Winning. Is it everything?

William Christensen 8/25/08 (14)

I often hear someone say, “Winning isn’t everything.” Upon further inquiry, I receive the answer, “It’s alright if you don’t win, all that matters is that you did your best.” This is taught to everyone at a young age. All that matters is that you do your best.

Your Best

You are capable of doing whatever you want. All you have to do is work for it. You set your limits. In your mind, you can only be as much as you can imagine. I think you can see what I am getting at. Lets use a game for example. There is a blow out win. The other team didn’t score anything. The coach for the losing team says to his team, “That’s alright. As long as you did your best, it doesn’t matter how well you did.” So, the players take this as consolation. They did their best, so everything is all right. But what are they unconsciously telling themselves? That even when they perform best, they are losers. That they can never do better, because they did their best. Quite the reward for doing your best.

The Rewards of Winning vs. Losing

In the Olympics, the winner receives a gold medal, and gets all the glory. The person who tried really really hard, but got 5^th, doesn’t get anything. In a Football Championship game, the winners get the trophy, and the glory. The other team, who tried really really hard, doesn’t get anything. In a business, the person who gets the promotion gets all the benefits. Not the person who tried really really hard. The winners in all these situations tried even harder. They didn’t set limits. Doing “their best” wasn’t enough.

Don’t set limits

A limit is a restriction. Why restrict how great you can be? Why restrict how much good you can do? Why should we say, “doing your best” is enough? Is America a bunch of pansies? The greatest nation on earth, and everyone wants to hold hands and sing. We did our best, we lost, you are better than us, let’s all be friends and watch butterflies! I am not saying that we should not show good sportsmanship. I am saying we shouldn’t go out and skip around thinking that everything is going to be all right as long as we “do our best.” Doing our best is a restriction. We say, “oh, I did my best, lost, I’m done.” We have to be better than that. Do better than you think you can. Don't be a winer and say, “But I did my best.” That means the same thing as, “I'm a loser!”

This is not to say you should be devastated when you lose, you should use that as encouragement to do better.

The Right to Fail

William Christensen 8/18/08 (14)

Equal and opposite

Imagine a point. This point equals zero.

0

This is what everything balances on. For this example, the zero equals the amount of light. Now extend a line out to the right of the zero. At the end of this line, there are 10.

0--------------------10

If there were only 10, this line is unbalanced. So you need to add a force that is Equal in length, but opposite in direction

-10--------------------0--------------------10

This balances the line. This works with everything. An Equal and Opposite force for everything. With out evil, there is no good. With out dark, there is no light. With out misery, there is no joy. If you are in a dark room for an extended period of time, normal daylight will seem blinding. If you are in a state of perpetual pain, to be relieved of the pain into a state that most people are in, will be like heaven. If you return into one of these dark rooms, they will seem worse, because you have adjusted to the light.

America is the greatest country on earth.

America is the greatest country on earth, because of our freedoms. Among our freedoms are:

Freedom to use a gun

Freedom to say what you want

Freedom to practice your religion

Freedom to choose your job

Freedom to work hard

Freedom to be self-employed

Freedom to reach for your dreams

Freedom to succeed

But as stated in Newton’s third law of motion; For every force, there is an equal and opposite force. So in order for these to balance, they must each have an opposite.

Freedom to not use a gun

Freedom to not say what you want

Freedom to not practice your religion

Freedom to not choose your job

Freedom to be lazy

Freedom to not be self-employed

Freedom to not reach for your dreams

Freedom to fail

These are all Freedoms, not guarantees. You are not guaranteed to succeed. You are not guaranteed to fail. This is why America is great. Because of out freedoms.

Now it seems like no one looks at the second list. They only look at the top list, and say those are guaranteed. Then the government bails out Fanny Mae, Freddi Mac, and Bear Sterns. They take away our right to fail. This seems good, but we forget Newton’s third law of motion. The government, by taking away our right to fail, has also taken away our right to succeed.

Gun Control

William Christensen 8/11/08 (14)

I was going to write about gun control, but I decided to let some other people tell you about it instead. Many of them are famous, and all of them are smart.

Admiral Yamamoto: "You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass." Advising Japan's military leaders of the futility of an invasion of the mainland United States because of the widespread availability of guns. It has been theorized that this was a major contributing factor in Japan's decision not to land on North America early in the war when they had vastly superior military strength. This delay gave our industrial infrastructure time to gear up for the conflict and was decisive in our later victory.

Adolf Hitler: "The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country." Adolf Hitler, dinner talk on April 11, 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations, Second Edition (1973), Pg. 425-426.
Translated by Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens.

Mao Tse Tung: "All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party." (Problems of War and Strategy, Nov 6 1938, published in "Selected Works of Mao Zedong," 1965)

Senator Orrin Hatch: "If gun laws in fact worked, the sponsors of this type of legislation should have no difficulty drawing upon long lists of examples of crime rates reduced by such legislation. That they cannot do so after a century and a half of trying--that they must sweep under the rug the southern attempts at gun control in the 1870-1910 period, the northeastern attempts in the 1920-1939 period, the attempts at both Federal and State levels in 1965-1976--establishes the repeated, complete and inevitable failure of gun laws to control serious crime." Senator Orrin Hatch, Chairman,Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution, 97th Cong., 2d Sess., The Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Committee Print I-IX, 1-23 (1982).

John F. Kennedy: "Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."

George Orwell: "That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."

The Dalai Lama: "If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun." (May 15, 2001, The Seattle Times)

John F. Kennedy: "By calling attention to 'a well regulated militia,' 'the security of the nation,' and the right of each citizen 'to keep and bear arms,' our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy... The Second amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic civilian-military relationships in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe the Second Amendment will always be important." John F. Kennedy, Junior Senator of MA in a 1959 letter to E.B. Mann [From the 1974 Gun Digest, article titled Gun Laws]

Israeli Police Inspector General Shlomo Aharonisky: "There's no question that weapons in the hands of the public have prevented acts of terror or stopped them."

President Theodore Roosevelt: "The great body of our citizens shoot less as times goes on. We should encourage rifle practice among schoolboys, and indeed among all classes, as well as in the military services by every means in our power. Thus, and not otherwise, may we be able to assist in preserving peace in the world... The first step – in the direction of preparation to avert war if possible, and to be fit for war if it should come – is to teach men to shoot!" –President Theodore Roosevelt's last message to Congress.

Louisiana Governor Mike Foster: "Most people don't ever want to use a gun to protect themselves — that's the last thing they want to do — but if you know how and you have a situation with some fruitcake running around, like they've got right now, it sure can save you a lot of grief."

Ted Nugent: "To my mind it is wholly irresponsible to go into the world incapable of preventing violence, injury, crime, and death. How feeble is the mindset to accept defenselessness. How unnatural. How cheap. How cowardly. How pathetic."

James Earl Jones: "The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will win and the decent people will lose."

U.S. Sen. Malcolm Wallop: "The ruling class doesn't care about public safety. Having made it very difficult for States and localities to police themselves, having left ordinary citizens with no choice but to protect themselves as best they can, they now try to take our guns away. In fact they blame us and our guns for crime. This is so wrong that it cannot be an honest mistake." - former U.S. Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wy.)

Paul Hager: "One of the arguments that had been made against gun control was that an armed citizenry was the final bulwark against tyranny. My response had been that untrained, lightly-armed non-soldiers couldn't prevail against a modern army. I had concluded that the qualitative difference in firepower was such that all of the previous rules of guerilla war no longer applied. Both Vietnam and Afghanistan demonstrated that wasn't true. Repelling an armed invasion is not something that American citizens are likely to face, but the possibility of a despotic government coming to power is not wholly unthinkable. One of the sequellae of Vietnam was the rise of the Khmer Rouge and slaughter of perhaps a million Cambodian citizens. Those citizens, like the Jews in Germany or the Armenians in Turkey, were unarmed and thus utterly and completely defenseless against police and paramilitary. An armed minority was able to kill and terrorize unarmed victims with total impunity." – Paul Hagar, "Why I Carry"

Larry Elder: "Anyone who demands further gun control legislation is like a chicken who roots for Colonel Sanders.

Law abiding people are the ones that obey Gun Control laws. The Criminals don't have to think twice before breaking another law. - Unknown