
the lifeboat had to die. Even as a young, liberal college student, this struck
me as an unacceptable result.

Thereafter, I spent less time lugging around Rawls's volume, and looked
for a more practical philosophy.

What prompted our July 26 op-ed was Barack Obama's statement that he favored an American retreat from Iraq even if the result would be genocide:

'Well, look, if that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the
deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops
in the Congo right now--where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of
ethnic strife--which we haven't done," Mr. Obama told the AP. "We would be
deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done. Those of
us who care about Darfur don't think it would be a good idea.'

This sounds an awful lot like Paulsen's collegiate application of Rawls to the lifeboat scenario. Obama finished college nearly a quarter century ago. Shouldn't he have started looking for a more practical philosophy by now?"