how to dismantle an atomic bear
30 November 2004
Here it is. I submitted it earlier this evening. I had planned this piece for next week, but had to move it up in response to a mass-email sent out by the commentary editor to the effect that this would be the final week for the semester and that he had open slots. It
You may now place your bets as to whether or not such an overtly religious article will actually make it into print.
Seems it didn't make it into the Tuesday edition. So at least if it does make it into print, it WILL in fact be in the month of December. That's usually a good thing for articles dealing with Christmas.
Christmas Symbolizes Hope, Forgiveness
There are a few mainstays of the Christmas season we can always depend on: long lines, waves of advertisements, rampant consumerism, decorated houses, extra time with the family, and regular reminders as to what Christmas is all about.
Christmas, as we are endlessly reminded, is about the birth of Christ. And yet, the significance of his birth is never discussed, as though our society fears to tread on such a fundamental issue except in churches.
Plain and simple, the central message of Christ's ministry was forgiveness for sinners on the basis of his righteousness. All too often, Christianity is perceived as being a religion for good people and for the rigorously morally observant.
And yet, the savior of the world was not born in a palace. His birth was not announced to princes and kings, and his ministry was not geared towards the elite elements of society. Rather, his birth in a cold, dirty manger was announced to insignificant shepherds. He never sought distinction among the rich or the powerful, but rather associated with prostitutes and thieves, the lepers and the lame, the helpless and despised elements of society.
No, Christ's message is not for good people, as all too many denominations seem to think. The righteous and the self-sufficient have no need of a savior.
Too often, the self-righteous easily forget that their good behavior counts for nothing as they continue their annual celebrations of Christmas without any thought that they desperately need forgiveness every bit as much and in the same way as the societal pariahs they so openly disdain.
The Christmas message is for the prodigals, for the sinners, even the worst of them. It is for those painfully aware of their own transgressions and who feel the crushing weight of their own guilt.
The birth of Christ is not just a feel-good story of angels and shepherds and mangers. It is a powerful symbol of salvation for the lost, of forgiveness for the guilty.
Merry Christmas.
28 November 2004
A brief summary of what I learned on my trip:
1. Joey cannot be trusted in giving directions. Ever.
2. Armies of killer dogs and flaming, rabid pigs are insufficient to defeat an array of elephants.
3. If you use your 7-Iron on the green while playing Tiger Woods Golf, everyone is going to laugh at you (after you hit it out of bounds). If you keep doing it, they'll take the controller away from you and won't give it back.
4. I've got to get some Winston Churchill books.
5. I may be much stronger than my 17-year old cousin, but she can clean my clock in the 50-meter freestyle.
6. Dolphin Trainer -- a job to which bright, young high school students inexplicably aspire.
7. Jenga is a fiercely competitive game, known to provoke frantic outbursts and merciless mocking among close family members.
8. Asians have no appreciation for Back to the Future. *sigh*
9. No one likes Monkey Tennis anymore (Mario Tennis in which the selected characters are Donkey Kong and his affiliates). Fine. I still hate Tiger Woods Golf.
10. The sound of insane, screaming foxes is not a desirable background noise to those concentrating on Tiger Woods Golf. Weirdos.
11. Monty Python: And Now for Something Completely Different is apparently a popular Thanksgiving rental.
12. Even when we don't believe in it, the Constitution still believes in us.
12a. The profound wisdom I am imparted from not-quite-sober relatives will never cease to amaze me.
13. One's willingness to tolerate inter-party differences on politically stalemated issues seriously calls into question his/her Christianity.
14. Adult socializing centers primarily around drinking, smoking, and gambling.
15. If I leave my dog alone for five days, he will spend five minutes jumping on me and licking me upon my return. I just have to sit down and wait till he's done.
16. Japanese anime characters haven't the subtlety that the Japanese people are generally known for. In fact, their lack of subtlety can even disturb American audiences. Where do these characters come from? Someone really ought to perform a broad study on the collective psyche of the Japan as a nation.
23 November 2004
HC!! I'm leaving for Kansas tomorrow to hang out with JoeyDie5 and co. Then to Iowa to hang out with rest of family.
I went postal after the brawl in Detroit. If Frank Francisco lost 30 games to suspension and faces deportation for throwing a chair, then Ron Artest, Ben Wallace, et al. surely deserve no less than the death penalty for what they did. Actually, I was saying Artest ought to sit out for no less than the rest of the season and probably more. But the NBA was thinking precisely the same thing apparently, and now I have nothing to gripe about.
I've spent the previous several days reading Speaker for the Dead and Pollack's book on the Iranian question. Pollack has written what appears to be a lengthy history of modern Iran, detailing its relations with the West (especially America) and how it came to be that way. He likes to trace themes, broad trends and currents of history.
The only problem is that I have no idea where he's going to go with all of this. It's all very fine and well to discuss Iranian relations with America, but the issue is not so much how to maintain good relations with Iran, but rather how best to prevent American cities from blowing up.
Pollack's analysis of Iraq dealt with every single question a layman might have on the question of invasion and its alternatives. Pollack clearly doesn't think invasion is a very good option. I gather this not because he has said so directly, but because he has neglected to even address the question in his preface.
The problem is not whether invasion is a very good option. The question is whether it comes out better than the alternatives.
Invasion surely carries enormous risks that could suck the entire Middle East into a maelstrom of terrorism and world war. But the real question is whether taking that risk is substantially worse than allowing nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of the world's #1 state sponsor of terrorism.
I'll keep reading and hoping that Pollack's work is something more ambitious than a another plea for greater mutual understanding with Iran aimed at meaningless State Department officials. I'm not holding my breath.
20 November 2004
Update
Okay, here's some pictures:
Introducing Sir Heffalump
Sir Heffalump is a great warrior so he shoots the monkey
...And then fights the orcs (die orcs! die!!)
Sir Heffalump with his friends Bunny and Alexander the Mouse
They did actually publish my article on the Marxist outlook that the democratic Party is so beholden to today. I didn't get much feedback. I don't think anyone understood it. I think it flew over the heads of most of my audience. Perhaps all my audience.
A very liberal sophomore, and a very insolent one too, left some feedback on my article. I wrote him privately and told him in very diplomatic language that he was out of his league and he ought to shutup before someone cleans his clock and humiliates him. He acted insulted and his insolence increased. But we kept exchanging e-mails, he began to look worse and worse with each one, and eventually he stopped arguing with me and became most respectful. He won't soon forget me.
I had a bit of short fiction in the works earlier in the week, but as I've never written fiction before, it's not coming off very quickly or efficiently, and I didn't have the patience to finish it. Perhaps later.
I've got a new elephant. I've named him Sir Heffalump. I'd put a picture of him up, but my camera is out of batteries and I can't seem to find the charger anywhere.
I really have nothing else interesting to say right now. I'm either burned out on politics or bored with it altogether, so I've not read any columns or analyses in the last week. I've had a cold the past week and have been either too sick or too busy working on other things to do much reading. I did read a bit of Ferguson's work on the American Empire. It's an interesting piece of work. Ferguson argues that American imperialism would be very good for the world right now. The problem is that Americans are not imperialists at heart, and will not tolerate overseas commitments on the level that the British once would.
Okay, that's all. Promise to update more this next week. Also, please try to utilize more the following egregiously under-appreciated AIM abbreviations:
hc!!: holy crap!!
wdygtbs: where did you get that baloney sandwich?!
14 November 2004
I sat there in technical writing class late on Monday morning. We had a proposal due in four days, on which I had done no work whatsoever, and yet I still sat there writing a blog entry instead of working.
The teacher had apparently finished grading our previous projects and began passing them back. By and by, she came to our group project. She hesitated. Oh no...
"[Kreliav], I need to see you outside," she said.
Oh great, I thought. I'm in trouble.
"You're not in trouble for anything," she reassured me. "I just need to see you about something."
What could I have possibly done to get in this much trouble?!
We made our way out of the classroom and and sat down on a bench in the empty hallway.
"There's a bit of a discrepancy in your team member evaluations," she began. "According to Deborah and Kyle, Dung Van did not do any work on this project. You did not say this in your evaluation. What do you think about this?"
I was stunned. I hesitated. A few seconds ticked by.
"The truth is that Van tried to participate, to make suggestions, to be helpful. It's so difficult for him to communicate with us though."
"I suspected this was the problem," she said. "Last year, I had a separate section for international students, but now they have decided, for some reason to throw them all together."
I said nothing.
"Continue," she said. "How did you handle the situation?"
"Outwardly, we entertained all of Van's suggestions. But Van didn't really know what was going on in our group. None of his suggestions were very feasible. So we never had any intention of using them."
"And do you think that was the best way to handle it"
Hesitation again. "What else could we have done?"
"What else? Well, you could have been honest with him. You could have told him that his ideas wouldn't work. You could have --"
"But that would have been just punting the problem down the road!" I insisted. "We can't just systematically reject all of his ideas one at a time."
She was right, of course, but didn't have time to argue with me.
"Deborah and Kyle were very critical of him in their evaluations. How do you feel about this?"
"No, I don't think that's very fair at all."
She thanked me and we went back to the classroom. Deborah and then Van were next to be called out into the hall to discuss the same subject (Kyle was absent). I don't know how the matter was resolved. I didn't ask.
My solution to the problem was to pretend that Van was a part of the group with the full knowledge that he wasn't. I would feign interest in his ideas and suggestions, but because none of them fit in with the direction we were already taking, I mentally disregarded them as soon as our conversation ended. When it came time to give evaluations, I would make no mention of the fact that Van made no contribution at all to the project. The problem would be quietly swept under the rug.
Kyle and Debbie seemed to be taking the same tac. It didn't occur to me that they never had any intention of doing any sweeping though.
Though I've never thought of myself as a pathological liar, It's occurred to me in recent days that I'm not a terribly honest person. And whenever there's a tension between honesty and politeness, the latter invariably wins out with me.
The results of an online personality test I took recently revealed the following:
Honesty is frankly not one of your strong points. While you may hide the truth from others in attempts to protect their feelings or to avoid looking bad in their eyes, fibbing most often leads to trouble. People much prefer when others are honest with them- even if the truth is a little hard to swallow. Dishonesty often ends up perpetuating itself when you need to tell a lie to cover up for a previous lie - it's a tangled web you don't want to get caught in!
Ouch.
10 November 2004
Bush Swats Kofi Annan with Rolled Newspaper
by Scott Ott
(2004-11-05) -- U.S. President George Bush, during a surprise visit to United Nations headquarters today, rolled up a copy of The New York Times and swatted U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan across the nose with it.
Mr. Bush said nothing after the swatting, but simply pointed the rolled paper toward Mr. Annan's office, and the U.N. leader returned to his desk.
The diplomatic gesture by Mr. Bush was seen as a response to Mr. Annan's recent statement that a joint Iraqi-U.S. effort to liberate Fallujah from terrorists might jeopardize elections scheduled for January.
I love it.
Scrappleface
Ah, the NT Daily. Always full of surprises, they are. And not the good kind of surprises, but rather the kind that tend to make you recoil with disbelief.
They published my article. How nice of them. That is, they published the one I wrote last week. I suppose that's okay. In the printed edition, my column appears next to a 500-word piece on the vitally pressing issue of getting a tan.
After having a powow with the commentary editor via e-mail last night that ended rather peacefully, I assumed I could count on my article appearing in the paper free of the conspicuous changes that subtly altered the meaning of my previous articles. Alas, I was wrong.
How many hundreds of thousands of votes did Bush have to win before the media would declare him winner?
Actually, that's not what I wrote. I wrote, By how many hundreds of thousands of votes .... I wasn't talking about Bush's total number of votes, but rather his margin of victory.
But now, thanks to the commentary editor's incompetence, I can expect to receive plenty of gleeful feedback from idiotic liberal students reminding me that President Bush's raw totals are irrelevant -- he still has to beat John Kerry.
And they picked out such a wonderful title: What every happened to unbiased journalism? No, that's not a typo -- at least not by me.
No wonder he does such a lousy job of editing me. He can't even edit himself.
I'm so fed up with this paper, I think I may just quit sending them submissions altogether.
09 November 2004
Written: 11/09/04
Published: Hopefully tomorrow
Marxist worldview can't explain election results
"I am tired of coming to the South and fighting elections on guns, God and gays..."
-- Howard Dean
In 1914, men and women of all classes in virtually every European capital cheered the coming of the Great War, thereby leaving Marxists and communists across Europe utterly confounded as to why working men and women felt a substantially greater affinity for their own neighbors and countrymen than for fellow workers in other nations.
But it's a funny thing about the Marxist outlook. Somewhere along the way, it ceased to be a political ideology and became a de-facto religious faith. As the twentieth century wore on, Marx's prophesy of a world divided along economic fault lines rather than national and cultural ones looked increasingly ridiculous.
Today, though long discredited by history, the Marxist faith continues to thrive. Its faithful would have you believe that it is an ideology for the rational skeptic. Don't be fooled. It is a fanatical religious faith, too fortified against the sway of established history to be considered anything else.
As in 1914 with the dawn of WWI, liberals can't seem to make sense of the conservative electoral victories of last week. Their worldview, rooted in Marxist dogma, simply cannot adequately account for why Americans seem not to care about their "economic interests." Nor can it explain why Republican appeals to cultural values resonated significantly more powerfully than Democratic appeals to a sense of economic victimization.
Not surprisingly, a substantial number of liberal pundits have spent the previous week seething with indignant rage that ordinary Americans are so unwilling to trade away their core cultural and religious values in exchange for economic advantage.
How, they wonder vainly, can Americans care more about "guns, God and gays" than their own "economic interests?"
And so in a twist of poignant irony, the high priests of a faith that holds wealth and greed to be the greatest sins have been reduced to complaining, essentially, that Americans are insufficiently materialistic.
Unbelievable. Their capacity for tolerating their own contradictions seems to have no limit.
Written: 11/04/04
Never Published
Media shamelessly dances to Kerry's fiddle
"What liberal media?"
It has become the classic comeback line for an increasingly unhinged American left in debates regarding the political orientation of the mainstream media. Listen more closely and you'll hear arrogant, shrill lectures that the media exists to serve the institutions of power, that Fox News is a threat to democracy, and other such nonsense.
Well how about this liberal media.
On election night, the networks released a set of exit polls that gave virtually every battleground state to John Kerry. This, of course, proved to be colossally wrong in every respect, and constitutes nothing less than a national scandal of gargantuan proportions.
"It takes a deliberate act of fraud and bias to get an exit poll wrong," wrote former Clinton campaign advisor Dick Morris in a Wednesday piece for the New York Post. "Since the variables of whether or not a person will actually vote are eliminated in exit polling, it is like peeking at the answer before taking the test."
But that's not all.
President Bush won Ohio by roughly 137,000 votes. The Kerry campaign simply decided on its own that, contrary to all reality, the race was still close to call; and the media blindly followed its lead like a company of filthy rats trailing the Pied Piper. Every newspaper across the country, almost without exception, carried the headline that there was no clear winner. Prestigious CNN anchors and analysts continued to bumble about the newsroom in denial as if the election were still undecided.
Yet, in my comprehensive scan of internet media sites, I could never find so much as a single doubt expressed about Senator Kerry's 121,000 vote margin of victory in Pennsylvania, nor his meager 12,000 vote margin of victory in Wisconsin.
Why the double standard? By how many hundreds of thousands of votes must President Bush win before the media will declare him the winner? How mathematically ridiculous must the possibility of a Kerry win become before the media, independent of the Kerry campaign, will finally concede a Bush victory?
08 November 2004
Ran out to Barnes&Noble to get presents for Lynniebeth's birthday. Lynniebeth likes diamonds and "pictures of pretty things." (yay for pretty things!)
So I searched high and low in the store for a book that might have many many pictures of diamonds and jewlery and stuff like that. No luck.
So I got her a kitty book. And Aladdin on DVD. Aladdin is by far the coolest Disney movie. The only one that comes close is The Jungle Book.
On my way out, I stumbled across Kenneth Pollack's new book. Just released.
For those who don't know the name, here's a little background. In September 2002, Pollack, a longtime CIA analyst, released a comprehensive treatise, laying out in great depth the case for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein. It read very much like an insider's report. It was a rare and valuable analysis widely available to the public. Such a thing is not common. Browse the best seller shelves at any given time at the local Barnes&Noble. They are often occupied by works on precisely the same subjects that are frustratingly superficial because they are written by journalists, not intelligence analysts.
The Threatening Storm was both at once the most useful piece of intellectual ammunition for those who advocated invasion and a devastating rebuttal to those who opposed it, ultimately proving to be perhaps the most influential piece of work on the subject during the pre-invasion months that were so characterized by intense debate on the Iraq issue. This book may not have influenced policy directly. But the doves lost the Iraq debate; and they lost because they could not formulate a response to this book.
Pollack just released another work that looks to be equally comprehensive. This time, the subject is Iran.
I've been waiting for something like this for quite some time now. Iran looks to be the next crisis. I had been waiting for an insider's analysis by Pollack or someone like him that might lay out all the available options for dealing with the Iranian crisis.
I've only read the first chapter thus far. Interestingly, you can't just pick up the book and know what policy the author advocates. When you picked up The Threatening Storm, you had but to read the subtitle to discover Pollack's position.
He appears much more subtle on this one, and invasion does not appear to be something he advocates this time around. On the inside flap, there is brief mention of a "diplomatic solution." And in the preface, Pollack discusses at length the primary themes of his book: these include the enormous disparity between Iranian and American views of the other, how each nation came to view the world the way it currently does, and a possible way forward.
I'll probably blog some of my findings here as I continue reading.
05 November 2004
With the election over and us having won, I feel a satisfying sense of closure to the matter, and now I can return to my summer mode of mostly ignoring politics and instead reading silly science fiction novels.
On second thoughts, this seems like an odd attitude to take after just having bought several books on the British/American Empires (and I've gotten almost no reading done on any of them), but nevertheless, I spent a solid portion of the morning reading the first lengthy chapter of Speaker for the Dead. It was good. I don't imagine I'll put it down anytime soon.
If we had lost, I would be too busy mourning and deciding what the loss means for the Republican Party, for the future of the Middle East and for America, and so on. Fortunately, I don't have that problem, and I've really been very much enjoying my internet reading as I lightly scan over the latest pieces by angry, sullen liberal columnists. Van lost a bet to me on the election. We bet a coke on the outcome, and for the duration of the time period leading up to the election, I continuously gave him a good deal of grief about how he was sure to lose. He then declared himself so confident of a Kerry victory that he would actually get me TWO cokes if Bush won.
Holy cow. What a deal. So today, he showed up in class with one coke and one diet coke. The machine ran out of regular cokes, he explained.
My latest diatribe on the media coverage of election night has been turned into an article submission. It's still very much an angry rant and has not yet been published (I submitted it rather late on Wednesday night. Since this newspaper doesn't publish on Mondays and doesn't publish an opinion section on Fridays, that means it won't be published until Tuesday at the earliest). I'd paste it in full here, but I'm in the writing lab and can't access the file here.
I rather enjoy being in the writing lab. I've often found myself chatting online with people at work who are pretending to be working. If there's one nice thing about being in college, I suppose, it's that you never really have to pretend. I'm sitting here in the lab in my pajamas (yes, even my shoes are off) writing a blog entry. I'm not on the payroll. No need to pretend to be working. I have to show up for attendance reasons, but otherwise, there's no need for me to be here. We're supposed to be using this time to work on our projects.
I spent a good portion of yesterday searching for the precious. Yes, the precious (my Return of the King DVD) was lost. At first, I thought some filthy hobbitses stole it. But then I finally managed to locate it and promptly decided that I didn't want to watch it anyway. I went to Best Buy and purchased the extended version of Fellowship instead. A few of the extended scenes were nice additions. But others, I thought, really shouldn't have been added even to the extended version. We definitely could have done without Gandalf engaging in some bizarre, thunderous chant in the language of Mordor at the council of Elrond.
I ran across the recently released Episode III trailer. Real has it. It looks like everything Episode II should have been. I'm sure it won't be on the same level as any of the original trilogy movies. But it'll still be good. That trailer will make you giddy. It'll make it a long, painful wait until May. If you like Star Wars as much as I do, you'll probably watch it at least fifteen times and then offer one of your more possessions as a sacrifice to it.
I think the problem with the new trilogy is that it comes across as deeply unserious. It doesn't seem to take war as a serious thing with serious consequences, and instead treats it all as an innocent adventure -- a game of laser tag rather than a brutal, merciless struggle. After watching Legolas or Frodo wrestle with despair in the LotR movies, there's something almost offensive about watching Anakin flirt with Padame on the battlefield or watching the viceroy of the trade federation yell out, "Shoot her!! Or something!!" And meanwhile, you have a bungling C-3P0 set up to provide a large sense of comic relief to a war scene that is already fraught with flippant lightheartedness.
That, combined with a lack of any strong characters (besides Darth Maul) rounds out the primary reasons why the new trilogy sucks so bad. Potentially, Mace Windu might have been a strong character, but he did little to distinguish himself in either of the first two episodes. He displayed no terribly impressive Jedi skills -- at least none that were unique to him. And as a character, he seemed never to quite unveil his full personality. "This party's over!" was a great line, but it never went further than that. You always got the impression that he was gearing up to say, "I'm a bad mother !@$^*&@!" But he didn't really do much to help the audience identify him that way. Hopefully we'll get more from him in Episode III.
03 November 2004
I just find it a bit odd that none of the major media organizations (a few excepted) can bring themselves to call Ohio for Bush.
That measily 136,000+ vote Bush lead just isn't good enough.
Oh, but Kerry's 103,500 vote lead in Michigan is plenty sufficient to color that state blue.
Likewise, Kerry won Pennsylvania by just 122,000 votes -- easily enough to call it a Kerry win.
It's a complete joke. It's mathematically ridiculous.
By how many hundreds of thousands of votes do we have to win before democrats can be gracious losers?
The Kerry camp simply decided on its own that Ohio was still in play and the media followed his lead like a bunch of rats after the Pied Piper.
Of course Fox News and and MSNBC did call Ohio for Bush, but then suddenly had trouble calling Nevada for Bush since that would have put him over 270. CNN seemed to have no trouble calling Nevada for Bush.
Any person who learned how to add past the fifth grade level can see that this is Bush's race.
02 November 2004
My prediction?
Bush
Ohio
Florida
Iowa
Wisconsin
Nevada
New Mexico
Hawaii
Maine -- Second Congressional District
Kerry
Minnesota
New Hampshire
Pennsylvania
New Jersey
Michigan
Final Count:
Bush: 301
Kerry 237
