29 June 2010

Plato got it ...

"The price good men pay for indifference to publiuc affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

Nice to know

who's running things.

23 June 2010

Interesting stuff

about memory and how it works.

and another piece from the same site about how opinions are formed.

22 June 2010

Malice and Incompetence

from Jerry Pournelle. Says he (I'm paraphrasing):
  • President Obama is and always has been a liberal socialist.
  • Probably this doesn't make him malicious.
  • It does put him in direct conflict with the US Constitution which generally emphasizes individual (and state's) rights over collectivism.
  • The upcoming election will be very important.

Despite strong (decent, at least) showing in the World Cup

Some expect U.S. men's soccer to decline going forward due to the shrinking number of NCAA Division I Men's soccer programs.
I guess time will tell.
My impression is that soccer is still a growing sport in the U.S. and skilled, passionate players don't necessarily have to go to college (particularly Division I schools) to wind up playing professionally somewhere. As anyone who watches the World Cup knows, it doesn't matter where a person plays professionally when it comes to fielding national teams.

13 June 2010

Uh-oh

I just got an email from the UN Secretary General that I have an overdue payment ... I better get right on that.

09 June 2010

You know what they say about learning from history ...

Walter Russell Mead discusses the role that peace activists and appeasers played in creating political environments that led to genocides and pogroms in the 20th century.

Fortunately the destructive doves weren't able to fool FDR about the Nazis.  "You can't turn a tiger into a kitten by stroking it," he once said — but the pious nincompoops and delusional intellectuals were persuasive enough here and abroad so that France, Britain and the United States were unable to step while Hitler was still weak and prevent World War Two by enforcing the peace.

Had these people wised up and supported moderate programs of rearmament in the early 1930s and insisted that the western democracies take a stand against Hitler early on, there would have been no Nuremberg Laws, no Holocaust, no mass terror bombings of European cities, no Stalinist occupation of central Europe — and no Cold War.

Morally of course this was nowhere near as bad as what the Nazis and Communists did.  The peaceniks didn't will the slaughter of millions of innocent people: out of ignorance and conceit they merely created the conditions which let it happen.  But while the peace movement wasn't as evil as the dictators, the dictators could never have achieved their goals without their sanctimonious and timorous enablers in the western world.

 
It is just not true, historically speaking, that 'peace movements' lead to peace or, for that matter, support policies that will bring peace.  More often than not, the opposite is true.  Winston Churchill was a grizzled old British imperialist of the worst kind, but if Britain had listened to him instead of to its peace campaigners in the 1930s there most likely would never have been either a World War Two or Cold War.
You don't get peace just by talking about it and wishing for it.

Hopefully we're not doomed to repeat this lesson.

03 June 2010

quote for the day

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote,"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."

01 June 2010

If I were ever in a position

to fund a multi-billion dollar foundation, I hope that I wouldn't name it after myself ...

A parent's

nightmare