I’m at a temp agency right now, waiting to be tested on Microsoft Word and such. Thrilling, I know. And here’s an exciting picture, to boot:

The eyewall is already on shore:

Click here for the latest radar image.

Claudette has just become, as of 1:00 AM Eastern time, the first hurricane of the Atlantic hurricane season.

On a beautiful, cloudless Saturday two weeks ago, as I showed Becky and Shannon around downtown Manhattan, we all noticed and commented upon a neat-looking, round-edged skyscraper. Shannon, in particular, thought this building was very cool. We referred to it matter-of-factly as “the blue building” because, well, it was blue.

Well, I was back downtown on Sunday with my parents, and guess what? The building isn’t blue! It’s a giant mirror! It looked blue two weeks ago because the sky was pure blue, without a cloud in it, but check out how the buildling looked on Sunday, a partly cloudy day:

Neat, huh?

And to think that this girl works for the Department of Environmental Protection… :)

Here’s a radar image of the tropical storm moving toward Texas:

audblog audio post

The 5:00 PM advisory is out, and it says Tropical Storm Claudette is “struggling with shear again this afternoon.” Its maximum winds remain at 65 miles per hour, although “it should be noted that several oil rigs near the center are reporting hurricane force winds several hundred feet above the surface.”

The forecast still calls for a westward turn, but the hurricane warning has been extended slightly northward; it now encompasses Houston and Galveston.

Back on March 31, during the Iraq war, I complained that anti-war liberals weren’t fessing up to their factual and predictive errors. I wrote:

Everyone should be held accountable for what they say, government officials and ideological advocates alike. Those who repeatedly lie or mislead the public for the sake of aggressive advocacy should be publicly discredited so that people won’t fall for their lines next time. Fellow liberals should hold their compatriots to a higher standard, lest they all be discredited by a deceitful few.

My fundamental point was that people should acknowledge their mistakes, and apologize for them, when they get things wrong.

Well, here goes.

There was a time, not so long ago, when I was a lot more liberal on foreign policy than I am now. And though I think I was, for the most part, a “smart” liberal, I am embarrassed to admit that I was known to occasionally buy into the sort of propagandistic lefty myths that I so often criticize liberals for these days.

One of those myths was the Jenin “massacre.” On April 24, 2002, I wrote:

Needless to say, we all have the right to come to our own conclusions about what we see on the news. I might think the Jenin onslaught was a massacre; you might not.

I phrased that as a hypothetical (in the context of an argument about free speech that, by the way, I stand by), but the fact is, I did think Jenin was a massacre, and that belief informed many of my opinions at the time.

I was wrong.

I still consider myself both a Zionist and a Palestinian nationalist. I still have my problems with the Israeli government. I’m still no great fan of Ariel Sharon (though I very probably wouldn’t call him a “terrorizer” or compare him to Hitler if I had it to do over again). I still think that in some ways, certain Israel actions “let the terrorists win” — though I certainly wouldn’t go nearly as far now as I did in my April 3, 2002 Daily Trojan column, “Israeli violence plays directly into terrorists’ hands,” or in an early blog post referring to “Israeli terrorism.”

But regardless of what my position on the issues happens to be, then or now or in the future, there is no excuse for supporting it with lies and propaganda. I didn’t mean to do that, and I never explicitly did so in print (at least not in reference to Jenin), but it is undeniable that “facts” which turned out to be lies and propaganda were indeed a significant part of the reasoning that informed what I did explicitly say in print.

I was too gullible. I believed my ideological allies too readily, too uncritically. I’m sorry.

UPDATE: For those who won’t bother to click two links and sign up for a free membership (which probably means, um, all my readers), here are some excerpts from the Jerusalem Post article. Emphases added.

In a study to be released next month by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and provided exclusively to The Jerusalem Post, Palestinian sources confirm that at least 34 Palestinian armed terrorists were killed fighting in the battle for the Jenin Refugee Camp.

… “The myth of a massacre at Jenin was the ‘crown jewel’ of a sophisticated effort to delegitimize the State of Israel,” Gold said.

Notwithstanding my Freedom Toast reference below, I’m not so anti-French as to refuse to celebrate France’s independence day. Hell, I’m not really “anti-French” at all — I just disagree with the French government’s policies on, well, a lot of stuff, not to mention certain disturbing cultural and intellectual trends there (e.g. anti-semitism). But that no more makes me anti-French than my disagreement with Bush’s environmental policies and my distaste for Christian fundamentalism makes me anti-American.

Anyway, my mom is a certified Francophile, having lived in Aix-en-Provence for a year during college, and that has rubbed off on me to some extent. I went to France with my parents when I was seven years old, and loved it; I have visited several times with mom’s delightful French friends when they’ve come to see us here in America; and I have models of both the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame (pronounced NOTE-rah DOMM, not NOTE-ur DAYME) in my tall-buildings collection on the windowsill. And I also have that French flag near the window, as seen below — that was my mom’s decorative choice before I moved in, not mine, but hey, I haven’t removed it, have I?

In keeping with her personal Bastille Day tradition, my mom sent out an e-mail to her friends about an hour ago quoting the Marseillaise:

Allons, enfants de la patrie!
Le jour de gloire est arrive!
Entre nous de la Tyrannie
L’etandard sanglant est leve!
L’etandard sanglant est leve!
Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes
Mugir ces feroces soldats?
Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras
Egorger nos fils, nos compagnes!
Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons! Marchons!
Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!

I’ll see if I can get her to sing it in an audio-blog post later.

On her blog, she quoted a rather different version of La Marseillaise under the heading Bastille Day for Jews. But she also defended Francophilia in these complicated times:

Surrender is not an option.
This is Bastille Day, folks. Give it a rest.
Merci.

Heh.

One more thought. However you feel about France these days, Bastille Day is worth celebrating because the French Revolution was, as a whole, a good event in the development of Western civilization — even if Bastille Day itself was rather a bloodbath, and various other stages of the Revolution were a bit, um, unsavory. Overall, the Revolution represented a break from repressive government (yeah, so Napoleon screwed that up, but only temporarily) and a strike for human freedom, the ultimate example of President Bush’s statement that “There is a current in history, and it runs toward freedom.”

Yes, you read that right, I just quoted George W. Bush as part of my celebratory remarks for Bastille Day. :)

Happy Bastille Day, everyone.

Happy Bastille Day. Where’s my Freedom Toast? :)

Tropical Storm Claudette’s winds are up to 65 miles per hour — that’s just nine mph short of hurricane strength — and Hurricane Warnings have been posted for a roughly 200-mile stretch of the Texas coast, from Baffin Bay (roughly 30 miles south of Corpus Christi) north to San Louis Pass (just south of Houston/Galveston).

The storm has slowed a bit, so landfall is now expected to take place tomorrow evening or thereabouts.

SILLY, UNRELATED UPDATE: All this talk about Claudette reminds me that, back in high school (or maybe it was middle school), when my friend Claudio (nicknamed “Claud”) was reportedly interested in dating some girl (I forget which one of his reputed love interests it was), some of his friends, myself included, nicknamed the girl “Claudette.”

“Is time slipping away for the infamous CNN ticker?” Apparently it could be. It seems lots of staffers, including the CNN News president, hate it.

On a side note, isn’t “CNN News president” a bit repetitive? Kind of like “CAPT Test” (Connecticut Academic Performance Test Test) or “Connecticut River” (Long Tidal River River) or “WMDs” (Weapons of Mass Destructions).

Meanwhile, New York Times ex-editor Howell Raines has had enough of journalism. “I think book writing is my future,” he says. Fiction books, to be precise. So, really, it won’t be that different from his last job. :)

Raines is reportedly “also pondering a non-fiction book about journalism, which would likely touch on his tumultuous tenure as top gun at the Times,” according to the Financial Times. Well now, let’s see the book first before we label it “non-fiction,” eh? Speaking of which, how is Hillary doing these days?