My sister KK said she probably won't be visiting, if at all, until late next week, so that means that if I go to the Handel and Haydn concert this weekend, I will be going alone. Christopher Hogwood is guest-conducting, so I wouldn't want to miss it--it may be the last opportunity for me to watch him in action for a long time. I don't know if rush tickets are available--I'll call later this afternoon or tomorrow morning. They may not be, if a lot of tickets have been sold; they are usually for really bad seats in the back, but for $10, I wouldn't complain. It would be nice to get Mr. Hogwood to sign one of his CDs, but I haven't seen him stick around after a concert before, to meet people and so on... I haven't purchased any of the recent recordings by the Academy of Ancient Music for a while... won't be able to until I get a job.
The deadline for the submission of abstracts for the Aristotelian biology workshop is tomorrow--I'm still doing some last-minute reading, and will attempt to tweak my notes and draft enough so that I can produce an abstract from them. I think the abstract needs to be about 300 words or so; it shouldn't be difficult to write one, but these days, writing anything coherent is difficult for me.
Tonight The Unit is on. I wonder if there are any clips available on You Tube. Dennis Haysbert makes for a rather clunky operator--he's just too tall, and not as well-coordinated as Kiefer Sutherland. Tonight should be one of the more action-packed episodes. As I pointed out on the Boundless blog, The Unit does not approve of torture, and the debate hasn't even come up (though members of the team were subjected to torture by friendlies posing as the bad guys as a part of their SERE training). I think both Robert Baer and Eric Haney have made statements about how useless torture is. In that respect, it's better than 24; people have drawn the conclusion that because Joel Surnow, who is one of the show's producers and has recently made public his so-called "conservative" leanings, supports the use of torture in times of "emergency," that 24 is a pro-torture show, and is trying to convince the American public of its liceity. Certainly, whenever Jack Bauer uses it, it has proven to be effective, contradicting Haney, Baer, and what I take is the reality of the case.
Are the real members of CAG as upstanding as the show portrays them to be? Does it attract a higher quality of soldier than the regular Army? Certainly members of CAG have a more enhanced skill set, but what of their moral qualities? Jericho has gone after PMCs in making Ravenwood, a fictional contractor, perhaps like the real Blackwater, to be one of its bogeymen and having its employees commit not only various atrocities but treason as well. (On the other hand, Federal agents and local law enforcement have been shown working hard to discover the conspiracy to use the nukes on American soil; unfortunately as the series premiere indicates, they were not very successful.) I would like to think there are decent people working for the Federal Government, even if the Federal Government is the Leviathan. Still, with the military under the control of the Federal Government, and with local law enforcement being the coercive force of local metropolitan and state governments that are dependent instruments of the "Federal" State, it is difficult to think that committed civic republicans will not find themselves at odds with both, after being closely monitored for "traitorous" activities.
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