OK, so this is the first month of weight loss progress. I had made my rather tardy New Year's Resolutions last month that included the goal of losing 60 pounds this year at a meager rate of five pounds per month. I know what you're saying, "Laz, you don't need to lose 60 pounds, you look marvelous." To quote Cartman, "I'm not fat, I'm big-boned" and I need to shed a few pounds off my bones.
Last month was a dismal failure as I lost no weight (although I have a bit of an excuse as I vacationed at the all-you-can-eat buffet with a great deal of zeal). This month I joined a gym and have only missed a few days. I have been using the elliptical machine, the tread mill, playing some basketball (a lot of running, very little scoring) and even did a little boxing and tried ten minutes of an ab class but had to sulk out with a towel over my head while the instructor -- and The Ber -- called me a "Jumper" for leaving the class.
The bottom line is, I lost five pounds this month, most of it in the last 8-10 days. No big drop like they do in the Biggest Loser TV show. I even gained one pound during my "last chance workout" last night. Oh well, I'm happy I am losing and I feel better exercising. Hopefully I can lose another five in March and keep that up for the rest of the year. Thanks for listening.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Death Of A Blogger
The Boy sent this to me a few days ago. It's about a soldier stationed in Iraq who kept up a blog on what was going on around him. He kept a final post in his back pocket in the event of his untimely death while in Iraq. Sadly that day came and his posthumous report is both powerful and sad. It also has it's moments of humor and shares some of his deep insight. It is really worth a read if you have the time.
Missing On A Promise
I am not sure, but at the present rate, I will not get to five blog posts this month as I resolved in my New Year's promises. I may fall short, but it may be too early to tell. I'll keep you posted.
Democracy Part Deux
Over the last several years, I have been ranting about a hypocritical and superior view of democracy as forwarded by members of our government and the major media. It’s been something of a private rant, but a rant nonetheless. Because I have a little time on my hands and feel a bit like ranting, I will share these views and maybe there can be a short test at the end to see what we’ve learned.
I started to notice a pattern of American democracy promotion after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and perhaps even before then with the shipyard protests led by Lech Walesa. It took me until recently while in Ukraine to recognize that our push to democratize others was more about using a political weapon then helping out people yearning to be free.
In 1983 President Reagan helped create a new agency call National Endowment for Democracy. To keep everyone in our democracy happy, funding for this agency was to be split among U.S. trade unions, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The agency was designed for the promotion of democracy in countries where we thought the citizens could use a little nudging to our side. Not surprisingly much of this early money went to Eastern European countries and places that had oil. Walesa got plenty of democracy training under these grants, which he used to pester the pro-Soviet Polish government and to have them respond by turning water hoses on Lech and his supporters without regard to political party affiliation.
Prior to the creation of the NED was the United States Agency for International Development, formed as part of the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II. Its mission, as stated on its website is to "extend a helping hand to those people overseas struggling to make a better life, recover from a disaster or striving to live in a free and democratic country..." Just to demonstrate the effectiveness of its push for democracy, the largest recipients of USAID funds, in order, are Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Afghanistan, Colombia, Jordan, Pakistan, Liberia, Peru, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Turkey and Uganda. Strangely, only a handful of these countries are democratic and the others are rather dubious in their practice of democracy.
Nowadays USAID and NED are funded from the same sources and overlap a great deal. In fact, USAID oversees a lot of NED-funded projects. I must admit that I have taken some of the taxpayer’s hard earned money and worked on a USAID-funded project or two. While working in an Eastern European country, I ran into an old friend who worked for another U.S. agency with well-known initials. He was quite impressed by my agency’s success at turning former adversaries away from the old Soviet sphere of influence. In fact he said if his agency had the kind of funding my agency did, we would have ended the Cold War much earlier. Indeed, a number of USAID workers have either been thrown out of the country for spying or, in some cases, been murdered for being spies. I guess it’s important and acceptable to break a few rules to encourage participation in the American form of democracy.
Hopefully this background puts today’s rhetoric in perspective. It shouldn’t take you long to read about the evil countries not practicing democracy, particularly the American form of democracy. Excluded in this debate are countries that are led by monarchs and dictators and have the common denominator of having loads of oil or countries that make our consumer products for $1 per day or less. If a country does not fall into one of these two categories, we can get very cross with them, indeed.
One country that is the subject of official government scorn is Russia with the free and diligent U.S. press always ready to carry the message of Russia’s failing democracy. Not that Russia ever had much in the way of a democracy unless you count the drunken years that Boris Yeltsin allowed various mafia dons to rule his country. No, it seems that Russia fails in our definition of democracy and, according to many, is the worst example of a free nation in the world, quickly sliding to the dark days of the Soviet Union. As an aside, those who pushed Détente with the Soviets to ensure world peace are the same people shaking their fingers at the Russians today. Their reason for Détente years ago was the assumption that the Soviet Empire was too powerful to defeat and really not all that bad so why fight them. Now there are howls by the same people that Russia is rediscovering its Soviet roots. Please, make up your mind.
Our official government position is that Russia fails the test of true democracy because Russian President Vladimir Putin controls the press, suppresses his political opponents and gives favors out to his favorite industrialists. This is all true. Of course this is also true in the U.S., with the only difference being our controls are engineered by two political parties instead of just one. So, I guess, the real definition of democracy is when you get two political parties controlling the system and screwing the masses. A dictatorship is when only one party leader screws the masses.
Both Russian and American leaders are elected but in the case of Russia, the choices are limited to one main political party pitted against whoever is the permanent opposition of the day. In the U.S. we get to choose from two parties! All other people interested in putting their ideas out there are given an impossible task of fleecing special interest for money to run for office, getting airtime (ask Mike Gravel and Duncan Hunter about that) and not having the support of a political party machine and their allies -- trade unions, trial lawyers, wealthy Hungarians, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, casinos, corporate polluters and the like.
And what do we get for our form of democracy? We get a 71-year-old nutcase who naturally the press loves because he gave them more power with the passage of his bill on campaign finance reform. Like all star-crossed lovers, however, the press demonstrated it can yank his chain back when it wants when the NY Times published an eight-year-old story on Page One about him cozying up to a lobbyist in more ways than one. Reporting on lobbyists trying to influence influential senators is akin to the NY Times reporting that gaming is going on at Rick’s. Naturally the NY Times, in a very free and fair way, reported his denial on Page Eight.
U.S. democracy has also produced one of the most ridiculous and intellectually insulting primaries in my lifetime. We have an angry and petty white woman running for president along with an equally petty and temperament-challenged white man. We also have the first black candidate to get this far in our quadrennial political beauty pageant. Of course, if we’re being totally honest and attempting to act race-neutral, it should be noted that only the candidate’s father is black and his mother is white so I am not sure which part of his heritage people are voting for if, in fact, his heritage is really that important.
Each of the candidates has had their difficulties playing at the democracy game. When things have been at their darkest, Hillary turns to the dark side and unloads all the political dirt she has on her opponents. The dirt has been accumulated through very undemocratic practices such as holding on to 1,200 raw FBI files (1,200 federal offenses) and hiring sleazy private investigators. Her latest trick has been to make sure we remember her opponent for the democratic primary, Barack Obama, once lived in a Muslim country (although he lived there as a Christian) by pushing a photo that looked like Senator Obama had just returned from a Toga party. To Obama’s discredit, it was not very flattering or politically intelligent to dress up in such garb and violates an old political adage: if you don’t want to look silly wearing a stupid hat, don’t wear a stupid hat. Of course Obama is driving Hillary nuts because he has what she wants: votes and popularity. Not that he is really running a political campaign so much as he is running a movement, which means that no position on any issue is relevant to any of his supporters.
John McCain, for his part, seems very keen on getting to hell. He has announced that he will see bin Laden in hell and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad there too. He also wanted to let the voting public know that Cuban leader Fidel Castro will soon be joining Karl Marx in hell – presumably with bin Laden, Ahmadinejad and McCain. Perhaps the quickest way for McCain to get to hell would be for him to follow through with his plan to invade Iran and North Korea.
So this is what democracy in the U.S. has become: a hollow contest without the mention of any issue that a future president will face. We’re still getting questions about “boxers or briefs?” and “who would you like to meet in heaven (or hell in the case of McCain)?” This isn’t democracy, this is idiocracy and does nothing more than demonstrate how our country has devolved into a celebrity culture.
I think it would be good for America if we spent a bit more time tidying up our democracy standards rather than picking on others who haven’t been at it for the past 230 years. Certainly we’re not getting it right at more than two centuries, how can we expect others to have it down in two decades?
I started to notice a pattern of American democracy promotion after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and perhaps even before then with the shipyard protests led by Lech Walesa. It took me until recently while in Ukraine to recognize that our push to democratize others was more about using a political weapon then helping out people yearning to be free.
In 1983 President Reagan helped create a new agency call National Endowment for Democracy. To keep everyone in our democracy happy, funding for this agency was to be split among U.S. trade unions, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The agency was designed for the promotion of democracy in countries where we thought the citizens could use a little nudging to our side. Not surprisingly much of this early money went to Eastern European countries and places that had oil. Walesa got plenty of democracy training under these grants, which he used to pester the pro-Soviet Polish government and to have them respond by turning water hoses on Lech and his supporters without regard to political party affiliation.
Prior to the creation of the NED was the United States Agency for International Development, formed as part of the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II. Its mission, as stated on its website is to "extend a helping hand to those people overseas struggling to make a better life, recover from a disaster or striving to live in a free and democratic country..." Just to demonstrate the effectiveness of its push for democracy, the largest recipients of USAID funds, in order, are Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Afghanistan, Colombia, Jordan, Pakistan, Liberia, Peru, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Turkey and Uganda. Strangely, only a handful of these countries are democratic and the others are rather dubious in their practice of democracy.
Nowadays USAID and NED are funded from the same sources and overlap a great deal. In fact, USAID oversees a lot of NED-funded projects. I must admit that I have taken some of the taxpayer’s hard earned money and worked on a USAID-funded project or two. While working in an Eastern European country, I ran into an old friend who worked for another U.S. agency with well-known initials. He was quite impressed by my agency’s success at turning former adversaries away from the old Soviet sphere of influence. In fact he said if his agency had the kind of funding my agency did, we would have ended the Cold War much earlier. Indeed, a number of USAID workers have either been thrown out of the country for spying or, in some cases, been murdered for being spies. I guess it’s important and acceptable to break a few rules to encourage participation in the American form of democracy.
Hopefully this background puts today’s rhetoric in perspective. It shouldn’t take you long to read about the evil countries not practicing democracy, particularly the American form of democracy. Excluded in this debate are countries that are led by monarchs and dictators and have the common denominator of having loads of oil or countries that make our consumer products for $1 per day or less. If a country does not fall into one of these two categories, we can get very cross with them, indeed.
One country that is the subject of official government scorn is Russia with the free and diligent U.S. press always ready to carry the message of Russia’s failing democracy. Not that Russia ever had much in the way of a democracy unless you count the drunken years that Boris Yeltsin allowed various mafia dons to rule his country. No, it seems that Russia fails in our definition of democracy and, according to many, is the worst example of a free nation in the world, quickly sliding to the dark days of the Soviet Union. As an aside, those who pushed Détente with the Soviets to ensure world peace are the same people shaking their fingers at the Russians today. Their reason for Détente years ago was the assumption that the Soviet Empire was too powerful to defeat and really not all that bad so why fight them. Now there are howls by the same people that Russia is rediscovering its Soviet roots. Please, make up your mind.
Our official government position is that Russia fails the test of true democracy because Russian President Vladimir Putin controls the press, suppresses his political opponents and gives favors out to his favorite industrialists. This is all true. Of course this is also true in the U.S., with the only difference being our controls are engineered by two political parties instead of just one. So, I guess, the real definition of democracy is when you get two political parties controlling the system and screwing the masses. A dictatorship is when only one party leader screws the masses.
Both Russian and American leaders are elected but in the case of Russia, the choices are limited to one main political party pitted against whoever is the permanent opposition of the day. In the U.S. we get to choose from two parties! All other people interested in putting their ideas out there are given an impossible task of fleecing special interest for money to run for office, getting airtime (ask Mike Gravel and Duncan Hunter about that) and not having the support of a political party machine and their allies -- trade unions, trial lawyers, wealthy Hungarians, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, casinos, corporate polluters and the like.
And what do we get for our form of democracy? We get a 71-year-old nutcase who naturally the press loves because he gave them more power with the passage of his bill on campaign finance reform. Like all star-crossed lovers, however, the press demonstrated it can yank his chain back when it wants when the NY Times published an eight-year-old story on Page One about him cozying up to a lobbyist in more ways than one. Reporting on lobbyists trying to influence influential senators is akin to the NY Times reporting that gaming is going on at Rick’s. Naturally the NY Times, in a very free and fair way, reported his denial on Page Eight.
U.S. democracy has also produced one of the most ridiculous and intellectually insulting primaries in my lifetime. We have an angry and petty white woman running for president along with an equally petty and temperament-challenged white man. We also have the first black candidate to get this far in our quadrennial political beauty pageant. Of course, if we’re being totally honest and attempting to act race-neutral, it should be noted that only the candidate’s father is black and his mother is white so I am not sure which part of his heritage people are voting for if, in fact, his heritage is really that important.
Each of the candidates has had their difficulties playing at the democracy game. When things have been at their darkest, Hillary turns to the dark side and unloads all the political dirt she has on her opponents. The dirt has been accumulated through very undemocratic practices such as holding on to 1,200 raw FBI files (1,200 federal offenses) and hiring sleazy private investigators. Her latest trick has been to make sure we remember her opponent for the democratic primary, Barack Obama, once lived in a Muslim country (although he lived there as a Christian) by pushing a photo that looked like Senator Obama had just returned from a Toga party. To Obama’s discredit, it was not very flattering or politically intelligent to dress up in such garb and violates an old political adage: if you don’t want to look silly wearing a stupid hat, don’t wear a stupid hat. Of course Obama is driving Hillary nuts because he has what she wants: votes and popularity. Not that he is really running a political campaign so much as he is running a movement, which means that no position on any issue is relevant to any of his supporters.
John McCain, for his part, seems very keen on getting to hell. He has announced that he will see bin Laden in hell and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad there too. He also wanted to let the voting public know that Cuban leader Fidel Castro will soon be joining Karl Marx in hell – presumably with bin Laden, Ahmadinejad and McCain. Perhaps the quickest way for McCain to get to hell would be for him to follow through with his plan to invade Iran and North Korea.
So this is what democracy in the U.S. has become: a hollow contest without the mention of any issue that a future president will face. We’re still getting questions about “boxers or briefs?” and “who would you like to meet in heaven (or hell in the case of McCain)?” This isn’t democracy, this is idiocracy and does nothing more than demonstrate how our country has devolved into a celebrity culture.
I think it would be good for America if we spent a bit more time tidying up our democracy standards rather than picking on others who haven’t been at it for the past 230 years. Certainly we’re not getting it right at more than two centuries, how can we expect others to have it down in two decades?
Saturday, February 16, 2008
A Happy Day
Well, we are a blessed family today. The Boy gave the Ber a lovely engagement ring, the Ber gave him the answer he wanted, and we were given a new daughter. We couldn’t ask for a happier day or a better woman to welcome into our family. We also couldn’t ask for a better family that will be merged into ours by the joining of these two bright souls.
Not much in the way of wedding details and all signs point to a very small gathering. They are getting wedding planning "help" by the Girl who I think desires a budget that is the approximate value of the U.S. deficit. I do have to hand it to the Girl, she’d be pretty good as a wedding planner. If you have contacts in the business, pass her name along....
It’s been quite a month for the Boy. He earned admission into University of San Diego Law School and they were pleased enough with his academic record that they offered him a substantial scholarship. While the world barely needs another lawyer, I think he will be different and will use the law to be a better businessman, scholar, partner or advocate for those who are denied access to redress through the legal system. Any way one slices it, he will be one of the few who will give the profession a better name.
The month could be a home run for our family if the Girl is able to get what looks like a really good job for a well-financed charity in the Bay Area. Aside from wedding planning, she’d be great at managing the public relations for a company that is giving back some of the wealth it earned in the Dot Com industry.
This is the kind of news we always want to hear in our family. Generally I am writing about somone dying in our family or complaining about why the world doesn’t give me everthing I want (maybe because I want everything?). For today, I have everything I need (except Diane Lane). Muah, as the Ber says.
Not much in the way of wedding details and all signs point to a very small gathering. They are getting wedding planning "help" by the Girl who I think desires a budget that is the approximate value of the U.S. deficit. I do have to hand it to the Girl, she’d be pretty good as a wedding planner. If you have contacts in the business, pass her name along....
It’s been quite a month for the Boy. He earned admission into University of San Diego Law School and they were pleased enough with his academic record that they offered him a substantial scholarship. While the world barely needs another lawyer, I think he will be different and will use the law to be a better businessman, scholar, partner or advocate for those who are denied access to redress through the legal system. Any way one slices it, he will be one of the few who will give the profession a better name.
The month could be a home run for our family if the Girl is able to get what looks like a really good job for a well-financed charity in the Bay Area. Aside from wedding planning, she’d be great at managing the public relations for a company that is giving back some of the wealth it earned in the Dot Com industry.
This is the kind of news we always want to hear in our family. Generally I am writing about somone dying in our family or complaining about why the world doesn’t give me everthing I want (maybe because I want everything?). For today, I have everything I need (except Diane Lane). Muah, as the Ber says.
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