It’s a loathsome phrase: “blogging will be light.” Go on. Just tell us you didn’t pay the electric bill and promise to return after you’ve hit up your brother-in-law for another utility deposit.

We’ll wait.

Around here, at least in certain quarters, blogging will be sparse and painful. On account of tripping over a wheelbarrow in the dark. One moment you’re vertical, walking toward the car, and then WHAM! you’re horizontal, lying in a large cold puddle next to the fig tree. Some unspecified period of disorientation passes. You feel the pulse of the rain and think vaguely of the Biblical observation that it falls on the just and the unjust at moment your awareness begins to take in the scent of roses nearby.

OK. Tactile sense of rain. Olfactory nerves intact: rose fragrance. Time for a body check: chins? Check. There, but bonging. Pain? Maybe a 3. Safe enough. Shoulder? Check. OK, just taking a cold soak in a puddle. Pain? No. Hip? Check. Padded and impervious. No pain there. Head? Resounding from the effect of cranium hitting ground. Pain? A 3, with some resonance.

That leaves only one problem: A wheelbarrow handle jammed firmly up and under the ribcage on the right side. Not such a great check here. Pain? Maybe a 5. The task, as it appears from ground level, is to maneuver the overturned and now wedged wheelbarrow in such a way that it won’t inflict further damage.

Fling it off? What if it doesn’t fling far enough? This is a wheelbarrow, not a frisbee.

Wait until someone notices my absence? That might be a while, dependent on whomever is hungry enough to look for dinner.

Slooowly maneuver the other handle in such a way that the whole thing shifts six inches and allows for a crawl out from under?

The last solution works, though the release of handle-jammed-under-ribs is probably akin to having an arrow removed. Since arrow-removal is not on my list of experiences, that’s just a guess.

Crawling out from under the wheelbarrow to the relative joy of wet grass, the main feeling is one of deep gratitude. Crawling means movement. Movement means life. Life goes on…

And so I get up off my knees the way a child does. Awkward, but it works. I bend over to… No, I start to bend over. No go. Ribcage/liver — whatever piece of damaged anatomy it is rebels at this movement. NO BENDING! Okaaay… Not so bad. Just don’t bend. Don’t bend that way…

So now, 24 hours later, blogging in a standing position is awkward. Blogging on my knees reminds me I need to pray more, but mainly it tells me this penance requires some medical attention.

We’re off to the doctor tomorrow, though not just for my pain. The Baron is getting noticeably jumpy at the sudden screams and moans when I bend that way.

It is fervently to be hoped that blogging will be under the influence of drugs next time we meet…

This week’s winners cover two disparate but important issues: the first is epidemiology and the threat that wide-spread communicable disease poses for all of us; the second is the huge failure of our leaders — cultural, political, media, etc.– to demand that Islam clean house and take responsibility for the extremists in their midst who are wreaking carnage.

In a way, these topics are not that disparate. Their theme is destruction and death; one via microbes, the other through hatred. Both are communicable disorders and rightly to be feared. It is up to us individually and collectively to find an effacacious response to these clear and present dangers. But especially to demand of those in leadership positions to come up with something better than what we have right now.

Council Winner:

A Killer in the Shadows by Right Wing Nut House

Prepare to worry. The next epidemic could be appearing near you.

The problem is that flu viruses have a nasty habit of mutating. The reason they mutate is as old as life on the planet; microbes do whatever gives them the upper hand in the fight for species survival. In Jared Diamond’s fascinating Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, the author lays out a natural history of infectious disease and how those diseases made the jump from animals to humans. Diseases like Measles (cattle), flu (pigs and ducks), Pertussis or whooping cough (pigs and dogs), and smallpox (cattle), made the successful leap in early farming societies because people lived in such close proximity to both the animals and their waste products. Microbes discovered (quite by accident) that humans were just as good a place to reproduce as animals.

Non-Council Winner:
Taking Islam Seriously by Bloggledygook

The US seems to be asleep at the wheel. According to Bloggledy,

This issue is not who is most honest and who has what agenda, but what is to be done about Islam. No one from any institution of American life has as yet enunciated the dangers of failing to demand that Muslims the world over take control of their religion and either reform or eliminate those that would destroy a centuries-old spiritual path that boasts peaceful adherents in every country on earth, a tradition of scientific and cultural innovation and at least, a history of tolerance and peaceful respect of other religious practices.

Go see all of them over at the Watcher’s place. There is everything from girls who are into boy-bashing (isn’t that cute?) to bias as a butterfly, to the terrorists in your backyard to Memorial Day celebrations to the Kafkaesque Syria to the fact that words actually mean something…that last not being a strong point in the MSM, known for its plasticity of meaning. Or was that the Politics of Meaning? Anyway, it’s a great round-up. e-claire’s a hoot, as usual.

____

BTW, Dr. Sanity has quite a gift for satire. Her prayer for Zarqawi was on this week’s list, but a must-link is her latest endeavor, a parody of “Blowing in the Wind,” surely one of the more vapid of the songs of that era. Her version is called Blowing in the Sand. It’s wicked funny. You’ll never hear that ditty the same way again. But put down your latte so you don’t blow it all over the computer screen.

 
Gates of Vienna, along with hundreds of other blogs, has signed up for the fledgling enterprise known as Pajamas Media. Something new is just getting started, and no one knows quite how it will turn out. We PJ people have the privilege of helping to define a new structure, of which, in five or ten or twenty years, PJMedia people will say, “This is the way we’ve always done it.”

As Dymphna said yesterday,

Don’t you just love the blogosphere? There you are, frustrated with the way things are going, realizing a letter to your congressman is a puny waste of time, yet feeling too old and encumbered to climb aboard a camel and head out to right the wrongs you can see so clearly.

Then you go out and find the resources that help, and add your voice to the enormous conversation.

The conversation, as John Hinderaker says, goes on among a self-selected group of intelligent people:

I’ve often asked myself what makes the blogosphere worthwhile. Certainly a big part of the answer is that the world is full of smart people, a large majority of whom didn’t go to journalism school and don’t work for newspapers or magazines. One of the basic things blogs do is give those people a voice.

This group of people tends to be center-right in political orientation, because these opinions are the ones systematically excluded from Big Media and the academy. But we are hardly monolithic in our orientation. In a conversation that includes Gates of Vienna, Powerline, Roger Simon, Glenn Reynolds, Wretchard, and Florida Cracker, the overlap of opinions will probably be less than 40%. Yet I know that nothing I say will be dismissed; I will be listened to with respect, disagreed with vigorously, and held to a high standard of accuracy.

This is something I never even dreamed of five years ago. There was not a prayer that anything Dymphna or I said would ever make its way into a public forum and be taken seriously, even to be refuted. What we and others like us have to say was simply excluded from the conversation.

But that has now changed. The growth of contrary opinions was too strong and widespread to be stopped; it has now found its fertile ground, and is ready to burgeon and bear fruit.

What’s the long-range forecast for our farmers?

 
Gates of Vienna is devoted to exposing the uglier aspects of the Islamofascist takeover of large parts of the world, and more specifically and importantly its threat to the integrity of the United States. The Middle East is a cesspit, of course, but Eurabia is another growing Islamic threat. This very large, marauding elephant is an unpredictable, unsocialized and dangerous creature which the Continent gestated and now studiously ignores even as it metastasizes in its suburbs. The various governments’ amazing feats of denial of their strange creation would be amusing, even of clinical interest, were the stakes not so serious. One could sit back and enjoy the spectacle of disintegration. Sort of. Admit it: there is a grim satisfaction like no other when you can mutter “I warned you.” It’s just not fun to say it to a vanished people.

But no matter. As life often does, rather than having you contemplate that mess, it presents several threads and weaves them magically into a tapestry… of sorts. A picture is emerging — perhaps not one that would be up there with the Flemish tapestries — nonetheless it takes several threads and makes sense of them. A picture is emerging. A picture of hope, even. Or, being American, it’s at least a possible scenario for doing something about the damned mutant elephant in the Middle East.

The first thread was an essay by Michael Ledeen. Reading it will not make you sanguine about our chances in this global terror war. Mr. Ledeen contends that we are drifting, that President Bush seems to be in the doldrums, at least where policy and personnel are concerned.

Indeed, if you talk to military officers engaged in the GWOT, more often than not you will hear a lament, because that war has yet to be defined. Despite all of the president’s tough talk, despite the often extraordinary performance of our soldiers and some notable accomplishments by intelligence officers, the “enemy” remains vague, and we are mainly playing a sucker’s game of responding to attacks and helping those who help us on the ground, as in post-Fallujah Iraq. Our other main claim to fame in fighting terrorism, Afghanistan, is currently suffering from cynical neglect by us and our allies, and from considerable corruption, some of it our own.

The whole essay is worth your time; just be prepared to be depressed.

On the other hand… on the other hand…

…along comes this blog, Regime Change Iran.

Don’t you just love the blogosphere? There you are, frustrated with the way things are going, realizing a letter to your congressman is a puny waste of time, yet feeling too old and encumbered to climb aboard a camel and head out to right the wrongs you can see so clearly.

It was Chester in his email (which if you don’t get you should, as life is very short and very full. Also get Michael Yon’s so you can regain some respect for journalism and find out about the dirty job in Iraq) who announced a solution. Something we bloggers can do. Gratias, Chester.

RCI is starting a new campaign to publish as much news about Iran as possible in the weeks leading up to the Iranian election. Here’s a blurb:

Considering the actual, self-perpetuating center of power, it hardly matters who in the end is declared the winner of this race. On the other hand, there can be no question about the real loser of this contest. While Iranians are suffering from chronic unemployment, poverty, brain drain, an ever-increasing number of street children and widespread drug addiction, the nation’s badly needed resources are squandered on yet another fake election. A strong consensus is emerging amongst Iranian political activists that boycotting this electoral travesty is the only honorable option left to the citizens. Many prominent leaders of the Iranian opposition, including Reza Pahlavi have invited their compatriots to stay away from the polls. Shunning the ballot box on election day could turn into a collective act of civil disobedience and a vote of no confidence against the whole regime.

Chester was right. This is a damn fine blog. They’ve got the latest information on unfolding events and what they mean. They can tell you why this election is so crucial… to us. They have news and pictures and explanations.

The election in Iran is the most important event since the fall of Baghdad.

Bookmark Regime Change in Iran.

Then add their button to your website.

Then send money. Give up, say, a few lattes.

Then pray.

Even the atheists should pray. It won’t hurt and it will give them something to do while waiting to see if the nukes land in Tel Aviv. And if you think the fallout from there can’t affect you, then you haven’t been paying attention.

That’s Regime Change in Iran. Be there.

As Ledeen would say (kind of), get a move on.

 
Remember (how were you allowed to forget?) the purportedly toileted Koran that raised such a stink? People died in the conflagration of outrage that followed this leak by you-know-which-journal in you-know-which medium. It’s Rumsfeld’s fault, probably. Everything else is.

Well, here’s an interesting comparison. Vikrant_Camberleykar, a commenter on Jihad Watch, posted a link to the Times of India. The story showed a pair of shoes… one has to resist the temptation to break into Manolo-speak here… and on these shoes were an image.

The story was not about the riots and death which followed the outrage of these shoes. No. No outrage at all. Instead, readers were urged to begin a letter-writing campaign to the manufacturers of the shoes, asking that they cease manufacturing these desecrations:

	“It has come to the notice of Hindu Human Rights Group that you are currently marketing shoes with the pictures of our sacred and highly revered Hindu god Lord Rama printed on them,” said a letter sent to Minelli by Web-based activist group Hindu Human Rights Group.
	“We wish to point out to you that Lord Rama thus illustrated is actually worshipped by millions of Hindus across the world. It stands to reason that such a display of contempt for the spiritual beliefs and practices of a billion Hindus worldwide is causing a sense of fury and outrage in the Hindu community and we have received numerous complaints from Hindus in France.”

So do you think perhaps the Hindus could begin giving demonstration lessons in civilized outrage to the Muslims? Supplying them with pen and paper perhaps, and several templates of letters expressing furious indignation or even threatening boycotts? Learning that lesson would be one giant leap forward for mankind.

Here’s the severe warning:

“Hindu Human Rights ask that you withdraw this line of shoes from circulation and sale immediately so as to prevent further unwarranted stress and distress to Hindus worldwide. Naturally, we also expect you to publish a fully apology to the Hindu community,” the website adds.

Faster, please. We’re not nearly there yet and we’re running out of water. And shoe leather.