I am listening to Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Interesting. A lot of what he talks about sounds like situations I've seen many times in the military. A lot of people trying to get things done, and faced with a bureaucracy that throws up walls everywhere. The author talks primarily of all the good things people try to do at the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA as he refers to it, headquartered in Saddam's palace. They call it the 'green zone', or did anyway.

Lots of oil, and a corrupt dictator trying to pacify the citizens with social programs paid for with oil revenue, make for, or rather made for, an interesting combination. I don't understand how the people allow such shit. Saddam only kept from some of Hitler's actions because that example showed how the world would react. Just my opinion. It is also my opinion that, based on what I'm learning about pre-occupation, that Saddam was destined to fail. However, anyone thinking they would be able to go in and fix things with secular and capitalist ideas really had no clue. The former is, of course, hindsight, but the latter isn't I don't think.

Reading another article today found on onegoodmove.org, I found this...

What counts as a community's morality is always a double thing, consisting of the conventional morality of a previous generation in tension with the contested, evolving values under negotiation at any one time in the public debate. A living community has to tread this line, always; once a static moral orthodoxy is enforced, the effect on the community is a stifling one.

So true. The whole article is good, but what is it about run-on sentences? The author uses this one...

That debate is a vigorous and responsible one, and it is disappointing but unsurprising that the former custodians of moral authority, the former arbiters of the good, namely officers of one or another religious group, insist on complaining that morality has gone to pot, is relativistic and thin, has been swamped by consumerism and individualism, and has collapsed in welter of drink and pornography, threatening the end of the world.

Couldn't he have broken that down a little? I realize that I should be able to work through it, and I can. But, these people should realize that, based on what is popular in society today, most of the public has just a little ADHD going on. I know I do, because although I could work through the sentence to make sense of it, I didn't really want to. This is the reason I have put aside so many older works, too many run-ons. It is distracting to someone like me that can't keep their focus wrapped around one thing for too long. Of course, there is the notion that pandering to attention deficit only reinforces it. I'm sure someone has studied it, but I don't have the attention span to seriously look into it. :)

On another note, I need more exercise. How do I know this? Two days ago I spent all day laying some Pergo in the back room, 11x17 feet of it, and I am still feeling it today. I'm too old for so many deep knee bends.