born live love die

When I was a soldier, there was a saying that had something to do with urine and rain.  It was used when one person would say something to another person that was intended to shade the truth.  The receiver of that communication would respond with something like this: “Don’t piss on my boot and tell me it’s raining.”  There were variations on this saying, but they all communicated the ideas that 1) the thing bearing reference was similar to the truth but not true, and 2) the speaker was not going to accept it as true.  The saying was usually used by a sergeant when talking to someone of equal or lower rank.

Another celebrity divorce flitted across the wire today.  Karl Rove and his wife Darby are divorcing after 24 years.  Rove is a celebrity in the area of political theater.  He was a star player for many years but has seen a diminished role in recent years.

The thing that made me think of my days as a sergeant was this:

A family friend told POLITICO: “After 24 years of marriage, many of which were spent under incredible stress and strain during the White House years, the Roves came to a mutual decision that they would end the marriage. They did spend Christmas together with their son, and they plan to spend time together in the future. They maintain a strong friendship, and they both feel that that friendship is a source of comfort and inspiration for their friends and family.”

Knowing what I know about marriage, I think that what happened was that Karl Rove was dipping his wick in places other than Darby.  It ruined the trust and respect that a marriage needs in order to function.  He did it because he is a selfish person.  That won’t change.  This marriage has probably been over for many years and the last couple of years were spent figuring out how to end it.

This bears examination:

They maintain a strong friendship, and they both feel that that friendship is a source of comfort and inspiration for their friends and family.

If that friendship inspires friends and family to do anything, I sense a crime wave about to start in Texas.

Yeah, it isn’t rain.

Pat Lang is an interesting person and I read his blog every week.  I loved this:

Ayn Rand and Jean Jacques Rousseau have much to answer for.

Rousseau for his inspiration of the line of thought that lead inexorably to Lenin, etc.

Ayn Rand has inspired the flowering of an unbridled selfishness that corrupts endlessly.

Investment bankers, unashamed of their looting of the economy, they are the new heroes of popular imagination.  “Greed is good,” Gordon Gecko proclaimed.  “We do the Lord’s work here,” the head of Goldman Sachs announced.  Can anyone doubt that the endless corruption of US Congressmen in the lobbying trade is inspired by other than Ayn Rand’s obsession with self above all else?

All those people who spend their lives in the service of others are thought to be “suckers” by the Ayn Rand crowd, suckers or those who not clever enough to be truly venal.

The country is largely served by people who are depised by the “objectivists.”  How long can that last?  pl

What he said.

I saw Avatar with Bookzilla and JMan on Christmas. There were some really small kids in the theater. There was a level of action in this movie that I don’t think is appropriate for very small children.

After leaving the theater, I wanted to talk about the movie alot. Not that there is a lot to talk about. The plot is pretty predictable. But the visuals are stunning. I saw it in 3D. Sometimes in 3D movies, the light from the screen will reflect off the front of the glasses of the people behind me and then into my glasses. It appears as a flicker in my peripheral vision. We sat in the back row of the theater and there was no flicker.

A run time of 2.40, plus trailers is a long time. I don’t think that there was two hours and forty minutes of narrative to be had in the movie.

But it was a visual treat.

I watched this with the kids last night and we talked about it afterward.  The movie is a fictionalized account of drug raids in Texas that targeted black people living in housing projects.

The drug raids were based on the testimony of a single informant.  The criminal case fell apart and one woman, at the behest of the ACLU, sued the district attorney.  The case was settled out of court and the law in Texas was changed so that indictments could not be issued on the testimony of a single informant.

Bookzilla and JMan were very uncomfortable while watching this movie.  The movie is not one sided.  Some of the characters are too neatly drawn.

We talked about the movie and much of the discussion was about the powers of the district attorney.  The kids seemed to think that district attorneys had too much power.  I didn’t lead, or at least I didn’t try to lead them, to this position.

Atom Egoyan’s movie, Adoration, has a lot in common with the scripts I have written where, half way through, I would throw them away, thinking that no one would want to watch that particular pile of convoluted, narcissistic crap.

This movie isn’t a bad movie.  But I’ll never get those two hours back.

There are pitched battles going on in Iran between police and demonstrators.

Iranian police opened fire on protesters in Tehran on Sunday, killing at least four people, including a nephew of the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi, as vast crowds of demonstrators flooded the streets of cities across Iran and fiercely fought security forces, according to witnesses and opposition Web sites.

The ruling clique fears democracy and they are right to fear it.  Democracy will be the end of their religion.  Democracy is agnostic at best, atheistic at worst.

Democracy is rule of the people.  Religionists want a theocracy, because then they get to rule.  Religionists want power, less to dispense justice, but more to exercise power.  Exercising power is always self justifying.

I coerced the kids into watching part of a PBS Frontline show about the beginnings of Christianity.  I led a discussion about the show afterward.  I talked about the political environment at the time of Jesus birth.  I then made the startling claim that the development of democracy was tied to the development of Protestant Christianity.

I have long held that the development of the scientific method could not be separated from monotheism.   Central to the core of monotheism is the idea that the world has order and that that order is knowable.

Protestant Christianity was a political statement.  The statement was that Man did not need an intercessory to God.  Man could approach God directly.  It paired rights with responsibilities.  It said that Man was responsible for his actions and led directly to organizing political structures that could fulfill those responsibilities.

One of the lessons of history is that religious rulers are poorly equipped to dispense justice.  They are very good at dispensing vengeance, but not justice.  The idea that they can build a just society is written in hubris, but then they are not alone in that endeavor.  Democratic political processes are also written in hubris, but it is hubris of many colors, none of them holy.

I would pray for the people in Iran, if I were a praying man.  So I write in my meaningless blog instead.

The high holy men if Iran are right to fear democracy because they will lose their positions of power, prestige and privilege.

Vic Chestnutt died.  He was in a coma after having taken on overdose of muscle relaxants.  The NY Times obituary didn’t say if the overdose was purposeful or accidental.  I’m thinking that it was probably more the former than the latter.

Mr. Chesnutt had a cracked, small voice but sang with disarming candor about a struggle for peace in a life filled with pain. A car crash at age 18 left him partly paralyzed, and he performed in a wheelchair.

The accident, he has said, focused him as a songwriter, and it became the subject of some of his earliest recordings. “I’m not a victim/Oh, I am an atheist,” Mr. Chesnutt sang in “Speed Racer,” from his first album, “Little,” produced by Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and released in 1990.

A documentary, “Speed Racer: Welcome to the World of Vic Chesnutt,” was released in 1993, and in 1996 his songs were performed by Madonna, the Indigo Girls, Smashing Pumpkins, R.E.M. and others for “Sweet Relief II: The Gravity of the Situation,” an album that benefited the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, a nonprofit group that offers musicians medical support.

I saw that documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994.  I thought that his music did all that art was supposed to do.  It provided a connection to things that I had not experienced, a context for understanding things that I sometimes see and a picture of a person who was trying to understand life and covey that understanding to others.  There are people who call themselves ‘artists’, but they are just so many narcissistic breathers, for whom art functions as a way of drawing attention to themselves so that they may further the goal of  participation in sensate ritual.

He sings about suicide in “Flirted With You All My Life,” from his recent album “At the Cut,” describing death as a lover he must break up with because his accomplishments in life are incomplete:

When you touched a friend of mine I thought I would lose my mind

But I found out with time that really, I was not ready, no no, cold death

Oh death, I’m really not ready.

I think that maybe life just became too much for him.

This is kind of a one note concerto, but it made me laugh.

So, we have these drones that we can send in via remote control to hostile parts of the world and not risk the lives of military personnel.  Sounds like a great idea, right?

Except for the fact that the video downlink is unencrypted and can be tapped.

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Data encryption needs two thing: hardware to do the encryption and a key management system for distributing keys.  The hardware would take time to implement and test.  Shipping keys around the world so that all of the right people can listen in on video is a pain.  The military already does it for all of their other communications, it seems like this should have been done.

And we knew about this when?

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it, the officials said.

Yeah, like the stupid militants don’t talk to each other?  Mitigate that arrogance, chump.

Al Franken wants to tell the truth.  You can see his passion for that.  And he gets mad.  You can see that.

I feel that way also.