Year: 2006

Believing In God

Some people believe in God…
You can’t but respect their beliefs even if they don’t coincide with yours…

Some people don’t believe in God…
You can’t but respect their right to believe what they think is fact…

And then there are some people who don’t want to believe in God… Meaning, they believe in God, but they don’t want to… They try to convince themselves that God doesn’t exist… For different reasons… Mainly not to feel guilty for whatever wrong they’re doing…
People like that simply can’t earn your respect…

The 10 Best Books of 2006

A list of the 10 best books of 2006 compiled by the NY Times:

– Absurdistan (Gary Shteyngart)

– The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (Amy Hempel)

– The Emperor’s Children (Claire Messud)

– The Lay of the Land (Richard Ford)

– Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Marisha Pessl)

– Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir (Danielle Trussoni)

– The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Lawrence Wright)

– Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (Nathaniel Philbrick)

– The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Michael Pollan)

– The Places In Between (Rory Stewart)

Some of these books sound very interesting and will sure be on my to-read list.

[Source: NY Times]

Casino Royale & James Bond

I must be one of the biggest James Bond fans; I grew up watching and enjoying James Bond movies, and have seen every single one of them multiple times.

My favourite Bond remains to this very day Sean Connery, followed by Pierce Brosnan; I think they embodied the character better than all the others.
My worst Bond was George Lazenby, I think a lot of people agree with me on that, the guy was just plain boring.

With “Casino Royale”, a new Bond is introduced to us, and the story takes us back to the beginnings of James Bond, just as he became a double-O agent.

When it was announced that Daniel Craig would be the new James Bond, a blond one, a lot of people were unhappy about it, and I myself was skeptical and thought it was a bad decision.

Anyway after watching “Casino Royale” yesterday, I can see that we were mostly wrong, Daniel Craig is a really good Bond; not the Bond we’re used to, but more of a Bond in the making, which is really interesting.

The movie basically has no gadgets at all, has some great action sequences, which are pretty realistic compared to what we’re used to in other Bond movies, it is also very interesting visually, and well to keep it short, it’s not a regular James Bond movie. In fact, somewhere along the movie, you do get a sense that it’s not a 007 movie at all, but then you’re reminded that this is the making-of and that this is how Bond became what he is, and the end emphasizes that, especially closing with the Bond theme which didn’t appear anywhere else in the movie.

I’m guessing I’ll have to watch the movie again to better appreciate it as a James Bond movie and to have it fit in with the other ones, but even after the first time, I really like it and I do recommend seeing it.

I’ll have to see another James Bond movie with Daniel Craig in it before I can properly place him within my top Bonds list, but now I’m more confident he’ll do a really good job.

My score for this movie would be: 8/10.

George W. Bush Only Fifth Worst US President

So, believe it or not, there were worse presidents in the US…

It’s unfair to claim that George W. Bush is the worst president of all time. He’s merely the fifth worst. In the White House Hall of Shame, Bush comes behind four other Oval Officers whose policies were even more disastrous: James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and James Madison.

[…]

… he will be remembered for the Iraq conflict for generations, long after tax-cut-driven deficits, No Child Left Behind and comprehensive immigration reform are forgotten. The fact that Bush followed the invasion of Afghanistan, which had sheltered al-Qaeda, with the toppling of Saddam Hussein, will puzzle historians for centuries. It is as though, after Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR had asked Congress to declare war on Argentina.

[Source: Washington Post]

Heaven On Earth

I remember when I was a child, at that age when we start to think about the world around us and analyze the different things we’re taught without any limits or taboos to restrict us; one of my thoughts was about heaven, which we learn is this perfect happy place, somewhere up in the skies, where people who do good deeds go.

I thought: what if heaven isn’t a place somewhere up there?
What if heaven doesn’t exist yet?
What if heaven is what this earth will become when we all start caring and thinking about each other, trying to make this world a better place and doing good deeds?
What if it is up to us to create heaven?

I know some people could regard those thoughts as heresy, but as children I guess we can actually get away with any kind of thinking or philosophy.

Now, years and years later, I still find myself thinking from time to time about how heaven-like our world could be if we just cared a bit more; about our planet, our environment, other people, the future, …etc.

What if we could create a heaven on earth?

Keith Ellison Wants to Take Oath on Koran, Not Bible

Dennis Prager, radio show host and author, wrote the following rambles in a recent article:

Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress, has announced that he will not take his oath of office on the Bible, but on the bible of Islam, the Koran. He should not be allowed to do so — not because of any American hostility to the Koran, but because the act undermines American civilization.

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Women Talk Three Times As Much As Men

It is confirmed…

It is something one half of the population has long suspected – and the other half always vocally denied. Women really do talk more than men.

In fact, women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day – 13,000 more than the average man.

Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat – and actually get a buzz out of hearing their own voices, a new book suggests.

[Source: Daily Mail]

So I guess we men shouldn’t feel that guilty when women accuse us of not being good listeners, they simply talk too much, we could never keep up, no matter how much we try.

Plus, the same study says that what the male brain may lack in converstation and emotion, we more than make up with our ability to think about sex. It estimates that men think about sex every 52 seconds.
How are we expected to focus?

Oh whatever…

[Via: Leilouta]

Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do

Some highlights from a new letter titled “Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do” from Michael Moore…

Tomorrow marks the day that we will have been in Iraq longer than we were in all of World War II.

That’s right. We were able to defeat all of Nazi Germany, Mussolini, and the entire Japanese empire in LESS time than it’s taken the world’s only superpower to secure the road from the airport to downtown Baghdad.

And we haven’t even done THAT. After 1,347 days, in the same time it took us to took us to sweep across North Africa, storm the beaches of Italy, conquer the South Pacific, and liberate all of Western Europe, we cannot, after over 3 and 1/2 years, even take over a single highway and protect ourselves from a homemade device of two tin cans placed in a pothole.

[…]

Let’s listen to what the Iraqi people are saying, according to a recent poll conducted by the University of Maryland:
– 71% of all Iraqis now want the U.S. out of Iraq.
– 61% of all Iraqis SUPPORT insurgent attacks on U.S. troops.

[…]

There are many ways to liberate a country. Usually the residents of that country rise up and liberate themselves. That’s how we did it. You can also do it through nonviolent, mass civil disobedience. That’s how India did it. You can get the world to boycott a regime until they are so ostracized they capitulate. That’s how South Africa did it. Or you can just wait them out and, sooner or later, the king’s legions simply leave (sometimes just because they’re too cold). That’s how Canada did it.

The one way that DOESN’T work is to invade a country and tell the people, “We are here to liberate you!”

[…]

A country can HELP another people overthrow a tyrant (that’s what the French did for us in our revolution), but after you help them, you leave. Immediately. The French didn’t stay and tell us how to set up our government. They didn’t say, “we’re not leaving because we want your natural resources.” They left us to our own devices and it took us six years before we had an election. And then we had a bloody civil war. That’s what happens, and history is full of these examples. The French didn’t say, “Oh, we better stay in America, otherwise they’re going to kill each other over that slavery issue!”

Read the full letter here: “Cut and Run, the Only Brave Thing to Do“.

[Via: Jimbo]