:Reasonable Force

That’s for Mr. Gore, the Academy who gave his science fiction film an oscar, Melissa Etheridge, and everyone else who gushed over how Gore has inspired them. I’m being harsh, I know. These people truly believe the “imminent climate disaster” hype, and they truly think we need to ACT NOW to preserve the earth for future generations. But they need to get a clue.

Speaking of which, take the time to swing by Peter C. Glover’s site on Global Warming Hysteria.

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I’m not looking forward to two years of presidential campaigns. I’m also not dead set on who I’ll be voting for, but I am praying that weaselly John McCain, er… I mean, “Great American Hero,” John McCain doesn’t win the Republican primary.

See, I can’t possibly vote for a Democrat, not because I think that the Republican party is a bastion of virtue, but because the Dems are immeasurably worse. Joe Lieberman notwithstanding (or is he independent still?), and values issues aside, they have sought to undermine our war effort at every turn purely for the purpose of gaining political power. Whatever mistakes the Bush administration has made in prosecuting the war, Pelosi, Murtha, and their ilk have repeatedly demonstrated that they either don’t grasp the threat of Islamic fascism, don’t have any concept of how to combat it, haven’t learned the lessons of recent history regarding American withdrawals from conflict (Beirut, Somalia, et al.), or that they are willing to ignore what they know and embolden our enemies for the sake of gaining control of the Congress and a shot at the Presidency.

McCain, however, has turned my stomach on numerous occasions with his “maverick” ways (he and his South Carolina sidekick, Lindsay Graham), most recently when he slammed the former SecDef, Donald Rumsfeld. He went after VP Cheney as well, who was asked about it in an interview with ABC News.

Cheney also responded to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who said in a recent interview with the Politico newspaper that, “The president listened too much to the vice president. … Of course, the president bears the ultimate responsibility, but he was very badly served by both the vice president and, most of all, the secretary of defense.”

“I just fundamentally disagree with John,” Cheney told ABC News. “John said some nasty things about me the other day, and then next time he saw me ran over to me and apologized. Maybe he’ll apologize to [former Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld.”

Cheney strongly disagreed with McCain’s recent statement that Rumsfeld was “one of the worst defense secretaries ever.”

“I think he did a superb job in terms of managing the Pentagon under extraordinarily difficult circumstance,” Cheney said. “He and John had a number of dust-ups over policy — didn’t have anything to do with Iraq. John is entitled to his opinion. I just think he is wrong.”

I think John McCain is wrong too. I just pray I don’t wind up having to vote for him to keep Democrats out of the White House.

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If you don’t pay attention to sports news you may not have heard about the former NBA player (John Amaechi) who recently revealed his homosexuality and the other former NBA player (Tim Hardaway) who avowed his hatred of “gay people” when asked about Amaechi during a radio interview. Actually, you’ve probably heard something about it if you’ve read/heard/watched any news at all.

I’ve been listening to numerous sports personalities from athletes, owners, and commissioners, to sports journalists and talk show hosts holding forth on the contemptible and unenlightened position illustrated by Hardaway and lauding the courage and gentility of Amaechi in the face of such naked “bigotry.” Callers or other commenters to these programs who have dared to digress from politically correct thought are routinely mocked as likewise bigoted, small-minded, or (my personal favorite) unevolved. Granted, most of the calls I’ve heard have done less than a stellar job of presenting well-reasoned arguments, but have either appealed to the Bible without being prepared to deal with the inherent difficulties (more on that later), or simply asserted the “natural wrongness” of homosexuality, which I think there’s something to, but it’s not very persuasive against a mindset that has accepted gayness as just another trait like race or left-handedness.
(more…)

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As you should see in my “Currently Reading” link on the upper right, I’m reading Susan Wise Bauer’s
The Well-Educated Mind. Billing itself as “A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had,” I’m hopeful that this book will help me make some headway against one of my biggest hindrances; an untrained mind.

I’ve always enjoyed reading. Yet I have never learned to discipline the mind to serious reading; that is, wrestling with worthy literature in order to first apprehend its ideas, analyze its logic or illogic, and then to formulate my own conclusions.

Instead I have settled into reading largely for entertainment, often reading the same books over again for the simple enjoyment of them. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with revisiting a favorite, but it hardly exercises the mind.

With nonfiction, I read primarily for facts. Where ideas are put forth, I usually find myself immediately trying to decide whether or not I agree with them. This, according to Bauer, is a misstep:

Classically educated students know that this pattern (learn facts; analyze them; express your opinions about them) applies to all later learning. But if you haven’t been classically educated, you may not recognize that these three separate steps also apply to reading. It is impossible to analyze on a first reading; you have to grasp a book’s central ideas before you can evaluate them. And after you’ve evaluated—asking, “Are the ideas presented accurately? Are the conclusions valid?”—you can ask the final set of questions: What do you think about these ideas? Do you agree or disagree? Why?

Classrooms too often skip the first two steps and progress directly to the third, which is why so many elementary texts insist on asking six-year-olds how they feel about what they’re learning, long before they’ve properly had a chance to learn it. This mental short cut has become a habit for many adults, who are ready to give their opinions long before they’ve had a chance to understand the topic under study. (Listen to any call-in radio show.) [emphasis mine... and I would add, "read the preponderance of blogs and message boards!]

In addition to helping a reader develop the habits needed both to tackle weighty material and to glean the greatest benefit from what is read, the book provides a self-education starting point with reading lists in five categories: novel, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry.

I find myself far more willing at thirty-eight to engage the so-called “classics” than earlier in my life. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment was probably my first dip into this ocean, and I found that I enjoyed it thoroughly despite the glaring absence of either a magic ring or faster-than-light travel!

First on the novel list is Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which the back cover says was “Voted the Greatest Book of All Time by the Nobel Institute.”

I’m rather eager to get started! As with everything I become interested in, however, the follow-through is the test.

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Hat tip to blestwithsons, my Numenorean sister. I won’t lie… my preferences probably shaded my results, but I’ve always identified with the elves. Not the Rivendel lot so much… a bit too merry, but definitely the Lorien type.

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?

Elvish
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