I rarely come across a movie I’m willing to go see in a theater. This one might make the cut, though.
From the trailer, it appears to be a reality-based fantasy about a world that ought to be. *heh*
Who Are You Voting FOR?
Perri, of the eponymous Perri Nelson’s Website, asks, “Shouldn’t we look at why we want to vote FOR a candidate when we’re choosing one?”
Well, of course we should ask ourselves that, Perri! In fact, it’s usually the first thing I do ask myself when looking at candidates for office. Unfortunately, I have rarely found a political candidate who offered me much in the way of valid reasons to vote for them. In fact, I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the total number of political candidates–national, state and local–who have offered me much in the way of legitimate positives in their candidacy or persons.
Ronald Reagan was one such. After voting in several other presidential races for the “least bad” choice (and being monumentally wrong with one, to my shame–and no, I’m not referring to votes cast for Nixon), my first vote for Reagan was a relief.
Bob Xxxxx–(in a local race). Good guy, Honest. Does his office credit.
Kevin Zzzzz–yeh, not an interesting speaker, but a decent man for a state senator.
Ummm, just about running dry here. I guess I could include our district’s Representative to the House. He’s a blowhard who gives me a rash, and he has his head up his _____ on several issues, but overall, he’s been an “honest politician” (that is, he’s stayed bought). I’ll vote for this blowhard again this time based on his (few, IMO, though in one case profound–his son’s turned out to be a better man than he is) positive accomplishments and the fact that his opponent’s a snake.
That about covers the pols who’ve given me valid, positive reasons to vote for them in the past.
Perri notes some positives for McWhatsisname, and I have to admit they exist, though some of the ones he mentions as reasons to vote for McWhatsisname are negatives in my estimation. A commenter on Perri’s post mentions his reasons for supporting The Obamassiah. Funny thing, none of his reasons involve any actual accomplishments or anything else I’d count as a positive.
Frankly, I’d like to embrace Perri’s idealistic search for reasons to vote for political candidates and avoid voting against a candidate for the candidate’s negatives, but while I always look for positive reasons to vote for a candidate, in the last 4 decades, I’ve found few. Perhaps that’s just my natural ability to spot flaws–an ability that has served me both well and ill in the past–but almost every time I hear a politician speak my B.S. meter pegs out, and that can’t be a good thing. *heh*
(Of course, it’s the rare, exceedingly rare instance when a Mass Media Podperson doesn’t overload my B.S. meter, but that’s another problem.)
For now, I think I’ll concentrate on dumbasses who proclaim themselves “undecided” and fools (yes, fools–those who aren’t themselves active poisoners of the body politic) who have swallowed the Obamassiah’s sugar-coated cyanide capsule and attempt to compare and contrast those few McWhatsisname’s and Sarah Palin’s (many more than McWhatsisname’s) positives with the truckload of poisoned B.S. from The Obamassiah.
That’s about as positive as I can be about this election cycle’s presidential offerings, and frankly, one-on-one, the method has shown some apparent success. I’ve had former Obamaites and Obama-leaners come back to me with negatives they’ve discovered on their own once their eyes were opened… and in one case, simply pointing an Obamaite to facts about the McWhatsisname health care proposals opened blind eyes to the lies Obama’s been spouting about that. That alone was enough to persuade one more vote for McWhatsisname/Palin.*
Heck, that’s about as positive as I think I can be in our local (Sheriff/County/City) and State (rep/senate/etc.) races this year. Well, perhaps a bit more positive about the Democrat running for governor in my State. In fact, he could well be my fifth candidate in the last 40 years I can actually vote for in good conscience. (Heck, even my dad has had good experiences with the guy, and he lives in another State!) I don’t even have to think about what a snake the Repugnican’t candidate is.
Politicians *spit*. Can’t live with ’em; can’t live with ’em. I’d be happy to live without ’em. Heck, a constitutional monrchy could scarcely be as bad as the mess we have now. I’d probably be better. See the header quote on this blog for a part of the reason…
“Render Unto Caesar”
I was over at Cathouse chat, just checking in to see what has been going on in Kat’s life recently, when I stumbled across a comment that referred to Charles Chaput’s “Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life”. Now, I’ve not yet read the book, but I have some taste of the probable thrust from the title. I’m not Roman Catholic either, but again, I think I can infer a bit of the content from my knowedge of Roman Catholicism, as well.
Looks/sounds interesting from what reviews I’ve seen. If its content is anything close to what I can infer from reviews/title/current knowledge about RC thought, I may well find myself in substantial agreement with Chaput.
Backing up a bit. I grew up in a Southern Baptist subculture where Matthew 22:17-21 ws usually applied thusly: pay your taxes and pay your tithe. Now, that’s always–even from childhood–struck me as a particularly shallow exegesis (*heh* from long before I had an inkling of an idea of what the word exegesis even meant). As I grew “in wisdom and in stature” (and in girdth and breadth *heh*), I became able to put some meat on the bones of my disatisfaction with that shallow interpretation. And so follows my shirt tail exegesis… a group of Pharisees came to Jesus and said,
Matthew 22:17 Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not? 18 but Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, [ye] hypocrites? 19 Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. 20 And he saith unto them, Whose [is] this image and superscription? 21 They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.
First, this was a group of Jewish “lawyers” attempting to pull Katie Couric on Jesus. Roman occupation (and Roman taxes) were strongly disliked by the Jews of Israel, so, they thought, if Jesus did not denounce paying Roman taxes they’d have trapped him into an unpopular stand. On the other hand, the Romans really came down hard on anything that even smacked of fomenting tax evasion or revolt, so if he did choose the popular answer they more than half expected, they could have him up on charges before the Roman government lickety split.
Horns of a dilemma? Not so. Jesus simply invoked the very orthodox Jewish principle of the imago dei–the concept that we are all made in God’s image, and then turned the Pharisees’ challenge on its head. “Whose image” is stamped upon the coin? Caesar’s. But you see, when Jesus followed that up with both “render to Caesar” and “render to God” he directly invoked the principle of imago dei, essentially saying, “This coin comes from Caesar, so pay him with it, but YOU are stamped with God’s image and belong to Him, therefore, you owe Him yourselves.”
I like to ask myself further, “What does this image of God look like when stamped on a man?” Now, we can look all through scripture and nature to discern what God’s image might “look” like, but I think Jesus was talking about His image as to character and behavior, and probably no other description succinctly distills the imago dei like Micah 6:8
He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
That is what the “coin” stamped with the image of God looks like: Justice; Mercy; Humility. Look for those traits in someone who’s “render[ing] untoi God the things that are God’s” and you’ll see someone who has internalized 2 Corinthians 5:17… and who exemplifies submission to Jesus command in Matthew 22:21.
Yes, “render unto Caesar” means much more than simply paying our taxes. It also–at the very least–means obeying those laws that do not directly contradict biblical precepts (see Acts 3-4), and in a representative republic (with democratic elements), it also means we have a responsibility to govern well. (Which in my experience largely means we ought to concentrate on throwing the bums out of office at every election, but that’s just my view, of course. :-))
“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”
Linux: Gottaloveit
It’s been a little over four months since I move nearly all my Windows use over to virtual machines running on an Ubuntu 8.04 box, and despite numerous big and little “gotchas” along the way, it’s been a Good Thing. In fact, now that more and more WINE issues seem to clear up with every recent WINE update, I rarely need to start any of the Windows VMs, apart from checking “CLICK paths” for other users I’m walking through Windows issues over the phone or via email (I still prefer to simply log onto a remote session on someone’s computer to walk through issues, instead of phone/email).
One of the nicest things about the all-Linux, all the time experience has been the security aspect. The built in firewall has performed as well at online security-probing sites as highly intrusive, third party Windows firewall powerhouses have performed, and although I installed ClamAV (not active protection like most Windows AVs), neither its on-demand scanner nor such places as Trendmicro’s Housecall have found any infections.
Get that: no active defense, as is recommended for Windows computers, but also no infestations of malware.
I attribute that to several things. First, Ubuntu is designed to NOT run in admin (or root privileges) mode, as most Windows computers are by default. Installing software, changing system parameters, etc., all require the user to specifically, manually input the root password, so if I were to have malware installed, it’d almost surely have been installed with my witting participation, and that’s not likely at all, at all.
Then there’s the fact that few malware authors want to invade such an admittedly small target population. (That’s one of the security advantages of the Mac platform, BTW: small target.)
Then there’s my choice of browser. (note: Opera recently had a security issue that affected all OS platforms, but was corrected in a 24-hour period. Compare that to security issues that’ve been outstanding for YEAS in Internet Exploder.) No kudos to Ubuntu for that, of course, but I do like the more secure (than IE or even Firefox, AFAIK) browsing experience. (For even more security enhancement, I’ll sometimes run OperaTOR from a flash drive. The Windows version runs Just Fine in Linux using WINE.)
And, of course, I can’t ascribe merit to Ubuntu for avoiding infections I’d not succomb to in any OS–I do not, for example, invoke email attachments from ANYONE unless I expect the attachment AND I manually scan it with an up-to-date anti-virus.
So, if you’d like to ditch your power-sucking vampire of a security suite, Ubuntu–or Linux in general–seems to be the ticket. (And yes, I know BSD offers even more security, as reported by many, but right now, its GUI options and software selection, even though it can run most ‘nix apps, is just slightly south of what I find in Ubuntu Linux–just slightly.)
For y’all who’re still wearing the Me$$y$oft ball and chain, why not give Wubi a try? It’s an easy-peasy way to install Ubuntu in a Windows folder. I’ve not had any problems installing/uninstalling Ubuntu using Wubi on any of a number of computers here at twc central, but do read the FAQ at the Wubi site. Heck, it even uses the Windows bootloader to boot into Ubuntu and is uninstallable using Windows’ Add/Remove Programs.
Or install VMWare Server and try running Ubuntu in a VM in Windows. You might just like it enough to ditch Windows entirely on your next computer build/purchase.
Update: savvy users are already aware of such things as “Clickjacking”–a type of browser hijacking allowing “an attacker to use one or more of several new attack scenarios to literally steal your mouse clicks.” It’s a set of malware techniques that all browsers in all OSes can be vulnerable to, although Linux still is more difficult to attack via clickjackig methods. Still, by disabling javascript and a few other lil content goodies, along with iFrames, Opera is safer than most, and still allows one to use javascript, et al, for any trusted site by simply setting Site Preferences to allow ’em for any one given “trusted site”. Granular controls: a Very Good Thing.