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The good die young.

Summing up "Lost"

I'm not a Lost fan, but my wife is, so I asked her "What happened?" and she told me. I just listened with the emotion of a court stenographer, not even pretending to care about the idiotic characters left. (I'll never understand killing off Michelle Rodriguez so early. Why not give the axe to some unmemorable blonde? That was when I completely lost interest, but I digress....) I had a two followup questions for her, first off, what happened to Hurley? She told me that Hurley became the keeper of the island, or whatever. So... neat.

My second followup question was "What was the point?" I don't think she knew what the point was, except that she told me that everyone ends up in a church at the end--whether they had died or not--and they have a big group discussion to try to figure it all out. To me, that's almost perfect. For the perfect way to sum up the series, we must go to the Solomon of our times, the Great Jack Handey of "Deep Thoughts" fame:

I think a good novel would be where a bunch of men on a ship are looking for a whale. They look and look, but you know what? They never find him. And you know why they never find him? It doesn't say. The book leaves it up to you, the reader, to decide. Then, at the very end, there's a page you can lick and it tastes like Kool-Aid. (Source)

"There's a page you can lick and it tastes like Kool-Aid." That's what Lost means to me. If you disagree, then great! It's wonderful that we can all have our own points of view and the world is beautiful. Or ugly, whatever you're into.

It's really easy to start a story and really hard to end it. So my hat is off to the Lost creators: they made a lot of money selling advertising and aborted the thing before it got any sillier.



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"Reading helps you know what you're talking about."

Too funny. H/T Redstate.

Kudos to the frog puppet for doing this. My guess is that he'll suffer a lot of ostracism in the puppet community for taking the gig for a conservative issue commercial. Most puppets are hard core leftists.

OK, I know what you're thinking. The frog looks a little like McCain. Go ahead--admit it.

I like how disappointed the frog looks when he finds out Holder et al didn't read the law.

Phil Orenstein's Open Letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg Regarding the Ground Zero Mosque

Source. Here's the complete text:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
City Hall
New York, NY 10007

Dear Mayor Bloomberg,

This letter is addressed to the mayor as well as to all public elected officials in New York City to recognize the only reasonable action to take for the City of New York and for all the people of America. In the name of righteousness and common sense, I demand that you to speak out in opposition to the proposed mosque, the 13-story Islamic Cultural Center called the Cordoba House, just a stone’s throw away from Ground Zero where the former World Trade Towers crumbled into dust on September 11, 2001 along with nearly 3000 New Yorkers.

The opening date for the Ground Zero mosque is September 11, 2011, the 10 year anniversary of the horrific terrorist attack which is seared into the memory of all Americans and directly touches the lives of every New Yorker through friends, family or co-workers who perished on that day. As long as we have memory that sustains us, we will never forget the horrific tragedy, and we emphatically oppose the construction of any mosque on the hallowed grounds where our fellow New Yorkers and loved ones were murdered in the horrific plot by 19 Muslim terrorist hijackers. This is not a freedom of religion issue. It is an issue of speaking out in name of righteousness. We have no objections to the construction of mosques. But why at Ground Zero? By the same token, who would allow the symbolic ignominy of a Shinto shrine commemorating Emperor Hirohito at Pearl Harbor with the opening day of December 7th?

The proposed mosque, a joint venture of the Cordoba Initiative and the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), is presided over by its founder, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf who paid $4.85 million for the building in December 2009. His bogus claim that the money came from New York Muslim contributors needs to be investigated. Where did the $4.85 million come from and above all who is footing the bill for the projected $100 million cost of the project? According to a New York Post report, the founding organizations have accounted for only a fraction of the projected costs and it’s likely that wealthy Saudi benefactors will pick up the tab. The 2009 financial statement of Rauf’s organization, ASMA, shows that they received large donations from foreign sources, including $576,312 from Qatar, a nation notorious for funding international terrorism.

As mayor of the greatest city in the U.S., you as well as all public elected officials need to take a stand as Mayor Rudy Giuliani did in 2001. He rejected the $10 million donation for September 11th relief efforts from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal after the prince suggested that United States’ foreign policies contributed to the 9-11 attacks, in a statement warning that the United States "must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack." Imam Rauf, with his deceptively “moderate” demeanor, also made a similar assertion about one week before the Saudi prince. On the CBS News broadcast of 60 Minutes on September 30, 2001, Rauf said: “…United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened…Because we have been accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, in the most direct sense Osama bin-Laden is made in the U.S.A."

Imam Rauf will predictably follow in the radical tradition of his father, Dr. Muhammad Abdul Rauf and his Islamic expansionist plans for building mosques and Islamic centers in New York City. Dr. Rauf senior built the Islamic Cultural Center on 96th St. purchasing prime Manhattan real estate and completing the massive project with funding from 46 Islamic nations including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Libya. Is it any wonder why Imam Rauf is hiding the funding sources for the purchase of the building for the mosque at Ground Zero? It is unconscionable that the Ground Zero mosque will have similar funding sources, including Saudi Arabia, which produced 15 of the 19 terrorist hijackers, and continues to finance jihad operations world-wide.

The greatest insult to the memories of our fellow New Yorkers who perished on 9/11 is the scandal that after 10 years, Ground Zero remains a gaping hole in the ground while construction for the new World Trade Center is being pushed back many more years and perhaps decades. Now a 13-story mosque at Ground Zero whose imam blames America for the terrorist attacks, will be completed within one year.

I call on the mayor of the great City of New York and all our elected officials to take a public stand and end this national disgrace. Terminate plans at once for the construction of the Ground Zero mosque.

Sincerely,

Phil Orenstein

Nothing here with which to disagree, nothing to add. Except... well, wouldn't it be ironic if the Islamists do build their big mosque and somebody sort of blows it up with a bomb or a missile or something? Just saying.

An embarrassing start

Boy, I hope this Rand Paul idiot wins the Kentucky Senate race. So far he is tripping on his own feet, and stepping on his own.... anyway. He's flubbing up on no-brainers like the 1964 Civil Rights Act just to preserve his libertarian street cred. And what will that buy him at a desegregated lunch counter? And then he gripes "where's my honeymoon" to George Stephanopoulos. Embarrassing.

Rand Paul is living in the same fantasy land inhabited by paleoconservatives and other troglodytes―the grad student late night bullshit session. Like Pat Buchanan the Brilliant who never won a single election. You are running for a powerful political office, buddy. Better get your game face on. The victim card is not attractive and neither is the image of you being eaten in November because you refuse to shed your inane libertarian purity.

Unhappy Friendings

There has been much ink, electronic and otherwise, spilled on the problems caused by social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, et al. Some points made are insightful and relevant in my opinion, hence my Living Out Loud posts. Others verge on Reefer Madness-like hysteria. So I try to limit how much I opine about social media. If you use these things in accord with their nature then I believe they cannot be very harmful. But it is possible that for many people, understanding the true nature of "social media" may be extremely difficult.

I think one of the problems with Facebook is the use of the word "friend". To become someone's friend on Facebook means that you're willing to share information on your Facebook page with that person. That's all. It doesn't mean anything more or less than that, and there is no alternate meaning. There might be a strong correlation between those who constitute one's real friends and one's Facebook friends, just like there is a strong correlation between religious people and people who protest against abortion. But to be religious and to protest abortion have two separate meanings. Likewise, a "Facebook friend" and a real friend are two very different things, and when the definition of "Facebook friend" is explained as I did above, it is not difficult for the reasonable person to see the difference.

By the way, this is why I prefer the LinkedIn.com site to Facebook. On LinkedIn, you "invite people to connect", you don't make a "friend request". Thus the terminology is much closer to the actual process which is one of granting access privileges.

Most people intuitively realize that posting things on the internet and letting certain people see what you posted has very little to do with friendship. So some might argue that I'm belaboring the point here. Really, isn't this obvious? But I think we need to go beyond intuition about this, especially if we are raising kids and have to explain to them, for example, why we don't publish family secrets or personally criticize someone on a Facebook page. As we know, what is obvious to adults is not necessarily obvious to children. And since social media was not around when we were growing up, our first impression of it will definitely be very different than that of our children.

To further clarify the difference between friendship and friending―that's the shorthand I'll use: an actual English noun for real-world friends and a stupid made-up verb for Facebook friendeds―is that there are many types of friendships between people in the world and yet really only one type of friending on Facebook. You are either friended with someone or you are not. Furthermore most of my friends are people whose friendship was never formally requested. For the most part, the question "Would you be my friend?" ceases to be cute around age 10 and begins to sound awkward and strained, to put it mildly. But this request is formally made in the friending process. And a friended person can see all of the friended's friendeds. This assuredly leads to problems among highschoolers. Imagine when Charlene finds out you're friends with Brittany. I mean... no one likes her. But the problem may be worse for older people. To take one aspect, I'll give you one word: photos. "Wow, she did not age well, did she?" Need I say more.

Thinking about the different kinds of friends one may have is what led me to write this post, along with thoughts about how someone with a propensity for "intelligence-gathering" (i.e., gossip) could glean quite a bit from your other friends' posts on your Facebook page. And those thoughts were initiated by a Facebook friend request from someone I know from long ago whose friend request I've decided to ignore. The ironic thing is that I wouldn't mind sitting down with this person―who happens to be female, not an ex-girlfriend―and drinking a cup of coffee and chatting with her. This would be a way to live charity, and I could fill up an hour or even two with innocuous conversation, although most of it would be listening to her run her mouth.

However it would be a disservice to myself and to everyone connected to me on Facebook were I to accept her request. When I knew her, she was an unrepentant gossip with a strong tendency toward exhibitionism, and the contents of the personalized invitation which she sent me demonstrates that she has most likely not changed. So it would probably be a disservice to her as well. Drinking a cup of coffee and making small talk with her would involve less sharing and be far less intimate than friending on Facebook, even though I barely use the service. I don't think I have to cite examples of the kind of stuff she was known for; everyone here knows her type.

I think that most mature users of social media realize these things. Let's not forget that it's up to us to point them out to the younger generation.

Informative

Ho hum....

Neat.

Two Moroccan students who attended a university in the central Italian city of Perugia were expelled from the country last month after it was discovered that they were conspiring to kill Pope Benedict. One of them allegedly said he wished to “earn a place in Paradise.”

According to Italian weekly newspaper Panorama, conversations intercepted by Italian authorities led to the arrest and deportation of the two suspects.

The order for expulsion reportedly included the transcript of a conversation in which one of the students, Mohammed Hlal, said that he wished “death to the head of the Vatican City State” and was "ready to assassinate him to earn a place in Paradise."

The 26-year-old Hlal was speaking over the phone with 22-year-old Ahmed Errahmouni when he made the statements which earned them the attention of the local police and a trip back to Morocco.

They were deemed a “threat to national security” in the document signed by the Italian Minister of the Interior and expelled on April 29, Panorama reports.

According to an investigation begun last October by the Italian anti-mafia police, the two were known to have a radical vision of Islam and had expressed a desire to obtain explosive materials. It was reported that no material used to construct explosives was found in their residence hall rooms.

But all religions are the same, right? I mean, those two Mormon kids walking down the street could be preparing to go whack some Baptist televangelist. And the two Hasids coming out of that bank―I'll be awfully surprised if another sundown passes without seeing them stabbing a Quaker.

Hlal studied international communications, while Errahmouni was a student of math and physics at the University of Perugia.

Wait... not poor and down-trodden? Not ignorant and uneducated? What?