I recently saw the movie Munich. If you don’t know, it begins with the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which a group of Palestinian terrorists took hostage and eventually killed 11 members of the Israeli team. The movie follows the team of Israeli assassins who were dispatched to kill the principle planners of the Munich attack. The events of the Munich attack itself unfold in sequential flashbacks interspersed throughout the movie.

Munich is powerful and worth seeing because the film’s director, Spielberg, did something unusual: he made every person in the film human. You might expect that with the ‘good guys,’ the team of Israeli agents. But Spielberg also does this for the ‘bad guys.’

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Congress passed and the President signed a law which makes it illegal to send email or post messages on a website with intent to “annoy,” if you hide your real identity. (link)

*cough* unconstitutional *cough*

In Colorado, you can get a ticket if you have a child riding in the car and you don’t have seat belt or child seat that is approved for a child of that age by the federal government. However, it is entirely legal to let that kid ride unrestrained in the bed of a pickup truck (if the child is five or older), or on the back of a motorcycle without a helmet.

Way to earn those paychecks, law-makers.

“Elsewhere, a new report shows that China now has the fourth largest economy in the world, after the United States, Japan, and Vice President Dick Cheney.” — Borowitz Report.

Yes, that is how long I’ve been out of the womb.

I don’t really have anything to say. That seems to be my problem lately. I had such great plans for this blog, but somewhere along the way I got interested in a new video game or two, a couple new career ideas (no, I didn’t switch), the plot for a novel, and well, now it’s nearly Christmas. I have nothing to show for my time but a couple high scores, a great first chapter, and a wife who thinks I’m inconsistent.

So I guess I’ll just blather about what’s on my mind, and see what happens.

The tension between idealism and realism - it’s been on my mind since Amnesty International ripped the US a hole for Guantanamo. I wrote a couple bitter posts about that. In short, I wonder how we can justify abusing one group-of-people’s inalienable human rights in order to protect our own; to put it another way: if America is supposedly about values, rather than mere survival, why are we compromising those values in order to survive? (1) (2)

And recently, as you no doubt know, it has been reported that the CIA operates clandestine prisons around the world to help us in our attempt to forstall future terrorist attacks. And it’s probably true.

But I’m also a realist. A friend of mine, after reading one of those posts, asked, So, how are we supposed to get information out of these people? Ask them nicely?

Half of me wants to suggest that if we believe there are certain inalienable rights - which logically would apply to all humans everywhere - then we should be willing to suffer and die rather than compromise the rights of other people to survive. The other part of me remembers that we fought the Revolutionary War - which probably involved many rights abuses on both sides - in the name of those values. And surely every war since that one has been the same? What does that mean? I’m not sure.

It’s like the whole debate over Truman’s decision to drop the A-Bomb. Or rather, what’s missing from the debate. The significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not the massive loss of life, but rather the fact that each required a single bomb, rather than thousands. We had been intentionally bombing civilian population centers in Japan and Europe for a while, killing hundreds of thousands at a time, before those two. We were the good guys: we did it because we hoped that the catastrophic loss of human life - innocent civilian men, women and children - would break our enemies’ will to fight.

Maybe, then, you can justify using torture to extract information via the same logic?

The tricky bit is that you can also justify terrorism by the same logic. What is terrorism, after all, but killing innocent people in order to win a war? If a terrorist’s cause is just, then his suicide bombing is certainly no worse than, say, our fire-bombing of Dresden or Tokyo. The terrorists certainly believe their cause to be just.

In the end, the only thing that seperates us from our terrorist enemies is the rightness of our cause, and the wrongness of theirs. I know their cause is evil. I’m pretty sure ours is mostly good. But I think that at very least we need to be constantly examining what we are fighting and why. There is nothing pretty or nice about the things we are doing - so we better be doing them for the right reasons.

Please, dear reader, tell me what you think. The floor is open. All comments are welcome.

I wandered smack-dab into another good blog: Less Idiots. I take my hat off to him for his latest post: In a nutshell, he eschews labels like “liberal” and “conservative” and judges each issue individually. I couldn’t agree more. The primary reason I stopped working for the Leadership Institute in DC (and sold out to Corporate America) was that I found myself surrounded by people whose only goals in life were (a) to be ideologically-correct Conservatives, (b) to beat the Liberals, and (c) to find other ideologically-correct Conservatives and sleep with them.

Most everyone (including me) acted like we were engaged in a massive spectator sport between Good and Evil. Everything “Right” was good, and the “Left” was assumed to be a cross between the Oakland Raiders, the Communist Party, and The Empire.

Never mind that Right and Left had far more in common than, say, Left and Commie, or that most of the people we were fighting were people just like us who wanted the best for America.

At least I hope that’s what we wanted. Nobody actually “discussed” what was good for America. That had already been established. Conservative was Good. All that was left to be determined was the correct Conservative stance on any particular issue, so that we could make sure we agreed and know who our enemies were.

I have no doubt that it was the same for the other side. People are people, and this appears to be what we do.

I wish that our politics really were about figuring out the best way to solve our shared problems. Until then, I’m grateful to live under a system of government that allows us to go about fighting our ideological wars without killing each other.

Just when you think Pat Robertson can’t say anything dumber and less Jesus-like, he outdoes himself. If you haven’t heard, here’s a recap. The school board of Dover, PA, has been attempting to include “Intelligent Design” in the science curriculum. The voters responded by electing a new school board this week. Pat Robertson, speaking on his TV show, The 700 Club, had this to say:

I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city…. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there.

Pat. Please. You’re not helping. Do you really think God speaks to you because you have a TV show? (Do you really think that God cares more about the school curriculum in Dover than he does about the rampant greed and materialism in the whole country?)

Somebody help Pat find the nursing home, please.

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper today announced that the state capitol building had been seized by the City and County of Denver and would be converted to lofts. “The Capitol was one of the few old buildings in Denver that hadn’t yet been converted to lofts,” said Hickenlooper. “It was really only a matter of time.”

Hickenlooper went on to say that the seizure was entirely legal thanks to this year’s US Supreme Court ruling on eminent domain. “The land has already been rezoned, and the city is taking bids from developers. Naturally, we will compensate the State government for the value of the property. Probably in Wynkoop Brewery Gift Cards.”

When pressed for comment, Colorado Governor Bill Owens shrugged. “The building was full of Democrats, anyway.”

The fight over C and D really revealed the great philosophical divide between the “small government” folks and everyone else. I believe most Coloradoans saw TABOR as a means of forcing the government to be careful with our tax dollars. Now, most of us wonder whether, with TABOR in place, we can pay for schools and roads and important social programs.

The small government crowd didn’t and doesn’t want government involved in those things in the first place. The draconian effects of the “ratchet-down” mechanism that occurred because of our recession, though surprising to the rest of us, were not an oversight. They were part of an intentional strategy to achieve small-government policy objectives that would have been impossible to achieve directly.

I’m sitting in bed with my wife, blogging. My cat is eating my ice cream, which is one of the reasons I have intestinal parasites.

Speaking of parasites, I’m very put out by the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said this week that Israel should be wiped from the map.

I think we should all be encouraged by the unanimous and strong denunciations of this statement by the rest of the Islamic world, except that they haven’t said a damn thing.

Like most unpatriotic non-Republicans, I’m actually in favor of trying to get along with everyone, as long as they’re interested in doing the same. But this is over the top. The Muslim world is really starting to piss me off. Oh, I know, the Christian world has done many terrible thing over the years. But we’ve also done a lot of good, too. We’ve brought universities, hospitals and Brittany Spears to other parts of the world for hundreds of years. Name one good thing that Muslims have given the rest of the world. Other than our system of numbers. And harem pants.

All I know is that the blogging community won’t sit quietly. Oh no. We will blog about this. We will say many nasty things about Mr. Ahmadiwhatever and his stupid backwards country. And they will be very, very sorry.