INTERESTING TIMES

Excerpted from Tolstoy's "Rules of Life" written when he was 18 years old:
· Get up early (five o’clock)
· Go to bed early (nine to ten o’clock)
· Eat little and avoid sweets
· Try to do everything by yourself
· Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater
· Keep away from women
· Kill desire by work
· Be good, but try to let no one know it
· Always live less expensively than you might
· Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
--Robert A. Heinlein

I just took the time to watch Barack Hussein Obama's Cairo speech. People disparage his "polished words" but I am overjoyed to have a president who is both educated and moral. Obama speaks for me. I agree that it is time for all peoples, all nations, all races, all individuals to cease and desist from the disrespect and violence that have poisoned our interactions. It is time to see all sides.
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Yep. Radovan Karadzic had been in hiding for over a decade, after leading the Bosnian Serbs in the 1992-5 war. They forced quite a few Bosnian Muslims into concentration camps. I have no idea how many died. Karadzic was a psychiatrist. In Srebenica, 1995, some 8,000 Muslim boys and men were massacred, and Karadzic is supposed to have orchestrated that. It gives me pause to think that someone who has training in human nature is capable of leading such disastrous action. And then, after whatever the war did to him and those around him, he tried to be a good person under a new name.
( a little more )

I finished reading Ron Paul's manifesto just now. I am impressed, though frankly it is a more basic primer than I personally would have liked. It explains to the average American (without financial knowledge or political interest) what is going on in our country, and what the Constitution was designed to do. It is plainly written and provides the reader with concrete examples and historical context for our national financial situation, our foreign empire and the decline of our currency. Perhaps I will now begin to be able to articulate better why I think we need to bring home the vast majority of our troops from around the world, eliminate the Federal Reserve and a lot of federal departments, and reverse the trend of imbalance that has led to complete disregard for our constitution. This document was written by men who had already seen and understood the workings of governments, the problematic logic of paper money, and the disaster that comes from empire. We need to listen to them more carefully now, before our nation is destroyed by the same mistakes that England and other nations have made before us.
( a quote about morality from RP's book )