Thursday, August 03, 2006

An Exciting New Project




I have been extremely busy over the last three days on a very exciting project: a team blog created for a group of enthusiasts who had never blogged before, but who were all regular commenters at Americablog and Sans-culotte.org. The site is called Les Enragés, (unrulymob.blogspot.com) and is very much patterned after the work of sans-culotte.

Sans is, as my regular readers know, my favourite all-time independent blogger. His boundless enthusiasm for what he does is matched by an uncanny ability to gather and analyse the most relevant information. On top of that is his habit of finding the rare and unusual items that other bloggers seem to miss. I personally see very little point in visiting ten or twenty blogs in a day that are all discussing the same issue, and all giving it the same spin. The occasional rare nuggets that sans finds provide a break from the same-old same-old. The problem is that sans has been inexplicably missing since July 23, which left his regulars feeling, I think, as though they had been set adrift.

My stopgap solution, suggested by reader and now blogger RevPhat, was to create a team blog patterned after san-culotte's work. This has been a smashing success, as a team of seven (including myself) has now formed. Of the seven, only myself and one other, Dena Shunra, have ever written blogs before. Three of the rookies, RevPhat, *grins* and Hornet, have already stepped up to the plate, and driven terrific pitches out of the park. Home run! Dena, a major asset in today's trying times in the middle east due to her being a Hebrew speaker, has also shown herself to be an excellent blogger, as well as an inspiringly sensitive soul. I have no doubts that the remaining team members, HillCountryGal and Jump to the Left, will also make significant contributions when their respective schedules allow it. In three short days this fledgling blog has come a long way towards being an outstanding effort.

My only regret in this is that I haven't had time to visit and comment at my other favourite blogs, all unique and outstanding in their own ways. So here's a shoutout (and a link that will bring their technorati rankings up a bit) to those places I haven't been able to visit since last Monday, with their latest posts linked as well.

Existentialist Cowboy: Israeli Soldiers Were Captured, Not Kidnapped

Firestarter5: Would You Like Fries With That?

Get In Their Face!: Hillary Makes Rumsfeld Squirm

Ice Station Tango: Report--Neocons Using Bush and NSA to start Four-Front War

Les Enragés: Breaking: Venezuala Recalls Ambassador From Tel Aviv

Welcome to Pottersville: Bob Herbert: Hot Enough Yet?

I love to end my posts with a quote or two, and it happens that my fellow Canadian blogger Firestarter5's penultimate post, Table Scraps, is rife with a lot of very good and timely ones. I blatantly ripped him off to provide you with the following food for thought. Take it away, Firestarter5:

America is a country that produces citizens who will cross the ocean to fight for democracy but won't cross the street to vote.

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor,
for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword.
It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows
the mind.
And when the drums of war reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has 'closed',
the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry.
Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all their rights unto the leader and gladly so.
How do I know? For this is what
I have done. AND I AM CAESAR." --Julius Caesar

“There is no war on crime. There is no war on drugs, no war on terrorism. There is only the ongoing effort by the federal government to collect as much information on as many people as possible.” — Jim Redden author of,
Snitch Culture: How Citizens Are Turned Into the Eyes and Ears of the State

I don't have to like Bush to love America

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President..." -- Theodore Roosevelt

It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a new bomber.


Update: Word is just in that in her latest post on Les Enragés, Shunra (which means cat in Aramaic) has scored an English-language exclusive, scooping Reuters and the BBC in providing the story of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez's recall of his ambassador from Tel Aviv. Not bad for a blog that's only into its third day of existence. Kudos, Shunra.

Update 2:We've done it again! Shunra beat out the bigs in reporting a Military push into Ramallah, picked off yNet and published ahead of the Mainstream Media.

Link