Drop a Nintendo for Peace

"We should think about terrorism not as a battle between Islam and the West but as a battle within Islam, says author Salman Rushdie. And video games might just be the way to resolve this conflict. 'I often think that the best way to liberate Iran is just to drop Nintendo consoles from the air. And Big Macs,; he tells us."

Maybe he's onto something. Crime has decreased since young men have gotten so involved in video gaming...

"In his Big Think interview, the literary giant tells us about how video games influenced his newest novel 'Luka and the Fire of Life.' As he proves in this and previous novels, fantasy can be a vehicle for writing about truth. That is after all the whole premise of fiction. 'We don’t need to know that Anna Karenina really existed; we need to know who she is and what moves her and what her story tells us about our own lives,' he says. 'Once you accept that stories are not true, then you understand that a flying carpet and Madam Bovary are untrue in the same way, and as a result both of them are ways of arriving at the truth by the road of untruth and so then they can both do it the same way.'"

What weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases?

George Orwell essay, How the Poor Die.

And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.

That could seem contradictory -- Orwell saying in this essay that it is better to die a violent death than a natural one of suffering -- it doesn't ameliorate war's cruelty that it allows people to "die in their boots."

It Was a Highly Prized Letter

I'm sure. This is the letter Kurt Vonnegut wrote from P.O.W. repatriation camp, informing his family that he was still alive.

Well, the supermen marched us, without food, water or sleep to Limberg, a distance of about sixty miles, I think, where we were loaded and locked up, sixty men to each small, unventilated, un-heated box car. There were no sanitary accommodations -- the floors were covered with fresh cow dung. There wasn't room for all of us to lie down. Half slept while the other half stood.

We spent several days, including Christmas, on that Limberg siding. On Christmas eve, the Royal Air Force bombed and strafed our unmarked train. They killed about one-hundred-and-fifty of us. We got a little water Christmas Day and moved slowly across Germany to a large P.O.W. Camp in Muhlburg, South of Berlin. We were released from the box cars on New Year's Day. The Germans herded us through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn't.

It's also a very moving letter, written in Pvt. Vonnegut's unmistakable style.