Today was the 70th anniversary of the Allied Normandy invasion or D-Day. Pretty incredible to think that on one day roughly 4600 young men lost their lives. I am not confident this current generation of young men could do the same. I am also not confident that our divided nation could unite together for such a cause despite the high losses of life.
Archives For November 30, 1999
The American public along with the media are a hilarious bunch of hypocritical imbeciles to witness in action. Take these two examples:
Old man gets illegally recorded and leaked to the media some un-politically correct statements. End result: Forced to sell business.
Now for the next scenario. Not as old man breaks the law he signed not even a year ago. Trades for a deserter who abandoned his fellow comrades in a war zone in exchange for 5 key opposition leaders. End result: Apologizes and says he won’t do it again.
This is the America I love. The one who tries to out-outrage everyone and cares about the things that are trivial. While true that in the US Military we don’t leave someone behind, the circumstances of this deserter make that line of reasoning fallacious. He wasn’t captured under heroic circumstances defending his fellow comrades in arms he left on his own accord. In more civilized times he would have been put to death for his actions.
Seeing as there are quite a lot of posts concerning the 25 year remembrance of the Tiananmen Square protests, some things need to be noted. Firstly China is no longer a communist economic system therefore referring to China as communist is inaccurate. Secondly while its reported that people in China are not aware of it this is absolutely false. Its well known that with a VPN or proxy you can pretty much access everything while staying in China.
While its good that people wish to remember history lets keep the democracy worship to a minimum shall we. While unfortunate that protesters lost their lives, Deng Xiaoping was in the right I am afraid. He understood that China would essentially go into a hypodermic shock if it suddenly had so much free politics and free economics at the same time . He valued the economics over the political freedom which is why China is #2 in the world and rising to the top where it ought to have been. The true tragedy is that the political freedoms were more than likely to come soon after but the ridicule China felt from the outside world pushed China to be hesitant when it comes to political freedoms.
For a Harvard educated man Obama showed in his USMA speech to be quite naive and defensive. I don’t hear anyone saying that they wish for war so putting foreign policy in the context of pro-war vs pro-alliance/diplomacy is redundant. The astute political observer should receive this news of a new Obama “foreign policy” in much the same manner he or she receives a weather forecast; if they don’t like it they should just wait a few minutes.
What I admire most from pre-Vietnam conflicts was the sense of pride in the troops who fought. Everyone felt they ought to do a part no matter if you were a drifter or a furniture salesman. Much different mentality from the career soldier of modern times. This isn’t to say its better merely different.
Its amazing the amount of people throwing around the terms Nazi and fascism inappropriately in relation to the recent European elections.
This Conchita Wurst person is clearly no more than a very confused individual. However instead of helping with this gender confusion we are instead told to be modern and tolerant by enabling people to remain confused as to who they are. Europe has gone so far down hill since the end of the Cold War.
It was mediocre. If you wish to not read a negative review I suggest you read no further. I will only speak on the adaption to film briefly as I wish to judge the movie of itself. I thought Peter Jackson did a fairly decent job of portraying the small details from the book. Enough so to give a decent book to movie portrayal anyway. Beorn had far too little screen time. Overall there was way too much Dwarf screen time throughout the film and very little of Bilbo. The silly contrived pseudo-romance between the elf and dwarf was unnecessary and added nothing but more “drama” to the film. Certain deviations from the story were pointless such as the splitting of the company at Lake-town and the near death of Kili. The dragon was pretty well done and didn’t come off as too unrealistic. The scenes where the dwarfs are running/fighting Smaug are acceptable changes as simply doing as the book foretold wouldn’t be as exciting for the audience. The overall feeling is that nothing was accomplished though in the end. They reach the mountain and awaken the dragon with little happenings along the way. All the major events were saved for the 3rd film. The closing song was not very pleasing to the ears. Although quite slow at the start and also not accomplishing much, An Unexpected Journey was far better. The music of course was excellent.
If I had a dollar for every time I saw the ridiculous perpetuated myth that you ought to do what makes you happy or you shouldn’t worry about what someone else is doing since it doesn’t directly effect you, I would be a millionaire. Where did modern society come up with this rubbish argument for their acceptance of everything (everything they want anyway)? Anyone who states this as a reason they ought to be allowed to do away with morality or societal structures can’t be taken seriously. Its like G.K. Chesterton eloquently states, “To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”
Acerbity [əˈsɜːbɪtɪ] 