Anniversary!

July 25, 2004, marked the first appearance of morialekafa. I find it virtually impossible to believe that I have written this blog for four years. I don’t even remember why I wanted to start a blog in the first place. More on this in a moment, but first, an observation about Calamity John.

McCain appears to be so obsessed with getting Obama to admit that he was wrong that he keeps embellishing his story. Is he really trying to take credit for our glorious “victory” in Iraq? His latest rants would seem to indicate that. He says, for example, we were losing. I told people we were losing but they didn’t want to listen. Then we began the surge and I was for it and Obama was against it. The surge worked and now we have won a victory. It sounds like, I, John McCain salvaged victory out of defeat. Is he really trying to take credit for the surge? Was it all his idea or did he just promote it after it surfaced. Did he have anything to do with it other than supporting it? When al-Maliki was asked why the violence had subsided in Iraq, he gave four reasons, the surge was not one of them. Now they are trying to say that Obama maligned the troops because he won’t admit the surge worked. Obama, sensibly it seems to me, suggests that yes, violence is down, and maybe the surge had something to do with it, but so did the so-called “Sunni awakening” and the decision by al-Sadr to have his militia cool it for a while. According to McCain, Obama not only opposed the surge but said it might even increase the violence. It did not do that. So I guess you could conclude Obama was wrong on that point. But, of course, we cannot know what might have happened if there had been no surge. In any case, I fear that if McCain continues to obsess over the surge and Obama’s failure to admit he was wrong, he is going to become a modern day Captain Queeg. But, then, better for McCain to keeps talking about the surge than anything else because any other topic might prove to be disastrous.

When I wanted to start a blog I initially wanted to use a Melanesian Pidgin English word like “masiki,” or something, but found that most of the ones I tried were already taken. So I decided on a word from the Bena Bena language of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea. Among other things I spent some time trying to get names for the incredible variety of insects, spiders, and such. Most bugs and spiders have names of their own. But when I encountered certain small bugs I was always told they were morialekafa. Kafa is the generic name for bug. I concluded from this experience that morialekafa must mean something like “little insignificant bug with no other name.” It seemed to me a perfect name for my blog, emanating from a nobody in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. It has served me well. Morialekafa has a small but fairly loyal following, mostly, but by no means exclusive, to Idaho. I did not intend it to be an Idaho blog although I do at times remark about Idaho politics and such. I do not get a lot of comments but occasionally I get one or two. What has proven to be the most fun, however, are the hits I occasionally get from all over the world. These are not a result of people seeking out morialekafa itself. They result from people trying to find information about some topic that I happen to have written about at one time. For example, one fellow wanted to look up “sild oil.” I had written a silly essay about my love of sardines in which sild oil was mentioned. I have no doubt the fellow was surprised by what he found. Similarly, someone was looking up the word “wuthering.” I had written an essay specifically about that word. I’m sure it was not what was expected but I hope he was not too disappointed. Another person was interested in filling wisdom teeth. Again, I had written a silly essay bout how it is that Dentists hate wisdom teeth, resist filling them, and invariably want to pull them. Still another person was interested in only children. He or she found an essay on just that subject, probably not the serious account of only children they were looking for. As I have now written over 1200 blogs in the past four years, on a wide variety of topics (unfortunately, mostly political comments), there will no doubt be other innocents that will end up with morialekafa. It’s exciting to realize that you can get hits from people in India, England, Paris, the Philippines, Jamaica, Brazil, Australia, Germany, Poland, and most anyplace on earth. The internet is a truly marvelous thing. My first blog had to do with Bush hypocrisy. Here I am four years later often writing about the same thing. Obviously I have not been very effective. It continues to be fun but, more importantly, it allows me to vent my rage at what Bush/Cheney and their criminal gang have done to our wonderful country. Impeachment would be far too mild a punishment for their crimes. Obviously they don’t listen to me, just as they don’t listen to anyone else. They only listen to the cash register as it rings up their billions upon billions of war profits.

LKBIQ:
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
W. H. Auden