My fiance bribed my room mate and I into going to downtown Athens, GA Saturday night to help the Athens Voter Coalition register voters.  If we stayed from ten to midnight, he'd drop the cash to give us an open bar for an hour and be designated to boot.  What are two girls to say to this but yes?

Like all voter registration drives, this one was officially non partisan.  However, it was filled up primarily with folks from the local Obama and Democrat organizations.  

Over the last year, I have done a series of Roman history diaries, under the title of "Hadrian's Forum". I would like to start doing a series of ancient Greek history diaries, and so I will start here. I am not sure how much interest there is here for a series on classical Greece, so I am hoping this diary will answer this question. While the Romans provided the structural foundations of the modern world, the Greeks provided the intellectual foundations. Greek hegemony (led by Athens and Sparta) gave way to Roman hegemony, which gave way to (after centuries of darkness) British hegemony, which gave way to American hegemony. The Greek influence is especially apparent in our politics (the word itself derives from the Greek "polis" which means "city-state"). Athens, for example, created the first democracy ("demos" being Greek for "people") during a period in which it was being strong-armed by its rival Sparta. Sparta, on the other hand, provided the underlying foundations for the military and patriotic spirit we have today. From all of Greece, we have borrowed other such concepts, such as science, philosophy, theology, and history, among the most notable topics. Here I will talk about the first of the two major classical Greek Wars: the Persian War.

Good for Barack Obama for deciding to accept the Democratic Party nomination for President this August in a huge outdoor football stadium in Denver.

Stadiums are usually thought of nowadays as platforms for sports and celebrity concerts. But they have a history that hearkens back to the very roots of democracy.

In ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy as far as we know, the ideal size for a democratic state was thought to be the number of citizens who could sit in a public arena or stadium and debate the issues.

Back in 1999, when everybody from Stephen Jay Gould to Arthur C. Clarke were arguing over whether the 21st Century began in 2000 or 2001, a great deal of discussion was had over what to call the new decade, whichever year kicked it off. But nobody could agree. The Aughts?  The Oughts? The Naughts? The Naught-ies? The Zeroes? Personally, I liked the idea of calling it the "ut-oh" decade. I think I have pretty good grounds for claiming that, so far, it's lived up to that name beyond a progressive's worst nightmares.

Being a Gouldian in this affair, it's my view that since we’ve now just about completed 100 months in the parade of "ut-oh" years, we’re not likely ever to get anybody to agree on a name for this decade. But how about a signature reform before the second decade of this century gets underway?

Ever since the railroad scandals of 140 years ago, Americans have been periodically encouraged to believe that one more round of reformist tinkering will shield elected officials from the bankable temptations of high office and make them all more accountable to us hoi polloi. Fruitless as these attempts to marry politicians and ethics have been, we keep trying. Tinker here. Tinker there.

They're so clever. Reforms this morning? Loopholes by noon. And before you can say Credit Mobilier or The Keating 5 or Enron or Tom DeLay, some cheeky new crusader is spurring yet another sure-fire reform into the political arena.

Well, the navel-gazing is over, and the Rescue Rangers have gone back to their unsung work for another year. Your resident historiorantologist spent the better part of the week picking beer cups off the furniture and sunflower seeds out of the carpet – many thanks to those of you who dropped by and offered the Rangers a little love, btw – but this week, things are looking a little different (and a little more back to normal) around these parts.

Lots of mortar, bricks, and masonry have been spotted moving along the roads in the valley below the Cave of the Moonbat (where the Whos live, if you need specifics).  This can only mean one thing: somewhere, somebody is building themselves a Wall – and since countries only build those things when they want to keep their people in or others out, it might behoove us to get to know a bit more about the designs and purposes of past wall-builders.  Join me, if you will, for a round-the-world-in-10-single-spaced-pages look at some of the great walls (and Great Walls) in history – and if you fall behind, just remember to meet up with us at the one currently being constructed in the American southwest.

although I have to say I liked the cartoon quality of it, it's just lovely fodder for the right. They get their oiled up WWF in leather thongs, and they have a despicable multi-ethnic Imperium to jeer at at. Anyway I enjoyed the comic book stuff.

What I'm thinking about is the way the right will build this film into ideology.

The Author endorses this right wing interpretation: One of the extraordinary things I've heard is that Frank Miller said that Eastern civilization could not have made "the microphone he was speaking into" at the press conference for the film. That stuck me as odd because most microphones are currently made in Indonesia.

Had Miller been fair to the Persians he may have noted the fact that the Persia had to build a three mile long pontoon bridge to cross the Hellespont and had to organize an invading army of 500,000 with an accompanying fleet of 1000 warships.

These were logistical and engineering feats only matched by the west in the last couple of centuries.  Certainly not mystics and tyrants.

Over the past year, many of us have been clinging to the vain hope that we could somehow stabilize the situation. But now, the situation has taken a turn for the worse and has spiraled out of control. It has gotten to the point where nothing that we do can stabilize the situation. Therefore, we have little choice but to leave as soon as possible.

This is no longer a time when we can somehow get bullheaded and "stay the course" like the Bush administration is doing. This is no longer a time when we can assume that the situation is still under our control and that if we just develop a plan to leave, we can go. That was the assumption that the One-Year Plan was operating under.

But now, we have gotten to the point where we have done all we can for Iraq and we have gotten to the point where we are contributing to the instability there, not making things better. It is time for us to end the occupation of Iraq and let them solve their own problems.

A while back, aphra behn and I identified the subject of human bondage as one dearly in need of moonbehnification; tonight's historiorant marks the start of our efforts to make such a project a reality.  I know, there's a ton of election stuff to do, a couple of dozen Republican scandals to try'n keep up with, and new diaries are popping up every two minutes (literally), and that you may feel like there's no time for history - but I'd like to invite you into the Cave of the Moonbat anyway.  Brew up a cup of coffee, permit yourself a short decompression break from the campaigns, and join me around the fires for the first of four historiorants on that cultural dichotomy that just never seems to go away: bondage and freedom...

The year was 415 BC, the expeditionary force hailed from Athens, its destination was Syracuse in Sicily, and it was the brainchild of Alcibiades.

Athens was at war with her rival for supremacy in the Greek world, Sparta, in an internecine bloodletting which was to range across the Mediterranean and would rage on for a generation. Men would fight in this war who were not born when it first began. When it ended, both victor and vanquished would have reason to rue its beginning.

Jeremy