Hitler's plan

At the beginning of Ken Burns' monumental epic on WWII, a survivor recalls talking to a German POW near the end of the war. The POW knew astonishing detail about the soldier's hometown in Waterbury, Connecticut. How do you know all this? the soldier asks. The POW replies that he was on the administrative team for this area of the U.S. after the German conquest.

It's hard to watch this documentary two hours at a time. It's brilliant, I think, but very difficult to watch. Astounding what we put ourselves through. And yet, when U.S. soldiers liberated Paris, the response of the populace demonstrated what they were fighting for. They truly were liberators (the very scene the misguided Bush administration expected in Baghdad).

I'm reminded again of my zero-sum theory of Everything. Everything adds up to zero. Thus, all the barbarity and atrocities of war get balanced by the great works of art and acts of human compassion. And maybe it's more exciting to live in a +1 million -1 million universe than in something much smaller, like +5 -5, where everything is pretty much the same with very small peaks and valleys. We get huge moments on each end of the scale. Good and Evil, fighting to a universal draw.