A good article about John Kerry from National Review.

John Kerry’s America
What he said about us.

By William F. Buckley Jr.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the text of William F. Buckley Jr.'s June 8, 1971, commencement address to the United States Military Academy at West Point. The speech appears here as it is in Let Us Talk of Many Things : The Collected Speeches.

The morale in the armed services was low, reflecting the impasse and progressive demoralization in Vietnam, and especially the trial of Lieutenant William Calley for the massacre at Mylai. A drastic charge, flamboyantly made by decorated veteran John Kerry (now a United States senator from Massachusetts), had been rapturously received. Kerry ascribed to our soldiers in Vietnam uncivilized, barbarous practices. I devoted my talk to asking about Mr. Kerry's charges and reflecting on their implications.

A great deal has been written lately on the spirit of progressivism at West Point. I note that a generation ago, cadets were not permitted to read a newspaper, whereas today, each cadet room receives a daily copy of the New York Times. I know now what it means to be nostalgic for the good old days.

I read ten days ago the full text of the quite remarkable address delivered by John Kerry before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. It was an address, I am told, that paralyzed the committee by its eloquence and made Mr. Kerry — a veteran of the war in Vietnam, a pedigreed Bostonian, a graduate of Yale University — an instant hero.

After reading it I put it aside, deeply troubled as I was by the haunting resonance of its peroration, which so moved the audience. The words he spoke were these:

"[We are determined] to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more, so that when, thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say 'Vietnam!' and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning."

"Where America finally turned." We need to wonder: where America finally turned from what?

Mr. Kerry, in introducing himself to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made it plain that he was there to speak not only for himself, but for what he called "a very much larger group of veterans in this country." He then proceeded to describe the America he knows, the America from which he enjoined us all to turn.

In Southeast Asia, he said, he saw "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

A grave charge, but the sensitive listener will instantly assume that Mr. Kerry is using the word "crime" loosely, as in, "He was criminally thoughtless in not writing home more often to his mother." But Mr. Kerry quickly interdicted that line of retreat. He went on to enumerate precisely such crimes as are being committed "on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." He gave tales of torture, of rape, of Americans who "randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravages of war."

Mr. Kerry informed Congress that what threatens the United States is "not Reds, and not redcoats," but "the crimes" we are committing. He tells us that we have "created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who have returned with a sense of anger."

Most specifically he singled out for criticism a sentence uttered by Mr. Agnew here at West Point a year ago: "Some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse." Mr. Kerry insists that the so-called misfits are the true heroes, inasmuch as it was they who "were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to." As for the men in Vietnam, he added, "we cannot consider ourselves America's 'best men' when we are ashamed of and hated for what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia."

And indeed, if American soldiers have been called upon to rape and to torture and to exterminate non-combatants, it is obvious that they should be ashamed, less obvious why they have not expressed that shame more widely on returning to the United States, particularly inasmuch as we have been assured by Mr. Kerry that they have been taught to deal and to trade in violence.

Are there extenuating circumstances? Is there a reason for our being in Vietnam?

"To attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom . . . is . . . the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart." It is then, we reason retrospectively, not alone an act of hypocrisy that caused the joint chiefs of staff and the heads of the civilian departments engaged in strategic calculations to make the recommendations they made over the past ten years, to three Presidents of the United States: it was not merely hypocrisy, but criminal hypocrisy. The nature of that hypocrisy? "All," Mr. Kerry sums up, "that we were told about the mystical war against Communism."

The indictment is complete.

It is the indictment of an ignorant young man who is willing to condemn in words that would have been appropriately used in Nuremberg the governing class of America: the legislators, the generals, the statesmen. And, reaching beyond them, the people, who named the governors to their positions of responsibility and ratified their decisions in several elections.

The point I want to raise is this: If America is everything that John Kerry says it is, what is it appropriate for us to do? The wells of regeneration are infinitely deep, but the stain described by John Kerry goes too deep to be bleached out by conventional remorse or resolution: better the destruction of America, if, to see ourselves truly, we need to look into the mirror John Kerry holds up for us. If we are a nation of sadists, of kid-killers and torturers, of hypocrites and criminals, let us be done with it, and pray that a great flood or fire will destroy us, leaving John Kerry and maybe Mrs. Benjamin Spock to take the place of Lot, in reseeding a new order.

Gentleman, how many times, in the days ahead, you will need to ask yourselves the most searching question of all, the counterpart of the priest's most agonizing doubt: Is there a God? Yours will be: Is America worth it?

John Kerry's assault on this country did not rise fullblown in his mind, like Venus from the Cypriot Sea. It is the crystallization of an assault upon America which has been fostered over the years by an intellectual class given over to self-doubt and self-hatred, driven by a cultural disgust with the uses to which so many people put their freedom. The assault on the military, the many and subtle vibrations of which you feel as keenly as James Baldwin knows the inflections of racism, is an assault on the proposition that what we have, in America, is truly worth defending. The military is to be loved or despised according as it defends that which is beloved or perpetuates that which is despised. The root question has not risen to such a level of respectability as to work itself into the platform of a national political party, but it lurks in the rhetoric of the John Kerrys, such that a blind man, running his fingers over the features of the public rhetoric, can discern the meaning of it:

Is America worth it?

That is what they are saying to you. And that is what so many Americans reacted to in the case of Lieutenant Calley. Mistakenly, they interpreted the conviction of Calley as yet another effort to discredit the military. And though they will not say it in as many words, they know that if there is no military, it will quickly follow that there will be no America, of the kind that they know, that we know. The America that listens so patiently to its John Kerrys, the America that shouldered the great burden of preserving oases of freedom after the great curtain came down with that Bolshevik subtlety that finally expressed itself in a Wall, to block citizens of the socialist utopia from leaving, en route even to John Kerry's America; the America that all but sank under the general obloquy, in order to stand by, in Southeast Asia, a commitment it had soberly made, to the cause of Containment — I shall listen patiently, decades hence, to those who argue that our commitment in Vietnam and our attempt to redeem it were tragically misconceived. I shall not listen to those who say that it was less than the highest tribute to national motivation, to collective idealism, and to international rectitude. I say this with confidence because I have never met an American who takes pleasure from the Vietnam War or who desires to exploit the Vietnamese.

So during those moments when doubt will assail you, moments that will come as surely as the temptations of the flesh, I hope you will pause. I know, I know, at the most hectic moments of one's life it isn't easy — indeed, the argument can be made that neither is it seemly — to withdraw from the front line in order to consider the general situation philosophically. But what I hope you will consider, during these moments of doubt, is the essential professional point: Without organized force, and the threat of the use of it under certain circumstances, there is no freedom, anywhere. Without freedom, there is no true humanity. If America is the monster of John Kerry, burn your commissions tomorrow morning and take others, which will not bind you in the depraved conspiracy you have heard described. If it is otherwise, remember: the freedom John Kerry enjoys, and the freedom I enjoy, are, quite simply, the result of your dedication. Do you wonder that I accepted the opportunity to salute you?

A good article on why President Bush is not stupid from the American Thinker.


GWB: HBS MBA
February 3rd, 2004

President George W. Bush is the very first President to hold a Masters Degree in Business Administration. Even better (or worse, depending on your perspective), his MBA is from Harvard Business School, where postgraduate management training was invented in the early part of the last century, and which to many stands as a symbol of the good, the bad, and the ugly faces of modern management. Harvard MBAs indisputably lead more major corporations, receive higher starting salaries fresh out of school, and carry with them more elan and glamour than the graduates of any rival business schools "– facts which do not necessarily lead to admiration and love.

The comparatively small amount of attention paid by the political press to the President’s Harvard MBA partially reflects a generalized ignorance of, and hostility toward, the degree itself. More importantly, acknowledging that he learned any valuable intellectual perspectives would contradict the storyline that young W was a party animal, who coasted through his elite education, scarcely cracking a book. In other words, as the left never tires of claiming, he is too “stupid” to have picked up any tricks across the Charles River from Harvard Square.

This is patently incorrect. Having attended Harvard Business School at the same time as the President, graduating from the two-year program a year after he did, and then serving on its faculty after a year’s interval spent writing a PhD thesis, I am intimately familiar with the rigors of the program at the time, and the miniscule degree of slack cut for even the most well-connected students, when their performance did not make the grade.

There is simply no way on earth that the son of the then-Ambassador to China, or anyone else, could have coasted through Harvard Business School with a “gentleman’s C.” I never, ever heard of a case of an incompetent student being allowed to graduate, simply because a certain family was prominent. On the contrary, I did hear stories of well-born students having to leave prior to graduation. The academic standards were a point of considerable pride.

An inability to learn and apply the lessons of the classroom and the voluminous nightly study materials, from regression analysis to strategy-formulation to marketing to human behavior in organizations, was simply not tolerated. Grading took place on a strict curve, and those who found themselves on the lower range of the curve in too many subjects hit the dreaded “screen” and had to supply convincing rationales to the Academic Performance Committee as to why they should be allowed to attend the second year of the program, much less graduate. The screen was a vital component of the HBS quality assurance program, itself an essential method of protecting the value of the school’s MBA “brand.” Harvard Business School would no sooner voluntarily graduate an incompetent MBA holder than Coca Cola would ship-out bottles containing dead mice.

Accepting the premise that George W. Bush actually learned the lessons taught him at Harvard Business School, there are a number of characteristics of his administration which become far more understandable. Here are a few of the more important ways in which his Harvard MBA explains the way he governs.

The very first lesson drummed-into new students, as they file into the classrooms of Aldrich Hall, is that management consists of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. There is never perfect information, and decisions often have to be made even when you’d really prefer to know a lot more. Given this reality, students are taught many techniques for analyzing the data which is available, extracting the non-obvious facets, learning how read into it the reasonable inferences which can be made, while quantifying the risks of doing so, and learning the costs and value of obtaining additional data.

The job of the executive of to weigh probabilities in evaluating imperfect information; to assess the costs and benefits of acting or not acting; and to construct scenarios around the various possible time frames for taking action, taking into account the probable reactions of the other vital actors. That political opponents at home carp at him over his imperfect data at the time is no surprise, and no reason to regret his decision. The costs of not acting were simply too great, and the downside potential of erroneous information too low to prefer inaction. Better data would have been preferable, of course, but President Bush shows no sign of remorse for doing what he knows was the prudent thing under the circumstances.

A second broad and important lesson the President learned at Harvard Business School is to embrace a finite number of strategic goals, and to make each one of those goals serve as many desirable ends as possible. The truism of this lesson is that if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. If you can’t focus on everything, then you need to be able to focus on those few goals which will have the broadest impact, leading to a future capacity to attain other desirable ends. No exact number of goals is the limit, but three is an awfully good number to aim at. Those goals should be mutually consistent, so that the step-by-step accomplishment of each one aids in the achievement of the others.

There is both evidence and logic to suggest that George W. Bush has chosen just a small handful of major goals. His current number one priority was thrust upon him: winning a complete victory in the War on Terror. There is no evidence that this was on his initial short list of priorities. But after 9/11, he made himself very clear, very quickly, that his priorities had drastically changed. He also set out a realistic time frame – decades – for this number one goal. From this broad goal cascade a series of subordinate tasks, from persuading dictators that it is in their interests to eschew support for terror groups, to strengthening American military, intelligence and domestic law enforcement capabilities, for example.

I think his second broad goal is to build a long-lasting pattern of Republican political dominance of government, by forging a new grand coalition of voting blocs, adding to the existing GOP stalwart groups (conservatives, low tax lovers, the traditionally religious, and small business owners) a substantial number of lower income, but upward-mobility-aspiring members of every group, including ethnic minorities, especially Hispanics, but also as many blacks as possible.

If there is any single theme which unites all these people, it is a belief in the American Dream. The freedom to improve one’s lot in life, along with the ability to marshal the necessary resources without hindrance by oppressive regulations, taxes, or other governmental interference, is one of the cornerstones of this coalition. The goal is not simply to attract poeple by serving their interests, but to convince them to identify themselves with the Republicans, as the political instrument of their dreams.

In the short run, issues of importance to the conservative base may seem to be getting short shrift: government spending, especially on expansion of entitlements and such amenities as the NEA, may help reach out to swing voters, but do not inspire the base. Look for President Bush to address his base directly, as well as symbolically, prior to the election. But understand that he will put more priority on the broad goal of reaching out to expand his voting support than he will on catering to his base, who will, when all is said and done, place so much weight on securing the Presidency for a War on Terror activist (see Goal #1) that they will turn out and vote for his re-election

A third major goal, closely related, is to get and keep the economy growing at a healthy pace. The President inherited an economy moving into recession as he took office. Then, 9/11 knocked the stuffing out of many industries, and dealt a huge financial and psychological blow to the nation. Aggressive tax cuts, augmented by cooperative Federal Reserve management of the money supply and interest rates, have now restored the economy to robust growth. Complaints about low job growth miss two points: that in the early stages of an economic recovery, employers defer adding staff, and that the economy as a whole is moving away from the full-time-job model of work towards independent contracting forms of work, thus omitting many people’s work (including my own) from being counted as a “job.”

A healthy economy which creates opportunities for work and self-advancement generates new members for the American Dream Coalition. A robust and successful conduct of the War on Terror secures domestic safety, encouraging investment and growth, and brings pride as an American to all groups in society. All of these factors encourage more people to identify as Republicans, securing the political goal of the President. The three goals mutually reinforce one another.

Another basic lesson young George W. Bush learned in the classrooms of Harvard Business School is that different managers have legitimately different styles of operating as executives. There is no “one right way” to manage. Successful executives develop a style which is true to their own nature, and which builds on their strengths. George W. Bush is a natural delegator, an executive who seeks the best possible people to work for him, instills loyalty (by practicing it himself), and then gives them plenty of room to operate. His “sins” as an executive have been, and are likely to remain those of a loose leash, allowing ineffective subordinates too much time and too much room. This is why it has taken him so long to remove certain cabinet officials.

The case study method as practiced at Harvard Business School features intense discussions of alternative plans for defining and then resolving the problems described in the B-school’s famous cases. A well-structured spirited discussion has the virtue of systematically revealing the implications of different courses of action, allowing deeper analysis, and ultimately leading to better decisions. President Bush’s preference for keeping senior advisors of different persuasions, such as Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz, reflects the value he places on hearing the best case made for alternative courses of action. Critics who speak of a power struggle which needs to be resolved in favor of one side or the other, completely miss the point.

One final note on George W. Bush’s management style and his Harvard Business School background does not derive from the classroom, per se. One feature of life there is that a subculture of poker players exists. Poker is a natural fit with the inclinations, talents, and skills of many future entrepreneurs. A close reading of the odds, combined with the ability to out-psych the opposition, leads to capital accumulation in many fields, aside from the poker table.

By reputation, the President was a very avid and skillful poker player when he was an MBA student. One of the secrets of a successful poker player is to encourage your opponent to bet a lot of chips on a losing hand. This is a pattern of behavior one sees repeatedly in George W. Bush’s political career. He is not one to loudly proclaim his strengths at the beginning of a campaign. Instead, he bides his time, does not respond forcefully, a least at first, to critiques from his enemies, no matter how loud and annoying they get. If anything, this apparent passivity only goads them into making their case more emphatically.

Only time will tell, whether Saddam ever had any WMDs. Their non-existence has not been proven. Only time will tell whether or not Osama bin Laden (or his corpse) will be taken into custody by American Troops. Only time will tell whether or not Iraq will continue to make progress toward a transition toward a peaceful democratic government. George W. Bush knows much more information about these topics than his domestic political opponents do. At the moment, they are betting a lot of their chips on one side of these questions.

We will see by November who has the winning hand.
Thomas Lifson

Maybe my calls are having an effect. Today was the first time in quite a long time that I did not see any panhandlers standing at the intersection, which I called the police about yesterday.

Doing my part to annoy the panhandlers.

Every morning I get to drive by a number of these lazy, useless people, holding their cardboard signs containing some lame excuse why I should give them my hard earned money. Today I had another opportunity to annoy some of them. Lately they have figured out that if they push the crosswalk button at one of the main intersections on my commute, they can hold up traffic in the left lane, thus providing themselves with a captive audience. The other day I called the police station and found out that these losers are allowed to practice their deceipt as long as they do not disrupt traffic. I complained about their little crosswalk trick and the police told me that this was not allowed and they dispatched an officer to look into it. Today I saw the same pair of panhandlers but they had modified their little game. One of them would hold the sign while the other walked around the corner with a garbage bag like he was picking up trash. While I appreciate his sincere desire to make the world a cleaner place, I do not appreciate his pushing the crosswalk button every time he walked past it, so I called the police and complained about him again.

It annoys me that these con-artists prey on the gullible compassion of passing drivers, when they should be out working for a living like the rest of us, but I can usually just ignore them. When they find a way to really inconvenience me, am more than happy to return the favor.

There are a number of sites running discussions about Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum's comments in an interview with the Associated Press. The ones I have seen are either mildly or strongly in favor of the gay agenda. In the interview Sen. Santorum said the following regarding an upcoming decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on the constitutionality of antigay sodomy laws. "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." He then added, "All of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family. And that's sort of where we are in today's world, unfortunately." It seems the gay rights activists are up in arms about the way he equates homosexuality with acts such as incest, adultry and polygamy (How dare you equate our sacred cow with all of these other cows). In principle I would have to say that I agree with Sen. Santorum's idea that legitimizing one form of immorality will lead to legitimizing others, although being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I would not necessarily include bygamy and polygamy in that list (I am interested to know if Sen. Santorum would include all extra-marital sexual relations on his list). I also agree that immoral practices have deleterious effects on society. Mainly I wanted to comment on the fact that society is silly in how it wants to pick and choose which moral rights we should have. Currently, much of society says that it is OK to have pre-marital sex and to llive together without marriage. If children are born as a result of this, it is perfectly acceptable. The same two individuals may then acceptably split up and repeat the process with two other individuals. One of the individuals may even have sexual relations and possibly children with a third individual without splitting from the first, as long as there are no legally binding commitments involved, like marriage. However if a man enters a commited relationship like marriage with one woman and then decides to become commited to another woman, through marriage, without leaving his wife, even if the wife agrees to this, the man is looked down upon or even prosecuted. So it is perfectly acceptable to have a polygamous-like relationship as long as there is no real commitment to provide for any offspring resulting from that relationship. Sounds a bit silly to me.

This post at Rantburg comes with a pretty funny comment by the poster, Steve.

A section of the post from Reuters:
"Lebanon said on Wednesday it had arrested five people in connection with a booby-trapped car discovered outside a McDonald's fast food outlet and accused them of planning attacks on Lebanon's Western embassies. "We have five detainees so far who have confessed to placing a booby-trapped Renault car at McDonald's," Interior Minister Elias al-Murr told a news conference."

This is followed by the comment from Steve:
"A booby-trapped Renault? That's enough a smoking gun for me, on to Paris!"

Good stuff Steve :-)

Two bits about the Iraq war that caught my eye.

One from ScrappleFace:
"Looting Suddenly Stops in Baghdad
(2003-04-09) -- The looting in Baghdad stopped suddenly today as Iraq's largest organized crime family disappeared from the city.
Thousands of Baghdad residents entered government buildings in an attempt to retrieve some small portion of what had been stolen from them for the past 24 years.
"I got a big vase from one of Uday's offices," said one local woman. "It can never replace the family members Saddam took from me, but all of this stuff belongs to the people and it was taken from us without our permission.""

The other from The Sydney Morning Herald:
""They stand, they fight, sometimes they run when we engage them," Brigadier-General John Kelly said.
"But often they run into our machine guns and we shoot them down like the morons they are."
"They appear willing to die. We are trying our best to help them out in that endeavour," he said."

Another article that expresses my feelings as well or better than I could. This one is by Victor Davis Hanson and talks about how we can let our backstabbing, ex-allies know of our dissapointment with them.

Good read. Where do they get young men like this?

Maybe all of those virtues, like charity and unselfishness, taught to these young men by the vast right-wing, Christian conspiracy have some value after all. CNN probably isn't sharp enough to catch that though.

Yeah, I know it has been a while. Things got busy after th three foot snow storm and my Grandpa's death. I couldn't pass up commenting on this one. The New York Times has an article detailing the warm reception US soldiers received from Iraqis in one town. The last paragraph was the best. Speaking of minefields that the fleeing Iraqi soldiers left and that the US soldiers were clearing, the article says, "Lt. Col. Duke Deluca, noting that the mines had been made in Italy, said, 'Europeans are antiwar, but they are pro-commerce.'"

I wonder what the French, Germans and Russians were selling?

Imagine that, the environmentalist/zero population crowd is wrong again. An op/ed article in the New York Times (of all places) now says that the real danger is from a decrease in the world population growth rates. "The Population Bomb" seems to have been a dud. This article was brought to my attention by Glenn Reynolds at instapundit.com who was linking a comment posted by Ronald Bailey. This post refers to the book "The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World" written by a now enlightened, former Greenpeace member, Bjorn Lomborg, which looks like it could be worth a read.
This brings to mind a scripture in the Doctrine and Covenants, section 104, verse 17, "For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare.." I guess that there will be "enough and to spare" for the descendants of those of us who still put stock in God's command to multiply and replenish the earth.

I thought this cartoon was humorous.

An American human shield was killed while trying to block an Israeli bulldozer from destroying a Palestinian murderer's house. While it is tragic that this woman died, it can't be said that she didn't bring it upon herself. I think the last line of the article really points to the cause of the woman's death. A spokesman for the group to which this woman belonged said, "We didn't think they would kill us." I think the truth of the matter is that they just didn't think at all. As little children we are taught not to play in the street because large, heavy, moving objects can kill us. Did these protesters somehow think that they were immune to this physical phenomenon? Should be a warning to the human shields in Iraq. Large, heavy, moving, exlosive objects are even more deadly than the non-explosive types.


Update: Here is a link to some pictures and articles about the girl. I hate to sound uncaring, but I don't hold a lot of sympathy for anyone willing to burn an American flag, even a homemade one.

Today on my way to school I saw a lady driving an SUV with hand-painted flowers all over it. Do the flowers change an SUV from environmentally unfriendly to friendly? Maybe we could paint flowers on the oil drilling equipment and then the wackos wouldn't mind us drilling in Alaska.

Two thoughts:

1) Hugh Hewitt read an article from an Italian lady. She discussed having lived through World War II and being in the Italian resistance. She talked about the many American and other lives that were lost in freeing Italy from Mussolini. She talked about being a war correspondent and how much she abhors guns and war. But she talked about how necessary this war with Iraq is. I was unable to hear the end of the article and I did not catch her name, but I will try to find out and link to it.


Contrast that with:

2) Michael Medved interviewed this 27 year old girl who is trying to organize a group of people to go to Iraq to act as human shields. She attended college at an exclusive private college. She has probably been pampered all her life. Suddenly she has this epiphany that she can do some good in the world by going to Iraq to save lives by laying down and waiting for a bomb to drop on her. Toward the end of the interview it became clear that she probably won't ever make it to Iraq. At one point she said something anti-war/violence and in the same breath talked about how we saved the world from Hitler, Mussolini and Hirihito (sp?).

Two viewpoints. One experienced in oppression, war, death, and violence but sees the need for conflict with Iraq. The other only experienced in editing and trying to find some cause worth living or dying for. I would rather follow the woman who knows what is important than the one who is trying to find it.

In today's society, young people have nothing to believe in. They have no cause to follow. Religion has been meticulously cleansed from their lives. They have no foundation and it is interesting to see what they grasp at in their need for a moral/spiritual base. People think that my choice to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ are foolish and outdated. Even if these teachings were nothing more than fables (not that I doubt them for a minute) wouldn't it be better than taking up the cause of lying in front of a bomb to protect a dictator who has murdered tens of thousands of his own people, which people want him killed so they can have some freedom and liberty?

Here is an article that on the whole Iraq/war on terror/Islam thing by Lee Harris. I haven't read the whole thing yet but he gets into the idea that, sure attacking Iraq would be a kind of a new thing, but as the world changes around us, sometimes we need to change to fit into it. America has never had to deal with terrorism in the way that Israel has and maybe we will have to change many things about how we live our lives to deal with it. Mostly I am just linking the article so I can go back and finish reading it later.

More good news for the day, I am going home. It is almost 10:00 at night, and I have been at school far too long today. Despite my earlier comment, I may have had some success today, but I will have to wait until tomorrow to elvauate my results further. Also of note for the day, the doctor was worried about dec and his small stature. Initial tests suggested a potential problem with nutrient absorption but today's checkup looked good. He had gained two pounds in the last couple weeks and the doc is less concerned now. I feel bad that I didn't get to see my cute boys much today. I love my family.

Even if my science sucks today (well really it is not just today, but particularly today) it has still been a good day. Elizabeth Smart has been found and is alive. I am so glad for her and her family.

If the MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast or Mother of all Bombs) doesn't bring 'em to their knees, we might have to break out the big guns.

Will actors and actresses ever realize how irrelevant they really are? Don't they know that they are merely eye candy and that nobody really cares what they think or what they have to say. Unfortunately they think that their opinion in politics really matters and then they go opening their mouths. It is getting harder and harder to find a bearable movie when the actors and actresses keep adding themselves to my blacklist. It really is too bad. I used to like Ethan Hawke even though he hasn't made a decent movie for quite some time. I even considered naming my next son Ethan (not really in honor of him, but I did like the name). Then he has to go and open his mouth and make me aware of how stupid he is. Who will be the next idiot to step up and show their ignorance.