Shelley Powers offers compelling observations on the Bush doctrine of unrelenting fear and misery…

We now have a new government-mandated fear. This time the enemy won’t let us down: it won’t take down the walls. It will be nebulous, and undefeatable, made more so by our own actions. We, the last of the generation of ‘duck and cover’ can now rest safely at night knowing that our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, will know fear. Every damn day of their lives.

You see, it is to our government’s advantage to have us be afraid. When we’re afraid, we don’t look around us and see how 43 million Americans still have no health care coverage; the middle class is dwindling while the ranks of the poor are increasing; there are jobs, but too many at wages that can barely cover subsistence living. You can get a happy meal for less than a gallon of gas now, and buying both feeds the same corporate machine which is raking in record profits at a time when our country is teetering on the edge of a major climate and economic shift.

Rather than list all the things I wouldn’t know if I didn’t read Shelley, I’ll simply point to the emergence of Gottfried the Intern at Valleywag. This makes the second time I’ve managed to amplify the universal derision associated with Arrington’s Web 2.0 techumentary without stooping to view it. Pray for me… I was tempted after reading Beth Gottfried’s report.

• Holly has a sweet (the way Ben says it, not the way my mom used to say it) video of BlogHer. It’s about a minute long.
• Melanie drills down into what it means to be Childfree with a link to this Wikipedia article.
• Jeneane logs a post in the scrapbook for Jenna.
• Combing my traffic logs I found this. Sah-weet.
• ae honors me with a link which like a badminton bird I quickly volley back.
• Tom Shugart has another post percolating, I just know it. Spit it out, Tom.
• McD has a new desk in the hallway between the bosses and the coffee machine.
• Shelley is planning a trip to New Orleans.

You can find her here…

… and here…

… and maybe even here.

Lots of places really…

“…and your little blog too.”

Appalling… maybe this is why I don’t pay much attention to the news:

Climbing enthusiasts will join Mt. Everest pioneer Sir Edmund Hillary in condemning climbers who left a British mountaineer to die during their own attempts on the world’s tallest peak. In an act of appalling indifference, more than 40 climbers reportedly filed past David Sharp as he lay dying without oxygen on the way down from the summit during a solo climb last week.

MtEverest.net reports…

The latest case is British David Sharp. David vanished on his summit bid last week, and the only reason the world knew was thanks to a blog entry by his team mate Vitor Negrete. Vitor dispatched that David had died, and reported 3 more climbers missing on the mountain. He was distraught by the situation, including the fact that his high camp had been robbed. “All these events have affected me deeply – I even considered calling the attempt off,” he said. The next day, Vitor was dead.

David Sharp, 34, was still alive at 28,000 feet. Double amputee Mark Inglis, told the news source: “He was in a very poor condition, near death. We talked about [what to do for him] for quite a lot at the time and it was a very hard decision. About 40 people passed him that day, and no one else helped him apart from our expedition. Our Sherpas (guides) gave him oxygen. He wasn’t a member of our expedition, he was a member of another, far less professional one.”

Mallory’s famous line, “Because it’s there,” always struck me as a little arch, fake on the face of it. I’ve spent enough time in the Sierras and on other mountain sides to have a different answer: “Because you’re not there.” For me there is no finer get-away than a ramble in the mountains. And I always thought the folks I ran into on the trails up there would help me if I was in a jam, as I would help them. Quasi-technical climbers, these summit tourists, must be a different breed though, a new age breed. The fact that forty could pass a dying man without giving up “their summit” to help him speaks volumes.

(Thanks to Shelley Powers for the reference point.)

Tom Raftery’s complaint…   I wish Shelley was blogging!  She would have an opinion regarding the O’Reilly/CMP Web 2.0 conference trademark!

Shelley posted more of a wonderful collection of photographs of a current Chihuly garden glass installation in St. Louis. I saw the Chihuly collection overhead in the Bellagio some time ago… how long has it been since I was in Las Vegas? It was probably for Comdex… anyway, I didn’t appreciate the guy because the stuff was jammed together overhead and impossible for me to grasp — seventy feet long and masterfully wrought and I just thought it was cluttered — purely colorful, but cluttered. The garden installation captured with Shelley’s lens gives me an appreciation for Chihuly as a top notch glass man.

Mark Woods linked to Shelley’s first batch of these a week or so ago.