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I woke up this morning and checked the news, as per usual, and naturally I thought it was a joke at first. But no, April 1 was a month ago… I promptly turned to Professor Juan Cole, who of late had already become required reading once again anyway, and yes it apparently has in fact happened. Osama bin Laden, dead.

One thing in Cole’s write-up really caught my eye, however, when he wrote that “the Pakistani news channel Geo [...] says that Pakistani troops and plainsclothesmen helped cordon off the compound in Abbotabad.”

Apparently—having confirmed it at the BBC—bin Laden was found in a “compound” or bunker of some sort “in Abbottabad.”

Which I found faintly amusing because, you see, I’ve actually heard of Abbottabad before. (more…)

Apparently, when I say that I’m busy, I’m actually exaggerating a good deal less than I often suspect may be the case. You know how much I usually read, after all. The last few months, however, BCBR has been on hiatus not because I had no time to post, but because I read next-to-nothing.

I did manage several books in January, during which month I started that big contracting job, but the subsequent two months which fell entirely during the contracting period really tell the tale. On my booksihaveread list, for each of the months of February and March of 2011, I have precisely one book. And I had nothing for April as of the last day in busy-mode… since when, however, in spite of a week-long vacation in France the number has zoomed up to seven.

I just found this interesting. But let us proceed to the books, themselves.

Dark and Tangled Threads of Crime, William Secrest. A biography of Victorian-era San Francisco Detective Isaiah Lees. Pretty good. Lees had a long, colorful career in a colorful era, and Secrest tells the story well, working in just enough context without straying too far from his primary subject. In all fairness, aside from the obscurity of the subject matter, Threads of Crime is probably deserving of a larger and more sophisticated publisher than whoever put together this edition with its flourishy, amateur-desktop-publisher design. Look past that and this is a good job of research and writing.

Bloody Crimes, James Swanson. Oh how I have waited for this book. Swanson’s first book, Manhunt, is absolutely riveting. So the prospect of a second helping of Civil War fugitive adventure was an exquisite torment. Perhaps only Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, if it ever arrives, will exceed the anticipation I felt when I finally had Bloody Crimes in my large grasping hands. (more…)

I’m mostly going to bother posting this just because hey, “our” President is in the White House at present and in all honesty, we might as well enjoy that as much as possible, particularly now with so many other government offices taken away from “us.”

And with that in mind I do want to credit Obama for delivering what seems to me like an excellent argument today, one I’d sure like to hear more often:

…when standards like these have been proposed in the past, opponents have often warned that they would be an assault on business and free enterprise. [...]

Early drug companies argued the bill creating the FDA would “practically destroy the sale” of “remedies in the United States.” That didn’t happen. Auto executives predicted that having to install seat belts would bring the downfall of their industry. It didn’t happen. The president of the American Bar Association denounced child labor laws as “a communistic effort to nationalize children.” That’s a quote.

Exactly. This applies to pretty much every progressive advance, ever, really. Medicare, right to form unions, clean air laws, votes for, well, pretty much every group to which the franchise has ever been extended. Generally, reactionaries seem to get a free pass on this… as I’ve noted and as NPR (and to be fair, many others) demonstrated again today by burying this at the end of a post in their politics-nerd blog where we can be sure it will be read by as few people as possible… but hey, it still seems worth at least trying to make this point a little bit more often.

Unless it isn’t. I mean, I like hearing this and it seems persuasive to me, but knowing me as we do, that could actually be evidence that this line of argument is absolutely futile with the “average voter.” I don’t know.

But thank you anyway, Mr. Obama. As long as you felt it necessary to reach out to the odious U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which some of America’s most popular and successful businesses like, say, a little company called Apple have actually seen fit to distance themselves from) it’s heartening that you were unwilling to check reality at the door.