lack-o-ambition Sunday

Date: April 29th, 2007
Time: 18:33
Place: My apartment, which I really should clean up

One of the reasons I resumed my college career in my mid-40's was that I had discovered I was doing damn little on the weekends other than lying on the couch, yelling at C-Span (or the Jets and Giants during the football season). DeVry was offering weekend courses with which I could upgrade my Amish computer skills, so it seemed like a good idea.

This weekend, I reverted to form a bit. There were some forums from the LA Festival of Books. There was a big push for Slate's Chris Hedges' book on the radical Christian right and its cronies in the Bush administration.

I think people accord way to much influence to philosophy in the Bush administration. If you look at them simply as interested only in the smooth perpetuation of the oil industry, everything makes a lot more sense. For instance, al Qaeda's main "campaign issue" in Saudi Arabia (where they are more popular certainly than the Royal family) was that American troops were on holy Muslim soil, i.e. Saudi Arabia. American troops were there to protect the Royal family from Saddam Hussein. Guess what?

Today's vocabulary word is "lucubration". It means roughly burning the midnight oil to contrive bloated gibberish, and in the dictionary they have a picture of Paul Wolfowitz testifying to Congress about the need to invade Iraq. Even he once included in his testimony that one of the benefits to this policy was that we could remove our troops from Saudi Arabia, where they were proving an irritant to local sensibilities.