Matt Brundage

Archive for 2005

Wednesday, 14 September 2005

Talking Under Pressure

Eric Meyer recently posted an entry about his apparent unpolished skills answering interview questions:

I have to be honest: reading the full transcription of the interview was a deeply shocking and humbling experience. In the past, when reading transcripts of news interviews and commentary shows, I’ve winced and clucked over the mangled syntax of the people being transcribed. False starts, weird shifts, strange commas, unfinished sentences, mind-number repetition, long rambling assaults on syntax and coherence —what was wrong with these people? Are these the best minds our society can produce? Can none of them do so much as utter a sentence with a clear point and progression? How many “you know”s does one person really need?

Some people just have a knack for proper diction during interviews. Consider John Roberts, answering a question yesterday during his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing:

Senator, you did not accurately represent my position. The Grove City College case presented two separate questions, and it was a matter being litigated of course in the courts. The universities were arguing that they were not covered at all by the civil rights laws in question simply because their students had federal financial assistance and attended their universities. That was their first argument. The second argument was, even if they were covered, all that was covered was the admissions office and not other programs that themselves did not receive separate financial assistance. Our position, the position of the administration, and, again, that was the position I was advancing, I was not formulating policy, I was articulating and defending the administration position.

None of the dreaded “filler words”. Totally unscripted, unprepared, unrehearsed — the man is a machine. Some people take comfort in others’ inability to speak in public (Thomas Jefferson’s problems come to mind). Somehow, Roberts’ eloquent words likewise give me comfort.

Eric’s admission to poor interview-giving doesn’t make him any less of a “CSS god” in my eyes. I’d be just as bad at it if I were important enough to be interviewed.

Sunday, 11 September 2005

Appearently, this works just fine

The back of my audio-video devices Pictured: the rear of my audio-video devices. I had the opportunity to dismantle this monstrosity during my recent foray into interior painting. What you see is only about 60% of the total conglomeration. I’m hoping that one day all of these date transmission wires will be supplanted by infrared technology or some other wireless means, perhaps. If it can happen to routers, it can happen to audio/video devices.

Sunday, 4 September 2005

When the Levee Breaks

Oh, the irony: so I’m cruising down the road in my $3.79 gas blasting Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” with nary a care. A sampling of the eerie lyrics:

…If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break,
When the levee breaks I’ll have no place to stay.
…Don’t it make you feel bad
When you’re tryin’ to find your way home,
You don’t know which way to go?
If you’re goin’ down south
They go no work to do

Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
When the levee breaks, Mama, you got to move.
All last night sat on the levee and moaned,
Thinkin’ ’bout me baby and my happy home.

Going down, going down now, going down.

Thursday, 1 September 2005

The terrorist, Katrina

How quickly he forgets. Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, a director at Kuwaiti’s Ministry of Endowment, believes that Hurricane Katrina was a “soldier of Allah.”

“But how strange it is that after all the tremendous American achievements for the sake of humanity, these mighty winds come and evilly rip [America’s] cities to shreds? Have the storms joined the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization?

…I began to read about these winds, and I was surprised to discover that the American websites that are translated [into Arabic] are talking about the fact that that the storm Katrina is the fifth equatorial storm to strike Florida this year… and that a large part of the U.S. is subject every year to many storms that extract [a price of] dead, and completely destroy property. I said, Allah be praised, until when will these successive catastrophes strike them?

“…I opened the Koran and began to read in Surat Al-R’ad [‘The Thunder’ chapter], and stopped at these words [of Allah]: ‘The disaster will keep striking the unbelievers for what they have done, or it will strike areas close to their territory, until the promise of Allah comes to pass, for, verily, Allah will not fail in His promise.’ [Koran 13:31].”

What Muhammad is failing to remember is last year’s Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami which killed 200,000 people — about half of which were Muslims from Indonesia. I’m willing to bet Muhammad didn’t call that disaster a “Christian soldier” or a harbinger from the United States. Muhammad is also forgetting about the chronic earthquakes in Turkey and Iran, two countries that are about 99% Muslim.

Monday, 29 August 2005

Left-handed flying farkles

From a narrow, personal-budget perspective, I don’t give a left-handed flying farkle about crude oil prices. Reid put it best the other day about how many of us are whining about nothing:

But right now, [Katrina survivors] need our help. They need your help, and luckily, they need it from the one thing you control.

And what are a lot of us doing? Whining. Yesterday in Atlanta, we had a full-fledged gas scare, complete with price gouging. People waited up to two hours in line to pay $4-$6 per gallon for gas, yet today there are no lines, and gas is below $3.50 per gallon. So people are whining about price gouging.

Look at the reports from New Orleans and Mississippi. If the sole effect Katrina has on you is some time in line to buy pricey gas, how freakin’ lucky are you?

Gas prices don’t matter to me. Why should I worry about them? Is there anything I can do to make them go down? No.

Thursday, 25 August 2005

Nitpicking Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?”

Father, father, there’s no need to escalate…

For some reason, I think of my dad, standing at the bottom of an escalator, asking my sister if he needs to go upstairs. Then she tells him that “there’s no need to escalate” and he understands.

…for only love can conquer hate.

Actually, the total annihilation of the human race could also conquer hate. But hate is not something in and of itself that should be conquered, though. For instance, I hate ignorance. I don’t think that some formless “Love” can swoop down and conquer the hate I have for ignorance. It’s ironic that most people are ignorant of my hate for ignorance. (This too I hate.)

Don’t punish me with brutality

So there’s some mob guy named Tony Butali from the Bronx. As a front for his organized crime, he owns a tea-bag “company” which he has named Butali Tea. When Tony needs to put the pressure on a rival, he ties the rival’s hands and feet to a chair and starts slapping him in the face with tea bags. Hence, don’t punish me with Butali Tea.

Monday, 22 August 2005

I broke down and installed WordPress

I have a few days before school starts again, so I thought I’d run a database-driven blog instead of my modest flat-file creation. Much integration will happen in the near future!

Monday, 15 August 2005

Zakat and today’s tax code

Some say that Islam’s third pillar, Zakat, was the forbearer of the graduated tax code. Today’s tax code is even more extreme than the ideal proscribed in Zakat. Islam’s across the board tax is a flat tax, not a graduated (progressive) tax. While Zakat implores that 2.5% of one’s annual holdings be given to charity, for it to be a truly graduated code, this percentage would have to be progressively higher as the scale of wealth ascends. For example, one with modest holdings would give 2%, one with holdings over $500,000 would give 2.5%, one with holdings over $1,000,000 would give 3% and so on. A similar type of progressive tax code is one of the major facets of the Communist Manifesto, and has been a part of the US income tax code since World War I.

Tuesday, 9 August 2005

The ideal of jihad has been corrupted

It’s quite sad that it’s come to the point where a proper study of Islamic culture must be prefaced with the explanation “Not all Muslims are terrorists”. But it’s obvious why the “stereotypical terrorist” is Muslim, as the great majority of terrorist acts in the past 30 or so years have been committed by fundamentalist Muslim extremists.

That the Oklahoma City bombing wasn’t committed by Muslim extremists doesn’t explain away their growing track record:

1998, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed … 2000, The USS Cole was attacked and more than 15 American Sailors were killed in Yemen … 11 Sept 2001, four airliners were hijacked and destroyed and thousands of people were killed … 2002 reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and beheaded … 31 July 2002 5 Americans were killed by a Palestinian HAMAS bomber in Jerusalem while attending school … 12 Oct 2002 more than 200 innocent civilians (including 200 Australians and 5 Americans) were brutally murdered in a Bali nightclub … 29 Oct 2002 more than 700 Moscow theater goers were taken hostage and threatened with execution … 11 Mar 2004 Madrid train bombings which killed 191 people and wounded 1,460 … 1-3 Sept 2004, Beslan, Russia school children taken hostage; 344 civilians were killed, at least 172 of them children, and hundreds more wounded … 7 July 2005 London bombings, 56 people were killed in the attacks, with 700 injured …

*Note that these specific atrocities were not committed within the context of declared wars.

To put this into perspective, there are over 1,000,000,000 peace-loving Muslims in the world who are not extremists. The idea of jihad has been corrupted by extremists to the degree that it justifies the murder of innocent people (especially Jews, Christians, and Westerners) for the purpose of instilling fear and terror into peoples and governments. That some Americans react negatively to the concept of “Arab” or “Muslim” is a testament to the terrorists’ effectiveness in instilling fear and terror.

When law enforcement and government agents are assigned the task of looking for terrorists, it seems prudent to me to profile people who are most likely to be terrorists. Put another way, instead of confiscating the nail file of an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s, we should be looking for terrorists. It’s all about statistics. It would be absurd to ignore them. A distinction should be made between statistical profiling and racial profiling, the latter of which is prejudicial and not based upon common sense.

Monday, 8 August 2005

To the death

Many of Jesus’ disciples were eventually put to death for preaching the gospel after Christ’s resurrection. They were willing to die spreading His word. Something of enormous importance must have happened after Christ’s death. One could hypothesize that the disciples would have gone back to being fishermen and carpenters had Jesus not rose from the grave and appeared in the flesh to them.