Walking on the Moon

Ah, Rod, what would I do without you?

How could I live without knowing that toilet paper was available with astronomy facts in Japanese on each sheet. It is certainly a fascinating world.

I was listening to KCRW’s To The Point broadcast about Guantanamo Bay in which a senior naval appointee’s views on how torturing people is antithetical to American values, and the fellow arguning the opposite position immediately began throwing up straw men and splitting legal hairs.

You know who does that?  Guilty people.

Torturing people does go against American values.  More than that, if you want to talk about those values being better than the rest of the world’s values – and I’d really like to – you have to hoild yourself to that higher standard.   And that means sometimes you do things not only the hard way, but the hardest way.

The basic truth is this: torturing people is always wrong.  There may be times that it’s the lesser of two evils, but it’s always wrong.  Any discussion of torture needs to start there.  After that we can weasel-word around about “lawful combatants” and exactly what penalties are appropriate.  The point is that if you’ve tortured someone or, worse yet, made someone to do it for you, you’ve done something that’s wrong – something that’s against the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.  And you really need to admit that.

Then come issues of legality and punishment.

From jtw:

“Failure is not an option.”

Via Educated Guesswork:
Ikea vs. Isben quiz

I’m particularly delighted by the domain name this is served by.

My review of Oyster is posted in Bell, Book and Candle.

Comments welcome.

Since I found an rss feed reader I like, Liferea, I’m sold on feeds as a way to keep up with the web. This is because it turns browsing the web back into reading news, which is good for old men like me. In any case, the easiest way to generate a feed is to use some blogging software. So now I’m going to use this blog to communicate site updates.

I’m also putting it into the menu as Walking on the Moon, where I used to post my rants (you can find the old ones under Archives). I haven’t done a new Walking rant in some time, and I’m planning to use this space for that, too.

I’ve got all the followups, etc. active, but moderated. Don’t hesitate to comment, should I actually build up the steam for a rant.

So…

I’m going to try this blogging thing out and maybe get a nice stream info going out with some regularity.