Tonight I blog on a few different topics. Tomorrow morning I hope to post my thoughts on the Harry Potter books and movies, including a summary of thoughts on HP7: The Deathly Hallows (which will be heavily labelled "spoiler alert"!!). I also hope to get my Europe travel photos processed and posted on my photos site by the end of the weekend, along with a lengthy post about the trip. Lots to do! First and foremost, I just to start doing a brain dump...
So, first up, my favorite workout implement: kettlebells! I mentioned a couple weeks ago that Hanna was interested in trying them out. So, as promised, I ordered an 8kg bell for her yesterday, along with a pair of 24kg bells for myself. I highly recommend this workout system to everybody, young or old! Start light if you need to, there's no shame in that. The shame is in not doing anything. These wonderful tools provide a full body workout with only a few simple exercises. To quote Pavel:
When we say "strength," we mean "kettlebell." When we say "kettlebell," we mean "strength."
In less happy news, the weather currently sucks. It is sooooo amazingly humid here, the air just feels disgusting. Thankfully, I have my 16kg kettlebell here at home, so am able to workout indoors. This morning, the air looked like a thick, brown fog. It was just nasty. It looks like things should cool down from the upper 90s to the upper 80s by the weekend.
Speaking of weather, I just noticed that NOAA has a cool new site called NOAAWatch. Check it out -- it has tons of very interesting, cool stuff there, with lots of different maps, charts, etc.
And now my rant/lament...
In Europe, we visited the site of Ancient Rome and the Acropolis in Athens. Both were quite fascinated, but got me to thinking. In 2000 years, will tourists be coming to Washington, D.C., to view the monuments and here lectures about this once great civilization?
Increasingly, I'm concerned that American civilization (and possibly western civilization in general) has passed its peak and is now begin decline. Corruption in government appears to be reaching epic proportions. We have leaders who are willing to start wars of aggression in foreign lands, launched on the premises of lies. They're violating human rights laws, the Geneva Convention, American laws, and so on, all the while playing nit-picky legal games that allow them, in their own minds, to justify what they're doing.
We visited the Holocaust Museum in downtown D.C. over the 4th of July with my parents, and I was struck by the many similarities to modern times. A friend of mine recently asked "I wonder how the folks in Germany felt when the Nazis were gaining power?". It's a very valid, and scary, question.
If you think about it, many civilizations (in recorded history) have already risen and fallen. To think that this will not naturally occur with our civilization is foolhardy. Egypt, Persia, Babylon, Greece, the Romans, the Aztecs and Mayans, the Chinese dynasties, Indian warlords, Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, Napoleon, the British Empire, the czars of Russia, and so on and so forth. And this doesn't even touch on the notion that "modern" human history may only be the latest iteration. If one were to accept that the planet has been around for hundreds of millions of years, then it seems reasonable to assume that we are not the first advanced civilization to exist, and probably will not be the last to expire.
In the grand scheme of things, then, one must really follow some of the Buddhist teachings and look inward to find peace, calm, and happiness. The world is fraught with evil, corruption, the power hungry, and constant change. The only way to survive that is to transcend above it, focusing more on a higher level of civil discourse and behavior, following the ultimate golden rule of "do unto others as you'd have done unto you" appended with "with special attention paid to empowering yourself and others in their quest for peace, love, and happiness."
This has turned out to be less a rant than a philosophical retrospective. I'm sure I'll have much more to post on this as time goes on.
