Chain Emails

I hate chain emails. Loathe them. With an undying passion. They mainly come in two different forms:

1. Social
2. Patriotic/Spiritual

The social kind are exceedingly annoying. Why? Because they're completely pointless. The rationale seems to be that if you can't figure out really basic, obvious minutae about 20000 people on your contact list, you don't have any friends. And they all seem to be the same.

"Please respond to this email and forward it to 4 billion of your best friends. What is your middle name? What is your favorite color? What brand of shoes are you wearing, like, right now? How many people do you think will respond to this? Who do you think will respond? Who do you think will not respond? What is your favorite movie? HAVE YOU EVER CRIED? Are you in love? If so, send this email *twice* to that person. Key: If 20 people respond you are an ok friend, if 500 people respond you are an awesome friend, if 20000000 people respond you are a ^best^ friend!"

Then there are the patriotic/spiritual type. I abhor these, because they try to attach some kind of moral significance to it.

"I thought this was really good. It seems that President Bush, may his name be eternal, was in Paris, that denizen of sin paralleled only by the worst parts of Sodom. And the French foreign minister asked him why Americans were so evil. President Bush, may his name be eternal, said, "When God made Texas, where I'm from, He told us all to keep an eye out for the French. Fact is, we're not evil, and the only land we've ever asked for from you is to bury our dead." You could have heard a pin drop. FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW OR YOU'RE NOT A FRIEND OF JESUS OR AN AMERICAN. If you don't, the Californians will take over!"

Please, do the world a service. If you ever get another chain email, end the chain right there.

Another Essay

                The greatest, the single most important challenge my generation faces is reclaiming a constitutional base for our government. Without the Constitution, we have a government with boundless power and influence. This limit has been slowly bypassed over the past several decades, to the point at which the general opinion is that Congress should pass whatever laws it wants, and let the Supreme Court decide if they should have or not. Just from a practical standpoint, the fact is, the Supreme Court takes so few cases a year, it cannot handle the load that this philosophy places on it. From a moral standpoint, it is flat wrong. Our nation's lawmakers cannot ethically pass any law they want, when they are sworn to protect the Constitution. In addition, they have delegated matters that they should oversee to the executive branch with such agencies as the EPA, FCC, and DEA. These agencies make their own policy, and are not held accountable by anyone. The reason Congress is supposed to oversee these issues is because Congress is directly accountable to the public. Also, the president should not allow these agencies to come under his jurisdiction. The president is supposed to enforce the laws of the country, not the rules of unelected bureaucracies. The Constitution has been slowly eroded until it is nothing but a nicety, or a vague and misapplied excuse for a federal overreach. When language like, "We'll just have to pass it to see what's in it" is condoned by the people with regard to massive bills, it is obvious something needs to change. Without a Constitution in effect, there is tyranny.

An Essay

I thought this was a cool college application essay topic.

"You have just completed your 300 page autobiography. Please submit page 217."

                This was a period of great change in my life. I went from being a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps to being an international diplomat and statesman. Instead of rising at five every morning and driving to the base, I would wake up at nine and go to the airport. Instead of planning military exercises and devising policy for my men, I would plan agreements between foreign countries and my own. Instead of always preparing for the next war, I was always preparing for the next election. Neither of these careers was easy, but that's not why I was born. It has always been one of my deepest desires to accomplish big things in my life, and I don't mean running 5k's to boost my self-esteem after watching my life pass by all too quickly. Whether it was leading thousands of Marines into battle or forging trade agreements with Germany, I wanted to make my life count for more than just my own satisfaction. And perhaps that is why throughout my career I never chose the easy way out. Maybe that's why never a thought about retirement ever entered my head. It's not that I was not planning ahead. It's that I was planning ahead for something most people don't. While other people make choices centered on when they could end their career, I was always planning on the next big thing. For a career spent serving others, it just seemed odd, foreign even, to say, "enough" when I still had so much energy, so much vitality left to offer. No, I would not, will not, quit until I die.

10 Elements of a Story Structure

     Every good story includes 10 main elements that make the story worth listening to, seeing, or reading.

1. A hero
2. A goal of the hero
3. A plan of the hero
4. An adversary
5. A flaw
6. An apparent defeat
7. A self-realization
8. A final confrontation
9. A resolution
10. A theme of life

     The funny thing about this is that The Good Story has all of the elements. We have our hero, Jesus Christ. His goal is to provide justice by absolving those who have sinned and repented. His plan is to become a living sacrifice that makes a way for us to enjoy that justice. His adversary is Satan. His flaw is that he is God (in that He then cannot live on Earth with sinful man). This was overcome by becoming man, while retaining his God nature. His apparent defeat was His death on the cross. His self-realization is leaving Hell, and destroying death's hold on us all. His story's resolution is rising from the dead. The theme of life should be the Christian's theme of life, that we are all originally condemned until we lay down our pride and actively acknowledge who Christ is and who we aren't.

     The other funny thing about these elements is that we realize that every good story has elements of The Good Story. People love stories, but they have to be good. Without any of these plot elements, the tale becomes boring or pointless. Nobody likes boring and pointless stories. They must stir the soul and be profitable to hear and analyze. But it is hard to find a story that is so good, that it holds the keys to Eternal Life. And what story displays each of these key ingredients perfectly? What story has a theme of life so applicable? What story has an adversary so deplorable? Christ's story.

Cornelius Ryan

Cornelius Ryan

     The man who's image you see above is Cornelius Ryan, as the caption says. He is probably in my top three or four favorite writers, and he achieves this place for three of his books, The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, and The Last Battle. These are historical books recounting the events of D-Day, Operation Market-Garden, and the final collapse of Nazi Germany respectively. The intriguing thing about all of his books is that he was actually there, on scene, for all of the events depicted. This enabled him to give not only a factual account, but also a more personal tone to all of his stories. I doubt anyone has been moved by a textbook description of Operation Market Garden, but to read eyewitness reports of the bravery and heroism exhibited by the Allied soldiers and be almost moved to tears, to know that you are reading about men who are far greater than you will ever be, and yet go unmentioned in most accounts of these events, is an amazing feeling.

     Most of you know that I am an avid WWII enthusiast who delightfully devoured 600 page books on the subject at the age of 10. I have studied, and re-studied most of the events, and can tell you the course of the war, from 1939 to 1945 by heart. Yet it took me years to discover these books. When they landed on my desk last summer, I was immediately interested. When I spent hours and hours and hours every day reading them, I was fascinated. By the time I finished the last one, I was obsessed. These are probably the best books I have read in a very, very long time. If you want touching, intense, and down-to-the-minute accurate battle accounts on an epic scale, I would highly recommend these.

A Very Bad Year

     It came to my attention today, while eating dinner at a friend's house, that 1913 was one of America's worst years. Ever. This was for three things:

1. Amendment XVII to the United States Constitution was ratified
2. Woodrow Wilson was elected
3. U.S. Federal Reserve was created

     Beginning with the first item on the list, this issue might appear a tad strange. As a refresher, the XVII amendment calls for the popular election U.S. senators. Why on earth is that a bad thing? Well, it effectively forced the states from any position in the federal government. You see, before 1913, the governors and legislatures of the individual states used to appoint federal senators, thus giving state governments some voice in the national government. Also, since the Senate is required to ratify or deny all foreign treaties, the states could control, in part, the nation's foreign policy. This created a political situation where the federal government was answerable not only to the people, but also the states. If there was a trend of congressmen who refused to listen to the people, at least they could rely on the senators, who could be recalled by the governors. Also, instead of acting as a strange extension of the House of Representatives, it empowered the Senate to act in the interests of the state government. This would have been useful in a few occasions, for example, when President Obama was shoving federal funds down everybody's throat, the Senate, with the governors behind them, could have said no. Instead, the political systems at work allowed this to happen.

     Second, Woodrow Wilson was elected. He was the president who not only suppressed anti-government voices during WWI, but also fathered the League of Nations. It was totally unconstitutional to jail government protesters, and remains a blight on his record in my view. Any time that the president disallows the most basic of civil rights, free speech, it shows serious and fundamental flaws in his governing philosophy and the state of the nation as a whole. In addition, he invented the notion of an international governing body in the mold of the U.N. Basically, without Wilson and his happily failed League of Nations, we would not have the national sovereignty defying, civil rights destroying United Nations. Surely his election will go down in history as one of the worst ever.

     Capping off this evil of evil years was the creation of the Federal Reserve. Basically, it institutionalized federal control of the economy. This goes against every free market principle ever. Allowing the government to control the value and distribution of a nation's currency may seem quite normal. However, its main purpose is to give the national government more power, which has no knowledge of satiation. Instead of having regionalized depressions and business busts created by speculation or other market forces, it extrapolated them across the entire country. This was first shown to be true in the Great Depression. Without the Federal Reserve, we would have been able to continue the stable economic policies of 19th century, the latter period of which is known as the "Gilded Age". There has not been a denoted "Gilded Age" since then.

    Thus we have seen that 1913 was one of the worst years ever. It proved to largely expand federal power, reduce national sovereignty, and destroy economic stability, the effects of which we are experiencing today.

Hello World!

I'm baaaaaaack! Check out the updated name. This blog will be posted on far more regularly than my last one, so ya'll will never lack for at least a daily post. Are you guys excited?