Food of the Month: Pure Maple Walnut Ice Cream

I just stumbled across a flavor of Snoqualmie Ice Cream that I had never seen before: Pure Maple Walnut. This is a Western Washington company that makes top quality ice cream (low air content, high fat content, and high quality ingredients), and I have tried a lot of their flavors before (my favorite at this point still being French Lavender.)

I have recently really begun to like walnut ice creams, and I love the taste of real maple syrup, so I had to give this a try. It contains all natural ingredients, and it's fabulous--the dark, smokey flavor of the maple combined with walnuts in the thick, solid premium ice cream is intoxicating. I need to get more! and more!

Multiculturalism and Feminism: strange bedfellows

For another very cogent example of the hollowness or even shallowness of trumpeting multiculturalism as a watchcry to guide the world, take a look at this interview (thanks to Blithering Bunny for linking to it) from FrontPage magazine with Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a contributing editor to City Journal and the author of his new collection of essays Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses. I was especially struck by this section near the end of the interview:

FP: You discuss the horrifying suffering that women endure under the vicious and sadistic structures of Islam’s gender apartheid. You touch on the eerie silence of Western leftist feminists on this issue, noting “Where two pieties – feminism and multi-culturalism – come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.”

To be sure, the Left has long posed as a great champion of women’s rights, gay rights, minorti rights, democratic rights etc. Yet today, it has reached out in solidarity with the most fascistic women-hating, gay-hating, minority-hating and democracy hating force on the face of the earth – Islamism.

What gives? It’s really nothing new though is it? (i.e. the Left’s political pilgrimages to communist gulags etc.)

Dalrymple: I think the problem here is one of a desired self-image. Tolerance is the greatest moral virtue and broadmindedness the greatest intellectual one. Moreover, no decent person can be other than a feminist. People therefore want to be both multiculturalist and feminist. But multiculturalism and feminism obviously clash; therefore, you avoid the necessity to give up one or the other merely by disregarding the phenomena. How you feel about yourself is more important to you than the state of the world.

And that is the problem that I have with the American Left. It's not all about me, and how I feel about things.

October 2005 Iraqi Elections

So, the Sunnis have finally decided that the elections weren't puppet elections after all, and have decided to give their yea/nay to the democratic process in Iraq.
An amazing thing to see, indeed.
Yet it seems that some of the headlines in the news are things like this:

Polling Stations Attacked as Iraqis Cast Ballots

A roadside bomb killed three Iraqi soldiers in Iraq, and seven people were wounded during attacks by insurgents near five of Baghdad's polling stations, police said.

This headline screams out about what a bloody election this is (and remember, if it bleeds, it leads), and how bad things in Iraq STILL are because that stupid Chimpy McBushitler decided to go over there and kill Iraqis for Oil or Halliburto....oh, wait, sorry...I started to channel a moonbat there somehow.
Compare this headline to Publius Pundit's compilation of information that he collected:

Terrorism was minimal, with only three relatively unsuccessful attacks wounding two police officers and one civilian — which, out of 6,000 polling stations, is a highly ineffective 0.05% success rate.

This headline is similar to what the more serious news agencies are publishing. Even Al Jazeera mentions this, although they say that the vote is expected to pull Iraq into three pieces (Kurdistan, Shi'iteistan, and Sunnistan, I suppose, although it is unclear what their rather pessimistic prediction is based on other than the standard anti-American viewpoint, that anything America is involved in must be bad and will fail.)
Anyway, yes, there are still some insurgents trying to derail the process--or is that what they are trying to do at all? If they were truly trying to affect the government, wouldn't voting be a better way to do it? If they were truly insurgents, why would they be targeting SUNNI muslims, who have been the ones most decrying the opposition? Could it be that these people might be terrorists?
Well, whatever they are, it is clear that the resounding media silence regarding the many,many instances of voting without death (ho hum, boring, won't sell news to jaded Americans, it's still a quagmire, dontchaknow?) seems to indicate what kind of news they prefer to tell/sell.
If you just read the headline and never bothered to go out and PULL news to you (instead of waiting for it to be PUSHED to you via MSM channels), you'd get a pretty skewed picture.
You want a good picture of voting in Iraq?
For starters, tryIraq the Model. Omar is decided pro-American, and doesn't hide it, but he has some pictures. Quiet and peaceful...but surely that's a lie, just like Michael Moore's infamous Farenheit 9/11 scenes of children playing in Saddam's Iraq? Then look at Sooni's blogspot, with some more pictures. Sooni seems to be a Sunni Muslim, who seems to be tolerating the American presence because of its effects on his country. But his pictures show nary a body--lots of voters--Iraqi military and police exerting security control.
For a very good overview and collection of articles and opinions on what the Iraqi on the street (Sunnis, mostly, since they are the key in this election), peruse The Adventures of Chester and his live-blogging and links. Then go back and read the Publius Pundit link posted earlier.

Good luck, people of Iraq. May your voices be heard, and may they peacefully organize and govern your country to become a safe place you can be proud of.

Multiculturalism and Tolerance near Seattle

This house is the residence of a former US soldier with three tours of Vietnam. He says that he feels like his own freedom of speech is under attack. According to this article, at http://www.komotv.com/stories/39576.htm:

in the last year the mailbox has been blown up twice with fireworks. The house has been egged. Paint has been thrown on the house too. The flags have been torn down and ripped up more than once.
And the 101st Airborne flag has had the
word "murder" and a swastika written on it with a permanent marker.
"It's really difficult for me to see something like this and not feel sad," Potts told us of the vandalism that started around election day last year. Especially, he
says, since the 101st led the charge in World War II to defeat Nazi Germany."

I thought that if somebody was a left wing party member in the USA, he or she was for tolerance and alternative points of view and lifestyles. Of course, I know that these people in this article are pretty fringe-oriented left wingers--it is wrong to tar all lefties with the same brush.

Now, what would be the proper liberal response to this action?

Serenity: the movie

Saw Serenity today, the feature film based on the too-soon-departed TV series Firefly.
I saw the show (most episodes, at least) when it first aired in 2002, and was disappointed when it was suddenly canceled, due to some rather stupid marketing errors and decisions on the part of Fox network.
The complete set of episodes (including unaired ones) was made available on DVD, and we have enjoyed repeated watching of the episodes ever since.
The movie was quite loud, frenetic, and has some great filmmaking in it. I love the cast--they are so good together, and make the whole premise work so well.

Here are some of my thoughts about the movie:
(WARNING--Possible Spoilers Below)

1) It bugs me when characters repeat stupid actions that are vital to the plot. To wit: Mal shoots the (unnamed) Operator once...maybe twice...grabs Inara and then runs. The Operator is wearing body armor, however, and is not harmed. Mal knows about body armor (since Zoe wears it in an episode of Firefly), so why doesn't he MAKE SURE the Operator is dead, before running off?
2) How did Mal know what the effect of the Operator's nerve-ending punch was to be, so he could stand there half paralyzed? Had he seen this before? The convenient reason why it didn't work was a throw-away gag.
3) This film is a love story, above all else. The writer/director Joss Whedon has created some complex characters with complex relationships, and this is why I liked the series so much. Here, we see the depths of love--how far will you (and Captain Mal) go for real, selfless love? It's Mal's love for his crew-family, his ship and even his ideals that make the show more than just a shallow action series. Sure, that's there, but it is this deep subtext that makes the show art. Whedon loves his characters, and the audience who has seen the TV series cares about the ship enough to cringe when it gets heavily damaged.
4) It is heartbreaking to see characters you care about actually die on screen. The deaths are anti-heroic, and this makes it so much less cliche than usual. It also makes the drama of the action so much stronger, because you realize the surving heroes might not actually survive to the end of the show, unlike so many other films.
The film had a few other problems here and there. It might also be confusing to people not familiar with the series, but there is just enough essential information that an awake viewer will quickly figure out who is who and what is what.
I rate it an 8 to 8.5 out of 10.
Well done, Whedon. And Nathan Fillion IS Captain Reynolds.