Rediscovering Thoreau

The last time I read Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, we were about two months away from going to war with Saddam Hussein for the first go-round. I was a junior in high school and the version we read was somewhat redacted from Thoreau's complete essay, but it got me thinking about a lot of things pertaining to what freedom really is and how we choose to use it. When I started my published writing career several months later with a series of letters to the editor of this area's biggest newspaper, it was partly because of Civil Disobedience that I was led to do so.

But until this past week I'd never read the entire essay in full. And then I came across a really good quote by Thoreau (from his A Plea for Captain John Brown):

"Many, no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by habit, and they cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are. Accordingly they pronounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves."

In other words: Do what you believe is right and screw what anyone else has to say about it, because they secretly hate and despise you... for you possess strength that they do not.

Well, that quote got me curious about Thoreau for the first time in fifteen years, and I went looking for more of his work. And that's how I came across a really well-annotated edition of Civil Disobedience.

Now I wish I'd spent a lot more time in the intervening years studying Thoreau, and the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and other writers of the Transcendentalism movement. That seems to be the school of thought that best describes my own philosophical leanings, although I also believe that there is one ultimate truth as established by God that we are called to understand... but that understanding only comes, as the Transcendentalists believed, through personal introspection and reflection. To them, understanding was an act of the individual, and not the corporate. Indeed, very little could come about from the will of incorporated might. And considering how big a mess we are in today because of collectivized thinking, Transcendental thought is looking awfully refreshing.

And it's so funny to me: Just about everything that I've been trying to express with my writing for more than a decade, everything that I've been led to understand through experience and intuitiveness that I've tried to share in one form or another... and there was Thoreau right there, having already said it more than a hundred years before I was born.

The past few days have had me experiencing a personal "renaissance" of thought. Once again - maybe really for the first time and yes I do mean to say that - I'm discovering what it is I believe in regarding personal responsibility, individual liberty, and the relationship between people and government. All these years of college and various jobs and different situations and times of personal and spiritual growth, and the kind of person they've made me to be (hopefully a good one)... reading some of this stuff this past week has been like an affirmation for me. But I also cannot help but believe that I've a long way to go still with my understanding of things: people like Thoreau and Emerson, they were the real masters.

So I've read through Civil Disobedience twice now, and have been thoroughly struck at how so much of it applies to where we're at today. Thoreau's style isn't quite as fluid as that which modern readers are used to - he writes in distinct units of thought - but it's still very readable... maybe moreso than most op-ed pieces that get published nowadays. This man wastes no time cutting to the heartmeat of the matter: this is an essay about ideas, not ideologies.

And what powerful ideas they are...

"...This government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way."

"Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward."

"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys , and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?"

"All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote."

"I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of this wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reasons to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought."

"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?"

"Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight."

"When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of the question, and their regard for the public tranquillity, the long and the short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the protection of the existing government, and they dread the consequences to their property and families of disobedience to it. For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. It will not be worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again."

"...The state never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior with or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men."

"Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."

Dear Lord, these are the kinds of ideas that would start a second American revolution, if enough people were allowed to think about them!!

I mean, can anyone be found in our federal government - or even our local ones - who believes like Thoreau did? This one essay totally destroys any validity that either the Democrats or Republicans, or the so-called "conservatives and liberals" have worked so long to establish for themselves. It's especially a slap in the face to all the "small government" Republicans who've come to Washington since the '94 election, who have only let government grow that much more overbearing and intrusive.

Can you envision an America where the tenets of Civil Disobedience are adhered to? No excessive taxation. No bungling in foreign lands. No PATRIOT Act. No more major political parties. No more "leaders" installed by special interests. From then on, it would be each man (and woman) and his or her conscience to guide this land. We would give all the damnable opportunists who have taken our money, our liberty, and our children's futures a good swift kick in the butt... and keep kicking them while they're down. Civil Disobedience reads like a manifesto for the common man to stand against the entrenched elites that would have him robbed of his individuality.

Dear God, why can't more people in our own time write the way Thoreau did? Why can't we take his ideas to heart and strive to apply them to ourselves and our government? Why, it would completely overturn more than a hundred years of bloated government. There would finally, at last, be a government of, by, and for the people... but government that is shown the line and told "to this point and no further".

Ever have one of those moments when you feel like everything crystallizes and you can finally see something you can't fully describe in words, but it irrevocably alters you? That's what it's been like for me the past half-week or so since discovering this, and some other stuff. And I like to think that it's going to have an effect on my writings from here on out, either here or elsewhere. If nothing else, I like to think that my personal meditation on Civil Disobedience will encourage others to do likewise, and grow from it.

And I hope and pray that I live to see the day when the ideas that Thoreau was expressing here - about what it means to be real men and women - take their rightful place in dominance over the hearts and minds of this country's people.

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Did Dumbledore die?

Of all that transpired in the fictional realm during 2005, none shattered the senses more than what unfolded in the pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Millions of fans bought the penultimate chapter of the Harry Potter saga... only to reel in horror as J.K. Rowling took everything to be expected of a children's book, dragged it out into the street and shot it in the head. And out of everything that went so terribly wrong in this sixth book of the series, nothing was more heartbreaking than what happened at the end of Chapter 27, during the Death Eaters's assault on Hogwarts: Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of the school and mentor to Harry Potter - and one of the most beloved characters of recent literature - murdered with the Avada Kedavra curse... by none other than Professor Severus Snape!

Call it the "Who Shot J.R.?" of the new millennium: since the release of Half-Blood Prince, the events that took place in its final chapters have become some of the most hotly debated subjects on the Internet. Most especially the question of what exactly did take place atop the tower that tragic evening, when Professor Dumbledore was mercilessly killed by the very person he had sworn could be trusted...

...Or was he?

Like a forensic pathologist, David Haber has meticulously sifted through the pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, taking notes and comparing this book to what we know from the previous chapters. And he's come up with a theory that's pretty interesting to anyone who's a Harry Potter fan. At Dumbledore Is Not Dead.com, Haber lays out a lot of evidence suggesting that there was much more going on in the final pages of the book than what was readily presented before us. His case is compelling: that Albus Dumbledore did not die, as the wizarding world believes he did. Read what David has put together but be warned that like any good scholar, he has been quite thorough with his documentation.

(Personally, I think Dumbledore is dead, but I was impressed enough with David's work here that I really felt led to make a mention of it here :-)

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Hostel territory

There's something awfully off-kilter in a country where (supposedly) the use of torture is condemned... but Hostel becomes the top-grossing movie at the box office on the first weekend of the new year.

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King Kong in Brevity

The Brevity comic strip is a new one to me, but this strip they ran on December 14th is so funny that I might have to check it out from now on...

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NASA contract with Russians to use Soyuz not a good sign

CNN is reporting that NASA has signed a deal with the Russian government to use its Soyuz spacecraft to bring relief crewmembers and cargo to the International Space Station. It'll cost $21.8 million to send a single passenger one-way to or from the ISS.

I know our own Space Shuttle program is grounded for the time being and that something needs to be done in order to transport personnel and equipment to the station, but this isn't a very good indicator of the current status for either NASA or the United States. There's been remarkably little innovation in the way of manned space flight to come out of this country in the past two decades: the proposed Crew Exploration Vehicle isn't even a clearly defined concept at this point, now a few years before the Space Shuttle is due to be retired. So in a situation strikingly parallel with how the Romans eventually came to rely on foreign mercenaries, we are having to hire other countries and the technology that has traditionally been regarded as inferior to our own in order to keep up our end of things. I'm not "dissing" the Soyuz spacecraft - it has a pretty good history of being a reliable workhorse - but this is a vehicle that's forty years old that we are now putting the brunt of our space effort onto.

Guess what I'm trying to figure out is: Where has our technological creativity gone to?

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The only thing about "Bareback Mountin' " I intend to post

Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) is slamming NBC's Gene Shalit because Shalit has (gasp!) said he doesn't think that the new film Brokeback Mountain is all that good.

You know: "the gay cowboy movie". Now, I have no intention of seeing Brokeback Mountain - ever - but I know some people who have. People I happen to trust quite a bit. And as one of them put it, if Brokeback Mountain had been about anything but the homosexual relationship between two cowboys, it would not have been that big a deal. But that one thing has become the point about which the entire movie is now being labelled as "groundbreaking" and "revolutionary". And now, as evidenced by GLAAD's response to Gene Shalit, if a person does not buy into that and furthermore disagrees that Brokeback Mountain is a good movie, this somehow equates that person with being prejudiced against homosexuals.

Admittedly, I happen to believe that there's a lot of things very wrong with homosexuality. For a lot of reasons too complex to adequately detail in the time I'm wanting to give to this. To me it all boils down to whether the concept of love is something that can be defined by physical expression at all. Oh yes there's definitely acts of love we express to others, like hugging and kissing, and things beyond that... but can love itself be framed within the context of sensual pleasure for sake of that pleasure and still be considered to be true love? The act of deepest physical love is one where both participants simultaneously yield to and receive from one another... but how can there possibly be something beyond mere carnality when that act is either only one of giving or receiving?

Like I said, my take on this is really, really complex. And I'm not the kind of Christian who is going to condemn to Hell anyone that I happen to meet who's doing this: Lord knows I've done enough things in my life - none of which even approached this kind of behavior, by the way - that would readily condemn myself. But neither should people like those at GLAAD condemn someone for the weak infraction of not believing that Brokeback Mountain is a very good movie. If someone is willing to say that this film is wrong, that's their right. If another is willing to be so bold as to point out that the biggest reason this movie is being called a success in some quarters is that it relies too heavily on the concept of gay love between cowboys, then that's my right to do that too.

What it all comes down to is this: is Brokeback Mountain that strong a movie to stand on its own without relying on the crutch of a novel gimmick? Just going by what I've seen so far, there doesn't seem to be that much faith in the film without regarding that.

I don't really care to spend seven bucks watching gay cowboys "go at it"... so what else is there in this movie that would make it worth my money?

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No encore, please!

The world's longest-running concert is underway in Halberstadt, Germany, as the second chord has sounded in a performance of John Cage's "organ2/ASLSP".

The performance is not scheduled to finish until the year 2639!

From the article:

Second chord sounds in world's longest lasting concert
Thu Jan 5, 11:12 AM ET

HALBERSTADT, Germany (AFP) - A new chord was scheduled to sound in the world's slowest and longest lasting concert that is taking a total 639 years to perform.

The abandoned Buchardi church in Halberstadt, eastern Germany, is the venue for a mind-boggling 639-year-long performance of a piece of music by US experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992).

Entitled "organ2/ASLSP" (or "As SLow aS Possible"), the performance began on September 5, 2001 and is scheduled to last until 2639.

The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord -- G-sharp, B and G-sharp -- not sounding until February 2, 2003.

Then in July 2004, two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded and are scheduled to be released later this year on May 5.

But at 5:00 pm (1600 GMT) on Thursday, the first chord was due to progress to a second -- comprising A, C and F-sharp -- and is to be held down over the next few years by weights on an organ being built especially for the project.

Cage originally conceived "ASLSP" in 1985 as a 20-minute work for piano, subsequently transcribing it for organ in 1987.

But organisers of the John Cage Organ Project decided to take the composer at his word and stretch out the performance for 639 years, using Cage's transcription for organ.

The enormous running time was chosen to commemorate the creation of Halberstadt's historic Blockwerk organ in 1361 -- 639 years before the current project started...

Hey it could be worse: project organizers could have chosen to perform Iron Butterfly's "In A Gadda Da Vida" instead!

(By the way, composer John Cage did a lot of weird stuff, the music-historian who is my wife has just informed me. His "4'33" was especially laughed about in college, she said: a three-movement piece comprised of four and a half minutes... of dead silence!)

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Best frozen pizza I've ever eaten

My Mom has been getting a lot of good food from Schwan's. She finds what she'd like to order from the Schwan's catalog, tells the deliveryman what she wants and gets her new order when he comes back around two weeks later. Lisa and I have been "ordering" through her and getting incredibly delicious stuff like chicken alfredo, potato skins, shrimp scampi, and some darned great ice ceam. Well last night I had their regular-sized pepperoni pizza (I think it's item #901) and I gotta tell ya: this is bar-none the best frozen pizza I've ever tasted in my entire life. Everything about it, from the crust (lightly dusted with cornmeal) to the sauce - maybe the best sauce I've had on a pizza anywhere - is just darned perfect. It puts most restaurant pizzas that I've experienced to shame. If nothing else it must be said that it does not taste like it's a frozen product at all. Schwan's also sells the same pizza in one-person servings, in boxes of six. Can't recommend this highly enough. If you appreciate a good pizza and wanna try real gourmet eating for a very good price, give Schwan's a try.

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The Ice Storm... ten years later

This week marks the ten-year anniversary of the 1996 blizzard/ice storm that paralyzed much of the East Coast. Can't believe it's been that long. In this area it was really two storms: one that covered the place in ice and snow and then a second one hit a few days later with much more ice. There wasn't nearly as much precipitation as there'd been in the Storm of the Century three years earlier (I doubt anything I'll ever live to see will be comparable to that) but it still ended up being a major nuisance for everyone affected by it.

The thing I remember most about the storm was that it forced me to move into my first apartment much sooner than I'd expected. I was taking a winter-term history class at Elon and my new roomie was off in London for the entire month: nobody was in the apartment and the last roommate had owned most of the furniture, so the place was really bare. Well, during the first storm I wound up staying one night in my old dorm room, made the very careful drive back home the next afternoon and heard that a second storm was on its way. I figured the logical thing to do was to hole up in the apartment a lot sooner than anticipated, so I'd be close to campus if we had class the next day. So I packed up a sleeping bag, a lamp, some books, and the TV/VCR combo I'd gotten for Christmas - and a few other essentials - into the car and headed for my new digs. I got the car unpacked and headed out to find food and some entertainment to hold me over in case I got iced-in with nowhere to go. I wound up getting a Battletech novel and a Doctor Who videotape ("The Five Doctors" episode) from the Burlington mall and then one of those 2-pizza deals from Little Caesar's (and some breadsticks 'course), and some two-liter Cokes. The accomodations that night - my first ever in my own apartment - were Spartan to say the least: without my own bed for the time being I had to sleep on the couch. But as I ate my pizza and watched the video, with the ice that ended up trapping me indoors for the next two days falling outside... I felt so much triumphant pleasure. Like a king over my own domain. It didn't matter that I barely had anything at all in the apartment: that it was my very own place to live in for the first time in my life was all that mattered to me. And I was loving it! It was so much fun in fact that a few years later when I moved into my next apartment, I just had to replicate the ritual of eating pizza while watching that same Doctor Who tape on my first night in the place.

Lotta good memories that were had in that apartment, along with a few crazy ones and some that... well, no one would ever believe me if I wrote about it here. But they all started with the ice storm ten years ago this week. And I just felt led to share my own memories about it, to add to those of anyone else who probably remembers the storm also.

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I started a new blog

There's not much to look at so far... I mean, really not much at all... but I started up a new blog a few days ago. I had the idea this past weekend to create an online journal covering developments along the county line between Guilford and Rockingham counties here in North Carolina. The area between Greensboro and Reidsville has started to build up in recent years: lots of new homes and businesses coming to what has for the most part been one of the most rural places you can imagine. The first idea that popped into mind about what to call it was "The Guil-Rock Guardian", but that sounded too dry: even though this is meant to be a serious blog I wanted a more colorful moniker, like those of The Neely Chronicle and The Rhinoceros Times. So I thought about it for the better part of thirty seconds...

...and came up with The Guil-Rock Gremlin. Which may turn out to be quite appropos if/when I wind up having to use it to throw a monkey-wrench into the works for some reason. But for now it's merely there to document what's going on in the "Greensboro/Reidsville metropolitan area". I'm gonna work on graphics for it this weekend (trying hard not to use images from Steven Spielberg's Gremlins movies). So if you're living around the county line between Greensboro and Reidsville (I'm gonna try my best to cover news and issues in both counties) give The Guil-Rock Gremlin a looksee!

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Race the Knight: Mario Kart DS with Wi-Fi is kewl!

Previously I mentioned here that Lisa got me a Nintendo DS for Christmas and that I've been really impressed with Nintendogs. We got a few other games here too: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (which has one of the hardest beginnings I've ever played in a videogame), Super Mario 64 for the DS (still getting used to the crazy camera controls), Pac'nRoll (Lisa's a nut for anything having to do with Pac-Man), and on New Years Eve I ran out and got another game that I'd heard nothing but good about: Mario Kart DS.

First of all, this is a great game in and of itself, even in single-player mode. Longtime fans of the Mario Kart series (going all the way back to the Super Nintendo) will find that this has all the action and humor you'd come to expect from the line. But as any of us who've played a Mario Kart game knows, the real fun is when you play with friends and compete in the race while throwing Koopa shells and Bob-ombs at each other (the one I really hate getting hit with is the lightning bolt that momentarily shrinks you): No telling how many times Lisa and I have thrashed each other playing Mario Kart Double-Dash on the Gamecube. Ideally you and your friends will each have a Nintendo DS and at least one Mario Kart DS cartridge (the game uses the DS's wireless capability to let multiple systems run off one cartridge). But what if you don't know of anyone else with a DS, or what if you do and that friend is located on the other side of the state... or even in another country?

Enter Nintendo's new Wi-Fi Connection: an online service offering free Internet gameplay on DS (and the Nintendo Revolution when it comes out) games that support it. The service just started up in November and there's not many games out at the moment implementing this feature, but there's an awful lot of promise in this, if how Mario Kart DS uses it is any indicator.

Basically, the Nintendo DS has IEEE 802.11 wireless capability built-in. If you take it (and a Wi-Fi enabled game) to most any public "hot-spot" with wireless Internet - or if you have an 802.11b or 802.11g wireless router on your home network - you can access the Wi-Fi Connection with a minimum of configuration on the DS end. It may take a little playing around with the manual settings though: it was two hours from the time I first plugged Mario Kart DS in before I established a hook-up with Wi-Fi. The very first time I tried picking up our wireless network in the apartment, the DS didn't detect it... but it did find two other wireless networks broadcasting the "linksys" factory default ID (here's a tip: CHANGE YOUR SSID when you set up your wireless network!!). I had to type in - via the DS's touch-screen - the SSID of our network before it found it, and then the DS needed our router's WEP encryption key (another tip boys and girls: turn on your WEP or WPA encryption). Still didn't get connected until I told it to auto-obtain both the IP address and the DNS info. Immediately after I did that the DS was able to log in to the Wi-Fi service.

What's Mario Kart DS gameplay like over Wi-Fi? There can be up to four players racing each other, and you would swear that the other three are right in the room with you: it's that good. Now, I haven't won a single matchup yet (I've won a few races but not enough to be #1 overall) but it's still a heckuva lotta fun to race against opponents who are apparently playing in France and Japan. You can customize your cart to reflect your unique identity, via your own racing emblem and nickname: my emblem is a red field with "Ride Hard Die Free" written in black, and my handle is "knghtshft".

And if you happen to know someone who does have a Nintendo DS and Mario Kart DSD, you can give him your friend code to race directly against that player, instead of Wi-Fi simply pitting you against random players. I haven't tried this out yet but if anyone wants to play me, shoot me an e-mail and register my friend code: 111731-598707. I'll take on all comers! And if my track record is any indication, you'll probably beat me hands-down... but I'm still up for a good challenge :-) Oh yeah, and if you want some help in finding good folks to race against, WiTendoFi.com, DS Meet and DS-Play will get you hooked up with nice people that you can send a friendly note to... before you try to run them off the track.

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Media blew it in West Virginia

I don't really feel like posting much on the subject but...

This was just about the most unprofessional behavior I've ever heard come out of the American news media.

I didn't know anything about it until this morning, when the dominating story was the anger at "the miscommunication" regarding the West Virginia coal mine accident. And I heard some pretty outrageous things about how the major news networks handled the announcement that twelve men had survived, before news came three hours later that in fact only one made it and a dozen had died.

They should have waited for official confirmation - either from company honchos or leaders of the rescue effort - before making so bold a pronouncement. And then they should have kept their cool and acted with solemn dignity... even if it had turned out that the twelve had made it through okay. Instead it sounds more like the media made a story of how the media was covering a story that later turned out to be false.

I'm not casting complete blame on the news media about this thing. Bad things happen, mistakes are made, there is some confusion... and that has to be expected from any disaster. But the press certainly did no one any favors by disregarding journalistic integrity for sake of a triumphant headline and higher ratings.

Let's hope next time that reporters from the major news outlets will remember to thoroughly source and verify their information before passing it along to others.

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Null and Void: Thoughts on the domestic spying situation

Five years ago when the Bush administration was sworn in, I remember hearing so much about how "the adults had taken over" after the disastrous Clinton term. There was supposed to be a lot more responsibility and accountability. These were the people who were going to bring integrity back to the White House, we were told.

What we got instead has been the worst destruction of the concept of the rule of law that has ever happened in the entire history of the republic.

It's like this: there is either a government that comes by consent of the will of the people, or there is government existing for its own sake. Under one we still have a contract in effect that was sealed with the blood of patriots. Under the other, that contract is null and void, and there no longer exists any reason why any conscientious American should be beholden to this government at all.

The Bush cabal is exactly like the Clintons before them, if not to a far worse degree. The whole purpose of their being in office is the seizure of power and consolidating the hold on what power they have already. At the core of their being THEY REALLY DO NOT BELIEVE that the American people have the ability to govern themselves. To the Bush camp, the American people instead are a citizenry that must constantly "be fooled" and lied to. They honestly believe that they are anointed to be our masters, and whatever sycophants have attached themselves to the Bush junta are in it only because they like to feel a sense of that same power, however far removed they are from their idol. If the object of their adoration is attacked, they see it as an attack on themselves and lash out accordingly... doesn't that same something about how hollow and petty they really are? They don't even bring real ideas to the table, just their hatred and fear and loathing of those who have the strength of will to think on their own.

"Oh Chris you're being ridiculous! Every President since Jimmy Carter has had the power to spy without warrants!" Maybe so... but did they have authority from the Constitution to use that power? Did any of these Presidents stop to ask themselves if what they were doing was the right thing to do? And if it is not, then wouldn't the real mark of leadership and integrity be to put a stop to this kind of spying without being provoked to do so?

Bush can't be President forever. But his abuses of power will remain far longer afterward. Sooner or later, someone else is going to hold the office of President... and they are going to point right back at the precedent Bush is setting when they do begin using unwarranted domestic spying for political and vindictive purpose. I would give it no more than two or three more presidential election cycles, before we start to see this blatant kind of misuse.

The George W. Bush years will go down in history, I believe, as being the point at which it will be realized in the future that it could longer be said that we were a nation of law, but instead became a nation of men. If President Bush insists that he does not have to abide by the Constitution of the United States, then there is no longer any compelling moral reason why any of us should abide by it either.

So it is that George W. Bush has proven to be a far greater threat to the constitutional rule of law than Bill Clinton ever was.

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A third helping of King Kong

After Lisa got back around 8 a.m. on New Years Day (she took a train down to Georgia to visit her family, I couldn't make it 'cuz of other obligations) that afternoon we went to the movies. She'd been wanting to see Pride and Prejudice for awhile so she saw that, while I was wanting something other than a "chick flick" so I watched King Kong for the third time. And I swear this movie just keeps getting better and better. It's funny: the first time when Darth Larry and I caught it opening night, the theater was probably less than 1/4th full. A few days later when I saw it with Lisa, there were quite a few more people seeing it. And this past Sunday there were even more people still! What do I make of it? I think that King Kong is definitely having long-term draw at the box office, and the only reasons that The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is edging it out for the current #1 spot is (A) the Narnia flick is much shorter i.e. able to be shown more times per day and (B) it has the "wanna see" factor for the kiddies. Otherwise King Kong is holding its own pretty darned well. It's definitely getting good word-of-mouth, and that's going to sustain it for awhile yet.

Anyway, I don't know why but I enjoyed this third showing more than the previous ones. The more I see it the easier it's becoming to overlook the flaws that are in it (which I'd already admitted to in my review the other week). Plus as a "third-timer" now it's just a heckuva lotta fun to go in knowing when to watch my fellow audience members' reactions, like the "bug pit" sequence: the lady to my right got really squeamish when that one happened onscreen! A lot more people cried at the end of this showing too. Heck, I felt like crying even moreso this time.

Don't know if I'll see this movie any more times while it's running in the theaters, but if you haven't already, give yourself a treat and check out King Kong. It's definitely worth five bucks and three hours of your time. Oh yeah, Lisa says that Pride and Prejudice was a pretty good movie too, so I'm gonna look into that one when it hits DVD.

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Good day today. One of the best even.

This has been about the most perfect holiday season I've known in many years, and I'm really hating to see it come to an end. Tomorrow Lisa and I head back to our teaching jobs. We'll keep the tree up for the rest of the week, and then it'll come down until next December. A lot of songs from Trans-Siberian Orchestra's The Christmas Attic CD keep playing in my head, especially "Christmas Canon", "The Music Box" and "The Three Kings And I (What Really Happened)". Those three, along with a few from the new Enya CD that Lisa got, really express the whole range of feeling I had this season.

So today we made the most of it, and got out for awhile. We wound up driving to Burlington for some reason or another, then headed back to Greensboro, stopping at Four Seasons Mall where Lisa got a new purse and I racked up some Star Wars Christmas ornaments (and two Galactic Heroes keychains that Lisa thought were too cute :-) then got a big box of cinnamon rolls from Cinnabon. We got home and while flicking through channels I saw that Time Bandits was playing on one channel... Lord only knows how many people are still in therapy since that first came out a quarter-century ago. As I tried to explain this weirdfest to Lisa she made chicken alfredo for dinner. And then about 7:30 I headed out to pick up a few things from a nearby store before going to my parents' house to watch Monday Night Live. Had a good evening with them and I even wound up calling the show to offer my moral support (long story but if you go to the show's blog that'll fill you in on the raging controversy that has blown this area wide open).

It was on the drive back home, which takes about 16 minutes or so, that for some reason I dialed up Wagner's "Prelude to Parsifal" on my MP3 player through the car's stereo. And it brought out a lot of the emotions I've been feeling the past few days or so. Between some other things going on in my life and the past week especially, this really has been the most wonderful period of life that I've known for some time. I don't want this to end. I don't want things to change from where they are now. But they are going to change and I can't stop that. There will be some bad, I know this. But there will be some good too. And the bad is going to work with the good, I must have faith at least, to yield an even greater good than I can realize right now. Eternal blossoming, becoming something new from that which we have been, unfolding according to God's design... if you've never listened to "Prelude to Parsifal" before, that's what this piece of music is all about. Not fighting the change but instead letting it happen. To hold onto things that will eventually be lost, that's not the way to live the full life. You can't even really hold onto yourself. You have to be willing to die a little each moment so that you can experience continual rebirth and re-creation... until we fully become that which we were meant to be.

I'm not the same person tonight that I was a year ago, or even probably six months ago. That Chris Knight is gone forever. I'm someone who has a lot of his characteristics, but I've also grown a lot too. And the Chris who types on this keyboard a year from now will be a different person then, hopefully for the better.

But however long this time lasts, today was a beautiful day (even if it's been raining and foggy all day). It was just about perfect. The past two weeks have been perfect. And that's something that nothing will ever be able to take away from me.

It's nearing midnight now, and a line of thunderstorms is coming through. Yes, real thunder (and pretty loud too) along with lightning in early January. For most of my life I've heard that if it thunders in winter it'll snow ten days later. The first time I heard that it was 1993 when we had a thunderstorm... exactly ten days before the Storm of the Century. And it's happened four or five times since then that I can recall. I'll make a note of it here if we get snow a week and a half from now.

I wanna make a note of something: I'm quite proud of the "home improvement project" that my friend Johnny conned... I mean, asked me to help him with this past Thursday night. We coulda gone to see King Kong (which I did see for the third time yesterday afternoon) instead we put up shelves in his walk-in closet. So years from now instead of remembering seeing a movie about a big ape, he and his wife can look on those shelves and remember Chris coming over to help. Well, it's a neat deal to me to make a note of that anyway :-)

So here it is, the perfect day drawing to a close. But it had to if it's going to remain forever special, right?

Signing off for now. I pray tomorrow is just as good as today was.

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Happy New Year 2006

So how am I celebrating the new year? I've had the Sci-Fi Channel's The Twilight Zone marathon going on all evening. And earlier today I picked up Mario Kart DS and after finagling with it for a couple of hours I finally got it working on the Nintendo Wi-Fi network. That's what I was playing as the clock hit midnight (and so far my butt's been consistently handed to me by some guys who are apparently somewhere in Asia).

Awful lotta fireworks going off around the neighborhood tonight. I had the TV switched briefly to ABC and Dick Clark's show: Clark did a pretty good job doing his New Year's Eve show, in spite of the stroke he suffered awhile back.

All things considered, 2006 is off to as good a start as any :-)

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Looking back on 2005

Well, the past twelve months went all over the map, and sometimes drove straight off of it. There were a lot of things that happened that I didn't share on this blog, including at least one real tragedy that we're still waiting to see how this is going to get resolved. This blog isn't really an online journal or diary of everything that goes on in my life: it's just a synopsis of my persona that comes out of writing about the things that interest me, or thoughts I have on various subjects, or sometimes when I need to set the record straight on something. But there was much more going on "behind the scenes" that didn't get put in the spotlight.

What to make of it all? For me, 2005 was a year with a number of disappointments and harsh realizations... some of which I've already written enough about. But toward the end this year started turning into something with a lot more optimism and hopefulness. On one front in particular, I couldn't imagine being more happy.

I can't say that this was a year without some action. 2005 saw friends and I doing some pretty crazy things especially regarding the hooplah surrounding the last Star Wars movie. Speaking of which, one of the highlights was the 1200-mile round trip that Lisa and I made to Star Wars Celebration III... which I still haven't gotten the pics online from it, but only because there were so many. This blog was the first place where it was announced anywhere that one of my best friends is getting married. Not long after that I got to finish and premiere my first movie, and Lord willing there will be more in the future. And speaking of that, there was my excursion deep into the bowels of a nuclear power plant to help with some filmmaking this past summer.

Admittedly, there were some upsets this past year. But now that it's winding down, and looking back on it all and what I went through and now that I'm still standing and able to smile about it all, and with all the positive that did happen... I don't know if I would have changed anything about my personal life this past year. In a weird sort of way, it all worked together to bring me to the point that I'm at now, and I'm really thankful to be here.

So... where do I go from here?

I've no idea what to say to expect. I do plan on "reinventing" this blog though, and sometime soon. The way it looks doesn't reflect who I am anymore all that well. I'm probably going to make it more serious somewhat. However, sometime in 2006 is when I will finally use my funniest graphic ever, I think. So there's one or two surprises that I plan on unloading sometime in the next several months.

So here it is, my final blog post for 2005 after several hundred I've written since last January 1st. I'm glad that I got to chronicle most of the madness and mayhem and merriment that took place during the past 365 days, for the amusement of anyone who might happen to find this blog in years to come.

Here's hoping and praying that all of us will have a great new year in 2006 :-)

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