I protest.

Give a goat!

This is a plea for money. Not, however, for myself. Randall at his weblog BWG — Adventures of a Big White Guy living in Hong Kong has twice before put together a group buy through Heifer Hong Kong of a goat or a flock of chickens for impoverished Chinese families. I gave both times and no fewer than eight families have had their lives improved through our joint effort. He's now doing it again.

When I say "impoverished Chinese families," I mean it. We in the United States don't know what poverty is. I grew up poor, for here, but my wife spent her childhood without enough to eat. My family always had a refrigerator; her family didn't have one until sometime in the mid 1980's. "Impoverished" in China means something different than it means in the United States. Essentially it means "starving" or something close to that.

Fortunately, helping is easy. A few dollars, a trivial sum for an American, is magnified by the exchange rate and again by the fact that the needs of these families are simple, and a goat or a flock of chickens can make a huge difference. My US$15 donation alone gets Randall 2.6 percent of the way to his goal. If 39 others contribute the same amount, he'll make it with room to spare.

Contribute, at least a few dollars. It's a trivial sum to you but it could make a really big difference to a family in China within just a week or two.

You can use this link to contribute, or use the Paypal button on Randall's site.

Either way, do it!

Finally. And a rant.

Via pie at Atrios' Eschaton: Kerry Slams 'Wrong War in the Wrong Place.'

Last Thursday night I hoped for him to finally take a position on the war in Iraq. I was disappointed then but today, at last, he did so.

Democrat John Kerry accused President Bush on Monday of sending U.S. troops to the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" and said he'd try to bring them all home in four years. … "We want those troops home, and my goal would be to try to get them home in my first term," Kerry said, speaking to a fellow Vietnam War veteran at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania who had asked about a timetable for withdrawal.

Of course, "Bush rebuked him for taking "yet another new position" on the war." You know, Bush can struggle and whine all he wants, but the fact remains that American soldiers are dying at the rate of almost two a day and Bush doesn't give a damn. What is his plan for Iraq? He says that Kerry "is against it again," but, tell me, just what is Bush planning to do to get us out of the quagmire he got us into? He attacks Kerry but, as usual, has nothing whatsoever to say for himself. Except, of course, for "ignore the last four years and give me another chance."

Well, Dubya, you fooled us once. You're not going to get another chance.

Ignore the polls. Ignore the doomsayers. Bush is through. There is no area whatsoever in which he is succeeding; the economy hasn't improved, soldiers are dying in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda is alive and well and killing people, his promise of "four million new jobs" is five million jobs behind, the federal government has a new record deficit, poor people are getting more poor and the middle class are becoming poor themselves, and all the while Bush and his friends are gorging themselves at the public trough.

You know that billion that they "can't find" in Iraq? If you're an American citizen, that's your billion. All those "no bid" contracts? It's your money that Halliburton and Bechtel are stealing. Meanwhile the soldiers themselves eat MREs and die in unarmored Humvees.

To date, George W. Bush, President of the United States, has attended not one funeral. He sends them off to die but when they do so, or when they return maimed in body and mind, he doesn't care. He cuts their benefits.

Yet he criticizes Kerry.

The only ones who will support him on November 2 are those who either stand to benefit from his actions or are too stupid, shortsighted or deluded to see him for what he is. He's not a leader, he's just a coward. He's not the "godly man" certain religious folks think him, he's a hypocrite who at best only adheres to his religion when it's convenient and doesn't interfere with what he really wants, and at worst uses his religion to justify actions that otherwise could not be justified. And, finally, he's certainly not the "good old boy" everyman he likes to try to appear to be. He was raised in luxury, he has never wanted for anything in his life, everything he has was given him and when he has failed he has been rescued from his failures. In every moment of his life, he has taken advantage of his family's power and connections and the only, only reason he's in the White House right now is because his last name is Bush.

Anyone with even a tiny amount of honor would shun him and those who support him.

And, like the last President Bush, he will be needing a new job in January. I suspect he could find something that more matches his capabilities in, say, the sanitation area.

Fahrenheit 9/11, another perspective.

To my great relief, Riverbend has a new entry in "Baghdad Burning," largely concerning her reaction to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. I am relieved because she hadn't updated since August 7 and I was quite honestly worried. She lives amid death and destruction and one never knows when it might find her. For the moment, though, she is okay.

Her reaction to the film?

All in all, the film was… what is the right word for it? Great? Amazing? Fantastic? No. It made me furious, it made me sad and I cried more than I'd like to admit… but it was brilliant. The words he used to narrate were simple and to the point. I wish everyone could see the film.

She goes on to point out a couple of truths, asking how Americans think Iraqis will remember the occupation in twenty years. (The answer is obvious for anyone not blinded by hatred, greed or so-called "patriotism.") Like most of the world, Iraqis reacted to the events of 9/11 with "a sort of collective shock," then "a sort of pity and understanding — we've been through the same." But:

We have 9/11's on a monthly basis. Each and every Iraqi person who dies with a bullet, a missile, a grenade, under torture, accidentally— they all have families and friends and people who care. The number of Iraqis dead since March 2003 is by now at least eight times the number of people who died in the World Trade Center. They had their last words, and their last thoughts as their worlds came down around them, too. I've attended more wakes and funerals this last year, than I've attended my whole life. The process of mourning and the hollow words of comfort have become much too familiar and automatic.

And then she describes an individual experience of one of the attacks of 9/11:

… he sat there, reading the paper. As he reached out for the cup in front of him for a sip of tea, he could vaguely hear the sound of an airplane overhead. It was a bright, fresh day and there was much he had to do… but the world suddenly went black — a colossal explosion and then crushed bones under the weight of concrete and iron… screams rose up around him… men, women and children… shards of glass sought out tender, unprotected skin … he thought of his family and tried to rise, but something inside of him was broken… there was a rising heat and the pungent smell of burning flesh mingled sickeningly with the smoke and the dust… and suddenly it was blackness.

A more recent 9/11: 9/11/2004, a home in Fallujah, Iraq.

Blogging about writing about blogging about stuff.

With respect to Billmon's weekend article about the takeover of the "blogging revolution" by the regular media, I have to agree with most of what Steve Gilliard says in The party's over. As Steve points out, Billmon has burned out and should just walk away if he can't handle it any longer. It's too bad, I'll certainly miss his insights and his particular viewpoint, but it's better for him to get away from that which harms him.

I have to agree with Steve as well that Billmon has, as he puts it, "confused the medium with the method." And that's where I most strongly differ with Billmon's view of things. Sure, the "establishment" can coopt certain of the popular weblogs, certainly gaining legitimacy may change the way certain folks express themselves online, as they begin to censor themselves to avoid offending those upon whom they now depend for their livelihood, but in the final analysis, nothing has changed. So now people see certain weblogs as having legitimacy, so now certain weblogs have advertisers and have become more commercial, so now the more conventional media can dismiss weblogs for those reasons and Billmon can thereby pronounce the death of the "blogging revolution." But he has missed the most important bit.

That wasn't the revolution. Billmon bemoans the fact that "it's going to become more difficult for those voices [that is, his lone voices 'speaking the truth to power'] to reach a broad audience." The fact is, though, that we have never had a "broad audience," nor were we ever going to have a "broad audience." The point is that we all have a way to speak those truths that didn't exist before. The power of blogging isn't in some idiot accidentally hitting on the truth about some forged memos, it's in each of us having the ability and the mechanism that allows us to express our truths to whoever cares to read them.

The funny thing about truths like that is that if they are sufficiently compelling, they tend to get noticed, even if the publication itself doesn't have that "broad audience."

Billmon bemoans the fact that those speakers of truth won't have the speaker-to-audience ratio of the New York Times or even the Atrios or (gods forbid) Dr. Isntapundit. But the Web in general and blogging in particular isn't a one-to-many mechanism, it's a many-to-many mechanism, and it's open to anyone with the ability to sit down at a (possibly borrowed) computer and type their thoughts.

Anyone. (Pretty much anywhere, too, that there's a connection, although in some places they may be risking imprisonment or worse.)

This is something that we've never had before. We haven't even begun to see how this new mechanism, and all the other new mechanisms that use the same and similar technology, will affect us, our culture and our institutions. That it will affect us is indisputable: It's already happening. But it has barely begun. Blogging is, what, maybe five or six years old now? The Web itself is only a tad over ten?

How about we wait a few decades before we declare the "death" of blogging, or of whatever it becomes?

To Billmon himself I can only say, relax, step back, let go a bit and realize that the revolution hasn't even really begun. A few have taken off but the real changes will happen with the rest of us, jointly, not with the popular and successful few.

And if you still want to speak the truth to power, you have a place to do it and just as big an audience as you've ever had. It's not the size of the audience that matters. It's the speaking.