Monica of The’ Inkwell has a great riff entitled Surrender monkeys unite!.

She begins by railing about some peacenik appeasement types whose pictures are collected in someone’s blog.

The quote from her entry that resonates most with me are the following two paragraphs.

I wish our politicians were this direct in their communication.

This blog post reminds me tangentially of a interview I heard where some historian was describing the naivety of Jimmy Carter’s foreign relations. He approached other world leaders as if they were reasonable people who would honor their agreements and could be convinced to take the actions that would be best for the people of their lands.

My reaction at the time, and to this day is that I wish I lived in this mythical “Jimmy Carter world”. It would be fabulous. Unfortunately, I live in a world filled with greedy, murderous thugs who are filled with ambition to take what is not theirs by any means necessary.

I do differ with Monica’s notion that prayer will do no good, other than perhaps the dubious honor of putting you into good stead with the shamans of your faith.

If there is no God, then prayer still has a good. I believe that no matter how much personal power one possesses in life, there are events beyond one’s control. Prayer is an active way to pursue a kind of mental health that wishes for the best and accepts a power greater than one’s own “metaphysical potence.” Praying for better weather does no harm and relieves one the duty to worry about it.

In the event that there is a God, than perhaps God will intervene in the behalf of the supplicants. It’s a small price to pay for a great possibility if you ask me. That’s my twisted version of Pascal’s Wager I suppose.

So I can pray for peace in the Middle East, but also be very glad that people are willing to go there and enforce the peace with deadly force if required.

Occasionally a blog I really enjoy goes on an extended hiatus. It’s a treat when they come back and they are just as good as they used to be.

Welcome back Critical Section, it’s great to see your posts. As usual, there is a lot of links to chew on.

Can’t wait for The Religious Policeman to start posting again, although I can understand that he might have to wait for regime change.

I’m loving google desktop.

Here is my “google desktop” wish list in no special order. It might do some of these things for all I know, but there isn’t much UI or documentation that might show me how.

• Ability to restrict search by file type.
• Integration with gmail.
• Tool to allow developers to write plug-ins to do something special with other file types.
• Syntax and/or configuration to include/exclude files or directories.
• Make initial indexing a little less intrusive re: system resources.
• Ability to search by other criteria.
• Ability to understand exif data, to allow for the searching of photos.

It’s a really nice first effort. I can’t wait to see how this will turn out.

I can’t believe how good the email searching is. I don’t know why the Lookout folks didn’t make the UI look so cool.

The Packers were in fine form yesterday winning 38-10 over the Detroit Lions. The Pack needed this game and not only did they win, but they did it convincingly. They all seemed to be playing from the same script and it showed in some great plays. Nice job guys.

In my continuing effort to read some important books, I finished The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger.

I didn’t like the book. I am doing a little research to see if there was some sub-text, meaning, or english lit crapola that would help me to like this book. I’ll be the first to admit that after pages and pages of whining and railing against the phonies in life I was a little numb and might have missed something.

Call me old fashioned or hopeless bourgeois, but I like plot. This book lacked that.

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We frequently visit a lake cabin owned by my wife’s uncle Russ. It is situated near Ely, Minnesota on Lake Vermillion. If you don’t have an atlas handy it’s not all that far from the border between Minnesota and Canada, on the edge of the BWCAW.

This weekend we went up there to have a little R&R and to get the cabin ready for winter. It was our first time to help shut the cabin down for the winter.

Shutting the cabin down for the winter is a melancholy sort of exercise. The cabin is so full of summer memories; catching loads of crayfish, catching northern and smallmouth bass, taking my niece and nephew camping, entertaining relatives and friends, watching a spectacular display of the Aurora Borealis for hours, and much more.

My kids in particular loved going to the cabin this year. From the moment there feet hit the ground they wanted to be outside on the dock or in the boat, or just running around catching squirmy things.

The crunch of leaves underfoot and the chill that accompanied a small snowfall made it clear that winter is approaching fast and we’ll have to wait out the bitter Minnesota winter to feel the same skinny dipping–shoes off freedom again.