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kitsapkorner
Dec. 21st, 2007
05:23 am - Clarity - a great post from Donald Sensing
http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2
Merry Christmas!! Don
Dec. 17th, 2007
11:06 am - The Vinyl Cafe
is a CBC program that features Stuart McLean, a very gifted story-teller (better than Keillor, and I have seen him live). The US broadcasts are here:
http://www.cbc.ca/vinylcafe/us-broadcas
The Vinyl Cafe is the smallest record store in Canada. Dave, the proprietor, has a long-suffering wife, Morley, and two kids, Stephanie and Sam. The dog, Arthur, is accompanied by Galway the cat. All of the characters have their moments - and some of the situations are enough to make you cry from laughing so hard.
Enjoy!
Dec. 7th, 2007
05:41 am - Funny Story
You may have heard of this one on Car Talk or other outlets. Scroll down the comments for some good laughs:
http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2007/n
Nov. 8th, 2007
04:54 am - Incredible Photo
Michael Yon is ex-Special Forces, US Army. For the past several years he has travelled around Iraq on his own dime (and through donations) documenting the war like no other person. This post is incredibly powerful and moving:
http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/200
Oct. 16th, 2007
11:22 am - Victor Davis Hanson - just back from Iraq
A fantastic set of essays at his blog on Pajamas Media.
The Chains of the Past
Prisoner of Memory
The end of the raisin harvest this year—I have rented out my vineyard to a neighbor the last several years—reminds me that a traditional Thompson vineyard is probably doomed. Some of these 6’x12’ vineyards were planted in the 1920s by my grandfather. Due to climbing costs, the future is in high-density plantings, perhaps up to 2000 vines per acre, trellised on pergolas, machine pruned and picked, water and fed by computerized drip irrigation, and requiring very little intensive labor per acre, but costing perhaps $5,000-8,000 per acre in initial planting costs.
Since the farm—the remnant of the original 135 acres that was parceled up between my siblings— will be very soon be in the city limits, its future rests with my son. For now I’m in a holding pattern, and enjoy walking around the house and vineyard, mostly for the recollections of the 1950s and 1960s when dozens of neighbors, small farmers all, used to congregate and talk after lunch about JFK, the dams in the Sierra, and new upcoming powerful 50-hp vineyard tractors (We had three older ones, a Ford Jubilee, an older put-put Ford 8N (I think it didn’t even have overhead valves) and a wonderful early model Italian-made Oliver. None would pull a 9-foot disk, meaning you had to disk each vine row twice in this age before the larger Masseys, Fords, and John Deeres).
I still have dreams that somewhere there will be a place, perhaps like the final scenes of How Green Was My Valley, where all these giants of the earth, the hired man Manuel George, the hulk Bill Hazzlehoffer, the other neighbor Harry Khasigian, and the Cherokee Joe Carey, the hardest worker and most honest man I’ve ever met, will reappear over the hill by the pond, as if they have never been gone at all.
Much of what I learned about farming—and life—came from my grandfather Rees Alonzo Davis who was at the center of all that, and who was born in my house in 1890, the grandson of the Lucy Anna Davis who came here from Missouri and built it much earlier. It is a dangerous thing to live in the past—Horace had a term for it in his Ars Poetica: laudator temporis acti—but as one ages, one increasingly can become captive to memory.
There were the widely variant mundane lessons—always shake hands and look one in the eye, value your name in the community, treat the common laborer with as much or more respect than you do the rich man, always pay your bills well before due, acknowledge deep appreciation of the natural beauty and bounty of central California, honor the United States, especially in times when others don’t, try to get up before dawn, expect things to break and try to maintain them in advance, adopt a rhythm in diet, activity, and habit, never smoke or drink (if at all).
Much of Rees’s advice about this lifestyle of the elder Cato was exactly the opposite from my wonderful father William Hanson who married his daughter, my mother, a Swede who flew on 40 missions over Japan in a B-29 and enjoyed cigarettes and whisky and hard living and hard fun all with a wonderful character of good will and a buoyant disposition.
It was a good balance between the two, but my father advised always “relax and enjoy things, life’s too short to be so serious;” his father in law countered with: “worry about things before they happen, be prepared for tragedy, to step up when others can’t (he tried to put away money to help pay for funerals, weddings, and anniversaries on the assumption that others wouldn’t).
He seemed to think hard physical work was somehow spiritual, and rarely worried about labor-saving devices or doing things differently that might save additional labor Calluses, sweat, soreness were all a sign of moral betterment, something deeply resented by me and my siblings when we were forced to join him for hours in shoveling or tying up vines on our knees, but later appreciated for teaching how the mind can tolerate hours of rote rugged toil.
My biggest worry? The loss of knowledge I inherited about the physical world. My grandfather could smell a storm on a southern September wind. He looked at the way birds nested to sense rain, and daily marked the phases of the moon, and tides and kept a precise diary for 50 years. He could judge the year by stunted or rich grape foliage, and weekly measured the water table, and checked the direction of the wind and the cloud formations. He had what I’d call a “sense”, the ability to know by intuition the impending physical world and the way humans would react to it, a Thucydidean in the fullest sense.
He had absolutely no interest in profit other than staying alive, and being able to farm and support his family. The appearance of his farm, not its profitability, was the key, since the aesthetics were a reflection of his own character. Shortfalls and farm losses were made up out of his hide, by avoiding expensive meat, and living off most of the things grown on our farm from persimmon bread to pomegranate juice.
We complained that he put all his money back into the farm—new end posts, vine wire, and irrigation valves—and only sparingly the house (I moved in at 26 to his run-down clapboard two-story pride and spent 30 years trying to restore it to what he once described it looked like in 1910 when it was only 25 years old).
I wish I could have passed on that natural wisdom to my old children, but only digested a fraction of it myself, more eager to leave the boredom and head to the coast, only in mid-twenties realizing how fortunate I was to have had such a refuge.
I think the most serious charge against my generation (born in 1953) was the blaming, victimization and self-absorption in which so often we faulted our parents or our family for our own ensuing problems. In my case, I owe any success I’ve enjoyed to my parents and grandparents who gave me such a wonderful youth, while the failures were all my own, usually as a result of not listening to their posthumous (they are all gone now) voices ringing in my head.
The Pulse of the Battlefield
War is the most unpredictable of all human events. Few can see how and when it ends. By spring 1918 after four years of horrific fighting, the Imperial German government was promising victory as its armies went on the offensive further into France and Belgium. Four months later they were in hasty retreat to a defeated Germany as the war drew to a close.
The worst campaign in the Pacific theater—the bloodbath at Okinawa that took 50,000 American casualties and 200,000 Japanese and Okinawa lives—was officially declared ended just six weeks before the surrender of Japan.
The four-year war to stabilize Iraq is similarly up-and-down, as the good news of Saddam’s defeat, the end of the Hussein family tyrants, and three successful elections are overshadowed by the insurgency, constant violence, and now 3800 dead American servicemen.
Politics always reflects this volatile pulse of war. In the bleak summer 1864 Lincoln had no friends, by April 1865 no enemies. FDR was considered by many a dangerous war monger in early 1941, by year’s end a sober war leader that was uniting the country against the fascist enemy. Truman left office despised in 1953 as an incompetent, but once South Korea was saved, he was seen as an architect of Cold War containment.
With the advent of 24/7 cable news, instant global communications, and a popular culture that is obsessed with the present and future, we became largely ignorant of history’s past lessons. But believe it or not, the war in Iraq is not immune from history and thus can also change once more and radically so—and has since early summer.
The most deadly area of Iraq was always the so-called Sunni Triangle where Baathists, Saddamites, Islamists, and al Qaeda all joined together to kill Americans. Now much of that area is quiet, as Sunnis have tired of the violence and are asking the Americans to both fight al Qaeda with them and broker a peace between themselves and the Shiite-dominated elected government in Baghdad.
If the Shiites were to follow the same script and turn on their own radical Shiite militias—and there is some reason to believe that is also possible—then it is conceivable to envision a mostly stable Iraq. And that would mean both sides could fight out their differences over oil revenues and government services in a mostly peaceful fashion.
Would anyone here at home believe that such a good turnout might be possible? Probably not, given the past four years domestic furor over the war. Remember that in 1974-5, after a decade of ordeal in Vietnam, the South Vietnamese government was still viable. But with Watergate and 57,000 dead the American public was sickened by the very name Vietnam. The Congress accordingly cut off all American military assistance, even as North Vietnamese communist forces invaded the south to finish off the its two-decade rival.
The administration and our military are heavily invested in securing Iraq, many on the left and in the Democratic party equally convinced that the war has been a horrendous waste of American blood and treasure and its long past time to pull the plug But amid this domestic back-and forth- the US military gets up each day to fight terrorists and train Iraqis to take over, and is suddenly getting better with it by the day.
The old blame gaming of the past—Was there ever really that much wmd?, Was Saddam promoting al Qaeda-like terrorism? Was Iran empowered by our invasion?—is now mostly irrelevant. Historians will decide whether a democratic Iran was worth the American cost, and whether the war was a grab for oil and hegemony or a mostly idealistic effort to end a genocidal dictatorship and bring constitutional government in its place. Today the question is simply how to stabilize the country, save lives, and leave it with a chance at a future unimaginable under Saddam.
So the only question left that really matters is not whether Iraq could be won—it can—but rather will it be secured before the American people demand an end to the mounting expense and withdraw? I think that would be a terrible tragedy. In contrast, I can imagine a year from now a quiet Iraq and a US military that deserves the thanks of the world for what it accomplished under almost impossible conditions.
Not Just Colonels
I mentioned the brilliant majors, LTCs and full colonels that serve in Iraq. But I should have noted that the ordinary soldiers, whether privates or sergeants, are equally competent and are the front line in the struggle. Whatever the critiques of America’s youth as I-pod and video-game addicted, and enjoying a prolonged adolescence, those in their teens and early twenties in Iraq seemed just the opposite. Many sleep on hard cots in forward bases, eat pop tarts and energy bars, and then climb into Humvees on mined roads—and never complain. It is often said the war in Iraq is surreal, perhaps—but being among our nation’s youth at the front lines was one of the great privileges I’ve enjoyed. No one could do what they do any better.
A final note.
I go in for more tests and some exploratory surgical procedures both Monday and Tuesday—after apparently losing this six-week effort to pass multiple stones and avoiding the resulting complications.
So I may be posting much less in the next week or so. But hope to be back to normal very soon.
Sep. 21st, 2007
08:05 am - Last Lecture - From the WSJ
MOVING ON
By JEFF ZASLOW
A Beloved Professor Delivers
The Lecture of a Lifetime
September 20, 2007; Page D1
Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer-science professor, was about to give a lecture Tuesday afternoon, but before he said a word, he received a standing ovation from 400 students and colleagues.
He motioned to them to sit down. "Make me earn it," he said.
What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? For Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, the question isn't rhetorical -- he's dying of cancer. They had come to see him give what was billed as his "last lecture." This is a common title for talks on college campuses today. Schools such as Stanford and the University of Alabama have mounted "Last Lecture Series," in which top professors are asked to think deeply about what matters to them and to give hypothetical final talks. For the audience, the question to be mulled is this: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?
It can be an intriguing hour, watching healthy professors consider their demise and ruminate over subjects dear to them. At the University of Northern Iowa, instructor Penny O'Connor recently titled her lecture "Get Over Yourself." At Cornell, Ellis Hanson, who teaches a course titled "Desire," spoke about sex and technology.
At Carnegie Mellon, however, Dr. Pausch's speech was more than just an academic exercise. The 46-year-old father of three has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months. His lecture, using images on a giant screen, turned out to be a rollicking and riveting journey through the lessons of his life.
He began by showing his CT scans, revealing 10 tumors on his liver. But after that, he talked about living. If anyone expected him to be morose, he said, "I'm sorry to disappoint you." He then dropped to the floor and did one-handed pushups.
Clicking through photos of himself as a boy, he talked about his childhood dreams: to win giant stuffed animals at carnivals, to walk in zero gravity, to design Disney rides, to write a World Book entry. By adulthood, he had achieved each goal. As proof, he had students carry out all the huge stuffed animals he'd won in his life, which he gave to audience members. After all, he doesn't need them anymore.
He paid tribute to his techie background. "I've experienced a deathbed conversion," he said, smiling. "I just bought a Macintosh." Flashing his rejection letters on the screen, he talked about setbacks in his career, repeating: "Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things." He encouraged us to be patient with others. "Wait long enough, and people will surprise and impress you." After showing photos of his childhood bedroom, decorated with mathematical notations he'd drawn on the walls, he said: "If your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let 'em do it."
While displaying photos of his bosses and students over the years, he said that helping others fulfill their dreams is even more fun than achieving your own. He talked of requiring his students to create videogames without sex and violence. "You'd be surprised how many 19-year-old boys run out of ideas when you take those possibilities away," he said, but they all rose to the challenge.
He also saluted his parents, who let him make his childhood bedroom his domain, even if his wall etchings hurt the home's resale value. He knew his mom was proud of him when he got his Ph.D, he said, despite how she'd introduce him: "This is my son. He's a doctor, but not the kind who helps people."
He then spoke about his legacy. Considered one of the nation's foremost teachers of videogame and virtual-reality technology, he helped develop "Alice," a Carnegie Mellon software project that allows people to easily create 3-D animations. It had one million downloads in the past year, and usage is expected to soar.
"Like Moses, I get to see the Promised Land, but I don't get to step foot in it," Dr. Pausch said. "That's OK. I will live on in Alice."
Many people have given last speeches without realizing it. The day before he was killed, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke prophetically: "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place." He talked of how he had seen the Promised Land, even though "I may not get there with you."
Dr. Pausch's lecture, in the same way, became a call to his colleagues and students to go on without him and do great things. But he was also addressing those closer to his heart.
Near the end of his talk, he had a cake brought out for his wife, whose birthday was the day before. As she cried and they embraced on stage, the audience sang "Happy Birthday," many wiping away their own tears.
Dr. Pausch's speech was taped so his children, ages 5, 2 and 1, can watch it when they're older. His last words in his last lecture were simple: "This was for my kids." Then those of us in the audience rose for one last standing ovation.
Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com
Aug. 10th, 2007
05:57 am - Vacation Pics
Just a few for now. The first is the view from the hot tub overlooking Lake Sutherland:
The lower Elwha River (flows out of the glaciers in Olympic National Park):
Aug. 9th, 2007
08:40 am - NIMBY Satire
The Daily Show lampoons Nantucket residents, as only the Daily Show can:
http://watthead.blogspot.com/2007/08/da
Aug. 7th, 2007
07:43 pm - The Beatitudes - a New Look
This essay, an excerpt from a new book, is overwhelming on first read. It deserves one look, two looks, and a lot of thought. WOW.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/poli
01:12 pm - On Bridges and I-35W from Michael Barone
Interesting reading, here:
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/barone/2
05:00 am - From Today's Wall Street Journal - an ex-KGB Official
Propaganda Redux
Take it from this old KGB hand: The left is abetting America's enemies with its intemperate attacks on President Bush.
BY ION MIHAI PACEPA
Tuesday, August 7, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
During last week's two-day summit, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown thanked President Bush for leading the global war on terror. Mr. Brown acknowledged "the debt the world owes to the U.S. for its leadership in this fight against international terrorism" and vowed to follow Winston Churchill's lead and make Britain's ties with America even stronger.
Mr. Brown's statements elicited anger from many of Mr. Bush's domestic detractors, who claim the president concocted the war on terror for personal gain. But as someone who escaped from communist Romania--with two death sentences on his head--in order to become a citizen of this great country, I have a hard time understanding why some of our top political leaders can dare in a time of war to call our commander in chief a "liar," a "deceiver" and a "fraud."
I spent decades scrutinizing the U.S. from Europe, and I learned that international respect for America is directly proportional to America's own respect for its president.
My father spent most of his life working for General Motors in Romania and had a picture of President Truman in our house in Bucharest. While "America" was a vague place somewhere thousands of miles away, he was her tangible symbol. For us, it was he who had helped save civilization from the Nazi barbarians, and it was he who helped restore our freedom after the war--if only for a brief while. We learned that America loved Truman, and we loved America. It was as simple as that.
Later, when I headed Romania's intelligence station in West Germany, everyone there admired America too. People would often tell me that the "Amis" meant the difference between night and day in their lives. By "night" they meant East Germany, where their former compatriots were scraping along under economic privation and Stasi brutality. That was then.
But in September 2002, a German cabinet minister, Herta Dauebler-Gmelin, had the nerve to compare Mr. Bush to Hitler. In one post-Iraq-war poll 40% of Canada's teenagers called the U.S. "evil," and even before the fall of Saddam 57% of Greeks answered "neither" when asked which country was more democratic, the U.S. or Iraq.
Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels. For communists, only the leader counted, no matter the country, friend or foe. At home, they deified their own ruler--as to a certain extent still holds true in Russia. Abroad, they asserted that a fish starts smelling from the head, and they did everything in their power to make the head of the Free World stink.
The communist effort to generate hatred for the American president began soon after President Truman set up NATO and propelled the three Western occupation forces to unite their zones to form a new West German nation. We were tasked to take advantage of the reawakened patriotic feelings stirring in the European countries that had been subjugated by the Nazis, in order to shift their hatred for Hitler over into hatred for Truman--the leader of the new "occupation power." Western Europe was still grateful to the U.S. for having restored its freedom, but it had strong leftist movements that we secretly financed. They were like putty in our hands.
The European leftists, like any totalitarians, needed a tangible enemy, and we gave them one. In no time they began beating their drums decrying President Truman as the "butcher of Hiroshima." We went on to spend many years and many billions of dollars disparaging subsequent presidents: Eisenhower as a war-mongering "shark" run by the military-industrial complex, Johnson as a mafia boss who had bumped off his predecessor, Nixon as a petty tyrant, Ford as a dimwitted football player and Jimmy Carter as a bumbling peanut farmer. In 1978, when I left Romania for good, the bloc intelligence community had already collected 700 million signatures on a "Yankees-Go-Home" petition, at the same time launching the slogan "Europe for the Europeans."
During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.
The final goal of our anti-American offensive was to discourage the U.S. from protecting the world against communist terrorism and expansion. Sadly, we succeeded. After U.S. forces precipitously pulled out of Vietnam, the victorious communists massacred some two million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Another million tried to escape, but many died in the attempt. This tragedy also created a credibility gap between America and the rest of the world, damaged the cohesion of American foreign policy, and poisoned domestic debate in the U.S.
Unfortunately, partisans today have taken a page from the old Soviet playbook. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, for example, Bush critics continued our mud-slinging at America's commander in chief. One speaker, Martin O'Malley, now governor of Maryland, had earlier in the summer stated he was more worried about the actions of the Bush administration than about al Qaeda. On another occasion, retired four-star general Wesley Clark gave Michael Moore a platform to denounce the American commander in chief as a "deserter." And visitors to the national chairman of the Democratic Party had to step across a doormat depicting the American president surrounded by the words, "Give Bush the Boot."
Competition is indeed the engine that has driven the American dream forward, but unity in time of war has made America the leader of the world. During World War II, 405,399 Americans died to defeat Nazism, but their country of immigrants remained sturdily united. The U.S. held national elections during the war, but those running for office entertained no thought of damaging America's international prestige in their quest for personal victory. Republican challenger Thomas Dewey declined to criticize President Roosevelt's war policy. At the end of that war, a united America rebuilt its vanquished enemies. It took seven years to turn Nazi Germany and imperial Japan into democracies, but that effort generated an unprecedented technological explosion and 50 years of unmatched prosperity for us all.
Now we are again at war. It is not the president's war. It is America's war, authorized by 296 House members and 76 senators. I do not intend to join the armchair experts on the Iraq war. I do not know how we should handle this war, and they don't know either. But I do know that if America's political leaders, Democrat and Republican, join together as they did during World War II, America will win. Otherwise, terrorism will win. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi predicted just before being killed: "We fight today in Iraq, tomorrow in the land of the Holy Places, and after there in the West."
On July 28, I celebrated 29 years since President Carter signed off on my request for political asylum, and I am still tremendously proud that the leader of the Free World granted me my freedom. During these years I have lived here under five presidents--some better than others--but I have always felt that I was living in paradise. My American citizenship has given me a feeling of pride, hope and security that is surpassed only by the joy of simply being alive. There are millions of other immigrants who are equally proud that they restarted their lives from scratch in order to be in this magnanimous country. I appeal to them to help keep our beloved America united and honorable. We may not be able to change the habits of our current political representatives, but we may be able to introduce healthy new blood into the U.S. Congress.
For once, the communists got it right. It is America's leader that counts. Let's return to the traditions of presidents who accepted nothing short of unconditional surrender from our deadly enemies. Let's vote next year for people who believe in America's future, not for the ones who live in the Cold War past.
Lt. Gen. Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to have defected from the Soviet bloc. His new book, "Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination" (Ivan R. Dee) will be published in November.
Aug. 5th, 2007
07:31 pm - Vacation
Squeezed out a week to relax and enjoy. Sharanga should enjoy this picture - is there enough space for the gear??
And, a mascot for the trip. Mopsy is a dwarf Lop rabbit and was a ball to have along. No dull moments as she explored the vacation home that we had rented for the week.
Jul. 28th, 2007
10:19 am - Front Yard
By popular demand, here are the overall pictures. Remaining to install are some fall bulbs and planters under the windows.
Jul. 26th, 2007
09:12 am - Perspective from Victor Davis Hanson
VDH always takes the long view, with a nod towards history. Always a must-read, whether you agree totally with him or not.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl
08:59 am - Michael Yon - Pulitzer in the Making?
His latest dispatch from Baqubah - incredible writing and photos!!
http://michaelyon-online.com/wp/birds-e
Jul. 25th, 2007
11:08 am - Neat Picture H/T: instapundit.com
Jul. 24th, 2007
06:29 am - Mars Rover Update, from John Tierney
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/200
Jul. 20th, 2007
12:52 pm - Michael Yon Dispatch
Baqubah is quiet, and Michael reports on that first meeting between the US Army and the locals:
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/7-r
11:24 am - From Instapundit.com Debating the Existence of God
This is an excerpt from a written debate between two law professors, which Glenn Reynolds excerpted.
The last 4 paragraphs are profound:
"That does not mean, of course, that God exists, or existing, bothers to evaluate your activities. He may not, literally or figuratively, give a damn. It is just that if He does exist (whether or not He cares), as an intellectual matter your problem of normative grounding would be solved. No more would ethical imperatives consist merely of human beliefs, intuited in privacy, perhaps validated by wide sharing or whatever, but just mortal opinions nonetheless. A belief in God and His will would solve the Gödel problem and would avoid the necessary defeat visited on any attempt to validate a system from within itself.
There are, Professor Unger, not very many possibilities. In fact, there are, I think, just two. The first is that mankind is a species that doesn't mean anything at all, except to itself. There is no evaluator out there. If the species is or becomes one thing or another, or ceases to exist altogether, nothing else cares--except perhaps some other species which, mostly with joy, might register the ecological impact of man's extinction. You are what you are, and will become what you will become, and the goodness or badness of that being and becoming is for you, and you alone, to define and declare. No state of being is more authentic than any other or, just because it exists, any better. Oh, it's not so awful. If being isn't meaning, and it isn't, meaninglessness isn't nonbeing either. You and the species get to live. It's just that you have to shape your living, and its meaning, all alone.
The second possibility is that God exists, and still cares. My own opinion is that the Hand that holds you suspended over my fiery pit doesn't abhor you, but has forgotten completely that It has anything in It. But God may still care, and, if that is so, you have but one epistemological problem, to learn the will of God. If there is no God, everything is permitted; if there is a God, it's even more terrifying, because then some things are not permitted, and men have got to find out which are which. Since He has the right and power to evaluate you, but no duty to do so, you are bravely right: you must pray.
But while you try to live as best you can until His revelation, perhaps you will accept some practical advice from me. Look around you at your species, throughout time and all over the world, and see what men seem to be like. Okay? Now take this hint from what you have seen: If He exists, Me too."
Read the whole thing, as Professor Reynolds likes to say. WOW.
Jul. 19th, 2007
01:43 pm - Great Satire from Dave Burge
using the nom de guerre Iowahawk, he posts some of the best comedy on the web. This piece concerns the recent terror attempts in London and Glasgow. The line about "little Khalid" is one for the ages.
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/20
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