Last week we were watching one of those TV dramas, and they had captured a terrorist, and one of the Federal Agents asks the terrorist what the difference is between a suicide bomber and a martyr, and when the terrorist hesitates he tells him that it was a trick question, that there really is no difference because, basically, both are dead in the end.
This got me to thinking, is that really true? Of course the answer is no. I do understand that both are dead in the end, but far from making them the same thing, that is their only point of contact.
What is drastically different between a suicide bomber and a true martyr is the fact that the bomber has chosen to kill him/herself for the purpose of killing other people, while the true martyr is killed by others, through no direct action of their own, for the purpose of faithfulness. That is to say that a suicide bomber chooses death and destruction over life, while the true martyr chooses faithfulness over life. For the suicide bomber there is no choice but death, mayhem and murder, for the true martyr there is no choice but faithfulness, even if it ends up leading to death.
You see, the suicide bomber has chosen to kill themselves, and is trying to kill as many other people at the same time as they can. The true martyr, on the other hand, does not seek death, rather they have chosen faithfulness, and whenever there is a way to both be faithful and live, they will choose that every single time, however, when saving their own life would require that they forsake their faithfulness, they are willing to die, but they do not seek for that death.
Regardless of the propaganda from the radical Muslim circles, or the left wing media types, suicide bombers are not martyrs. Rather, they are killers. Degenerate murderers, and nothing more. There is a nobility in true martyrdom, there is nothing noble in blowing oneself up to murder innocent people.
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Monday, May 10, 2010
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives
I thought I would take a moment today and tell you about one of my favorite shows. Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives on the Food Network.
Guy Fieri travels around the country trying out little out of the way eateries. Usually single location mom and pop operations.
It's a great time, watching him go back in the kitchen, learning a little of the history of the place, and how some of their signature dishes are made, and then going out into the dining room and checking in with the customers, which really makes for some good realism, and getting a feel for what regular folks think about a certain place. Most of the time anyway, there was that one time he found Gene Hackman enjoying a little place down in New Mexico, but I think that's the only celeb I've ever seen on the show.
Guy is a lot of fun, and the show probably wouldn't work without him, he just brings such high energy and such a great sense of humor to the table.
Take a little time, it's just a half hour show, and check it out. I think you'll be glad you did.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
"We're So Good!"
I had been thinking about how funny it is the amount of national pride people get from the Olympics. There is something really cool about watching these amazing athletes and seeing that the one that is representing your own country wins the Gold Medal, and it does make you feel good.
The truth though, is that most of the sports that we watch at the Olympics, are not sports that we watch on a regular basis. Honestly, when was the last time you watched a swim meet? Or beach volleyball? Or Rowing? Or Gymnastics? Or a myriad of other Summer Olympic Sports? If you're like me, or the vast majority of other Americans, the answer would be, 4 years ago at the last Olympics. And yet, the games have the power to captivate us, none the less.
Last night, while I was watching some of the Olympic coverage that I have recorded on my DVR, one of our (that is the USA) swimmers, other than Michael Phelps, won a race, and my daughter started dancing around proclaiming, "We're so good!" Over and over again she said it... and she had nothing to do with it! Yet she saw someone from her own Country coming out on top, and was really excited by it.
I'm really not all that into sports on a regular basis, but there is something about the Olympics that I really enjoy.
The truth though, is that most of the sports that we watch at the Olympics, are not sports that we watch on a regular basis. Honestly, when was the last time you watched a swim meet? Or beach volleyball? Or Rowing? Or Gymnastics? Or a myriad of other Summer Olympic Sports? If you're like me, or the vast majority of other Americans, the answer would be, 4 years ago at the last Olympics. And yet, the games have the power to captivate us, none the less.
Last night, while I was watching some of the Olympic coverage that I have recorded on my DVR, one of our (that is the USA) swimmers, other than Michael Phelps, won a race, and my daughter started dancing around proclaiming, "We're so good!" Over and over again she said it... and she had nothing to do with it! Yet she saw someone from her own Country coming out on top, and was really excited by it.
I'm really not all that into sports on a regular basis, but there is something about the Olympics that I really enjoy.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
The Olympics Are Back
When I was a kid, I really didn't care about the Olympics at all. I had no interest whatsoever in watching the games, or hearing news of them or anything. But four years ago, when the Summer Olympics were in Athens, something changed. I don't even know what that change was really, but suddenly I started to watch the various events. What's more, I really started to enjoy watching the games.
This year I have found myself really looking forward to the start of the Olympic Games, and they started right off with a bang. The USA took women's Fencing in a clean sweep, Gold, Silver and Bronze. Michael Phelps already has another Gold Medal, and a new World Record for swimming. All this, and the games are just getting started.
Of course, there is also the fact that a family member of the men's indoor volleyball coach was murdered, which is certainly not a good start to the games for him. My heart really goes out to that family. What should have been the wonder of a lifetime will forever be transformed into a nightmare.
I also find myself thinking about the huge House Church movement in China, with millions turning to Christ, and the ranks Chinese Christians growing by leaps and bounds. This is very exciting to me, and I praise God for it. In fact I have been thinking about this a lot, and am sure that I will give this topic it's very own post in the very near future.
Hope everyone enjoys the Olympics this year.
This year I have found myself really looking forward to the start of the Olympic Games, and they started right off with a bang. The USA took women's Fencing in a clean sweep, Gold, Silver and Bronze. Michael Phelps already has another Gold Medal, and a new World Record for swimming. All this, and the games are just getting started.
Of course, there is also the fact that a family member of the men's indoor volleyball coach was murdered, which is certainly not a good start to the games for him. My heart really goes out to that family. What should have been the wonder of a lifetime will forever be transformed into a nightmare.
I also find myself thinking about the huge House Church movement in China, with millions turning to Christ, and the ranks Chinese Christians growing by leaps and bounds. This is very exciting to me, and I praise God for it. In fact I have been thinking about this a lot, and am sure that I will give this topic it's very own post in the very near future.
Hope everyone enjoys the Olympics this year.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Is T. Boone Pickens "Swiftboating" America?
Below is an article from JunkScience.com regarding the "new" plan of T. Boone Pickens. You may have seen him on the TV in commercials trying to convince us that he's going to be the savior of the American people as far as energy goes. Trying to tell us that he has all the answers and that we don't know what's really going on. The truth is that we know far more than he wants to give us credit for, and we know that what he's really doing is trying to put Billions more of our dollars into his already overflowing pockets. Yeah, some great guy he is.
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Is T. Boone Pickens 'Swiftboating' America?
By Steven MilloyJuly 24, 2008
Liberals have done a U-turn on conservative billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens.
Formerly reviled for funding the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" campaign against Sen. John Kerry, he's now adored by the Left — unfortunately, for trying to gaslight the rest of us on energy policy.
This column recently spotlighted Pickens' proposed plan to get America off foreign oil by substituting wind-generated electricity for natural gas-generated electricity and then using the natural gas to replace gasoline.
Already having addressed the proposal's flaws — and Pickens' plan to profit at taxpayer expense from it — let's consider how Pickens' marketing shades the truth.
On his Web site and in TV commercials, Pickens tries to frighten Americans about being "addicted to foreign oil."
"In 1970, we imported 24 percent of our oil. Today, it's nearly 70 percent and growing," he intones.
Aside from the fact that the Department of Energy (DOE) puts the import figure at a more moderate 58 percent, Pickens gives the impression that imported oil is scary because it all comes from the unstable Mideast.
His TV commercials feature images of American soldiers fighting in Iraq and he likens the annual $700 billion cost of foreign oil to "four times the annual cost of the Iraq war."
But hold the phone. Only 16 percent of our imported oil comes from the Persian Gulf — barely up from 13.6 percent in 1973, according to the DOE. Imports from OPEC countries are actually down — from 47.8 percent in 1973 to 44.5 percent in 2007.
Contrary to Pickens' assertion that oil imports are growing, the DOE expects oil imports to decrease by 10 percent by 2030.
Pickens tries to shame Americans because, "America uses a lot of oil ... That's 25 percent of the world's oil demand, used by just 4 percent of the world population."
Some might think these figures make us sound greedy and wasteful.
But what Pickens omitted to mention is that the size of the U.S. economy in 2007 was about $13.8 trillion and the size of the global economy was $54.3 trillion.
This means that the U.S. economy represents about 25.4 percent of the global economy. So what's the problem if a nation that produces 25 percent of the world's goods and services needs 25 percent of the world's oil output?
Would he prefer that we shrink our economy by 84 percent to match our share of world population?
Pickens plays the hope-squasher.
"Can't we just produce more oil?" he asks. "The simple truth is that cheap and easy oil is gone," he responds.
But there are hundreds of billions of barrels of oil in the form of oil tar sands and oil shale in North America, not to mention the more than one hundred billion barrels of oil in the outer continental shelf of the U.S. and on public lands like the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve (ANWR).
And don't forget that coal-to-liquids technology can convert our 268 billion tons of coal into 20 times the nation's current crude oil reserves, according to investment analysts. We have liquid fuels to burn.
While producing this oil may not be as easy as it was in 1859, when crude oil bubbled out of the ground in northwest Pennsylvania, it is much more feasible and far less expensive than Pickens' fantasy of replicating the entire existing U.S. wind supply system every year for the next 15 years in addition to building the national infrastructure for natural-gas filling stations.
Finally, Pickens laments the $700 billion (less at current oil prices) "wealth transfer" from America to foreigners every year because of our "addiction."
But is he also concerned about our "addiction" to other imports?
In 2007, the U.S. merchandise trade deficit — the difference between imports of goods from and exports of goods to foreign countries — exceeded $815 billion.
Contrary to Pickens' demagoguery, "wealth transfer" is a term generally used in the context of estate planning, where money is simply "gifted" to heirs.
Our purchases of foreign oil, in contrast, are more reasonably known as "trade" — and trade is good.
Americans are not simply petro-junkies who mainline crude oil for the masochistic high of watching gas pump numbers spin faster. We produce goods and services with imported oil more than any other people on this planet.
Pickens' bad-mouthing of our use of oil sounds like it comes from Al Gore and his fellow Democrats and extreme Greens — and guess who Pickens' new friends are?
Pickens told the National Journal that, "I think I would be for Al Gore for energy czar [in an Obama administration]."
Pickens said that he and Gore agree on about 95 percent of their respective energy plans.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited Pickens to speak before the Democratic Caucus.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that, while Pickens was once a "mortal enemy," they are now friends because of the oilman's conversion to alternative energy.
Then there's Carl Pope, the head of the Sierra Club, who not only flies in Pickens' private jet but writes paeans about him on the liberal Huffington Post blog.
"T. Boone Pickens is out to save America," Pope wrote on July 3.
It would have been more accurate, perhaps, for Pope to write that "Pickens is out to make billions of dollars for himself and to save the Sierra Club's anti-coal, anti-oil, anti-natural gas agenda."
Lastly, the New York Times rhapsodized about Pickens in an editorial this week.
Pickens' involvement in the alleged swiftboating of John Kerry seems to have been forgiven and forgotten by the paper. But the Times went absolutely over-the-top when it observed that the billionaire Pickens wasn't in it for the money because "he doesn't really need it."
It's too bad we can't generate electricity from such hilarity, half-truths and hypocrisy. Pickens and his new friends could power us — as Buzz Lightyear might say — to infinity and beyond.
Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert, and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
**************
Is T. Boone Pickens 'Swiftboating' America?
By Steven MilloyJuly 24, 2008
Liberals have done a U-turn on conservative billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens.
Formerly reviled for funding the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" campaign against Sen. John Kerry, he's now adored by the Left — unfortunately, for trying to gaslight the rest of us on energy policy.
This column recently spotlighted Pickens' proposed plan to get America off foreign oil by substituting wind-generated electricity for natural gas-generated electricity and then using the natural gas to replace gasoline.
Already having addressed the proposal's flaws — and Pickens' plan to profit at taxpayer expense from it — let's consider how Pickens' marketing shades the truth.
On his Web site and in TV commercials, Pickens tries to frighten Americans about being "addicted to foreign oil."
"In 1970, we imported 24 percent of our oil. Today, it's nearly 70 percent and growing," he intones.
Aside from the fact that the Department of Energy (DOE) puts the import figure at a more moderate 58 percent, Pickens gives the impression that imported oil is scary because it all comes from the unstable Mideast.
His TV commercials feature images of American soldiers fighting in Iraq and he likens the annual $700 billion cost of foreign oil to "four times the annual cost of the Iraq war."
But hold the phone. Only 16 percent of our imported oil comes from the Persian Gulf — barely up from 13.6 percent in 1973, according to the DOE. Imports from OPEC countries are actually down — from 47.8 percent in 1973 to 44.5 percent in 2007.
Contrary to Pickens' assertion that oil imports are growing, the DOE expects oil imports to decrease by 10 percent by 2030.
Pickens tries to shame Americans because, "America uses a lot of oil ... That's 25 percent of the world's oil demand, used by just 4 percent of the world population."
Some might think these figures make us sound greedy and wasteful.
But what Pickens omitted to mention is that the size of the U.S. economy in 2007 was about $13.8 trillion and the size of the global economy was $54.3 trillion.
This means that the U.S. economy represents about 25.4 percent of the global economy. So what's the problem if a nation that produces 25 percent of the world's goods and services needs 25 percent of the world's oil output?
Would he prefer that we shrink our economy by 84 percent to match our share of world population?
Pickens plays the hope-squasher.
"Can't we just produce more oil?" he asks. "The simple truth is that cheap and easy oil is gone," he responds.
But there are hundreds of billions of barrels of oil in the form of oil tar sands and oil shale in North America, not to mention the more than one hundred billion barrels of oil in the outer continental shelf of the U.S. and on public lands like the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve (ANWR).
And don't forget that coal-to-liquids technology can convert our 268 billion tons of coal into 20 times the nation's current crude oil reserves, according to investment analysts. We have liquid fuels to burn.
While producing this oil may not be as easy as it was in 1859, when crude oil bubbled out of the ground in northwest Pennsylvania, it is much more feasible and far less expensive than Pickens' fantasy of replicating the entire existing U.S. wind supply system every year for the next 15 years in addition to building the national infrastructure for natural-gas filling stations.
Finally, Pickens laments the $700 billion (less at current oil prices) "wealth transfer" from America to foreigners every year because of our "addiction."
But is he also concerned about our "addiction" to other imports?
In 2007, the U.S. merchandise trade deficit — the difference between imports of goods from and exports of goods to foreign countries — exceeded $815 billion.
Contrary to Pickens' demagoguery, "wealth transfer" is a term generally used in the context of estate planning, where money is simply "gifted" to heirs.
Our purchases of foreign oil, in contrast, are more reasonably known as "trade" — and trade is good.
Americans are not simply petro-junkies who mainline crude oil for the masochistic high of watching gas pump numbers spin faster. We produce goods and services with imported oil more than any other people on this planet.
Pickens' bad-mouthing of our use of oil sounds like it comes from Al Gore and his fellow Democrats and extreme Greens — and guess who Pickens' new friends are?
Pickens told the National Journal that, "I think I would be for Al Gore for energy czar [in an Obama administration]."
Pickens said that he and Gore agree on about 95 percent of their respective energy plans.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited Pickens to speak before the Democratic Caucus.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that, while Pickens was once a "mortal enemy," they are now friends because of the oilman's conversion to alternative energy.
Then there's Carl Pope, the head of the Sierra Club, who not only flies in Pickens' private jet but writes paeans about him on the liberal Huffington Post blog.
"T. Boone Pickens is out to save America," Pope wrote on July 3.
It would have been more accurate, perhaps, for Pope to write that "Pickens is out to make billions of dollars for himself and to save the Sierra Club's anti-coal, anti-oil, anti-natural gas agenda."
Lastly, the New York Times rhapsodized about Pickens in an editorial this week.
Pickens' involvement in the alleged swiftboating of John Kerry seems to have been forgiven and forgotten by the paper. But the Times went absolutely over-the-top when it observed that the billionaire Pickens wasn't in it for the money because "he doesn't really need it."
It's too bad we can't generate electricity from such hilarity, half-truths and hypocrisy. Pickens and his new friends could power us — as Buzz Lightyear might say — to infinity and beyond.
Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert, and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Ice Road Truckers Is Back
About a year ago I posted a blog about a show on the History Channel called, "Ice Road Truckers." I enjoyed watching this show all the way through the first season, and ended up wishing that it was longer. Ever since it ended I have been waiting for it to come back for the second season.The wait is, at long last, over. Some of the same truckers are back for this season, but it's going to be very different this year. So, if you were worried about this being a re-hash of last season, you need not worry. In fact, they are not even driving on the same ice road this year.
Last season they were delivering equipment to Diamond Mines in Northern Canada. In that case the ice road that they were driving on was composed of frozen lakes, with small land bridges in between. This time they are driving over a frozen river and then out onto the Arctic Ocean. So, there are no land bridges this time.
In the last season we learned that stopping on the frozen lakes was a bad idea, because then the truck becomes dead weight on the ice, and the idling of the truck weakens the ice further, and runs the risk of falling through the ice.
This time there are no land bridges, they will be out on the open ocean, with no place to stop when there is a problem. After all the dangers of last year, you wouldn't have thought that they could have stepped things up, and yet, they did.
Now, as I said, last time they were going to they were delivering equipment to the diamond mines, this time they are delivering equipment to the oil companies as they work to gain access to natural gas and do research on new and, hopefully, viable forms of alternative energy.
Two episodes have been on so far this season, but so far I have only been able to watch the first one, as there was a mistake made with the settings on the DVR, but fortunately, unlike broadcast networks, the History Channel is really good about reshowing episodes to give you a chance to catch up if you miss some.
To me, this show, and others like it , are way better than most of what is being offered by broadcast networks. I don't tend to think of this as a reality show since they usually bear no resemblance to reality, and this is actually real. I highly recommend this show, but, watch it or not, I enjoy it.
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