Dear Presidential Debate Commission:
I did not like this experience at all. It was scary.
I have instructed Karl Rove to look into whether debates are un-American. Or maybe they threaten national security because they make me look weak.
In any event, please stop calling me for these things.
Very truly yours,
I’m reprinting this for my benefit, so I don’t lose it. Farnaz Fassihi, a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Iraq, confirmed that a widely-redistributed letter she emailed to friends about the nightmarish situation in Iraq was indeed written by her. Too bad the WSJ doesn’t allow this reporter to write these kinds of stories for the paper.
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Stole this from the Chicago Tribune
By David Martin.
September 29, 2004
Let’s face it. The presidential debates are a nuisance. But for whatever reason, most television networks feel obliged to carry them.
So stop your whining and make the best of a bad situation with the Official 2004 Presidential Debate Drinking Game. All you have to do is line up your favorite beverage and pick a candidate. Then let the game begin:
- Every time President Bush says the word “safer,” take a drink. If he uses the word “democracy” in the same sentence, make it a double.
- For every John Kerry reference to the UN, have a drink.
- If Bush uses the phrase “compassionate conservative,” you must chug your entire beverage.
- Take one drink for every three times Kerry points with his left hand.
- Any previously recorded Bushism, like “misunderestimate” or “subliminable,” used by the president during the debate requires one drink.
- If Kerry exceeds the time limit for any response, take a drink.
- Back-to-back offenses require a double shot and a NoDoz.
A reference by your candidate to any of the following requires one drink:
1) Florida
2) North Korea
3) Axis of evil
4) Saddam Hussein
5) The American people
- And for an exciting twist on the game, anytime anybody mentions the word “Vietnam,” everybody has to take a drink.
In this game, everyone’s a winner. At worst, you’ll reach the end of the debate experiencing a warm, pleasant buzz. But if you’re really lucky, you’ll pass out by 10 o’clock and won’t have to listen to the closing statements. Cheers!
You gotta love The Memory Hole. While many of us realize that the design of the public school creates an assembly line type of “education” system, where conformity to the standard is more important that growing in true knowledge, it’s nice to find research where we can hear this sort of thinking straight from their mouths of the government educators.
I found on their site an article entitled, “The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile“, in which the author reprints a number of quotes from John Taylor Gatto’s book, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling. Some of the quotes he references are so amazing, you almost think they need to be a hoax! Here’s one of my favorites, from President Woodrow Wilson:
We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
Sigh…. don’t read this post while you’re eating.
I’m going in for surgery tomorrow. For the last nine years, I’ve been living with a pilonidal cyst in my more… um… nether regions. After the initial infection my senior year of high school, it’s been pretty benign, with the occasional flareup. It’s always been a pain, but from what I learned from the occasional website is that the fix is a lot more painful. Well, during my past Australia trip, I had a flareup, and I didn’t have any antibiotics or doctors to turn to. During my international conversations with my wife, she finally got fed up my whining, and told me she was going to schedule an appointment with the surgeon for when I got back. She did, and I went.
Tomorrow morning, mom is picking up the kids, and Sarah will be taking me down to Chester County Hospital for the surgery. It’s outpatient, and the doctor has assured me that it won’t be too bad. When I went down Friday for my pre-op checkout, they said that they had done three of these procedures in the last week. I think that helped me.
Anyway, I’m not really scared… I just don’t want to be laid up and useless to those to whom I have responsibilities. We’re in a busy period right now with work, but my thought is that if I postpone the surgery, I won’t have the courage to reschedule it. Oh well… we’ll see. Someone bigger than me is in control.
Recently, historians have discovered an old letter from Presbyterian Elder Screwtape to a young elder, Wormwood. It’s a short letter, and provides a lot of interesting observations from an experienced elder to the young man.
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As any cigar affectianado knows, Cuban cigars are considered the ultimate in forbidden fruit. Since the embargo was enacted on Cuba in the 1960’s, their cigars have been severely restricted from entering the United States. Since then, many people have done backflips and risked felony conviction to smuggle bundles back into the U.S.
Since that’s the case, I found the following quote on Holt’s Cigar’s website to be especially interesting:
Before the US embargo Cuban cigars were considered to be the very best in the world by virtually all cigar smokers. Pungent and full-bodied without excess strength, the smoke of a Cuban led to rapturous descriptions in prose and verse. Slowly though, more and more is heard that the fabled Cuban cigar is no more; the land is not fertilized properly; the master cigar rollers are gone; there is no quality control; and so on. It is not for us to become involved in this discussion, but we will throw a word of caution into the pot - most Cuban cigars sold in the US today are high-priced fakes. Beware!
Amazing! Simply amazing. The French obviously have too much time on their hands.
To the tune of the Mr. Ed theme song:
—————————————
“A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
but the Vehicle Code does not divorce
its application from, perforce,
a steed as my colleagues said.
“‘It’s not vague,’ I’ll say until I’m hoarse,
and whether a car, a truck or horse
this law applies with equal force,
and I’d reverse instead.”
Yesterday, this was how Supreme Court Justice Michael Eakin voiced his minority dissenting opinion on a ruling that drunk driving laws do not apply to individuals on horseback.
I wonder if this law applies to those driving horse-drawn vehicles. My guess would be yes, being as it is a vehicle being drawn by a horse. Hmmm….
Sometimes, it’s difficult to discern many of the principles found in scripture. Honest Christians oftentimes look at an issue, or they’ll hear a convincing argument based on ideas like compassion and justice, and are attracted to them. Many of the truths seem to disagree with what we believe to be fair, like spanking children, but in the end, we must hold to the truth that it is scripture that defines what is right and wrong, and not our whimsical tastes.
Well, I took another one of those stupid online quizes.
A gang of us went to see Innocence last night, and, well, I wasn’t too impressed. The visual imagery was incredible, and the story was pretty involved, but as with any Mamoru Oshii movie, the story gets bogged down in a bunch of existentialist mumbo-jumbo. Of course, you can’t really expect much more from a Japanese movie, but it seems that the writer decided to rehash a conversation with himself on the nature of consciousness in the middle of the movie. Sadly, it’s a conversation we’ve heard before.
Personally, I don’t really mind the existential questions, but all the questions are the same questions that were asked in Ghost in the Shell, and Avalon. Ghost in the Shell and Innocence both display the struggle the writer has with the nature of consciousness. Both movies take place is a society at least 50 years in the future. This society has become so technically advanced that cybernetics has become commonplace. During both movies, the characters ponder how much of their biological selves they can replace with artificial components before they cease to be human.
The main character of the first movie, Motoko Kusanagi, has none of her biological self left, and is full of self-doubt. These doubts are compounded when an artificial intellegence begins to crack into robots (in the context of the movie, robots are different from cybernetic people because they lack a “ghost”, or real human soul.)
From a heathen perspective, such self-doubt is absolutely justified. A perspective that rejects God must also reject the divine author of their souls. Without the scriptures to tell us that “we have a soul that can never die”, we must consider our consciousness to arise from the biological functions of our brain. As Christians, though, we know that our soul exists apart from the physical workings of our bodies, and we know that our souls will exist after our physical bodies stop working. The heathen has no such assurance, yet they struggle to come to grips with that belief.
In Romans 1:18-31, the Apostle Paul tells us that nature gives clear evidence, even to the unbeliever, that the Triune God of the Bible exists. One of the nature evidences that the unbelieve must acknowledge is that our minds exist apart our physical bodies. As much as the unbeliever would love to believe that our minds are illusions created by us, we all know (believer and unbeliever) that this is not the case. This struggle is what the cybernetic characters in Ghost in the Shell are dealing with everyday. The cannot live with the idea that their conscience disappears when their bodily functions cease.
While the sequel is beautifully executed and illustrated, in my mind, it really didn’t add anything to the philosophical discussion. Of course, it didn’t need to add anything if they wanted to focus on the plot, but so much time was spent in philosophical dialog, and ignoring the plot, that it really didn’t keep my interest. The world created in Ghost in the Shell is an amazing place, and I was disappointed that the writers insisted on rehashing old ideas, rather than explore other questions that would be raised in this society.
You may have noticed the RSS links at the bottom-right side of this website, linking to some weird XML data. These links contain the feed data for our website.
Hacking Netflix has written up a summary on what RSS is, how it works, and how it can be useful to you. I highly recommend taking the time to read it.
There are many aspects of life that we often take for granted, culturally, without considering them from a Biblical perspective. I take a certain pleasure in challenging those cultural assumptions, especially when challenged by our postmodern culture. The question becomes, why do we do things the way we do, and even more importantly, is there a right way to do these things.
Boing Boing has posted a link to a company called Capsula Mundi that has create a more environmentally friendly way of burying the dead. They’re method involves burying the body in a biodegradable cocoon, and planting a tree of the deceased person’s choosing as a marker.
While Christian funerals have pretty much become ritualized and somewhat standardized within the Church, I’ve often wondered why it is that we fill large plots of land with old markers, and what Biblical alternatives are more feasible in densly populated areas. Many Christians are even accepting cremation as a viable alternative, even though the practice has been considered abhorrant to the historical Church.
So, are there priciples involved when a loved one passes from this earthly sphere? Is the body left behind simply an empty shell, or does it deserve respect? Is burial more respectful than cremation?
Wow… I am smoking the strongest cigar ever. “Buzzing” is too weak a word for what I’m going through right now. It’s called a “La Aroma De Cuba“, which, with even my broken spanish, is “The Smell of Cuba”. Now, my understanding is that, under it’s current dictatorial regime, Cuba really stinks. This cigar, however, is amazing. My friend, Dave Dimmick, works for the company that produces this beast, and I’m impressed.
Sarah gave me a humidor for my 27th birthday this past July, and it’s the best present, ever. No longer do I need to smoke a cigar within a few days of purchase… instead, I can simply reach into my box anytime I so desire a smoke a perfectly seasoned cigar.
My appreciation for my wife will never be fully realized or expressed, but she’s an amazingly thoughtful woman, and one I will never deserve. The pressure is on to get her a present even half as thoughtful. Thanks, love!
