It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
Winston Churchill
Considering that the Palestinian people have duly elected terrorists to head their government, and that the elected head of Iran is another in the mold of Hitler, Democracy may not be the best solution. Except that it is. There just isn't a better way of ensuring that people get the government they deserve, in the best and worst ways.
Hammas will have to learn to take the blame for a poorly run governement, blame that was fairly laid at Fatah's feet before. The former Fatah government was thoroughly corrupt, as was Arafat's government before. Now Hammas will have to fend for itself, no Fatah to blame, no Arafat, no Sharon, just themselves. Of course, now they will have to make the choice between Western aide and militant activity against Israel. There again, democracy is in action. You can choose your governement, we can choose not to send money. Simple stuff, really.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Monday, January 30, 2006
Missing Winter - A List of 10 things
Some people don't like the cold. I'm not one of those some people. I like the cold. I like winter. It's 60 freakin degrees out there right now! I want a winter!!!!!
Top 10 List of Things I'm Missing
10. The cool pattern that frost makes on my windshield. I know where paisley comes from, it's ice patterns on windows.
9. A reason to wear that yummy down coat gathering dust in the hall closet.
8. Teaching my nieces and nephews the joys of rolling snow angels. We don't bother with the fall-back-and-waggle-your-arms-and-legs kind. We do the what-would-it-look-like-if-the-angel-came-to-a-screetching-halt-in-the-backyard ones. Much more fun. Then I log roll them.
7. Snowball fights. I love snowball fights.
6. The gleam in my father's eyes as he revs up his snowblower. It's an incendiary glow that comes only with power tools for him.
5. A reason to make hot chocolate from scratch.
4. A good reason to add bourbon to the hot chocolate I just made from scratch. I have lots of reasons to do that, shoveling the driveway is one of the good ones.
3. The way my world looks when it snows. I love the monochromatic sheen on everything, I love the cute bird tracks under the feeders, I love the evergreens covered in snow, the streets, the houses, the cars, everything looks wonderful under snow.
2. Interpretive and interestingly posed snowmen. Mimicking Calvin's snowmen is worth hours and hours of fun. Especially the House of Macabre ones. Love that.
1. Snow Days. I work for a university and every now and then I get a paid day off to go do 2, 4, 5, 7, 8 & 9 and to enjoy 3, 6 and 10.
Top 10 List of Things I'm Missing
10. The cool pattern that frost makes on my windshield. I know where paisley comes from, it's ice patterns on windows.
9. A reason to wear that yummy down coat gathering dust in the hall closet.
8. Teaching my nieces and nephews the joys of rolling snow angels. We don't bother with the fall-back-and-waggle-your-arms-and-legs kind. We do the what-would-it-look-like-if-the-angel-came-to-a-screetching-halt-in-the-backyard ones. Much more fun. Then I log roll them.
7. Snowball fights. I love snowball fights.
6. The gleam in my father's eyes as he revs up his snowblower. It's an incendiary glow that comes only with power tools for him.
5. A reason to make hot chocolate from scratch.
4. A good reason to add bourbon to the hot chocolate I just made from scratch. I have lots of reasons to do that, shoveling the driveway is one of the good ones.
3. The way my world looks when it snows. I love the monochromatic sheen on everything, I love the cute bird tracks under the feeders, I love the evergreens covered in snow, the streets, the houses, the cars, everything looks wonderful under snow.
2. Interpretive and interestingly posed snowmen. Mimicking Calvin's snowmen is worth hours and hours of fun. Especially the House of Macabre ones. Love that.
1. Snow Days. I work for a university and every now and then I get a paid day off to go do 2, 4, 5, 7, 8 & 9 and to enjoy 3, 6 and 10.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Anti-Movie Review - Movies I'm not going to see
Brokeback Mountain
Two words: gay cowboys. Nope. Not gonna do it. Love story, you say? Still, not gonna do it. Cowboys are some of the sexiest men on earth and I'm not gonna ruin my enjoyment of bullriding by visions of two boys riding off in the sunset pledging undying love to each other. Yick.
New World
One of the "accolades" for the movie convinced me before I knew anything about it. "Best historical drama since Titanic." Since I hated Titanic enough to scream "Die, PLEASE, JUST DIE!!!!" at the "King of the World", I can't imagine that this one is anything less than dismal. Plus it's staring the man whose last turn as an historical figure, Alexander, gave me intestinal cramps from the commercials alone.
Munich
Why Steven, why? Such talent and you twist it so? To equate terrorists with assassins isn't right. Both kill, okay, that I'll give you, and of course if the Germans hadn't let the terrorists go in the second place, none of that revenge would have been necessary. The first place is this: a bunch of thugs taking innocent athletes hostage only to kill them with a shot to the back of the head while blindfolded and bound hasn't got jack to do with hunting down and killing the thug who killed your countryman/woman while bound and blindfolded with a shot to the back of the head. They aren't the same thing. All killing is not equal.
Spielberg made a big deal about making "War of the Worlds". He said that before 9/11 he never believed that beings smart enough to develop an interstellar engine and ship would "shlep" weapons all that way. Truth is that a being smart enough to invent such things would be smart enough to know how freakin stupid it would have to be to go millions of lightyears away from the safety of the homeworld without them. Maybe they won't be needed, but who wants to get caught with your shorts down around your tentacles. Smart aliens, and humans, know these things. Peace isn't made by a lack of weapons alone, it is made by the judicious use of them and wise choices at the bargaining table. Anyway, Spielberg keeps getting it wrong when he moves away from science fiction and history younger than WWII. I think it's connected to when he cried at the end of the last Star Wars.
I'm sure this list will expand.
Two words: gay cowboys. Nope. Not gonna do it. Love story, you say? Still, not gonna do it. Cowboys are some of the sexiest men on earth and I'm not gonna ruin my enjoyment of bullriding by visions of two boys riding off in the sunset pledging undying love to each other. Yick.
New World
One of the "accolades" for the movie convinced me before I knew anything about it. "Best historical drama since Titanic." Since I hated Titanic enough to scream "Die, PLEASE, JUST DIE!!!!" at the "King of the World", I can't imagine that this one is anything less than dismal. Plus it's staring the man whose last turn as an historical figure, Alexander, gave me intestinal cramps from the commercials alone.
Munich
Why Steven, why? Such talent and you twist it so? To equate terrorists with assassins isn't right. Both kill, okay, that I'll give you, and of course if the Germans hadn't let the terrorists go in the second place, none of that revenge would have been necessary. The first place is this: a bunch of thugs taking innocent athletes hostage only to kill them with a shot to the back of the head while blindfolded and bound hasn't got jack to do with hunting down and killing the thug who killed your countryman/woman while bound and blindfolded with a shot to the back of the head. They aren't the same thing. All killing is not equal.
Spielberg made a big deal about making "War of the Worlds". He said that before 9/11 he never believed that beings smart enough to develop an interstellar engine and ship would "shlep" weapons all that way. Truth is that a being smart enough to invent such things would be smart enough to know how freakin stupid it would have to be to go millions of lightyears away from the safety of the homeworld without them. Maybe they won't be needed, but who wants to get caught with your shorts down around your tentacles. Smart aliens, and humans, know these things. Peace isn't made by a lack of weapons alone, it is made by the judicious use of them and wise choices at the bargaining table. Anyway, Spielberg keeps getting it wrong when he moves away from science fiction and history younger than WWII. I think it's connected to when he cried at the end of the last Star Wars.
I'm sure this list will expand.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Feeling Nice
Feelings
Feelings are wretched barometers of reality, but more especially, they are terrible aides at discerning right from wrong. I can feel a certain way, positively or negatively, about a certain idea, activity or thing. My feelings are unable to produce the actual concrete truth about the thing, fact or idea, they are a merely an accumulation of past feelings and experiences interpreted through memories. Memories not being amoung the more reliable sources of information known to man. I like feelings, they sure can be fun, but beyond helping me to figure out how I personally feel about a certain event, they are not helpful.
Why the diatribe you ask? Because I hear constantly in the media, in commercials, in conversations around me that doing such and such was great cause "it made me feel good." That's cool if it was the right, moral, good, healthy correct thing to do. What about when doing the wrong, immoral, irresponsible, reprehensible and possibly criminal thing makes you feel really good? Will you still do that for that reason? I'm asking because unless you have a highly evolved sense of honor and a deeply ingrained code of conduct, doing the wrong thing usually feels REALLY good. Which is why we choose to do the wrong thing in the first place, it's because we want to.
Doing what is right involves much more than feelings. Often it invovles going against our inclinations and desires to feed our pleasure senses, it involves sacrifice. Doing what is good should be more satisfying that just doing what "feels good", but these days you won't get many agreeing with you.
Just so you are warned, if you are sitting with me watching TV and a certain commercial selling custom blinds comes on and a certain salesgirl who "feels really good when that man said thank you for selling me those blinds", don't mind me if I throw something and scream.
Nice
I despise how misused this word is, how often I am expected to be nice when no one can define what being a "nice" person is. I can be kind or mean, nasty or considerate, compassionate or cruel, but being a "nice" person is undefineable, everyone has their own definition, which renders that description useless. You can have nice toes, meaning attractive, a nice home, nice lawn, but you yourself can only be described by character terms. All that to say, I'm not nice.
Feelings are wretched barometers of reality, but more especially, they are terrible aides at discerning right from wrong. I can feel a certain way, positively or negatively, about a certain idea, activity or thing. My feelings are unable to produce the actual concrete truth about the thing, fact or idea, they are a merely an accumulation of past feelings and experiences interpreted through memories. Memories not being amoung the more reliable sources of information known to man. I like feelings, they sure can be fun, but beyond helping me to figure out how I personally feel about a certain event, they are not helpful.
Why the diatribe you ask? Because I hear constantly in the media, in commercials, in conversations around me that doing such and such was great cause "it made me feel good." That's cool if it was the right, moral, good, healthy correct thing to do. What about when doing the wrong, immoral, irresponsible, reprehensible and possibly criminal thing makes you feel really good? Will you still do that for that reason? I'm asking because unless you have a highly evolved sense of honor and a deeply ingrained code of conduct, doing the wrong thing usually feels REALLY good. Which is why we choose to do the wrong thing in the first place, it's because we want to.
Doing what is right involves much more than feelings. Often it invovles going against our inclinations and desires to feed our pleasure senses, it involves sacrifice. Doing what is good should be more satisfying that just doing what "feels good", but these days you won't get many agreeing with you.
Just so you are warned, if you are sitting with me watching TV and a certain commercial selling custom blinds comes on and a certain salesgirl who "feels really good when that man said thank you for selling me those blinds", don't mind me if I throw something and scream.
Nice
I despise how misused this word is, how often I am expected to be nice when no one can define what being a "nice" person is. I can be kind or mean, nasty or considerate, compassionate or cruel, but being a "nice" person is undefineable, everyone has their own definition, which renders that description useless. You can have nice toes, meaning attractive, a nice home, nice lawn, but you yourself can only be described by character terms. All that to say, I'm not nice.
Monday, January 09, 2006
My Winter Reading - Why you should read it too.
If you want to understand why we are the way we are, you have to understand the past, and sometimes the very far away past. Be it Greek or Medieval, what happened then informs what happens now. With that in mind, two books I've read in the past few months have excellently schooled me on some of the "why". Follow the links to the Amazon pages, they write far better reviews than I can and are more thorough than I intend to be.
In the Wake of the Plague
By Norman Cantor
Fantastic book, fascinating in its subject and scope. This book covers the catastrophe of the plague from it's beginnings to its aftermath, a far reaching aftermath. I loved this book, not just because it told the story of the plague, but because it offered just a cogent, detailed history of what we lost and gained because of the vastness of the death toll. Great reading.
Carnage and Culture
Victor Davis Hanson
Another fantastic book. A part of me wants to make at least the first chapter on the battle of Salamis required reading for every man and woman who enters the military. And the entire book for everyone else. Here is the story of where the ideals of freedom and democracy came from, and why those ideals are so important and vital, to us generally and specifically to us now.
Get these books. Read them, underline the good bits. Then read them again. Then make the people you love read them.
I'm reading this next month. And after that, this. I love getting books for Christmas!
In the Wake of the Plague
By Norman Cantor
Fantastic book, fascinating in its subject and scope. This book covers the catastrophe of the plague from it's beginnings to its aftermath, a far reaching aftermath. I loved this book, not just because it told the story of the plague, but because it offered just a cogent, detailed history of what we lost and gained because of the vastness of the death toll. Great reading.
Carnage and Culture
Victor Davis Hanson
Another fantastic book. A part of me wants to make at least the first chapter on the battle of Salamis required reading for every man and woman who enters the military. And the entire book for everyone else. Here is the story of where the ideals of freedom and democracy came from, and why those ideals are so important and vital, to us generally and specifically to us now.
Get these books. Read them, underline the good bits. Then read them again. Then make the people you love read them.
I'm reading this next month. And after that, this. I love getting books for Christmas!
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
The Information Age
The microwave is a lovely thing to reheat food but it's useless when it comes to cooking in the first place. It's too fast and uses the wrong kind of heat to properly get the best flavor out of a product. The internet and satellite communication does the same with news. Great for repeating accurate information, not so great for getting out accurate information in the first place. Rumors start quickly and easily, humans love them and love to repeat them. Now when everyone is a phone call/email away from everyone else it is just too easy for the wrong information to get loose. Trouble always comes from rumors, among the worst is that correcting the wrong information is nearly impossible to do, people have moved on, are thinking of other things, have cemented the first erroneous reports in their heads and nothing else will stick. Two things reminded me of this today.
The Sago Mining Disaster:
Early this morning family members waiting anxiously to hear if their father/brother/husband/son was alive were told joyously, but falsely, that they were, only to hear the true and tragic news several hours later. I have no idea who is to blame, but fact checking could never be more important that when delivering such personal and life changing news. Read more here.
Katrina Victims:
There have been so many epithets thrown, so many accusations made and all before the information was complete. See the Philadelphia Inquirer's Study Here.
The Sago Mining Disaster:
Early this morning family members waiting anxiously to hear if their father/brother/husband/son was alive were told joyously, but falsely, that they were, only to hear the true and tragic news several hours later. I have no idea who is to blame, but fact checking could never be more important that when delivering such personal and life changing news. Read more here.
Katrina Victims:
There have been so many epithets thrown, so many accusations made and all before the information was complete. See the Philadelphia Inquirer's Study Here.
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