End of Summer

I know I haven't posted in awhile, mainly because I had myself a big ID reunion in Spain a couple weeks ago that I wanted to discuss, but I'm waiting on my friends to post all of their pictures to link them all in my post before I go into it. Hopefully I can write it up in the near future, even though at this point it's already been a couple of weeks since I came back.

In the meantime I guess I can discuss the winding down of Summer, and Fall lifestyle that seems to have quickly taken over. Since the beginning of September that Summer weather of 26-32 degrees Celsius has disappeared seemingly overnight and given way to 8-16 degrees cloudy weather. Frankly with how heavy Czech cuisine is (no Summer friendly fruit or smoothie dishes), and the nature of most of my clothes brought for the purpose of dealing with the cold, the temperature drop has been a welcome change.

Antonio climbing one of said new "modern/" ugly sculptures in the city

With Fall also comes a push to complete the construction projects around the city before the university students return, and the season opening for the local classical theater companies (drama, ballet, opera.) The city has nearly completed the construction around the construction that had diverted a lot of the tram lines around the city earlier this year, and has dotted the city with new sculptures (much of which I consider crap, but eye of the beholder right?)




My first excursion with the Brno trainees to the local ballet company was quite the revelation. The theater is quite stunning, and a student ticket at a measly 55CZK works out to less than 3 dollars for a 2 hour performance! In the US for the same thing I could expect to have spent at least 10 times that.



Pictures of the theater

Theatre

Synopsis of the ballet I saw can be found here:
http://www.youri-vamos.com/coppelia_en.php

Pax Americana and Imperialism

Lately being one of the few Americans in my social circle, conversations take a serious turn, and despite being a liberal Californian I am asked to account for why the US has done the many notorious things it has. None of my explanations I could offer work into nice short sound bites, and often I hold my tongue for lack of desire to perform a lengthy lecture on history and philosophy. Yet, without going into said lecture suffice to say, I firmly believe that there is a quite complex web of reasons for why the US needs to exert its military power internationally (especially in the role of posturing to maintain regional peace), while such actions are certainly towards its own benefit and gain; it often benefits the rest of the world by the similar margins. My point being that Americans, while the argument can be made that we have our own selfish reasons, do things that benefits the global community, because no other superpower to serve as an alternative to do so, and thus the US has a moral imperative to use said superpower status to its full capacity to bring about common good when within its reasonable power to do so.

However while I've been a believer of the Pax Americana, and the US being a "disinterested" party utilizing military force for the betterment of the global community as a whole. This video of debate between Buckley and Chompsky from over 50 years ago has forced me to wonder whether the US should really bother. The hard truth is that perhaps our military ventures have been largely imperialistic. Chompsky does not really offer any better condition we should strive for, as his best techniques like Socrates has been merely to point out what we think to be commonly held truths to be not as truthful as we would like to believe. It can be inferred that the only moral application of force is in the defense of our own borders. However I don't really believe there's any practicality to the thought of regressing our forces to such a stance.

Full video of the Chompsky Buckley debate


A more recent speech on the same topic with references to Suharto, which I imagine holds some relevance for the members of my family who grew up in Indonesia.