I came upon a fascinating link yesterday. A while ago, a group of Boston Red Sox fans got together, wondering how they could lift the famous “Curse of the Bambino” and raise some money for charity at the same time. The solution they came up with was ingenious and heartwarming.
They proposed to raise money to “buy back Babe Ruth’s contract”. All monies raised would be donated to help fight Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, the disease more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, after Babe Ruth’s longtime friend and teammate. They set up a nicely designed website, got some attention, and managed to raise almost $70,000.
And, of course, the BoSox went on to win the World Series.
You can’t get better finishes than that.
Putting Your Unfinished Heart on Display
Erin’s fieldtesting her latest novel, Plain Kate over on a separate Live Journal blog. She’d very much like your comments on this early draft. Feel free to come out and lend your thoughts!
The Uncontrollable Internet
Bob Harris is reporting that anybody who tries to access the Bush/Cheney 2004 website from outside the United States is blocked. I can get into the website just fine, and I’m wondering if something’s changed, or if Bob’s hallucinating, or if Canada as a whole should be worried about the symbolism.
Seriously, though, whatever the truth, I’m accessing the site from my Rogers cable internet service, which used to be part of the @Home network. Rogers Cable is pretty Canadian, as far as I know, but the @Home network was continent-wide. Maybe the explanation is, if there is a block, it applies to non-North American IP addresses, or to internet service providers which don’t operate with top level domain names.
I’d be interested to know if people from other Canadian Internet Service Providers are having any difficulty in accessing the site.
At the time of reporting, there has also been no connection problems from this website
Worth Reading
POGGE puts it together. Iraq was not a legitimate front on the war on terror. The connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Queda was virtually non-existent. George W. Bush went to the U.N. reluctantly, with war a virtual fait accompli, leaving little chance for the U.N. inspectors to actually do their jobs. And they went in on faulty intelligence. It’s all been folly, folly, folly.
POGGE’s links suggest that George W. Bush’s interest in Iraq stretched back beyond September 11, 2001, to before he even took the presidency. It goes to my original post on the (then) coming Iraq War, that the rush to war had all the apperance of avenging Bush’s father.
That said, Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds crafts a credible case in the Guardian that John Kerry, should he be elected President this Tuesday, is unlikely to embark on a significantly different course with regard to Iraq. I agree with him. More than that, I think that this would be the correct course of action, despite how many of the anti-war crowd Kerry’s actions are going to tick off.
However I may have felt about the rush to war, or the legitimacy of Iraq as a front on the War on Terror, the fact remains that we’re there now. The government of the country has been toppled and we (the whole west, not just the United States and Britain) have a responsibility to put the country back together in better condition than when we found it, and that means stable and democratic (the country is currently neither). It’s the only moral thing to do for the people of Iraq. It’s certainly in our self interest.
Even Howard Dean, who had been firmly in the sights of the Kerry Haters before his infamous scream of doom, noted that the correct response to the Iraq situation was more troops, not less. Bush may have gotten us into this war through faulty intelligence, honest mistakes or gross incompetence, but the consequences of failure do not end at his door, unfortunately.
To my own government, which was right not to support the invasion of Iraq, I call upon them to provide whatever assistance possible to the coalition forces operating within Iraq, if asked so by whoever is in charge next Wednesday. Arguing over whether or not we should have gone to war is yesterday’s news. When a house is on fire, you run for a hose. There are other, more appropriate times and places to point out who the arsonist was.