Month: April 2008

Cougar Menu

by

As a follow up to my posts about urban wildlife I am reading and reviewing a suggested book, “The Beast in the Garden” by David Baron.  I hope to have my review done in a few weeks.  But for now, lets look at a cougar menu, from page 51 – you may even be able to use this as your quote of the day:

They have been known to eat grasshoppers, snails, mice, rats, lizards, turtles, snakes, squirrels, rabbits, bats, gophers, weasels, prairie dogs, skunks, beavers, raccoons, opossums, armadillos, marmots, porcupines, turkeys, chickens, geese, grouse, badgers, foxes, bobcats, coyotes, bighorn sheep, domestic sheep, pigs, goats, cows, horses, elk, moose, alligators, bison, bears, and other cougars.  But a mountain lion’s favorite meal, by far, is venison.

One more, the occasional human.  Ah, diversity.

The Nature of Dictatorships

by

Last June, I linked an article by Mario Vargas Llosa about dictatorship and what it does to the human spirit. In the current National Review (4/7), Jay Nordlinger has an article which touches on the same theme.

Nordlinger’s piece is about Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, maker of the film The Lives of Others. (If you haven’t yet seen it, you should.) Florian himself spent his early childhood in the U.S., with his family returning to Germany (West Berlin) when he was eight. His personal knowledge of Communism was based on family visits to East Germany and to his two-year visit to Russia in the early 1990s.

The leading actor in the film, on the other hand, had a very personal knowledge of Communist totalitarianism. Ulrich Muehe was an East German, and, while still in high school, he had already been identified as a promising actor.

From the NR article:

Muehe had the fate of being an East German, and the Stasi had its eye on him from the moment he left high school: They knew he would be a big star. During his military service (obligatory), they made him serve as a sniper at the Berlin Wall. He was under orders to shoot whoever tried to cross from east to west. If he failed, he would never be allowed to work as an actor. He would have to be a manual laborer to the end of his days.

So there was Muehe, 18 years old, sitting in the towers, with this incredible burden on his shoulders. The only thing worse than not being an actor would be shooting someone. Muehe developed stomach ulcers, and one day he collapsed on duty, bleeding from the mouth. Doctors had to take out three-quarters of his stomach. But, fortunately, no one tried to cross. Still, the Stasi never stopped warning him to toe the political line, through all the years of his acting. He kept his counsel–until just before the Wall came down, when he gave a big, pro-freedom speech in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz.

(cross-posted at Photon Courier)

Quoting WSJ

by

Twenty years [Forty] ago last week, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. The toll his family took was heavy. But the goal was – is – worthy. Bret Stephens contrasts King with Mugabe. Those who admire (mostly past tense, of course) both missed the core concept of the Civil Rights movement, of the assumptions of the will to live free. David Hackett Fischer notes how freedom and liberty are intertwined concepts in our history. Still, it is the very limits of our freedoms and liberties (the points where they touch others) that gives them shape and power, within those broad limits they empower us. If we don’t accept the limits of our freedoms – our human condition, others’ freedoms – they become perverse. Willing our death, willing other’s – that hardly changes our condition. And the most perversely revolutionary thought doesn’t throw over tradition for a universal of individual growth but rather to allow expression of one individual (one corporate) will that uses each to express that will. (Perhaps talking about Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” over and over with freshmen newly exposed to that terror makes me read the editorial pages with hyperbolic context – or maybe it is Conrad’s that is the real context.) Anyway, here is Stephens:

Maybe the question is better put this way: Why is it that “progressivism” seems so prone to nihilism? Friedrich Nietzsche, who knew something about nihilism, had an answer: “Man,” as he famously concluded in his Genealogy of Morals, “would rather will nothingness than not will.” Ultimate freedom, complete liberation, demands that man overthrow every constraint, or what Nietzsche called “a revolt against the most fundamental preconditions of life itself” – including life itself. In this scheme, nature and the natural order of things become subordinate to the mere act of willing. This is the essence of totalitarianism, a political order that recognizes no higher authority, no limits and no decencies.
 
Which brings us back to Martin Luther King Jr. In his 1958 essay “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” King described his encounter with, and rejection of, Marxism. “Since for the Communist there is no divine government,” he wrote, “no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything – force, violence, murder, lying – is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end. . . . I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God.”

“Exterminate the brutes!” may be the colonial view but it was also Stalin’s, Hitler’s and it wasn’t just the cry of Europeans in Africa but also of Cambodians in Cambodia, Rwandans in Rwanda. Wars prove less deadly than democide, for winning a battle doesn’t require the extermination of the “restless spirit” Frederick Douglass describes.

Keeping Austin Weird

by

George Will looks at Austin’s campaign to keep itself weird. A useful contrast between the two flagship schools and the communities that house them might be interesting – community participation, generosity, attitude toward the “other.” Of course, analyzing levels of religious commitment, political philosophy, and applied citizenship in such minor commitments as voting and jury duty and larger ones such as enlistment would also be interesting. Last night, we watched Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace. He chooses to focus on the application of Wilberforce’s beliefs in the practical realm of politics, but the undercurrent (as certainly was true) was that the driving force that impelled him was his belief in the universal rights of man, his belief in a God and the God-given nature of those rights. But, of course, he was someone who was interested not just in believing but in acting. There is nothing more beautiful nor more useful than the practical application of the great beliefs.

Packing my boxes to move, I kept writing Austin, Nebraska – but once there, well, it felt like home for me as for so many others. Soon, Willy was setting up the first of the Dripping Springs concerts and I was reading manuscripts by the great twentieth century writers in one of the best two or three libraries in the world. Fromholz described himself as a rumor in his time and people claimed he’d run for governor (I don’t think very seriously, but who knew then). It’s cooler and dryer than much of the state and more laid back than about any place. Still, when both my kids packed up to move last year, they also felt they’d lived there long enough. I guess, in a way, so had we over twenty years before. It’s a good place to be young, but walking the dog down streets full of broken glass was getting to our daughter who lived in West campus; the rents had raised from our day but the druggies still dealt on the drag; the street people had gotten sadder (or maybe we’d just gotten older).

Read more

This Work Could Get Dirty

by

Today on a Fox News live feed I saw some people littering up the Golden Gate bridge with some unreadable banners about Tibet.  In the same news cycle I read about protesters “for Tibet” in London and France mucking up the running of the Olympic torch.  In France it appears that they even decided to take it up with a person in a wheelchair who was probably living out some sort of dream by moving the torch.  Nice.

 To this very simple blogger it seems that all of the Beastie Boys front row seats, bridge scaling and Richard Gere speeches are doing exactly zero for the people of Tibet.

I would have to assume that the only real solution is a dirty one for those who want to “free Tibet”.  Two words:  Send Guns.

I suppose nobody who is doing all of this protesting, bridge scaling and other nonsense is interested in the real solution, but are more interested in making a statement and feeling good.