Viraj's Weblog

From George Soros' The Age of Fallibility:

What makes the war on terror a false metaphor is that it is taken literally. Terror is an abstraction. One cannot wage war on an abstraction. We have the means to destroy any target as long as we can identify it, but terrorists rarely provide an identifiable target. When we declare war, we must find a target; but the target we choose is unlikely to be the right one. We have killed more innocent civilians in Iraq than the terrorists killed on 9/11. In addition to killing, we have also humiliated and tortured many Iraqis. By creating innocent victims, we have advanced the terrorists' cause. They can now depict us as the terrorists and enlist the support of theiry countrymen, just as President Bush has enlisted ours. We find this difficult to understand because we cannot envision ourselves as terrorists. Yet, that is exactly how we appear to many Iraqis.

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Since terrorists are invisible, they will never disappear. Since the war on terror is counterproductive, it is liable to generate more terrorists or insurgents that it can liquidate. As a result, we are facing a permanent state of war and the end of the United States as an open society. All men and women of good faith, regardless of party affiliation, must come together to reject the war on terror as a false and dangerous metaphor.

Oceania is at war with Eastasia... no, I mean Eurasia.

I remember seing a movie called Fresh which was about a precocious young kid growing up in the inner-city. He excels at one game: chess, whom his dead-beat father (played by Samuel L. Jackson) has taught him. This is a movie that takes a completely different look at inner-city struggle. It's about a struggle to get out of that environment, and not fall trap to the plagues that affect the majority of the community (drugs, violence, etc). The boy plays everyone as if they were chess pieces, and the strategy is only revealed towards the end of the movie. But the strategy is a success and he frees himself from the shackles that held him down in that environment. I thought it was beautiful.

Half Nelson reminded me of that movie. It's about an inner-city teacher who is good at his work but has a crack addiction which one of the students that admires him finds out. It was very moving and sometimes very heart-breaking to watch. It really made me think about how tough it must be for inner-city children to find good role-models and avoid the pitfalls that plague those communities. It really is a struggle to get out of such an environment and it takes alot of strength to do so. I think this is what the movie was really trying to convey. It ended optimistically but in no way was it a Hollywood type of ending. I liked that because it was realistic.

The teacher is played by Ryan Gosling, whom I really liked in the movie The Believer. In that movie he played a neo-Nazi, and a journalist uncovered he was actually Jewish. In the end he realized he was wrong and was filled with guilt. Supposedly it is based on a true story, but I thought he acted really good in that movie and this one.

Excellent article on the impact of jogging on baby boomers.

Besides I've seen many joggers, and never a happy one. So if their agonized expression is the same as the pain experienced by their joints, it's small wonder that hips and knees give out at a young age. Jogging is frequently a disaster waiting to happen as it involves intense pressure, particularly on the knee.

Really, when have you seen a smiling jogger?