I have been reposting some old blog posts from my former site which is now defunct. The advantage of using iBlog to create and publish them was that copies of everything were kept on my computer, so I still have everything I wrote all those years ago. It’s a weird experience, reading and reposting those bits and pieces. It’s also very time consuming, so it will take me months until I have everything caught up to date. I wish there was an easier way to just move the site from one place to another, but I couldn’t find one. Of course, I am also still commenting on the events of the present, and I do not always have time to upload any of the old ones. I haven’t done my list of Blogroll yet, either, as much of it has changed over time. Sites have disappeared. People whose words I used to read daily don’t post so often any more. Some people have disappeared altogether, like Riverbend the writer of Baghdad Burning, whose words were turned into a book. The members of A Family in Baghdad have scattered around the world. In other words, this site is not really ready for prime time yet, and I have more to learn about how to get it the way I want it to look.

Reading words that I wrote myself back in 2004 reminds me of how it felt to be lost in those early days of the war in Iraq. Some of what I wrote then turned out to be dead wrong, but some of it was right on target. I never meant what I wrote to be more than a diary of sorts. I wasn’t very much interested in the kind of self-promotion that seems to go with so much of what appears on the web these days. I only wanted to get my thoughts into some kind of order that maybe a few might be interested in reading. I haven’t changed that attitude even though I am now well into my 70’s and still struggling to make some sense out of the world I live in, still fascinated by the game of politics and what passes in the US for foreign policy, and, yes, still disgusted with the inanity of much of it, like the idiocy going on right now in Washington. If the Republicans didn’t make much sense during the Bush era, they make even less sense now. What kinds of people are they to propose laws they know will not pass, just so they can evade responsibility (they hope) for not compromising with a Democratic President on they financial mess they mostly got us into? What a selfish irresponsible age we have come to!