Gameboy - Yesterday Michelle and I both left the house at the same time. I was heading to work. She was heading to Target. She was breaking down to buy a third Gameboy Advance SP. This one is "Platinum", aka silver/gray. It was getting difficult whenever the three boys got in a game playing mood. So much like we had with the Leapsters earlier this year, each boy has his own Gameboy. Sometimes I think we should own stock in Nintendo.
Claire - Claire has a piano recital this Saturday. In one of her three numbers, I do a duet with her. We've been practicing it together. Even though neither half is particularly difficult, it is when you try to combine the two. It helped me work on a weakness of mine: reading notes that are deep bass clef. I think it's helped Claire to see me trip over the piano. When she started playing, she had this false impression of how good I was at it. My skills are relatively modest after many years of not playing. Meanwhile she's making rapid progress. She now seems to better understand that even when I point out where she might have made a mistake or could do better, I don't at all mean to imply that I could do it perfectly. Seeing me struggle has helped her consider my feedback as more of a peer rather than a master/novice relationship.
G'itmo - There's been some press about Guantanamo Bay, Cuba lately. Personally I don't support closing it down, but that's not what's aggravated me. It's the recent Senate discussions (following on a retracted statement by Amnesty International) comparing it to tactics of Nazis, the Russian Gulag and the Cambodian regime of Pol Pot.
In internet folklore there's a concept known as Godwin's law. It's shortened form is:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
The tradition says that once such a comparison is made, the thread of discussion is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. If you've hung around on the internet long enough, you'd be surprised at how many heated threads of discussion devolve into a comparison to Nazism or Hitler.
Senators Durbin and Kennedy weren't satisfied to just go for the Nazis. They had to throw the Gulag and Pol Pot into the mix, going way beyond Godwin's Law.
When you talk to people across the US, there is a broad spectrum of opinion about the war and the subsequent occupation. There are those who support the war, but not the occupation; those who didn't support the war, but support the occupation; etc. I respect that there's quite a mix of opinion on the actions in Iraq.
You diminish the gravity of the Nazis, the Gulag, and Pol Pot when you draw a parallel to G'itmo. There are around 500 illegal, non-uniformed terrorists there. These are not national soldiers from a country. Is it possible that a few are there unjustly? Perhaps. I don't find it likely, but perhaps. But to compare G'itmo to the millions of innocents who died under the Nazis, Russia's gulag, or Pol Pot shows no sense of proportion whatsoever.
These politicians talk about the world opinion of the US. It certainly does not help when they themselves use such far reaching analogies. It insults the families of those who died under those regimes. It puts our soldiers further into harms way. Some dare call it sedition. Even now Aljazeera is using Senator Durbin's comments as a lead story, effectively saying to the Arab world, "see, even their leaders say …"
Best sarcastic comment on the above comes from Ann Coulter:
American soldiers make do with C-rations. Dinner on an America West flight from New York to Las Vegas consists of one small bag of peanuts. Meanwhile, one recent menu for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo consisted of orange-glazed chicken, fresh fruit crepe, steamed peas and mushrooms, and rice pilaf. Sounds like the sort of thing you'd get at Windows on the World – if it still existed.