Point Taken

Strange

My blog layout randomly changed and I had no clue. Luckily it was a quick fix but if I scared any of you sorry about it!!!! And don't ask me how it happened.

F FOR FAILURE

I am finally busy for once so blogging may not happen as much as I would like but I will try my best to keep it up.

Last week I was so bored I clicked through the Obama's first 100 days in pictures. I almost had to remind myself that I do not like this guy, it was so memorizing for some reason. A celebrity star he is. So I like this a lot better. Obama can't fool you now. Should we be expecting a list of 200 mistakes in a 100 days? Perhaps more than 200 as making mistakes become habitual? Anyways here is another article to make one disenchanted with Obama, though for many of us its harder not to be. Also, how is Obama going to let something like this happen? Perhaps Obama shared with Ahmadinejad the secret behind his succesful campaing to get on the Iranian leaders good side.

Some may say that we are giving Obama too hard of a time, but that happens when one promises more than can be delivered. In most jobs, he would probably be fired by now.

Townhall.com

So I joined Townhall.com today just because I wanted to argue an ignorant comment some liberal made about this article. Sometimes I just cant help myself. There are probably a 100 websites by now that I have forgotten I joined.

Anyways, I thought the article and video were somewhat interesting. If you decide to watch the video it takes you to Liveaction.org. I want to really quickly highlight this organization because it was started by Lila Rose at the age of 15. What a great example of someone seeing a problem and trying to do something about it.

Great Leader

This country seems to be lacking something recently and that is A Great Leader. I read the following this weekend and it just kind of slapped me across the face. This country has an obsession with self help books on how to lead and be successful. But I feel this says more in less words than those could ever say.

I respect all men, and it is from disrespect for none that I say there are no great leaders in the world today. In fact, greatness itself is laughed to scorn. You should not be great today — you should sink yourself into the herd, you should not be distinguished from the crowd, you should simply be one of the many.

The commanding voice is lacking. The voice which speaks little, but which when it speaks, speaks with compelling moral authority — this kind of voice is not congenial to this age. The age flattens and levels down every distinction into drab uniformity. Respect for the high, the noble, the great, the rare, the specimen that appears once every hundred or every thousand years, is gone. Respect at all is gone! If you ask whom and what people do respect, the answer is literally nobody and nothing. This is simply an unrespecting age — it is the age of utter mediocrity. To become a leader today, even a mediocre leader, is a most uphill struggle. You are constantly and in every way and from every side pulled down. One wonders who of those living today will be remembered a thousand years from now — the way we remember with such profound respect Plato, and Aristotle, and Christ, and Paul, and Augustine, and Aquinas.

If you believe in prayer, my friends, and I know you do, then pray that God sends great leaders, especially great leaders of the spirit.

A great leader suffers in a hundred different ways, and keeps his suffering to himself.

A great leader survives both his suffering and the fact that nobody knows anything about it.

A great leader loves being alone with God.

A great leader communes with the deepest the ages have known.

A great leader knows there is a higher and there is a lower, and he always seeks the higher, and indeed the highest.

A great leader fights against the spiritual forces of darkness and disintegration, both in his own soul and in the world.

A great leader overcomes himself, rises above himself, daily, minutely.

A great leader is very polite, but he never tones down the truth just to please others.

A great leader never seeks fanfare and publicity- they come to him, and often he rejects them.

A great leader never craves the approval of the world- in fact he often intentionally provokes its disapproval.

A great leader hitches his wagon to the remote, the unattainable, the stars.

A great leader does not worship quantity, multiplicity, perpetual motion- he stubbornly sticks to the one or at most two ultimate truths that there are.

A great leader is very simple, but the moral force of his conviction shines through every tone of his voice and every gesture of his hand.

A great leader lets the oneness of his interest burst forth with endless creativity.

A great leader is absolutely fearless- fearless because he fears only God.

A great leader loves, not sentimentally, not by making an effort, but with the effortless overflow of God's love for him.

A great leader identifies himself with, and is not ashamed of, the deepest in his own tradition.

A great leader is never disturbed by the fact that other traditions too have their own deepest.

A great leader is decisive, yet with the utmost tentativeness and tenderness.

A great leader, under God, does not care if he is crucified- there is something he knows and sees in the distance infinitely more important than to avoid crucifixion.

A great leader knows what the Bible calls "the fullness of the time", I mean the time in which he lives, and God gives him the grace and the power to fulfill that fullness.

You insult a leader if you call him great; he does not want your judgment; he wants only to please God.

A great leader calls forth the most secret and the most sacred impulses of those whom he leads.

A great leader leads those who are not even aware that they follow him, but only rejoice in the fact that he leads them.

A great leader is at the forefront of danger, be it physical or moral danger, when danger strikes.

A great leader heals....

And so I say, my friends, if you believe in prayer, and I know you do, then pray that God sends great leaders, for that is the world's greatest need.

Charles H. Malik, "Forum Address" (18 November 1975), BYU Studies 16, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 543­44

In a different version of a similar speech Charles Malik said the following:

And so, if we really believe, my friends, we should pray, and work together, and accept suffering and sacrifice, and we should have the courage of our convictions when it comes to the deepest we know.

For the greatest single evil today is this blanket of fear and intimidation spread all over the world, so that people do not dare to stand up for their convictions.

... I pray you all to consider on your knees how much God has blessed you and how much you therefore owe him.

For you owe him everything. And once we realize how much we owe God, then, since we can never give him anything commensurate in return, we can at least pay him back tears of gratitude and love.

While this speech was made many years ago it couldn't be more relevant to our times. I know not everyone out there is religious but the lesson from this speech is all the same. We are in need of great leaders. People who forget about themselves, people who do not believe they are owed anything, people who represent what they believe in, and who love others. Let us not only pray for great leaders, but lets try to become one ourselves.

My Ideology Is Better than Yours

Random but I ran into this on google and liked it for its simplicity. God Bless the USA.

UN = Uninformed Nicompoops

Well if Obama does not divide the nation the UN will. Now the President is obligated to prosecute Bush administrative lawyers. Lets not forget though that this is the same association that allowed Iran's President Ahmadinejad to speak. Did they forget about all the evidence of abuses in Iran. Maybe they should read this again.

My original plan was to write a whole posting about torture and the UN but because the UN posting is taking me a while I've decided to just post about Torture for today so that you can see the article above. The UN posting will come soon enough. I know I already did a posting just a few days ago about torture, but this has a bit more information.

I have a hard time dealing with abuses against humans. The sex trade is not only saddening but disgustingly immoral. Massacres are horrific. Torture, in almost every case, not okay. But when one thinks about torture what do they think about? Probably broken bones, lots of blood, or perhaps whipping. There are plenty of methods. My point is that we think of methods that cause pain and extreme discomfort, perhaps even death or disfigurement. Out of all the methods that the US has used, I would say waterboarding may be the one form of "torture" to be worried about. The one that would cause the most discomfort and pain. This memo explains the Office of Legal Councils stance they took on the torture that was occurring and I think its worth reading. It is one of the memos that has been making a big uproar but I bet most people have not even read it. Though it has defined torture narrowly, I think it makes many legit points. If used carefully and for short periods of time and not done often, waterboarding would be considered the lesser evil of torture methods. People have their differences of opinion on whether waterboarding is torture. I believe, unless used carefully, and in a certain fashion (some forms of waterboarding are not pretty), it is a form of torture. But I do not believe that some of the other methods used, such as holding their head still, or slapping them once or twice, can be considered torture. If so, we should probably look at our jail systems in America because I am sure there are worse things going on in them every day.

Now with that out of the way, is this "torture" used by the US okay? As I said, I am not a fan of torturing people usually. But times have changed also. We are fighting a new type of enemy. One with no boundaries and one with new methods of fighting (computer warfare anyone? sounds kind of fun to me). Torture may be our only chance in saving the lives of thousands of people. It may be our only way to get any information out of terrorists that believe they are fighting for a great cause which they will be greatly honored for. Do I think we should use methods that in most cases cause pain, mental problems, extreme discomfort? No, I do not.

Using torture is definitely walking a fine line. But the benefits of using it has outweighed the negatives. One terrorist in discomfort and perhaps a bit of pain vs thousands of deaths. Not a hard choice. And its not like we asked for those terrorist to try and destroy our country.

Obama, if you feel its bad and immoral of us, then put a stop to it. If we get hit, it will be on your head but at least you did what you felt was right. Just don't prosecute those who were simply trying to help save American lives. And don't try to take the higher moral ground by releasing important documents. Its not working. Oh and if we do get it, don't even try to blame it on Bush. I know your already thinking of trying that.

Anyways here are a few last thoughts to end Friday on (TGIF right?). If there's so much room left open to debate about whether something is torture or not, its probably not worth prosecuting over. Just saying...And we all know that the UN would never do anything to the US if we don't prosecute Bush's people. They are an association of threats and no action. Just look at the UN's history. Obama probably hasn't so can someone please point that out to him. Plus with all the money we pay to the UN why don't we own that sucker yet?