Errata and Chaos

2009-09-08T22:03:00.001-07:00

I just sent this missive off to some Newspaper Editors, maybe they'll put it in, or not.

Brutal acts of terrorism are occurring every day on our door step. Torture, kidnappings, executions, beheadings, and mass killings fill the headlines coming out of Juarez. A family from Las Cruces is chased down, and executed on the side of a highway. Gunmen storm into a rehabilitation clinic, line patients up against the wall, and murder seventeen of them. Violence like this would be considered extreme anywhere on earth, but this is happening right here, to our neighbors, and to our own families, who have relatives on both sides of the border. To end it, we must know what causes it. Organized violence doesn’t arise in a vacuum. It’s a side effect of certain situations. Our nation’s insatiable appetite for drugs ensures that a market will exist for them. Our prohibition of these drugs will in turn ensure that that market is regulated by thugs, criminals, and gangsters. When gangsters have a business dispute with thugs, their ways of dealing with it don’t usually involve business courts, or lawyers, at least not until the police are involved. It’s interesting to look at another drug that we import from Mexico, Tequila. Tequila’s main constituent is ethanol, a drug which kills about 15,000 people a year through vehicle accidents, as well as being involved in tens of thousands more through its health effects, its ability to precipitate accidents, and its propensity to induce violence. Yet there aren’t any drug wars being fought over such a lethal substance. Why not?

The American Refugee Crisis

2008-12-06T12:29:00.000-08:00

Refugees, as defined by a nearly half a century old United Nations treaty, are given certain rights when officially recognized as such by nations where they go to for asylum, and those countries have certain responsibilities when it comes to dealing with those people. That specific convention in question, the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines a refugee as "A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.."

I think that it may be time to amend the criteria that we use to define refugees, or at least officially create a new international legal category for some people. People flee their own countries for a number of reasons, and political, religious, or ethnic persecution is probably as a whole a relatively small proportion of that. People who flee for other reasons, ones that make it so they don’t legally qualify as refugees, still face the same problems that “official” refugees do; they make it to another country, where they might not know the language, or have any idea of the laws and how they relate to their legal rights and responsibilities, they can find it hard to get access to healthcare and jobs, and their kids often start out without even having a basic chance at getting anywhere else in the world. The biggest bloc among these unofficial yet nonetheless very real refugees is economic ones. These heretofore unrecognized econo-refugees leave their homelands not because they face repression and persecution meted out by their governments, but because capitalism as a global economic system cannot help but to be exploitive in a way, and it’s left them economically impoverished, repressed, with no hope for advancement if they choose to stay, just an unrelenting life of long, brutal hours in unregulated, miserable conditions for very little pay that leaves them struggling to find a way to provide basic necessities, like food and shelter, let alone any type of healthcare if they should happen to get sick while living in squalid conditions. They have lived hard lives devoid of very much hope, and they know if they choose to stay, the lives of their children promise to be just the same.

So, as people have throughout history, they up and move to places that hold the promise of more opportunity, a better life, if not necessarily for them, at least it will be for their kids. They often do so at very great expense, especially for people who have so little, and it is far from unusual for them to put their lives at great risk. It is this phenomenon that we’re experiencing in this country right now, though to a confusion of terms, instead of refugees, we’ve been labeling these people “illegal aliens.” Language is a very powerful thing, it’s probably the one thing that has the most influence when it comes to shaping how we see the world, and that way that you frame an issue can really affect how exactly people view something, and the way that they feel about. (Parenthetical aside: I was thinking of the illegal immigration controversy when the term “economic refugee.” I’m pretty sure that I hadn’t heard it anywhere before, but I do a lot of reading so I guess that I may have come across it somewhere before. I googled it and came up with a page from the Rockridge Institute using it in the exact way I was thinking of it. I saw it after the idea first popped up, but credit where credit might possibly be due.)

Compare the two terms: refugee, a refugee is somebody that deserves compassion, respect, charity. They’re people who, through no fault of their own, have been placed in a situation where they feel it’s more worth it to leave their homes for another country, one that may be absolutely foreign to them, because even that is so much better than staying in the situation that they’ve been placed. Then take a gander at Illegal Alien. The first word, illegal, brings up all sorts of nasty, underworld connotations, they’re criminal lawbreakers with no respect for the institutions of this country, they’re abusing and exploiting our natural generosity as Americans. Alien, what a wonderful way of dehumanizing, being able to look down at them, they aren’t people deserving of dignity and respect, they’re foreign others, it must be perfectly alright to do our best to round them up to where they came form, Mexico maybe, Colombia, Guatemala, or perhaps Venus.

When it comes to this immigration crisis, or as how many people have referred to it, an “alien invasion,” it should be remembered that this isn’t just a matter of Mexicans laving Mexico and coming to the United States. Though they do form a vast majority of the people coming over, a good deal also hail from other Latin American countries, and a small number come from countries all over the world, particularly a quite a few Asian ones. Wherever they come from, the forces that are forcing them to make the decision to leave their homes are generally similar. It should also be kept in mind that, particularly when it comes to Mexico, it isn’t just economic forces pushing people out. The recent violence in Mexico relating to the narco trade, with carnage on a scale not dissimilar to Iraq, which has left thousands dead and dozens headless, would most likely qualify some people as refugees as we now see them, though since they do come from Mexico, and most often come via the unofficial route, they’ll be treated just the same as other Mexican immigrants.

This violence has been concentrated around the border with the United States, where the drug pipelines run through. In a city a mere thirty five miles from where I’ve lived all my life, Ciudad Juarez, there’ve been more than fourteen hundred murders there so far this year. The cartels have made it a habit of assassinating ranking police officers and officials, and Federal Attorneys. They’ve dumped heads and headless corpses in every section of the city, hanging a decapitated man from an overpass, dumping bodies in a soccer field right next a school, walking into a seafood restaurant and murdering eight people eating dinner with a barrage of hundreds of AK47 bullets. We worry about terrorism in India more than we do it on our doorstep. A number of towns have had their entire police force abandon their posts due to death threats, more than a few police chiefs have showed up at border crossings demanding asylum. There is a very real war going on, and it’s being fueled by profits from Americans’ insatiable appetites for drugs, and our insanely easy access to guns.

Particularly in Southern Mexico, in the mainly indigenous areas, such as Chiapas, people face governmental repression, as well as repression by groups given the tacit support of the government. The most notable aspect of this involves the EZLN, the Zapatista National Liberation Army. The EZLN, a group that I admire more than most other armed revolutionary groups, has been engaged in a “war” against the Mexican government since 1994, though apart from a few armed clashes following the start of their campaign, which purposefully coincided with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, they’ve been fairly ardent in their embrace of non-violent tactics. They aim not to have complete independence, but merely autonomy. Many members of the group and their supporters have faced repression and persecution that would qualify them as refugees in the sense that it’s now used. But all of this is a whole other topic from what my main point started out being.

I do truly believe that it isn’t inappropriate to call most, if not all of the people in this country that are considered illegal immigrants, refugees. If you look at it from this viewpoint, the United States comes off as a completely appalling, sick, racist, xenophobic country. If you think of immigrants refugees as victims, people deserving of compassion, respect, and dignity, and compare it to the way we treat them, we come off as almost Nazoid.

Take a look at the politically, and most likely racially, fuelled anti-immigrant hysteria that has swept across this country in the past few years. There are people in the media like Lou Dobbs that devote hours of airtime every single week railing against immigrants. Dobbs himself has hyped sensationalistic stories claiming that immigrants are bringing new epidemics of leprosy and scabies into this country. People have been manipulated into believing that these people are intentionally coming over to steal their jobs, and force their children to learn Spanish. (Until I see one of you guys out in a field picking chilis and onion, please shut the fuck up.) There’s a particularly insidious belief among some extremist strains in the right that there is a concerted Latin American conspiracy to take back the Southwest United States by sneaking over, out breeding the Gringos already living there, and reclaiming it as Aztlan. They call this particular lunacy “Reconquista.” People go on and on about how much they cost the system, they don’t pay income taxes, but their “anchor babies” are overcrowding our schools, and them trying to get medical treatment is bankrupting our healthcare system. They’ve become scapegoats, demonized and dehumanized in ways that to me don’t seem unlike the caricatures of Blacks that you can see in cartoons from the thirties and forties, and German propaganda from the thirties.

This politico media campaign against immigrants has gotten people so worked up, that there is now an organization devoted to sending volunteers down to the southern border, armed with binoculars, and some are also strapped, so that if they spot any brown person out there in the desert, they can call it in to the Border Patrol so that they can swoop in and take them off to disappear into the bowels of America’s immigration detention system. Leave it to them to purloin the name of revered American Heroes, revolutionaries themselves, who’d most likely be appalled that they were being used as a label for an extremist conservative vigilante group. Back in the revolution, those people sitting at the border would be the people saying, “Awww, come on guys, the Brits aren’t so bad.”

All of those examples are just things that have been happening in the zeitgeist, they aren’t officially government sanctioned or promoted. The actual governmental policy is much worse. We have the Border Patrol patrolling our border, who in the past has been assisted by members of the National Guard, which is all well and good, as any sovereign country has the right to protect its borders. The immigrants/refugees who make it across the border, evading the Border Patrol, and the Minutemen vigilantes, and surviving the heat (about 500 people die trying to make it across the border every year, thousands over the past twenty years)(a Clinton-era immigration enforcement measure called Operation Gatekeeper intentionally upped security in safe areas to cross the border, forcing people to try to make it through far harsher, more dangerous and desolate areas, leading to a huge upsurge in border crossing deaths), face a life of living in the shadows. Due to a fear of being rounded up by “La Migra,” they’re vulnerable to exploitation by employers and criminals, who know that they’re too worried about their immigration status to report crimes committed against them.

If they do get picked up by the authorities, they get tossed into the Kafkaesque system of immigration detention facilities. Over thirty thousand people find themselves in such a situation every day, including entire families with young children. They may spend months in jail, until they can get around to having a deportation order issued, if they don’t agree to get sent back willingly. One of the most infamous of these facilities is the privately operated (gotta love that privatization) prison called the T. Don Hutton Residential Center of Taylor, Texas. Recently opened, it has the capacity to hold slightly over five hundred individuals, but currently holds around three hundred. Half of those three hundred detainees are children.

While living in this country, the refugees are often forced to live together in what’s considered the “ghetto” part of town. They’re looked down upon by the broadest part of society, maligned in the press, and used by conniving politicians pandering to the basest part of their base in the search from votes appealing to some of the uglier parts of the human psyche. Since they live in fear of apprehension, and often are fairly uneducated, they don’t know about, and or are to afraid to exercise the rights that they have as human beings within the confines of our borders, and don’t take refuge in the protections that they may be able to find, even in such a climate as there is. Another refugee crisis that has American fingerprints over it, one that’s considered by many metrics to be among the worst, if not the worst, in the world is that of Iraq. There are about two million Iraqis who have sought refuge outside of their own country, mainly in neighboring states like Jordan and Syria, as well as another two million who have been displaced in country. There are about twelve million refugees who have come to the United States, most of them belonging to the as of yet unrecognized category of econo-refugees, but also many who are fleeing violence and political repression. They come to this country not knowing much about the way our government functions, the rights that they may have, the language that we speak, and they still come here, to this place that degrades them, demonizes them, treats them like shit, because in spite of all that, it’s still better, with more chances of hope, than staying where they are, and even if their lives don’t become very much better, they still have to toil away in the shadows doing brutal work for long hours and minimal pay, they know that it’ll at least give their kids a fighting chance to have something they never did. That is why I admire many of the people we call illegal aliens, and one of the reasons I find it hard to say things like the pledge of allegiance.

Cost Benefits

2008-11-08T23:35:00.001-08:00

To hear John McCain, and others of that leaning, talk about how we’re finally winning the war in Iraq, it’s frustrating. That was a point that he made at the rally that I went to, and I’ve heard it from several different places. It comes down to what is an irreconcilable difference in the way that I view the world, compared to how the people across the aisle are thinking. I’m still trying to figure out whether this is merely a difference of opinion, that there are many different equally valid interpretations of the world. I don’t think that every point of view is equally valid, but I’m wary about drawing any line in the sand, saying that the beliefs that lie on this side of the line are reasonable, and those ones over there are completely absurd, because whenever I look at things this way, I do not share my side with the larger part of humanity. So, getting back to what I find frustrating when people talk about winning the war in Iraq. The war could have ended years ago, with Iraq rebuilding and well on its way to recovery, and I still wouldn’t be able to call it anything but a failure. Some people say that we must win that war, but when it comes down to it, winning seems to only be about some shallow notion of pride. Let’s view winning as meaning something akin to success. The goal of the war was to neutralize the threat that Saddam Hussein posed, either through his ties with terrorist groups, or his stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. Since those weapons turned out to not actually exist, and Mr. Hussein’s contacts with terrorist organizations was fairly minimal, it’s hard to talk about success or winning. We went in with errant assumptions, which turned success or failure, victory or defeat, into a false dichotomy. The situation we were hoping to bring about would have existed whether we went to war or not. So it becomes a matter of cost. There are two paths we could have taken, one is what we actually chose, and the other would’ve been continuing on with the status quo, which wouldn’t have cost a penny extra. We have brought about on ourselves enormous costs, in reputation, honor, money, and lives, with no benefits that wouldn’t have been gained if we hadn’t gone about what we did. In this war, we gained nothing. You have to weigh the costs against that simple reality. Forty two hundred American soldiers, maybe a million people who used to call their home Iraq, when the cost is those people’s lives, and the gain is absolutely nothing at all, to talk about winning is shameful. I often let my emotions show through in my writing, I’ll throw in expletives, and sarcasm and I think that sometimes that creates an appearance that might be considered rash or impulsive. When I do that it’s because there are only so many ways to shout using text. Some people probably find that off putting, especially people who just randomly come across it. I’ve enjoyed reading some of the comments that have been left; some of the more critical ones were unexpected. I didn’t anticipate that type of reaction. Perhaps the vitriol overshadows the other parts, makes some miss the ideas behind the words. I think it’s been useful, constructive; I’ve got some new ideas on how to change my writings a little, change them around, find some improvements.

Thank You

2008-11-04T19:36:00.000-08:00

This is almost ubelievable, after so many years of nothing ever going right, disaster after unmitigated disaster, I can't find the right words for this right now. Thank you, Mr. Bush, I think this will turn out to be your true legacy. We couldn't have made it without you.

ENOUGH!

2008-10-28T17:41:00.001-07:00

New rule: the next person who spews the words “Joe the Plumber” at me gets a guest role in the remake of “The Best of Al Zarqawi’s Home Videos”! I am tired of hearing those three words, and I am tired of hearing Obama called a socialist. Do any of the people who are talking this rubbish have any idea what they’re saying? If you actually listen to what Obama and Sammy Joe talked about, you’d blow a gasket too after hearing that encounter brought up again, and again, and again over the past weeks. I’ve finally had it with this election, and all of the absurd inanities that are being constantly brought up. ENOUGH!!!! Shut the fuck up about Caribou Barbie and her hundred fifty grand in new clothes! Shut the fuck up about McCain possibly killing someone in a car wreck forty fucking four years ago! Just shut up already!!! When Obama says that his tax plan includes cutting taxes for people making under a quarter of a million dollars a year, and raising taxes on the money above the quarter of a million dollars a year that rich fucks are making, when the first quarter of a million dollars those rich fucks are making every year is getting taxed at the same low rate other people are getting, DO NOT CALL IT SOCIALISM JUST BECAUSE OBAMA SAID IT WAS GOOD TO SPREAD THE WEALTH AROUND IN AN IMPROMPTU INTERACTION!!! Okay? Do you get what I’m saying? It’s not accurate to call that “redistribution of wealth,” because, if you follow me here for a second, the people getting a tax cut are still paying some taxes, the people who don’t pay any taxes at all aren’t getting extra welfare checks or anything like a handout, and the rich people are paying the taxes that they used to be paying before Bush made their load a little easier to carry! Can you follow that? I am barely eighteen years old without a very lengthy formal education, and that shit seems damn obvious to me. I am making a pledge, and I am absolutely serious about this, that if somehow McCain pulls this thing out of the gutter and squeaks in on the thinnest of margins, or if they somehow steal like they did eight years ago, I will do my best to get out of this country. Fuck you very much America! I might even do that if Obama wins, just because I’m pretty sure that whatever happens, this country’s a ship that’s already hit the iceberg, and nothing can stop it from going down. Excuse my language, I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I’m a little cranky.

The Big Issue

2008-10-28T08:50:00.000-07:00

I know that I am not looking at this thing objectively. I know that my viewpoint is skewed, that I’m looking at things through blue tinted glasses, but there seems to be one big feature of this race that stands out. There seems to be on the republican side an ugliness, a negativity, a certain vile strain of thought that just doesn’t show up on the other side. Am I crazy, am I seeing things that aren’t there? The progressive platform that Obama’s been running on seems to be so much more hopeful, and optimistic, and inclusive, and forward thinking. What’s going on? Could I be seeing this wrong? Is there something wrong with my model of the world? I don’t understand how these vast differences can exist, are we really living in such an inconsistent world? I have no idea. I don’t think I could be so terribly wrong, but it seems arrogant to think that other people might be as abysmally wrong as they seem to be. How the fuck is someone supposed to make heads or tails of this world?

In My Defense

2008-10-26T21:57:00.000-07:00

I’m not used to people actually reading these things that I write; it was interesting to get comments from people who’ve probably stumbled across my little plot of land. I usually write thinking that my audience will only be people that I have connections with. I know that I exist on the interweb as a node that connects to different networks, like family, friends that I have, classmates, and all that. I haven’t been writing with the idea of people being introduced to it for the first time. Some of the comments were critical of what I did. What I want to do is explain myself, why I did what I did and said what I said. I don’t have very much sympathy for hecklers at performances. I saw George Carlin perform about a month before he died. Carlin was a very intellectual person, and he prided himself on trying to be logically consistent. I saw him perform at the plaza theatre in El Paso. He got to a point in his routine where he was talking about how much importance we place on symbols, and said that cemeteries around the world are filled with dead brain washed soldiers. A gentleman who was also attending took offense at that. He might have been drunk, which is just an extra detail, and he started out yelling from the balcony. He would shout things like “shut the fuck up!” and “fuck you!” and he continued on with that with several different variations on that theme. I thought that man was out of line. You pay money to go see an entertainer, a performer, you should know what to expect, and you shouldn’t have to deal with people who don’t like it. I see a difference between things like heckling performers when people are out to have a good time, and heckling politicians whose actions have real world impacts. You shouldn't try to shut entertainers up, because that's all they are. Entertainers. Fluff. What they say doesn't really matter, only as much as it influences the people who hear it. But with politicians, the issues that they talk about, they actually matter, they have consequences. These are the people that will be making life or death decisions. When he goes out and gives a speech talking about how we will only let our troops return with victory, he is the man who will be pushing those troops into continuing that war, and it would lead to people being killed who otherwise wouldn’t have been. When they speak, it’s not just entertainment. Interrupting them, correcting them, offering counterpoints in that public environment of a rally, I think it should be considered fair game. There are actual implications and consequences when a candidate campaigns, it’s not entertainment, where you could take it or leave it as you like. This isn’t just a matter of disagreeing about politics, many, many lives are hanging in the balance in a very real way. What they say matters in a way that is horrifyingly real.

Heckling McCain

2008-10-25T20:03:00.000-07:00

One of the lone benefits of living in the state of melancholia known as the Land of Enchantment is that every four years it gains a small, brief flash of prominence. It is, thanks to the absurdities of our electoral system, one of a handful of “battleground” states that are considered up for grabs. While that liberal bastion of depravity called California is the juiciest prize with fifty five electoral votes, its outcome is reliably anti-American. Similarly with Texas, the land of inflated egos, its thirty four votes ought to be much more enticing than the paltry five of neighboring New Mexico, but it’s bound to go for whoever the Republican is. Unless the Republican is Alan Keyes, then it’s a toss-up. But since New Mexico can teeter-totter either way, and has done that quite a bit, its five votes can go either way, it’s a slightly bi-curious state. That means that we’ve been blessed with campaign stops by all of the major candidates, and their surrogates, and we’ve been subjected to an unrelenting stream of torturous campaign ads, and robocalls.
Due to my fortuitous residence, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to see men from both tickets up close, and managed to miss the single woman from the main candidates by a matter of mere hours and ninety or so miles. Both men appeared weeks apart in the exact same venue.
I showed up to see Joe Biden on a Friday. Tickets were required, I showed up a little before the announced time for distributing the tickets the day before. There was already a line of a dozen or so people who had showed up even earlier than I had. The group was diverse, an assortment of the elderly, college age young adults, middle aged fogies, with several different ethnicities.
The rally was in the Mesilla Plaza, gates opened at eleven thirty, which is right when I arrived. Joe was scheduled to show up at one thirty. My associate commonly known as Waffle Bob, and my very lovely Mexican friend decided to humor me and come along. I was gladdened to see that security had improved markedly in the four years since I’d last seen a vice-presidential candidate in the same spot. When John Edwards showed up to speak in his failed attempt to unseat Dick Cheney, the security was abysmally poor. There wasn’t a metal detector in sight, and the short staffed managers of the event picked a few large looking high school students out of the attendees to do crowd control. The school to which I went, an alternative school peopled mainly by gangsters and delinquents, was just across the street, and students were allowed to attend as a lesson in civic responsibility. So when they needed bouncers to stand at a gate, and only allow people with the right ticket to pass, they picked out some the more imposing students to do that job. I happened to know the ones they picked, and luckily they took that responsibility seriously.
The Biden rally and speech was mostly unremarkable. Our own Governator Billy Richardson dropped in, his beard in tow, Senator Jeff Bingaman also put in some face time, and Mr. Udall, the democratic candidate for senate, was unable to attend, but his lovely wife Jill attended in his stead. The most lasting thing I took away from that event was a nasty sunburn. I do love Biden though, and think he’s a great guy, always one that’s good for a laugh.
I really wanted to go see Sarah Palin. She was going to be in Roswell the Sunday after the Friday that I saw Joe, and that weekend I was with my mom, sort of in the area, about an hour and a half drive’s a way. Alas, I was unable to convince her to put in the gas and the time to make it to it. That one might’ve been fun.
McCain’s the big guy; he’s at the top, not a mere number two. When I heard that he was coming to town, my first thought was I need to get tickets to go to this thing, and my second thought was, I should make a big “VOTE MULATTO! 08” sign to smuggle into the rally. Unfortunately people weren’t very accommodating, so I didn’t manage to make that sign. I did get tickets. They were being handed out at the McCain campaign’s Victory office. Showing up there, I made a point to not park too close to their office, lest they see my Obama bumper sticker and realize that I’m an impostor. Every time that I’ve been to an Obama office, the people there, workers, volunteers, tourists, whatever, were very diverse, they were from every age group and every ethnicity. Walking into that McCain office, I was greeted with a uniform collection of white, wrinkled faces. Everybody else there must’ve had at least thirty two years on me. Every single person other than myself was old and white, which I guess should be expected, the supporters mirror their candidates.
The rally opened at two, which is right around the time I got there. I had to be a little early to pay parking scalpers two bucks to park in a dirt field. Amid dozens of trucks and SUV’s adorned with McCain-Palin stickers and various other obscenities, mine was the lone car sporting a sticker saying “Obama 08- Si se puede!”
I didn’t have backup this time, the one time that I probably needed it most. I got there early enough to get an advantageous spot to stand, probably about forty feet away from the microphone, almost as close as I had been when Biden was there. A crane had raised a giant American flag, at just the right angle, so that minutes into it, the sun snuck behind it, eclipsed by the flag as America’s eclipsed the hope of the world. That was roughly what I said in a photo-text-message that I sent from the rally. I think I got a pretty good shot of it dipping behind the flag. That flag was the best, if only for the shade that it gave me. I may have escaped with only a minor sunburn this time.
People started filling in around me, and I let a few people g closer, because I assumed that they legitimately wanted to see the guy. Workers began assembling the podium, and the crowd roared as the “Straight Talk Express” drove past. The McCain campaign is in such dire financial shape that they were handing out hand painted signs, at least that’s the spin I’m putting on it. There were a handful of professionally printed signs, but most were of the elementary school chic type. They may have been going for a folksy feel.
I saw one black guy there, he was wearing a McCain shirt, I tried getting a photo of him, to have the caption, “The uncoolest black dude ever.”
I was standing alone, in a sea of enemies, wondering if they knew that I was not one of them. It was definitely whiter than Biden’s crowd, and older, but there was some variety, and a few young people, parents had brought their young children, presumably to warn them about what types of men may make it in politics. A republican candidate for the New Mexico state legislature gave the opening, prayerful invocation, a whole bunch of religious mumbo jumbo; for the most part I stayed respectfully silent, shouting at the tail end of it something along the lines of “Atheists for Obama!”
Vikki Carr was there, I don’t really know who she is, apparently some Grammy winning singer from El Paso who supports McCain, she didn’t say anything that I felt required a response, she did bring up Vietnam, going to visit the boys. She sang some songs, America the Beautiful, and went into a thing where she was singing “let it be him,” god willing, let it be John McCain.
Tinsley showed up to speak. I don’t like him very much. He is the republican running for congress, and he was quite an annoying windbag. He got to a point where he all but accused his opponent of being a child pornographer, a statement I felt did warrant a response, so I so eloquently shouted back “BULLSHIT!” And a few people turned around to stare at me for a second or two.
Next up to the plate was Steve Pearce, a truly vile republican, gap toothed scumbag who snubbed my sister’s college wine class. He is the current congressman, and he’s running for a seat in the senate that’s being vacated by Pete Domenici. I don’t have any unkind words for Domenici, who was also there, but I don’t really know if he deserves any or not. But Pearce, when he started talking about Joe the Plumber, whose name is not Joe, and who’s not really a plumber, and who can’t afford the business that was the point of him talking to Obama, I couldn’t stand it. Enough with Joe the Plumber! I’m tired of even hearing his name (I must admit, in the interest of fairness, that Lindsey Graham talking about Joe “the Biden”, I let out a little laugh). Pearce said that we needed to elect McCain, so that Joe the plumber would be able to afford his business, and create new jobs, while Obama just wanted to spread the wealth around. Since Joe the not actually “Joe” and not actually a “plumber” actually makes forty grand a year, I yelled at Pearce “Under Obama’s plan, Joe the Plumber would get a tax cut!”
Steve went on to say that McCain needs to be president, so that we’ll get good republican economic policies, tax cuts to create jobs and grow the economy. Naturally, a shout of “It’s worked great the past eight years!” was in order. And all of my heckles were timed, almost perfectly, because I cannot hope to claim perfection, so that they were said in that little window of opportunity after the speaker has finished his sentence, and after the crowd has died down, right in that moment of silence as the speaker draws his next breath, so that they would have maximum impact.
By the time the elderly war hero finally came around, I had picked what I wanted to say, and was waiting for a good silent moment to shout it in. So after he talked about how we’re winning the war in Iraq, “Surge, baby, Surge!” I found an opportune time to ask, “How many more soldiers are you going to send to die, is forty two hundred not enough for ya?!” It was at this one when I most feared for my safety.
A rotund, middle aged white gentleman with thinning hair started pushing against me. His wife said something, and I’m paraphrasing here “you better watch out buddy, he’s a soldier.” Big scary soldier feels like he needs to shove around a thin, gangly white boy, why? I have no idea. I wanted to say to him, “if you’re a soldier, you should be more upset, I’m not happy about dead soldiers, this fucking guy wants to make more of them, why do you have a problem with me? You should care about dead soldiers more than I do.” But not wanting to provoke anyone anymore than necessary, I said that I’d appreciate it if he stopped assaulting me.
By this point I was definitely found out, I was no longer undercover. People knew that I was not one of them. Through the various shouts people were turning around and looking at me, some said “you can leave if you want to.” “Why would I want to leave, I’ve waited an hour and a half out here in the sun for my chance to shout invectives at these politicians. It’s my right to be here.” And I think that most of what I was saying were legitimate things to say, not just taunts and jeers, but things that were for the most part grounded in reality. Which has a well known liberal bias.
I stuck it out there, feeling fairly unwelcome, clapping politely at the applause lines. Some people were shouting Socialist as Obama’s name came up in discussions about economic policies. The one time I pulled my punch was when McCain started talking about how the government needed to buy up all the bad mortgages across the country, because that’s where the problem started. I so dearly wanted to yell “SOCIALIST!” because that’s as socialistic as anything the other guy’s put up, but I was tempered by not wanting to provoke the man who might be a veteran who was still eying me. I stayed till the end, trying to strike up polite banter with the people next to me. As I walked out, I heard someone whisper to somebody else “there’s the demonstrator.”

Baghdad in My Backyard

2008-05-30T18:43:00.001-07:00

Any day of the week, you can read, if you want to, about countless heartbreaking things going on across the globe, but usually, they seem distant, it’s possible to keep yourself separated from them. I could go on and on about what’s happening and happened in Iraq, and I have, many times, but on that, I feel like there’s not much left to say, that there’s nothing to be added by throwing in more words to the discourse.

After more than five years, and hundreds of thousands dead (though I’d suspect that most Americans are moved more by the hundreds of billions of dollars that it’s cost), there are precious few minds left to be changed, if you haven’t seen it for the massive crime against humanity that it is by now, you must be totally deranged, with no sense of scale or perspective or morality.

I could talk about how the people that envisioned this war and led my vengeful nation into it, should and deserve to be impeached, indicted, and punished in ways that would only be appropriate for a crime on the scale of destroying a country, tearing millions of lives apart, and snuffing out thousands upon thousands upon thousands. But I know in my heart that they won’t be, they will never be held to account for all that they’ve unleashed. The ones that still hold onto their jobs soon will leave them, though not soon enough. Some may retire; others will go on to be commentators on twenty four hour news channels, columnists, professors, lobbyists, or paid speakers. Those who haven’t done so already will probably get six-figure offers by major publishing houses to have their stories ghostwritten for them, and a few will end up on the bestseller list. There won’t be any justice, there’s not anyone with the power or the will to hand it out.

I can see how this war will end, without actually ever ending. Soldiers will still be fighting and dying in that country for many years to come, but as time progresses, things will began to wind down. Instead of dying every day, they’ll start to get killed only every other day, and that will be seen as a huge success, so some of them will get to come home. After another couple of years, fatalities will only be a weekly occurrence, and that too will be held up as a huge success, so the numbers will wind down a little bit more. Eventually probably twenty thousand Americans will be left on the ground there, but they’ll spend their time on permanent bases, and in the green-zone, there to serve to keep the Iraqi government on our thumb. Somewhere along this timeline, whoever happens to be President will declare the were to be over, probably when the frequency of mass bombings drops to just about every month or so, and at a time when they need a boost in the polls. The story of it’s already been written; all that’s left is for it to be acted out.

And that brings me back to what’s been closer to home than usual. Shootings, executions, bombings, beheadings, roving street to street gun battles, such are key words that are ubiquitous in news stories about Iraq, which is why it’s distressing to me that now they not only describe the situation in a country where the nearest border is seven thousand miles from me, but one with a border only thirty miles distant. It’s almost like a war in my own backyard. Mexico has always been a violent place, any developing country that serves as a smuggling conduit right into the belly of the United States is bound to be, but in the last year it’s jumped up to another level.

Several thousand people have been killed in internecine battles between rival drug cartels and the Mexican government. The cartels are fighting each other over control of territory used to smuggle illegal drugs, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine, into the US, and they’re also fighting the Mexican police and military. One of the worst hit cities is just forty miles from my house, the city of Juarez.

Almost every day, policemen are ambushed, being killed in their cars by machine gun fire, officials have been assassinated in their own homes, and bodies are often found dumped in the desert. Right now I’m reading a news story from today, it says that just in the last day ten people have been found shot dead execution style, three of them were beheaded. Less then a week ago, six severed heads were left in and around Juarez, some in coolers on the side of the road. The violence has gotten so bad that the government sent over 2,500 armed soldiers to patrol the city of 1.3 million.

A couple months ago I remember reading about the police digging in a backyard of a house there; they found thirty six bodies in one backyard, that’s a veritable mass grave, and it struck me how people reacted to it. It made the newspaper, but buried in the back page, with only a few paragraphs of print. If that house was just a mile to the northeast, across that river that marks the border, it would have been a massive story. Mass Grave Found in El Paso Backyard! Massacre in the Borderland! But since it wasn’t in El Paso, but Juarez, people’s lives are valued differently. I’ll never understand that, why the worth of someone’s life depends on which side of which border they happen to be on.

There’s another town that’s been brutally affected by the violence. The town of Palomas is just across the border from Columbus, New Mexico, about an hour’s drive from here. It’s a fairly small town, with about ten thousand people. A month or so ago the police chief for the town, fearing for his life, came to the border demanding asylum in the United States. The entire police force for the town had quit for fear of their lives.

Where I live, even though it is in the United States, is intimately connected with Mexico. A majority of the people are of Mexican heritage, it’s very common to hear Spanish spoken every day, the culture has more in common with Mexico than most places in the United States, but you still have to go out of your way to find out information about what’s going on, literally just down the road. My best friend is Mexican, she lived in Juarez until she moved here a few years ago, her family still owns houses there; all of this makes what’s going on there have that much more of an impact on me.

The tragic thing is all of this comes down to business, albeit an illegal one. People here love using drugs, people everywhere do, and anywhere there’s a demand for something, there will be people right there to provide it for a fee. The violence is a direct result of the product they’re trying to move into the United States being illegal. Anytime something is made illegal, it puts it into the hands of criminals, who often have no recourse to conduct their business through other than violence. The violence is the result of market forces at work in an underground economy.

A guaranteed solution would be to remove the criminal penalties surrounding drugs, that makes sense from a moral view, a security view, and a health view, but sadly not from a political point of view, because people have an irrational fear of drugs, and the people who set the policy know that if they stand against that fear, they won't have their jobs for very long. It’s drug prohibition that keeps these criminal gangs in business, flush with cash, the only way to not only fight them, but eliminate them in one fell swoop, kick their legs out from under the cut-throat bastards is to remove their product from their domain. The historical precedent is clear; today beer, wine, and liquor companies are an all-American part of public life, a far cry from the criminal syndicates that popped up when the eighteenth-amendment and the Volstead Act was made the law of the land. Prohibition doesn’t work, it punishes people for engaging in something that’s not immoral, puts their safety at risk from unregulated products, wastes money and effort, and funnels billions of dollars into a criminal underworld where the only way to get people to follow through is through violence.

And it's made worse by the easy access to guns here in the US. In Mexico, it's illegal to own a gun, but just come across the border and you can buy almost anything you want, even assault rifles, and it's a simple matter for them to smuggle it back over the border.

And on it goes.

Us V. Them

2008-02-26T17:34:00.000-08:00

In any type of fight, conflict, or struggle, let alone a War, an Us vs. Them mentality always infects and pervades the mindset of those involved. Us, we are righteous, good, just, blessed, the epitome of virtue. Them, they are scum, animals, barbaric savages; they’re absolutely fucking worthless evil sub-human pigs. So it goes in the GWOT (Global War on Terror, because it’s always a good idea to bomb an emotion). It’s good versus evil. It isn’t only America that’s on the side of good, as it’s assaulted by no less than what very well could be an army of the minions of Satan, it’s all of Western-Christian civilization, set upon by the swarthy, scheming Islamofascistic hordes of the third world. They are unequivocally evil, not one shred of doubt about, and we must lock them up, possibly torture them, and kill them, for the good of the world.

Sometimes, even to a terrorist sympathizer such as myself, it can seem like there is something that really is different about them, that Al Qaeda and their ilk are not only an especially vicious assortment of sadists and thugs, but that compared to us, they must be pathologically ghoulish in their love of killing as many people as possible. Take for example one of the worst things anyone could ever hope to not see, it’s definitely the worst I’ve ever come across, the video of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi beheading Eugene Armstrong. Anyone who has the misfortune to watch that cannot come away from it without knowing that what they saw is as pure evil that you can get, it stands shoulder to shoulder with any other acts of depravity visited upon man by his fellow man.

The site of a man being held down while someone in a balaclava saws through their neck doesn’t leave you, and the sound, the sound of it is even worse. I can’t imagine anything that could ever sound any worse than that, a man screaming as a knife blade cuts into his throat, turning into a high pitched squeal as it gurgles through so much blood. Words don’t match it, and they shouldn’t be able to. And you can find dozens more like that, hundreds even; beheadings, shootings, bombings, a lot of them accompanied by these awful chanting Islamic songs devoid of instrumentations, nasheeds. A group of men lined up and laying down in front of a wall, unloaded on with a Kalashnikov. An injured man helped to his feet after surviving a helicopter crash, then promptly murdered by his “rescuers.” Countless videos of a convoy of hummers, people in the background whispering “allahu akbar!”, then they highlight a particular car… BOOM! it disappears in a sudden grey explosion, and now they’re shouting, “ALLAHU AKBAR!!!”

This is a group, or rather, a grassroots movement, that methodically documents the most violent, evil actions imaginable, that glorifies them, lays them out before the world, “this is us, this is what we believe, what we stand for.”; there has to be something wrong with them, something different about them, something that we wouldn’t be capable of, doesn’t there? But then, we do the exact same thing. Of course, we clean things up a little, at least from the view on our end. We don’t go out and use knives that we very well might have just finished using to make a sandwich, we don’t use Improvised Explosive Devices set up by roadsides and set off by garage door openers, or suicide bombers. We don’t have to, we spend too much money to have to do something as unsophisticated and messy as all that. That would be embarrassing. We have F-16’s, Tomahawk cruise missiles, precision GPS guided JDAM’s, apache gunships, predator and global hawk UAV’s (a pet peeve, I’m with Bill Maher on this one, think whatever you want of a young man who will drive a car packed with explosives into a military convoy, or who can pilot a plane right into a building, but do not call them cowards when there are soldiers flying remote control combat missions, blowing up some car in Mosul with a hellfire missile while they’re sitting in an air conditioned building in Nevada sipping lattes), and al sorts of other flashy, high tech instruments of death.

And people have uploaded snuff films made from our side, you know, the good one, all over the web; you can find dozens, hundreds of them. Many of them are from the IR camera of a gun sight, devoid of color, so when you see a man torn from limb to limb, leaving a glowing white stain on an empty grey field, it somehow seems more sanitized, less gory. Our sides preferred style of battle is from a distance. That’s what we like to do, distance ourselves from the killing and danger; the people we’re trying to kill can’t help but get in close and dirty, their shoestring budgets necessitate it.

So while the videos they post up there might be more gruesome, our’s are just as brutal and violent, even more so perhaps, if the idea of institutionalized killing turns you off more than young guys taking up the initiative on their own. There are a plethora of buildings viewed from the sights of bombers seen disappearing in a silent blast of dust and debris, of eyes in the sky tracking convoys of cars and trucks, then those being shredded by gunfire and missiles, of men being dismembered and decapitated by bullets shot from apaches, and there’s also footage shot by soldiers from the ground with their own personal camcorders, mostly of air strikes taking out whole buildings, and everyone inside them, also of firefights, and the aftermath of such engagements. Often, you can hear people in the background shouting things like “Hell Yeah!” and “Jesus!”

So we upload those videos for all the world to see, glorifying our way of mechanized killing, some of them are even spliced together to form montages, which can be set to music, most of the time something like heavy metal. Are we really different from them at all? On anything other than a technological level? On one website where you can find tons of these videos, anybody can post comments about them, and most of those comments come from people on our side, or who at least sympathize with us. Those comments contain some of the most ultra-nationalistic, racist, hateful, and violent sentiments I’ve read. On the enemies’ websites and message boards, most of the comments that they leave on their videos don’t go much beyond “praise god” and “thank you brother.”

Their hate doesn’t come through quite as rabidly on the islamofascist forums. The people on the good side have things like this to say about videos of us brutally killing people in as many ways as our grand technology allows:

"mmm think i saw some mooj parts flying there...dogs will eat fried meat tonight."

“1 less Arab terrorist wasting the Earth's precious oxygen.”

“Beautiful,just beautiful...some more brownies we need not worry about GOT BLESS THOSE BRAVE PILOTS”

"thx dude, and sure those dirty Sunni Wahabi Salafi pigs will go to hell all of them cuz they infidels. cheers :D"

"Die f***ing scum!!!"

"They are Muji Pork with salad now. LMFAO LOLZzzzzzzzzz"

"Quoted comment by lasrever: murder is nothing to gloat about, even if it's an enemy Murder??? If someone broke into your house while you and you lovely wife were in bed. Would murder him or just kill him? I'm not talking about gloating. I'm talking about the difference between "murder" or ridding your cat of fleas."

"Excellent Vid,outstanding! I laughed and laughed."

"Nice day for shooting daiperheads..."

"There are still some hadjis in there alright... Sliding down the sides of the back of the walls.. Hahahha ******* LIT UP!! Get some scumbags!!"

"the rats will have a virtual mooj buffet over this."

"Man i love that last clip. No Muja can escape! Can you imagine the fear and horror the Mujas felt in their last minutes? Just as they deserve."

"LMAO at the terrorists. Lets see, we offer a chance to have a happy life, raise children, enjoy all life has to offer. The terrorist way of life includes beheading videos, randomly blowing up civilians and chanting while cutting your body with a knife. Which future would you 'accept'"

"ohhh glorious Allah... thank you for putting the dummies that take your religion too far into our gun sites so that we may blow them too bits and send them straight to hell!! ALLLLAAAHHHHHHH BOMBCAR!"

"the dirty Sunni Wahabi Insurgent who survived at first is engaged again by Apache @1:23 and killed with his friend and u can see his dirty dead body @1:44. Allah Akbar :)"

"HELL YEAH, THATS WHAT I NEED TO SEE, OWNED OWNED!!! WE NEED MORE POSTS OF MOOJS GETTING ****ED UP."

"HA HA HA HA HA HA looks like those dumb arse iraqis never learn . stay home you will live longer but thousands of years of inbreeding gives the world whole nations of dumb dumb dumb people like iraq iran ect ect"

"God I love when we slaughter these primitive little Muslims. It's so easy -- like stepping on ants! I guess they shouldn't have tried to f.uck with us."

"If they keeping this killing pace the UN is gonna put these Mother F@#$&$ on the Endangered species list.....ahahaahahahahahha"

"why run? you can't hide EVER!! all you mooji brother will die and you can't hide!! you guys picked the wrong side! ALLAH is not with you. HAHAHAHA!! islam scum."

"ahahahaha death from above. Didn't even know it was coming. Mooj bits all over the place."

"More dead rag heads!! i love it when the dogs get away and moojs get owned bigtime!! voted!! keep up the good work killing those scum bag cowards..."

"as easy as squishing bugs"

"so true... but what do you expect from guys worshipping a rock and hoping for virgins fron their pedophile prophet."

"hahahah the dirty Sunni Wahabi Pigs get OWNED as usual by the heroic US Troops (God Bless Them)."

"sexy fukin vid it feels so good to watch those dirty sunnis get fukin owned...how do these e-hajis root for these jobless uneducated pieces of shit...welll they must be like them too"

"You killed another Iraqi. The world is safe now."

"Oh man, those Haji's got OWNED! Those muslim terrorists are such MORONS. Sounds like they need to pray to a real God instead."

To me, it seems pretty clear, we hold no monopoly on good and virtue, and they certainly don’t have the market cornered on brutality and evil and hatred. Whichever side they happen to be on, people are going to be people, for badder or for worse.

Why write, right?

2008-02-19T21:46:00.000-08:00

Why do I write? Why should I write? I’m not all that sure why I do, or whether doing so does any good or not. Perhaps it’s some type of a neurological defect, a compulsion to put my thoughts to paper, which usually do, even when where they end up doesn’t have the slightest bit of paper, just bits and bytes.

Most of what I write, I write for me. I think it might be because most of the time I’m thinking, about all sorts of things, some random, and in wanting to make sense, or a reasonable facsimile of sense, of everything that’s going on around everywhere, and if I can collect all those disparate things floating around in my consciousness, if I can structure it into something that’s coherent, something that can make sense to other people, I can be just that little bit more sure that the way I have things worked out in this skull of mine is more or less kind of close to the way things actually are, or the way things actually could be.

But since that might be why I write, it sure as hell sounds as good as any other explanation, I don’t see what good to anyone else it would do to read it.

It seems to be as clear as day that that I’m right about most of the things I think about, my positions on all the issues seem to be well thought out, but there are people who would vehemently, venomously disagree with pretty much anything I could possibly say, and I’m sure more than a few of them feel that they have things worked out just as well as I do. But both of us can’t both be right.

If I was going to pigeon hole myself, I’d label myself politically very firm liberal-leftist with libertarian tendencies. Abortion doesn’t bother me at all, I think drugs should be legalized, I don’t get apoplectic if a see a tit during the Super Bowl, guys should be able to marry guys and gals ought to be able to marry gals, if I wanted to pay someone for a quick hummer I should be able to, pressing 1 for English doesn’t annoy me, people should feel free to gamble away their house, and I think something as absurd as religion should be a very, very private affair. But how can I be so sure?

I haven’t got any special qualifications to be taken seriously about anything. My resume is embarrassingly thin. I’ve got a High School diploma, I was the valedictorian, but that’s out of a class of two dozen from a school packed with criminals. The only other thing I could think of to put on there is that I’m an ordained reverend, thank you Universal Life Church. However, when it comes right down to it, I’m just a seventeen year old kid from a city in a state that most other Americans think is a foreign country. I truly have zero qualifications. I’m just another guy, lost in this world without a map. I have no special insights, no unique fountain of truth. I feel that I’m right, that even if the broad sense of things doesn’t make an iota of sense, at least the reasons I feel the way I do about specific issues do.

In reality, I see no reason to assume I’m anymore right than anyone else. Bill Kristol, Pat Robertson, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, Michael Behe, George W. Bush, there’s no reason I should be any more right about any possible thing than these people are. Anything I write that by chance someone happens to read should be read with as much skepticism as can be mustered. All of it’s the product of an imperfect mind trying to make sense of an incomprehensible world. I may get a few things right, but I have to be getting a few wrong, but hopefully, as time goes on, and I grow nearer the precipice, I can get closer to what is.

That question, “why the fuck do I bother writing?” seems slightly more interesting, given that that shining jewel of a newspaper, Las Cruces’ own Sun-News, saw fit to publish my letter. I write them. Earlier they published a letter from what I would assume to have to be a fascist Christian zealot, not a very bright one at that, with the thesis of “we don’t deserve Bush,” that was the actual title, and going by that alone, any reasonable person could think to themselves, “well shit, of course Bush isn’t a president we deserve.” But what the zealot actually meant, the point of the letter, was that “we don’t deserve Bush” he’s much too good for us. What the fuck dude?! Someone can be that masochistic? He sounds like a battered wife who keeps crawling back to her husband.

He went on to say that Mr. Bush never gets the credit he deserves for how great the economy’s been doing, you know, the one with that whole recession thing looming over it and all. His third point is that people are always railing against the poor guy for not wanting to kill unborn children. Even though I’m all for baby killing, we should be tossing the little larval people off of bridges two at a time, I can’t remember the last time somebody jumped all over him on account of the abortion issue. After seven years of his regime occupying the White House, there are so many screw ups, nobody need bother bringing up abortion, You could pick from the war, water-boarding, torture, signing statements, Guantanamo Bay, habeas corpus, extraordinary rendition, domestic spying, nepotism, cronyism, corruption, hurricane Katrina, FEMA, Valerie Plame, or even the trigger happy Dick. Who needs to bring up abortion anymore? I don’t.

It was the guy’s middle and main point that really pissed me off, enough to jot off a letter to that paper. His argument goes something like this: since the War in Iraq started, more people have been killed in murders and highway accidents here in the states than the 4,000 or so soldiers that have died “over there,” so it must be safer to send our young people to Iraq, because of course the streets of Camden and Oakland are so much rougher than Baghdad and Fallujah. The problem with that is that it’s like comparing a crate of apples to boxcars of apples, a whole freight train load.

Sure, more people meet their maker violently here at home than have in those desert sands, but we’re dealing with 300,000,000 people here. Only around 800,000 people have served tours of duty in Iraq during the last five years. When you work out the numbers, it comes to being at least eight times more dangerous to be stationed in Iraq than it is to live in any of America’s most dangerous cities.

To claim that we’re saving the lives of our young people by shipping them to an overseas war is absolutely fucking absurd on its face. Much of the time I know it’s entirely possible for me to be wrong about something, but this is one that I know I am not. The least the dumb guy could’ve done is quoted the right figures; it would even have made his case all that much stronger. He understated his highway fatality figures by almost 400%, and the number of murders was twice and a half what he said.

That’s one of the reasons I write, because I don’t want all the bullshit I hear to go unanswered. A letter to the editor does do that much better than when I fire something off into the void of the internet. The only people reading this version of what I have to say are phantoms. But as it goes, I’d much rather write for phantoms than I would newspaper editors. All I can do is try to be me, whoever that is. But I can’t be me in a letter to the editor. I have to be the type of person they would want to print a letter from, I have to change my tone, to be more formal, reverent. I don’t like that tone, And this particular letter limits you to three hundred words; it can be hard to package things down that small, especially if it’s a response to something that requires a little vitriol. But sometimes you’ve got to sacrifice things that you prefer for a greater good. So, hopefully, at least a few thousand people were able to hear some semblance of my voice, and that dumb zealot didn’t go unanswered.

The Tide is Turning

2008-01-12T23:29:00.000-08:00

The surge is working! Vive le guerre! It may’ve taken four and a half years, half a trillion dollars, forty two hundred coalition soldiers, and up to twelve hundred thousand Iraqis, but at last, the tide of this glorious war to disarm Mr. Hussein of his weapons of mass terror, topple a benefactor of Osama Bin Laden (and liberate those Iraqis) is turning! Hallelujah, George W. was right; the neo-cons are vindicated!

Some of the reactions to the really quite dramatic downturn in the levels of violence going on in Iraq lead one to wonder at how much partisanship and ideology color people’s views of things, from all sides of the political spectrum, right, left, liberal, neo-conservative, paleo-conservative, secular progressive, log cabin republican, etc. etc. Some on the left, or maybe just those that oppose the war, whether or not they’re politically leftist or not, have been trying to deny in some ways that there has been a turn for the better. On the other side, those that favor the war have latched on to it with a ferocious mendacity, trumpeting it as their own personal vindication, that all was true and good.

It’s undeniable, the truly, insanely massive levels of violence that followed the bombing in February Oh-Six of the Al-Askari mosque haven’t tapered off, they’ve plummeted precipitously. That’s cause for joy, I don’t care if it makes the wackos, George W. among them, feel vindicated, that that full scale ethnic war that had been going for over a year has cooled down, and that fewer people are dying, is fantastic news.

The most complete statistics for any group in the war, foreign soldiers, show something very remarkable, even though Oh-Seven still turned out to be the best year for manufacturers of American body bags. From January through March, the monthly toll was consistently in the mid eighties, April through June saw the numbers jump up into the triple digits, the toll for both July and August was back down to the high eighties, it went down even more in September to 69, October and November both had a monthly toll of 40, which was almost cut in half to 24 in December. After August, the numbers really started to drop off, after staying consistently high throughout the year.

From August to October, the numbers were more than halved. That type of change seems like it might require an explanation other than the gradual improvements in security that could be expected from an influx of twenty or so thousand extra soldiers. If there was something else, what might it be, what could create such a massive down shift?

After a bloody fight with a rival Shia militia left fifty people dead, Moqtada Al-Sadr, the leader of the 60,000 strong Mahdi Army, declared a six month ceasefire at the very end of August; they would lay down their weapons and agree to not challenge either the occupation soldiers, or other militias.

Sixty thousand armed, relatively organized men would pose a formidable obstacle to even the most advanced of armies. The removal of that part of the equation definitely would have some effect, and the timing of it coincides with the precipice on the graphs. By no means can I say that that’s absolutely what happened, or was the only factor, as it almost absolutely wasn’t, but the timing of it seems to agree pretty well with the conclusion that it had a great deal to do with it. If that turns out to be the case, then the improvements have less to do with any changes in the Americans’ strategy, and more to do with domestic decisions made among the Iraqis, independent of foreign influences.

There have been restive periods in the war before, so there’s no real reason to expect the current lull to last, though the respite is a more than welcome one. George W. has made it clear that the war will keep on keeping on as long as he’s president, so the only thing I can hope for is that the killing doesn’t pick up its pace again, and that he takes advantage of the very relative quiet to shore up national reconciliation, and some type of a political solution. Knowing him, my pessimism wins out.

There have been so many turned corners before, optimism seems to be misplaced. That’s why so many on the anti war left are so quick to point out the caveats. The people who started this war have been so incredibly dishonest, from since before their nightmarish vision was actualized, through the past, at this point, nearly five full years, it’s to be expected for people to assume that even now, they’re cooking the books and misrepresenting reality.

To me, and it will look differently to people on the sides of all the other fences, it looks like the strategy of “The Surge” isn’t having as much of a positive impact as the political changes that are being brought about from within Iraq. The “successful” ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods also seems like it probably shares some of the responsibility. The less Sunnis are around Shias, the fewer the chances for religiously motivated acts of murder.

If peace, or even relative security, is all it will take for the belligerent to feel justified, that doesn’t seem like it’s as far away as it was a year ago. But for those who think that a price of five hundred billion dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, and a confirmation of our enemies’ darkest beliefs about us is to steep a price for a war that never should’ve been, that outcome seems bittersweet.

The Iran NIE

2008-01-05T21:33:00.000-08:00

People, many, many people, politicians, pundits, and the uninformed masses alike, take it for granted that a nuke is right at the top of Iran’s wish list. For many, it’s a matter of faith that no matter what the objective facts and conclusions show, the mentality of Iran’s leaders makes it inevitable that they’ll do whatever they can to get the bomb, a desire driven by visions of the apocalypse dancing in their heads, and a pathological hatred of Jews; the promise of a second instant holocaust is just too much for them Mullahs to resist!

Along comes the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, and in one fell swoop, all that common wisdom of what Persia’s been up to is seemingly thrown on its head. A flurry of activity, from the talking heads and blogging hands from all sides of those innumerable fences, immediately took off, like dust kicked up by thousands of stampeding wildebeest. For those faithful ones, those who can’t imagine the country being run by people who might not be entirely irrational, they couldn’t believe it. Bullshit, of course they’re working on nukes! This is all part of the CIA's and State Department's War on Bush (that’s one of my favorite lines, and not a bad idea in itself), it has to be, everybody knows those guys’ fingers are getting itchy just at the thought of pushing that big red button. If you don’t think that, you’ve gotta be crazier than they are!

Some of the things various people, seemingly qualified, and not, have had to say:

Justin Milauckas “Iran claims to have 3,000 working centrifuges. If they continue to operate successfully they will create enough fuel for a nuclear weapon in a year. Why, given that the president of Iran has said he wants to dominate the world, would we think Iran’s nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes? The Iranian president calls the Holocaust a “myth” and frequently calls for the destruction of Israel. If we do not act, we run the risk of placating an extremist and making the same mistake we made with Hitler, which led to World War II and the deaths of millions.”

Not to defend the guy or anything, but when people talk about the President of Iran, a Mr. Ahmadinejad, they are given quite about of latitude to mistranslate, misquote, and otherwise pull words right out of their ass and say they came from his mouth. There’s nothing wrong with criticizing Heads of States, and picking apart what they say, just take a look at Mr. Bush, and Mr. Ahmadinejad does do quite a good job of offering up plenty of material, but come on, at least be honest about it! That whole thing about wanting to wipe Israel off the face of the map? Try something a bit closer to him saying the Israeli government will “vanish from the page of time” a la the Soviet government. So, given everything I’ve heard that the man has said, saying he wants to rule the world seems to be out of is rhetorical style, and given the habit of people to put words in his mouth, without any type of sourcing whatsoever, that attribution screams out to me “Bullshit!”

Michael Ledeen “At this point, one really has to wonder why anyone takes these documents seriously. How can anyone in his (there was no female name on the document, nor was any woman from the IC present at the press briefing yesterday) right mind believe that the mullahs are rational? Has no one told the IC about the cult of the 12th Imam, on which this regime bases its domestic and foreign policies?”

What reason do we have to assume that they’re not rational? The “cult” of the 12^th Imam is very easily a totally irrational belief system, but then again, what religion isn’t? Twelver Shi’ism, as it’s known, is also far from being a cult. It is by far the most widespread for of Shi Islam, composing eighty percent of that group. Maybe that should be compared to the cult of the 2^ndJesus? Our country seems to be in the thralls of people who believe very fervently in that irrational ideology, much to our detriment, but to single out Iran as particularly in the grips of a man who belongs to a cultish group is hypocritical. Why can’t we take a look in the fucking mirror once in a while? That would probably do more good than anything.

Dubya “"If the Russians are willing to do that, which I support, then the Iranians do not need to learn how to enrich," "If the Iranians accept that uranium for a civilian nuclear power plant, then there's no need for them to learn how to enrich." "I think Iran's a danger to peace. My attitude hasn't changed toward Iran. If somebody had a weapons program what's to say they couldn't start it up tomorrow?" "That (intelligence) report says to me, when you read it carefully, Iran was a threat, Iran is a threat to peace, and Iran will be a threat to peace if we don't stop their enrichment facilities."”

One of the ideas that have been floating around, especially since oil has shot up to a c-note a barrel, is that of energy independence and security. To entrust to other nations the responsibility of providing you with the fuel to keep your light bulbs glowing and your cars pumping out noxious fumes isn’t the brightest thing you can do. Some of the campaign promises you hear are about how that particular candidate will work to have America energy independent by 2123, or some other date in the pretty distant future. Why should we expect Iran to be content to rely on fuel shipments from Russia, shipments that could stop at any time, to keep its power plants going? It’s as dumb for them as it is for us to rely on Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and other foreign countries for our fuel.

Another point that Mr. President has made, is that Iran was, is, and will be a threat to peace. How come? Take a look at our countries’ respective track records. From 1979, when the Mullahs took over, Iran has been involved in one war, in the eighties between them and Iraq. We, the USA, supported Iraq and Saddam Hussein when Iraq attacked Iran, in a long, brutal war that killed 1,000,000 Iranians, tens of thousands from chemical weapons that we, the USA and other Western countries sold to Mr. Hussein.

On the other hand, during the eighties, the United States backed brutal death squads throughout Central America, to stave off leftist political gains there. In 1983 the United States invaded the country of Grenada, in 1986 the US bombed Libya, in 1988 we shot down Iran Air Flight 655 killing all 290 on board, in 1989 we invaded Panama, following the end of Operation Desert Storm and continuing until the Iraq War, American backed sanctions led to the deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqi children, with periodic bombings just to keep them on edge, from 1994 to 95 up to 20,000 American soldiers were deployed to Haiti, in 1995 the US and NATO bomb Bosnia, in 1998 the US bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, 1999 saw the US and NATO bombing Yugoslavia, we tried to have the hugely popular president of Venezuela overthrown in 2002, in 2003 we invaded Iraq and liked it so much we never left, and in 2004 we helped kick the democratically elected president of Haiti out of his own country.

Yet Iran is the country that is a threat to peace.

Brett Stephens "Equally disingenuous is the NIE's assessment that Iran's purported decision to halt its weapons program is an indication that "Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach"--an interesting statement, given that Iran's quest for "peaceful" nuclear energy makes no economic sense.”

Allahpundit “A simple question: Why would Iran, which floats on an ocean of oil, choose to invest in a nuclear energy program instead of upgrading its refining capacity so that it doesn’t have to import gasoline?”

Joe Klein “Even after the new intelligence assessment, Iran's uranium-enrichment program remains troubling to the international community because enrichment is considered the most difficult part of building a nuclear bomb. Iran claims it is enriching the uranium for a peaceful nuclear-power program, but--given its ocean of oil--most international observers don't believe it.”

Stuff like that shows up quite a lot, why on earth would Iran need anything else with it sitting on that ocean of oil and all? It’s an argument that could also be put sort of like this: what would make Iran possibly want to develop and diversify into alternate energy sources, when it could burn away this ocean of money that it’s floating on, you know, burn it at cost instead of selling it abroad and enriching its economy with potentially hundreds billions of dollars, quadrillions of rials, why the fuck wouldn’t they want to burn this immense fortune that a happenstance of geography has given them? Quite right you are, Mr. Stephens, “Iran's quest for "peaceful" nuclear energy makes no economic sense.” Trying to take advantage of something that goes for a hundred bucks a barrel (that’s 933,000 rials) on the open international market makes absolutely no economic sense!

So for them to want to be able to take advantage of this resource, selling it to bring in some extra cash, while still being able to meet their domestic energy needs independently, it doesn’t make an sense, does it? They must be itching to get their hands on their very own nuke. Yeah, that’s it.

Why shouldn’t Iran be able to enrich uranium anyways? The way the world runs, the only reason that there isn’t an anarchic free-for-all like in the good ol’ days, is that international interactions are governed by laws, treaties, and the vast majority of countries imbue those laws with authority, and respect the rights that they give to other nations, and fulfill their obligations under them. Under this system, Iran has the right, as does any nation, to engage in the peaceful use of nuclear energy. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which only four countries in the world haven’t ratified or have pulled out of (Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea), states that “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination.” That gives Iran the inalienable right to produce fuel for its civilian nuclear power plants, just as surely as the first amendment of the US Constitution gives me the right to shout “Theater!” in a crowded fire.

What reasons are there to assume that Iran isn’t telling the truth about the nature of its nukes? Even if the National Intelligence Estimate was a ploy by the intelligence community to try to make up for screwing the pooch about Iraq by playing it safe with Iran, it meshes perfectly with what the International Atomic Energy Association has found. On 21 August, 2007, they released a report titled Understandings of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the IAEA on the Modalities of Resolution of the Outstanding Issues. The most pertinent parts are to be found in Section IV- General Understandings; to quote it at length, it goes:

“1. These modalities cover all remaining issues and the Agency confirmed that there are no other remaining issues and ambiguities regarding Iran's past nuclear program and activities.

2. The Agency agreed to provide Iran with all remaining questions according to the above work plan. This means that after receiving the questions, no other questions are left. Iran will provide the Agency with the required clarifications and information.

3. The Agency's delegation is of the view that the agreement on the above issues shall further promote the efficiency of the implementation of safeguards in Iran and its ability to conclude the exclusive peaceful nature of the Iran's nuclear activities.

4. The Agency has been able to verify the non-diversion of the declared nuclear materials at the enrichment facilities in Iran and has therefore concluded that it remains in peaceful use.”

So that gives us a report from the United States, hardly the biggest friend of Persia, saying Iran doesn’t have a program to develop nuclear weapons, and an independent international regulatory organization saying that there is zero evidence that Iran’s intentions are anything but peaceful, and furthermore, there aren’t any unresolved issues or ambiguities surrounding it. What else do we have to go on to believe that that’s not the case? Is it really just because they give us a funny feeling? It seems to me to be an emotional response more than anything; we don’t like them so they can’t be trusted so if they so they’re not trying to get an A-bomb they must be in an all out sprint to get, fuck the facts and fuck objectivity.

Next Stop, Tehran

2007-11-08T23:19:00.001-08:00

The risk of the powers-that-be starting another war has never seemed to be higher. Right now, there seems to be a real, coordinated effort to push up support for such a thing, and to attempt to justify it.

If the people pushing for another war, and the people who control whether or not there’ll be one, believe even half of the things they’re saying about Iran, about Iran’s nuclear program, support of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, funding and equipping of Hezbollah, and all the other claims that keep getting thrown around more and more, if they actually believe only half those things, it would be remarkably surprising for them to decide to not go with a military attack.

That was one of the things that most worried me about the Bush administration continuing past 2004, that they would take the extra time they were given to try to redeem themselves for the catastrophe that Iraq turned out to be by trying to go after another country, hopefully with a more successful outcome. The reckless insanity of the whole thing’s something I can’t get my head around.

If and when they do decide to attack, it will be very much different from the fighting faced with the Iraqi military during 2003. Before the war, however many years ago that is now, it was promoted, almost sold, no, not almost, it was sold to the American public and the world like a product would be. The advertising for it touted how easy it would be, its low, rock bottom, super value savings price, which would take care of itself through oil revenues. It was going to be quick acting, lasting only weeks, six months at most. Most of all, it was going to be a miracle cure for most things that were wrong in the world. With Saddam out of power, Al Qaeda would shrivel away from lack of support, elections in Iraq would trigger a tsunami of change which would sweep across the near east, nascent democracies blooming like wildflowers. Americans liked what they saw and bought the product, the rest of the world didn’t.

While there has been a wave of change across the region, it’s gone in a very different direction than what was hoped for and expected. Unfortunately, there is very little truth in advertising. Almost everything they claimed before the war turned out to be false, not just understandable mistake false, but “how in the world could they have been so absolutely wrong about everything?!” false.

They were right about one thing though, the war was easy, at least the war that they thought they were going to fight. That war, the one against military forces acting under the command of Saddam Hussein, and in defense of his baathist government was extremely quick and easy, at least when looked at from a historical perspective. A hundred and fifty thousand troops were able to go into a foreign country, defeat its army, assume uncontested control, and dismantle an entire government in a period spanning from March 20 to May 1, little over a month.

Just two hundred of the invading soldiers were killed in that war. That’s not an insignificant number of people, of lost brothers, fathers, sons, husbands, daughters, wives, mothers, sisters, and best friends. Still, to be able to completely assume control of another country in around a month with around two hundred thousand soldiers, and lose only two hundred of the people on that side is an accomplishment unparalleled in military history.

The war that’s turned out to be not such an easy task is the one that followed those first months. The two wars are altogether dissimilar ones, and it has been the unexpected, disorganized guerrilla war that’s dragged on for five years that’s been the difficult one, not the war against Iraq’s woefully inadequate, ill equipped, and under supplied conventional military.

The efficacy of guerilla warfare is really testified to by the fact that a 400,000 strong military force, equipped with tanks, artillery, and all the armaments of a conventional military, can be defeated in a month by a force half its size, while inflicting only two hundred fatalities to the other side. In contrast, an unorganized, untrained ragtag force of at most a few tens of thousands, armed with assault rifles, RPG’s, roadside bombs, car bombs, and little else, can hold that same two hundred thousand strong army in a stalemate for five years, while inflicting over four thousand casualties. We weren’t sold that war that would come after the war.

If it wasn’t for that one, many of the promises we were told might’ve been kept, though the justification, reason, rationale for the entire escapade would still have turned out to be just as false. If they give the order to launch an attack on Iran, it won’t be nearly as easy as combating an army dilapidated by a decade of military and economic sanctions. The Iranian military is much better equipped, trained, and supplied. Like Iraq, the first part of it wouldn’t cost an excessively high price; the trouble comes, however, from dealing with the aftermath.

I hope, more than anything, that I am wrong about this. I would never be happier for being completely wrong; the problem is that I don’t think I am. Right now, the advertising campaign going on in the media for another war is practically screaming. They’ve got a window of fourteen months left, and while the chances that an attack may happen certainly won’t end after the next president takes office; I’ll certainly be able to breathe a sigh of relief.

Qahtaniya

2007-08-27T23:22:00.000-07:00

The war supporters, the cheerleaders have taken to saying that the newest strategy to win the war is finally working; what could be a sign that they might possible be right? How about when the second worst terrorist attack in history happens? With more people killed than in any other attack in history, with the sole exception of September eleventh, yet another tragic milestone has been reached. Before the Tuesday two weeks ago, on the fourteenth, the second highest toll caused by terrorists was 430, twenty nine years ago in Iran, when a movie theater called the Cinema Rex was torched by militants.

Even with the tragic distinction of having only one other attack surpass it, I don’t think that it’s received the amount of coverage and attention that something of this magnitude deserves, it happening in Iraq couldn’t have helped the matter. With daily car bombings and massacres, these types of events can grow to seem routine in their monotony, but still, it is by far the worst bombing of the war, almost three times worse than the next worst one. I’ve asked a few people about it, and not a single one of them knew what happened, or how massive it was. I think that it being worse than anything other than 9/11 is important, something significant that people should at least be aware of, but it’s probably too much to hope for to get people to care.

Even the attempted car bombings in the UK back in June received more attention, despite how incompetent they were. It was all over the news for at least a week, while the only real consequences that those would-be bombers managed to get were setting themselves on fire and getting arrested. They crashed one car bomb, caused another to get towed, then ended up only managing to get one of them burned to death and the others arrested.

Even with the stupidity, incompetence, and failure that those would be terrorists showed, that event received overwhelmingly more coverage than the second worst terrorist attack of all time simply because it happened in London and Glasgow, instead of Qahtaniya and Siba Sheikh Khidir. It’s depressing how much people’s outrage is directly proportional to how similar to them they see the victims to be. It’s how the mentality of “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” takes hold. As long as they’re “not like us”, their lives are expendable in the thousands, if that may provide some possibility of saving a few dozen lives that they identify more with, not only from the US, but from Spain or the United Kingdom.

What does it say when the next to worst terrorist attack that’s ever happened can take place, and hardly any one notices?

The Reply

2007-06-21T22:30:00.000-07:00

This was surprising, that fundy Shawn replied promptly to my critique of his video. As I think most of what I wrote were valid criticisms, he helpfully gave a full reply. Here it is, unabridged and all: “Matthew 16:28 'Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.'
Yep, and a chapter or so down the line, the disciples witnessed Jesus on the mount of transfiguration, ascending to heaven in full glory.”

Out of all the points I raised, that one part was, in my opinion, the most minor. I'm waiting to see if that's all he could say.

Aggravating Fundamentalists

2007-06-21T21:13:00.000-07:00

There’s this person on YouTube that is eminently aggravating. He goes by the name VenomFangX, and armed with his webcam and a lousy attempt at a moustache, tries to convert viewers to his brand of Biblical Inerrancy Young Earth Creationism Fundamentalism using “rational” and “logical” “arguments” that would “force” any rational person to accept them. My problem with this kid, who’s real name is Shawn, is not with the way he believes, or even his proselytizing. I’ve gotten used to people believing some crazy ass shit, and I generally don’t mind for the most part as long as it doesn’t cause them to harm anybody besides themselves. My problem with him is a combination of his pomposity, his crazy as fuck beliefs, and most importantly, his dishonesty. I hate propaganda of any variety, and what he does could be drawn from the playbook of any professional propagandist. He censors the comments that people can place on his videos so that only those professing saccharine adoration of him will have theirs displayed. The most dishonest thing he does is artificially inflates the ratings that his videos receive. Going through them all, almost every single one has five votes of five stars each, and is then locked to guarantee a permanent rating of the highest order. He rates each of his videos himself, and prevents other people from critiquing them. That is absolutely dishonest, and this little douche-bag, Kirk Cameron wannabe deserves to have the shit kicked out of him. (Figuratively, violence of any kind is usually wrong)

Below the video is my quick response to most of the points he tries to argue. I have no idea if the little repressed fruit will read the email I sent him of what follows, but if he does, I’ll post his reply.

It’s all quite easy to explain really. Isaiah 40:22 “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth”. Notice the absence of a particular word. Can you find it? The word sphere isn’t mentioned anywhere. Maybe you got confused between a sphere and a circle, they are similar. I’ll help you out a little bit. A circle is a curved line surrounding a center point, with every point on the line equidistant from that center. An important thing to bear in mind is that a circle exists in two dimensions, and thus is flat. Now here’s where things get a little tricky, a sphere is defined as a three-dimensional closed surface consisting of all points that are a given distance from a center. Circle=Flat, Sphere=Three-Dimensional. Do you see now how that point disappears? The Bible was saying that the world was circular, i.e. flat, which is entirely compatible with the scientific knowledge of the time. A cynic might believe that you already knew the difference between a circle and a sphere, and chose to replace circle with sphere in that quote because you knew that saying circle wouldn’t guarantee you made your point. Either you were mistaken, or you intentionally misrepresented scripture.

As for your contention that Noah’s Ark is located in eastern Turkey, the man whom you seem to be relying on for your interpretation of what it is (presumably because you like that that specific interpretation validates your beliefs) is a guy named Ron Wyatt. He was trained as a nurse-anesthetist, and lacked any training in basic geological science or biblical history. People who are actually trained in the relevant fields have examined the formation that you believe to be the Ark, and found it to be a natural geological structure. The “anchor stones” that you point out where of a variety of rock unknown in Mesopotamia, the place where Noah supposedly constructed his Ark, but of course, with god on your side, bringing in stones from hundreds of miles away wouldn’t be much of a problem. If you are so inclined (I doubt you are), you can look at something that isn’t completely pseudoscience at http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/bogus.html

About Sodom and Gomorrah, ancient cities have been completely buried by volcanoes before you know; have you ever heard of Pompeii and Herculaneum? Moreover, the examples of architecture on the website you so helpfully suggested, look, to my untrained eye, much like natural formations that I have seen myself throughout the Southwestern US. The presence of Gypsum crystals is hardly conclusive proof of fire and brimstone reacting with limestone, yet alone proof that the locations in question are those two cities.

Do you have any idea how many black mountains there are? They aren’t particularly rare, especially in places with a history of volcanism.

Ah, the field of Biblical Prophecy. Would it be fair to assume that you believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of god? Now, if we are examining the question of whether the Bible is the inerrant word of god, or it isn’t, to prove that it isn’t, all you would need to do is find one place where it gets it wrong. God in all his perfection couldn’t make one mistake or otherwise he wouldn’t be perfect. Likewise, for the Bible to be a perfect book, it always has to be right. Am I right about this? So take a look at Matthew 16:28 “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” That is prophecy, and in it, Jesus is saying that some of the people that he is talking to at that specific moment in time will live to see the second coming. Everyone present to hear Jesus speak those words has been dead for more than 1,900 years, but Jesus still hasn’t showed. What gives?

Domino Theory

2007-05-21T11:51:00.000-07:00

The Iraq War’s architects espoused a neo-domino theory in support of it. Where in Southeast Asia, it was feared that if one country fell to the onslaught of Communism, another would follow, and then another, like a chain of dominoes. In Southwest Asia, it was, and in some circles still is, hoped that if one country, in this case Iraq, could be converted to a Western style liberal democracy, others in the region would follow. An assumption of theirs was that democratic Arab states would be inherently more pro-American, anti-extremism. This doesn’t seem like it would necessarily be the case, considering the electoral victory of Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Mahmoud Ahmadenijad in Iran.

So they assumed that planting the seed of democracy in Mesopotamia would allow it to flourish throughout the region, eventually supplanting the widespread hatred of America with an oasis of pro-western thought. It’s not that democracy is the end in its self, it’s merely a means. Otherwise the base fact of elections would please them; instead, they condemn the results when the winner is a group or a person that they don’t approve of. While there have been elections in countries through out the near east, these may be in spite of what is happening in Iraq, and not inspired by it.

Also, an election does not make a democracy. A democracy must be embraced by the populous, and the entire form of government must be based around it. Without that foundation, an election will not accomplish anything. There are elections in Cuba, China, and Iran; there were elections in Saddam’s Iraq. Elections do not make a democracy.

A different sort of domino effect seems to have happened. Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, extremism and terrorism has flourished, arriving in places that it hadn’t been before, at least not in its present form. It has destabilized the region, leading to additional wars, and setting the stage for civil wars in other countries.

Instead of engendering peace, just last war there was a war between Israel and Lebanon that took over 1,500 lives in the course of a month. Right now, internecine fighting between rival Palestinian factions has raised the threat of a Palestinian civil war. Right now, the worst infighting in Lebanon since the end of their civil war seventeen years ago is occurring. Since 2003 there has been a low-level insurgency against the Saudi monarchy. There has been an increase in terrorism in England, Spain, Turkey, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Jordan, and Egypt. There have been many attempted attacks in many other countries as well.

If the goals of the Iraq war were to disarm Saddam of his weapons of mass destruction, establish a liberal democracy in Iraq, hinder the efforts of Al Qaeda and related groups, promote democracy throughout the region, liberate the people of Iraq, and ensure the security of the United States, it has been a failure on every account.

Poignant Parallels from A Dissenter’s Guide to Foreign Policy, or How History Repeats its Self

2007-05-13T20:07:00.000-07:00

Here's how this works; first, every time it says "Vietnam" put in its place "Iraq", then where appropriate, substitute "Iran" or "Syria" for "China", "Islamofascism" for "Communism", "Arab" for "Asian", and so forth. None of this was written after 1968, yet you can hear the echoes across time.

“During the past fifteen years the two major triumphs of Chinese policy have been in Korea and Vietnam. In Korea, by hurling American forces back to the 38^th parallel, China proved to the world that it was a power to be reckoned with. In Vietnam it watches the Americans bleed, the Vietnamese grow increasingly disaffected, and the Asian masses grow more anti-American, without having to expend much of its material resources or any military manpower.” Pg. 85-6

“Consider, by way of contrast, our record in Vietnam. The other war, the effort to “pacify” the countryside, is, after eleven years and many billions of dollars, still “at the beginning of a beginning”-to quote Senator Mike Mansfield’s words. Imagine the outcry if the U.S. Army was to be put in charge of flagging Head Start programs in Mississippi and Alabama. The decision to transfer authority over pacification efforts to the American military command in South Vietnam is no less ludicrous. Men engaged in a shooting war, exposed to a totally different cultural experience, are being asked to teach the Vietnamese how to achieve stability, freedom, and democracy. The notion that their efforts hold any promise of success is nonsense on stilts.” Pg. 79

“Every opportunity to rely on multilateral rather than bilateral relations ought to be pursued. Every effort to create and utilize supranational agencies ought to be made. This obligation falls most heavily on those nations that are currently most powerful; for they have the defensive power that make them less liable to suffer vital injury through pursuit of this realistic goal. This is why the decision of the United States to bypass the United Nations in Vietnam is perhaps the greatest of the many tragedies of that pointless war.” Pg. 92

“A justification may be argued in domino theories or indefensible analogies with Europe in the 1930s, or warnings that if we don’t fight here we soon will have to fight… in Hawaii or California.” Pg. 98

“In Vietnam an American preoccupation with the freedom and well-being of other men, morally inspired but sentimental in its analysis of real possibilities, has converged with an American fear of Communism which naively exaggerates the unity, power, and threat of the Communist movement.” Pg. 100

“The second argument currently being made relies on the character of guerilla warfare. By the special use they make of the civilian population, it is said, the guerillas themselves destroy all conventional distinctions.” Pg. 308

Addendum

2007-05-04T22:13:00.000-07:00

I have to put this up under a new post because I don’t want to go through all the trouble of formatting all the tables in the previous one, I’m lazy, it’s a character flaw. How I came up with the worth of states in comparison to that of Florida was this: I took every state’s population and divided it by its electoral votes. I saw that Florida had the largest number of people to each of its votes, so I chose to use that as a baseline. Taking the number of people per electoral vote for each state, I used that number to divide that of Florida’s to come up with how many times that of Florida it is worth. The only thing special about my choice as a baseline is that it allowed every state to have a number greater than 1.

Inequity In the Electoral College

2007-05-04T21:00:00.000-07:00

This is some "analysis" I did of the possibilities and characteristics of the way that the Electoral College is set up.

States won by 1	Population	Electoral Votes	States won by2	Population	Electoral Votes
California	36132147	55	North Carolina	8683242	15
Texas	22859968	35	Virginia	7567465	13
New York	19254630	31	Massachusetts	6398743	12
Florida	17789864	27	Missouri	5800310	11
Illinois	12763371	21	Tennessee	5962959	11
Pennsylvania	12429616	21	Washington	6287759	11
Ohio	11464042	20	Arizona	5939292	10
Michigan	10120860	17	Maryland	5600388	10
Georgia	9072576	15	Minnesota	5132799	10
New Jersey	8717925	15	Wisconsin	5536201	10
Indiana	6271973	11	Alabama	4557808	9
	166876972	268	Colorado	4665177	9
			Kentucky	4173405	9
			Louisiana	4523628	8
			South Carolina	4255083	8
			Connecticut	3510297	7
			Iowa	2966334	7
			Oklahoma	3547884	7
			Oregon	3641056	7
			Arkansas	2779154	6
			Kansas	2744687	6
			Mississippi	2921088	6
			Nebraska	1758787	5
			Nevada	2414807	5
			New Mexico	1928384	5
			West Virginia	1816856	5
			Hawaii	1275194	4
			Idaho	1429096	4
			Maine	1321505	4
			New Hampshire	1309940	4
			Rhode Island	1076189	4
			Utah	2469585	4
			Alaska	663661	3
			D.C.	550521	3
			Delaware	843524	3
			Montana	935670	3
			North Dakota	636677	3
			South Dakota	775933	3
			Vermont	623050	3
			Wyoming	509294	3
				129533432	270
Total Voters	85107255		Total Voters	77720059
Votes Won	85107255	___268	Votes Won	39637230	[270
Votes Lost	0		Votes Lost	38082829
Vote Total 2	124744485		Vote Total 3	39637230

That table shows how it would be possible for a candidate to receive in excess of 75% of the popular vote, yet still lose due to the electoral count, and that is with clear majority wins in every single state, not pluralities brought on by three or more candidates. If you included those possibilities, the discrepancy would be even larger. The situation has one candidate winning states worth 268 electoral votes, and carrying them with 100% of the vote. The remaining states are split 51/49 in favor of the other candidate. While such an occurrence is so unlikely as to be virtually impossible, it highlights what I believe to be a deep flaw in the means by which we elect our commander in chief. The pie chart below illustrates the incongruency very well:

The following table expresses the relative worth of each individual vote, as compared in multiples of Florida, which I found has the least value of any other state.

State	Population	Electoral Votes	Per Vote	Rank	Worth (Multiples of Florida)
Alabama	4557808	9	506423	24	1.3
Alaska	663661	3	221220	5	2.98
Arizona	5939292	10	593929	43	1.11
Arkansas	2779154	6	463192	19	1.42
California	36132147	55	656948	50	1.003
Colorado	4665177	9	518353	27	1.27
Connecticut	3510297	7	501471	23	1.31
D.C.	550521	3	183506	2	3.59
Delaware	843524	3	281174	8	2.34
Florida	17789864	27	658883	51	1
Georgia	9072576	15	604838	45	1.09
Hawaii	1275194	4	318798	10	2.07
Idaho	1429096	4	357274	14	1.84
Illinois	12763371	21	607779	46	1.08
Indiana	6271973	11	570179	36	1.16
Iowa	2966334	7	428047	17	1.54
Kansas	2744687	6	457447	18	1.44
Kentucky	4173405	9	463711	20	1.42
Louisiana	4523628	8	565453	35	1.17
Maine	1321505	4	330376	12	1.99
Maryland	5600388	10	560038	34	1.18
Massachusetts	6398743	12	533228	31	1.24
Michigan	10120860	17	595344	44	1.11
Minnesota	5132799	10	513279	26	1.28
Mississippi	2921088	6	486848	22	1.35
Missouri	5800310	11	527300	29	1.25
Montana	935670	3	311890	9	2.11
Nebraska	1758787	5	351757	13	1.87
Nevada	2414807	5	482961	21	1.36
New Hampshire	1309940	4	327485	11	2.01
New Jersey	8717925	15	581195	40	1.13
New Mexico	1928384	5	385676	16	1.71
New York	19254630	31	621117	48	1.06
North Carolina	8683242	15	578882	39	1.14
North Dakota	636677	3	212225	4	3.1
Ohio	11464042	20	573202	38	1.15
Oklahoma	3547884	7	506840	25	1.3
Oregon	3641056	7	520150	28	1.27
Pennsylvania	12429616	21	591886	42	1.11
Rhode Island	1076189	4	269047	7	2.45
South Carolina	4255083	8	531885	30	1.24
South Dakota	775933	3	258644	6	2.55
Tennessee	5962959	11	542087	32	1.22
Texas	22859968	35	653141	49	1.009
Utah	2469585	4	617396	47	1.07
Vermont	623050	3	207683	3	3.17
Virginia	7567465	13	582112	41	1.13
Washington	6287759	11	571614	37	1.15
West Virginia	1816856	5	363371	15	1.81
Wisconsin	5536201	10	553620	33	1.19
Wyoming	509294	3	169764	1	3.88

As you can see, most of the states have similar worths to Florida, while a few peak much higher than the rest. In particular, a vote in Wyoming is worth nearly four times as much as a similar vote in Florida, with Washington DC not being very far below Wyoming.

Worth	# of States
1	3
1.1	10
1.2	9
1.3	7
1.4	5
1.5	1
1.7	1
1.8	2
1.9	1
2	2
2.1	2
2.3	1
2.5	1
2.6	1
3	1
3.1	1
3.2	1
3.6	1
3.9	1

The preceding table shows the distribution of vote value among the states. States worth 3 or more times Florida are very rare, with only 5 of them, making up less than one-tenth of the total. On the other hand, states worth less than twice that of Florida number 39. This next chart contains the same information as the table above, just in a more aesthetic way.

One of the bedrock fundamentals of the idea of the United States of America is equal justice under law. As it stands now, people's votes in presidential elections are far from equal. When someone's vote is worth nearly four times that of another's, that is not an example of equal treatment under the law. The way it is set up now should be changed; the Electoral College doesn't work in a country that values equality. It should be replaced with direct popular voting, Instant Run Off Voting, or any of a number of alternatives that provide for every single person's vote to be worth and treated the same. No one should be granted special statuses, or lesser ones.

Rough Draft Valedictorian Commencement Address Vers. 2.3

2007-04-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

I was wondering if I could come up with some remarks that managed to avoid the platitudes and cliches that these speeches are invariably peppered with. Things such as, "not only does this mark the end of a long journey, but the beginning of a whole new one." While most cliches are true, they are only shallowly so, and don't bear repeating, though I guess that I've already done that. Being valedictorian is an honor, it truly is, but in a graduating class of only 22, it's not the absolute grandest of accomplishments. Most of the 21 other graduates here tonight have accomplish much more, and worked far harder than I. Many of them have juggled raising a child, working a job, often full time, dealing with problems such as gangs and or drugs, and going to school five days a week, thirty-six weeks a year, and, for most of them, four years. I have developed a tremendous respect for all of them, for getting so far, and overcoming so many hurdles, ones that I myself, for the most part, haven't been faced with. Through four years of going to this school, a rarity given its nature, and the fluid, transient aspects of its student body, there are many wonderful teachers and staff members that I've become indebted to. I'd like to recognize and thank, in no particular order, Sue Ann Dobbyn, David Hutchison, Shelly Hangen, Brandy Snyder, Doug Bickel, Bruce Marks, Jack Bonham, Linda Kincaid, Ken Schaeffer, Amy Carpenter, Ignacio Tebas, Mrs. Barber, Polly Staski, and many others. I must apologize for I know that I must have left a few people out that deserve my gratitude, and I did so only due to the frailties of my memory, and not through any desire to slight. I can honestly say that in my four years at this school, I have not had one teacher that I absolutely could not stand. I'd also like to thank my family, my mom and dad, brother and sister, and my grandparents and uncles. I'm extremely lucky to have so many people willing and dedicated to help me along in any way that I might need. I also want to thank all of my friends through the years, there are too many for a list, you guys were awesome, even you Bob, you raving lunatic. In all honesty, I probably could've done it without you guys, but it wouldn't nearly of been so fun. I'd especially like to thank Yeny, my absolute favorite and best friend, you've done more for me than you can know. In my time at this school, not everyone's that been involved in it has been nearly so benevolent and helpful as those I've mentioned. Two people in particular spring to mind. People who have been at this school long enough will know who I'm talking about, and those of you who don't, I'm sure those that do would be more than willing to tell you all about it. Two years ago, from the beginning of the 2005 school year, this disastrous duo began a seemingly systematic campaign that appeared to be aimed at dismantling and destroying the fundamental character of this school. I know not whether that campaign was of their own conception, or if they were merely implementing the wishes of someone or ones higher along on the food chain. Even if it wasn't their brainchild, they displayed in their administration an unnecessary, counterproductive, tyrannical, totalitarian, oppressive and vindictive attitude of general contempt not only for the students, but for the staff as well. One incident stands out above all the others, and there were many, that best encapsulates the zeitgeist of those times. A few weeks into the '05 school year, the then principal got into a disagreement with a teacher, David Hutchison, over a matter of discipline. In what can only be described as a blatant attempt to punish dissent, regardless of the negative impact on dozens of students' educations, would be for Hutch to switch the classes that he taught with Ken Schaeffer; Ken would take his, and he would take Ken's. With them being two of the most loved teachers at the school, this decision didn't sit well with their students. The very next day, a student managed to organize a way for the school to express their disgruntlement, and there was a school-wide student walkout to protest the unjustness of the whole affair. This caused the principal to review her actions, but also institute a regime of collective punishment, mainly against the students, but that also had a strong effect on the staff as well. The administration managed to create such an oppressive environment that they effectively forced numerous teachers to transfer to other schools, and caused quite a few students to drop out, who otherwise might have been here tonight alongside us. This lasted for the entire year, and was perpetuated for the first half of this year by her folically challenged successor. Their combined year and a half reign fundamentally altered and effectively destroyed the place that this school was. Much of the damage done is most likely irreparable. However, this semester, I've begun to see the beginning of mending happening. Most likely, this is due to the departure of the aforementioned administrators, and the arrival of new ones dedicated to more than just their ego. Our principal, Dr. Hobbs, as well as our assistant principal, Mrs. Staski, have managed to very quickly begin to turn this place around. I have an amazing amount of respect and gratitude for the both of them. They have replaced the former dictatorial, heavy handed management policy in favor of one that's more open minded, balanced, even handed, and dedicated to serving the needs of the students. They have given the teachers the proper professional freedom and latitude to perform the jobs they're tasked with effectively, and that is something that this school had been sorely lacking for the longest time.

We are all a product of our times; my time has been ominously overshadowed by one issue above most others. Almost half a year before I started my first day of High School, and throughout my entire time there, our country has been involved in war on a scale like no other it's been in since the days of The Beatles, LBJ and Tricky Dick Nixon, Woodstock, and the Apollo moon landings. Since we started this war, over 3,300 of our soldiers have been killed; that is a number that surpasses the toll that 9/11 took on this country. There have also been nearly 300 fatalities of soldiers from other countries, mainly the United Kingdom, but also Bulgaria, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Thailand, and the Ukraine. Besides uniformed soldiers, at least 400 civilian military contractors have been killed, the preponderance hailing from the states, but also citizens of dozens of other countries. This war has been the most deadly of any for journalists since WWII, with not less than 167 of them being killed. By far though, the population that has born the brunt and suffered the most is, ironically, the one that it was supposed to liberate. The people of Iraq have suffered 70,000 reported deaths, a bare minimum number, with 30,000 of them coming in the last year alone. The real number may be closer to 650,000. In a nation with the population one-twelfth that of the US, that's the equivalent of them suffering a terrorist attack equaling 9/11 somewhere in between two months and every week. Taken as a proportion of the population, that would be like the US suffering such an attack from as rarely as every five days four hours, to as frequently as twice every twenty-eight hours. Try to imagine the effect, if you can, that that would have on the core fabric of our society, the equivalent of 850,000 through 7,800,000 people dead. For the two or three soldiers we lose every day, they lose from 50 to 500 civilians, ordinary people going about their daily lives, trying to survive in a war-zone that we had the courtesy to create for them. They suffer several massacres every day rivaling and surpassing our most recent national tragedy, the Virginia Tech shooting. As of today, we have been inside of Iraq for 1,521 days; it has been 1,479 days since George W. Bush declared the end of major combat operations; of every US fatality, all but 140 of them have taken place after that declaration of his. It took us 174 fewer days to defeat the Axis nations during WWII, from Pearl Harbor to VJ Day. The example that the students of San Andres showed a year and a half ago is one that should serve as a template for a response to this war. A year and a half ago, we not only saw an injustice, because we see them every day, but we saw one that affected each of us personally, and we decided to try and do something about it. Even if in the end we didn't succeed, the point is that we still tried. What each of us must realize, not only those of us graduating, or you guys out in the audience, but us collectively as a nation, we must realize that even if we don't enlist, or have someone we care about sent overseas, it is still an issue that affects each and every one of us personally. Actions such as this are carried out in our name, and when they happen and very few people stand up and say, "This is not right", we give it our tacit support and approval. The nearly half a trillion dollar price tag that this war comes with is taken directly out of your paycheck, and, at the rate we're spending, that of your child's as well. Every bullet that's fired, every bomb that's dropped is paid for by you; it is the fruits of your labor that has allowed this war to happen. It has been clear since almost right after the fall of Baghdad that the Casus Belli for initiating this war was false, and the preponderance of evidence indicates, deliberately so. This war is the most massive mistake, the worst crime that this country has been in the middle of for my lifetime, and probably most of yours. Unfortunately, it's reached a point where it's developed into a civil war, with 150,000 of our soldiers caught in the crossfire. Effectively, the course of the war is now largely out of our hands, and the killing will continue no matter what we do, whether we listen to that wise sage of a man, George W. Bush, and "stay the course", or we admit our grievous mistake and bring the boys back home. We failed to contain this war when we had the chance, or better yet, before it even started. Many of us take comfort in the mythos of a mighty America, with liberty and justice for all; if we seek to be able to continue to honestly claim that mantle, there is something that we, as a country, must do, and that personally includes all of us here tonight. Each of us needs to demand accountability from the people who were the architects of this war.Such people as George Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Condeleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Stephen Hadley, George Tenet, and others unknown, must be impeached, censured, indicted, incarcerated, fined, whatever may be appropriate given their responsibility for what has happened, and the extent of their role in it. You should call you congressman, your senators, write them, write letters to the editor, occupy the offices of congressman and recruitment center, take to the streets and lie down in them; the situation is so dire, the stakes are so high, that no action of dissent, protest, or civil disobedience can be considered too drastic. I'd like to end with a passage from the Nuremberg Judgment of the Nuremberg Trials that encapsulates the massivity of what I am speaking. "The charges in the indictment that the defendants planned and waged aggressive wars are charges of the utmost gravity. War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, but the Supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes that it contains within its self the accumulated evil of the whole." A war of aggression is a crime in and of its self that leads to all other war crimes, which are bound to occur in any war. The leaders of this nation are undoubtedly guilty of such a crime.

I'd like to thank everyone her, and, if I managed to make it this far, I'd like to thank whoever decided not to cut my microphone for, admittedly, straying outside the bounds of my prerogative. The only reason I did that was because the opportunity to speak before such a large crowd gave me the chance to change possibly even just one person's mind, and I had to take advantage of it. I'd just like to say again how much I admire and respect these men and women that I am here with tonight, thank you.

Limbo

2007-04-22T10:52:00.000-07:00

Pope Benedict’s removal of limbo from the Catholic Church’s doctrines raises an important and interesting point. It is reasonably safe to assume that there exists a specific way that reality actually is. There are different models that people subscribe to that attempt to explain the way things are. The current most popular scientific theory states that approximately 13,703,987,124 years, three months, and fifteen days ago, the universe exploded into existence from an infinitely dense, infinitely small singularity. The matter that we see all around us condensed out of a soup of energy into quarks, leptons, protons, neutrons, electrons, x-tons, and hundreds of other different particles; ever since that world creating explosion the universe has been expanding outwards faster and faster. The scientific explanation has a simplicity that theological ones lack. The Catholic Church’s model includes a heaven, hell, purgatory, and until recently, a limbo for the unbaptized children to go into. Those kids wouldn’t be let into heaven, because of something stupid the first man did 6,000, 50,000, or two million years ago. (hardly seems fair, doesn’t it?) Two thousand years ago, they believe God screwed a virgin, who gave birth to a person named Jesus, who was actually God, and who was tortured 33 years later and killed so that someone would be punished for our sins, because apparently God can’t forgive someone without somebody getting hurt. Their model of reality also includes a slew of saints that can help you out when God has his hands full. The excision of limbo was made in order to make the Church more appealing in places with high infant mortality rates, because apparently people don’t like the idea of their children not getting into heaven. Whether or not we can ever know for sure the true nature of reality, we can rest with the assurances with the knowledge that there was actually one specific way that things happened. Nobody knows for sure the identity of Jack the Ripper, and at this point, we can probably never know for sure. There are many different theories, one of them might be right, or none of them, but not more than one of them can be. We can be sure that there was one specific person, a man who had a name, and maybe a job, that was responsible for that string of dead and mutilated prostitutes over a hundred years ago in England. That is why it is interesting that the model of reality that up to a billion people believe in can be changed by executive fiat, ostensibly for marketing reasons. Either there is a limbo, or there isn’t one, and it is supremely odd to think that any humanly decision can in any way affect its existence or non-existence. If they say it doesn’t exist now, then it has never existed, and they were wrong for hundreds, over a thousand years, but if they were wrong once for all that time, what gives that institution any credibility now?

They Care.

2007-04-22T10:51:00.001-07:00

In Douglas Adams’ work of genius, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a trilogy in five parts, in one of the books, I think maybe it could be The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, I do remember it was the one about Krikkit, a character, probably Ford Prefect, makes a comment. Referring to the killer white krikkiter robots, he says something along the lines of they care, they care more, we don’t, not quite as much, they win; apathy will always lose out against fanaticism, there’s no reason to believe that that isn’t the case. In the abortion debate there are pro-life/anti-choicers, pro-choice/pro-death/anti-lifers, and those such as I who don’t really give much of a fuck one way or the other. While a pro-choice proponent might hold that a women’s right to control what goes on inside of her own body as a very deep and fundamental right, the ones opposing abortion believe it to be a matter of life and death, they equate abortion with murder. They care more than the other side does, they win. It’s as simple as that. No pro-choicer feels so strongly about their cause that they’d go out and shoot priests and bomb churches, but some pro-lifers, for example Eric Rudolph, who do feel so strongly that they will, and they have, gone out and shot doctors and nurses, and blown up clinics where abortion’s were performed. They feel so strongly about it that they feel the murder of someone who they consider guilty is necessary to save the life of an innocent. Not all feel that way, and many do condemn such acts of terrorism, but their faction contains that segment, while the pro-choice side doesn’t. There’s no way to compete against such rabid fanaticism, ultimately, they will win.

Of Iraq and Virginia

2007-04-20T20:01:00.001-07:00

Though it certainly is truly extraordinarily tragic, the only thing about the Virginia Tech shootings that makes it shocking or unthinkable is that it happened in Middle America, and not the Middle East, Africa, or almost any conceivable place in the world besides a narrow band where such things are relatively rare. The murder of more than a score and a half people is something that occurs on a regular, steady basis. If instead of a headline reading “Thirty-Three Dead after Deranged Gunman Rampages at Virginia University” it had instead said “Gunmen Massacre Thirty-Three Students at Baghdad University”, absolutely no one would bat an eye, yet the worth of the lives lost is exactly the same. Such headlines can be found multiple times every day. It’s always worthwhile to maintain a sense of proportion and perspective. What is the worst spree shooting in United States history is what we have caused Iraq to suffer daily, many times over. That is a point that one shouldn’t forget. We, through our allowance of George Bush and his associates, have caused thousands of tragedies on a scale that equals and surpasses that which happened April 16 in Virginia. The day after the assault, George Bush even traveled to speak at the University, yet he refuses to acknowledge his culpability in a much larger number of equally tragic, barbaric events. Independent of the Casus Belli for the war, the fact remains, unassailable, that this is what we have done; this is what we are responsible for. Whether or not the war was “justified”, there have been, again and again, actions that taken cumulatively, dwarf the tragedies that people in this country mourn: Virginia Tech, Columbine, Oklahoma City, Jonesboro, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and others.

Inhuman Events

2007-04-20T18:47:00.001-07:00

In the course of inhuman events, sometimes a people are faced with an imposing dilemma, or dilemmas, and the way in which they choose to react to that trying test determines the way in which history will remember them. The baby boomer generation was faced with twin problems, the Vietnam war, and the application of civil rights to everyone equally. Looking back on that time with the benefit of hindsight, despite a few shortcomings, many people met the burden that the circumstance of the day forced them to bear. In our time, we have many problems, and many threats that are all to real and grave, some of them from forces abroad, and others by people right here in the USA. Unfortunately, no swath of the population is willing to stand up and put themselves in the way of these unholy juggernauts. Look at just a few of today’s crises. We have let yet another African genocide continue on unimpeded. We have the US in a disastrous war of aggression in Iraq. This country’s other war, in Afghanistan, is now facing the very real possibility that the Taliban may eventually triumph. The calls to do something about catastrophic global climate change remain unheeded. A country that literally enslaves its citizens, and puts them in concentration camps for mere suspicion of sedition, has been allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, and repeatedly threaten a litany of other countries. The guarantees of liberty that define this country are being eaten away from within by people overreacting to a perceived terroristic threat. I do not understand why people are so apathetic to such senseless perversion of the human condition.

Conservatism and Liberalism

2007-04-20T18:29:00.000-07:00

Conservatism is by definition the preservation, maintenance, and protection of the status quo. It’s right there in the name CONSERVATism, the conservation of the way things are, keeping them the same way, it places tradition over progress, stagnantation over growth. Opposed to conservatism is liberalism, or more accurately, given the semantic subtlety of our current lexicon, progressivism. That political ethos strives for progress, the making of things better, as opposed to keeping them the same for the sake of sameness. It preaches improvement over dogma, growth over ritual. People are conservatives because they see change, any thusly, progress, as a negative, something to be protected against. They see any change as degradation. Governments and theological institutions rely on conservatism to maintain their hegemony. They are threatened by change; they feel it’s incompatible and contradictory to the corporations that give them meaning, the ones that they devote their lives to. All advancements in human history was brought about by liberals/progressives, and resisted and impeded by conservatives. Conservatives were on the side of the red coats during the revolutionary war; conservatives defended the genocidal institution of slavery, they supported segregation. Liberalism or progressivism is named because it wants to make things better, to improve society. The term liberal comes from the Latin “liber”, and doesn’t come from anything relating to wasteful. Liber means liberty or freedom, and liberalism has always been about bringing liberty to as wide a group as possible. What sounds more appealing, Liberalism or Conservatism?

North Korea

2007-04-20T17:30:00.001-07:00

By scale, perhaps the most egregious thing going on in the world today is the situation going on in North Korea. North Korea is in a very real way 1984, and in some aspects, surpasses the heights of paranoid totalitarianism that was Orwell’s nightmare. It brings to mind Stalinist Russia, with its gulags for those that don’t precisely toe the party line, Nazi Germany, with its assembly line concentration camps, and takes tyranny to a level that those countries only dreamed of. That something like that would be allowed to exist in this world of today is absolutely shocking to me. Concentration camps were, I thought, a nightmarish anomaly that only existed on the pages of history books. There are camps covering the area of Washington DC, or Los Angeles, with 50,000 people who committed, or were suspected of committing, crimes injurious to the state along with their parents and children. Not only will the son pay for the sins of the father, but the father will also pay for his son’s sins. Human experimentation, public executions, mass famines, gas chambers for whole families, forced labor; it really is at least as bad as the world the George Orwell feared. It is absolutely frightening. In North Korea, you have no rights at all; you are the property of the state. You do absolutely nothing unless you are told to. You don’t get food to eat, a place to sleep, you get nothing unless the state grants it to you. Every single aspect of your life is beyond your control. Not one minutiae of freedom is allowed. And the leader, Kim Jong-Il is deified, worshipped as God incarnate. If you don’t follow and fall into lockstep with the party’s ideology, you are as good as dead. The leadership of the country has a messiah-complex, and partakes in the fine products of western culture, while nurturing his delusions of being a benevolent patron of the arts. While sipping champagne, spraying on hairspray, and watching the latest that Hollywood has to offer, thousands are starving while working 12 hour days, to support Kim Jong-Il’s expensive tastes, and to provide him with the most destructive weapon on earth. It is truly bizarre, nearly unbelievable, and nauseatingly barbaric; there is no lack of adjectives that would be apropos. The dark fantasies of the most cynical, misanthropic of novelists could be based on that country, with no need of exaggeration or artistic license. It is a country of slaves, with almost an insect like mentality reminiscent of the fanatical loyalty exhibited by honey bees, termites, and ants. That suicidal, blind obedience that they impart on people is quite simply terrifying. North Korea is so demarcated, separated from the rest of the world that the people there are clueless. They have been brainwashed into believing that their’s is a utopia, a paradise on earth. They believe that anything good happens because of the supreme ruler, Kim Jong-Il. Everything comes from him. That there is this type of society in existence while the rest of the world goes about things obliviously is incomprehensible.

Yet More Words and Thoughts on the War

2007-04-20T16:33:00.000-07:00

Each generation must face down its own unique conflicts, and must come to task to them in their own personal, peculiar way, and some generations do that more effectively than others. Others shirk their responsibility, and misdirect that burden on to others to bear. It is too soon to tell how the naught generation will be judged, but I suspect that it will be seen as one that largely failed to meet all of the things that could reasonably be expected of it, one that wasn’t up to the task of its time. Some generations face more problems than others. As things go, the nineties weren’t all that bad. The baby boomers faced a total war in Southeast Asia, and the fight for people to enjoy equality here at home. Today, we’re facing a war of attrition in southwest Asia, a worldwide guerilla war being fought from the shadows, and an inept regime of rabid ideologues at home doing their best to undue everything that comprises this nation’s soul, everything that has given it the reputation for justice and greatness that they are now jeopardizing. What we do now is how we will be viewed for the rest of history. How shall we be judged? Will it be as the generation that backed down from the set of the biggest crises in this nation’s history, or will we rise up to meet the challenge? Our choices now will determine what our legacy will be, whether one of cowardice and capitulation, or one deserving of a country as righteous as we like to believe ours is.

Mr. President, how long will you allow this to go on? How many more families will be sent home their sons, brothers, fathers, daughters, sisters, and mothers in flag draped coffins? How many more will be made to lose their sight, their hearing, how many will you allow to be maimed and brutalized? How many more must lose their lives because you can’t live with the thought that somewhere along the line, you made a mistake? How many will you force a life of nightmares, PSTD, and guilt upon? How many will it take for you to finally admit that you were wrong? Do you believe that whatever you thought necessitated this war, is worth the price that’s been paid, the one that continues to be paid, and will continue to be paid for as long as you allow it to? Is it worth the half of a trillion dollars, and the almost four thousand Americans? Was getting Saddam at the end of a rope worth the lives of half a million Iraqis? I bet daddy’s proud now, isn’t he? He couldn’t be happier with the legacy you’ve made, the one thing that will forever be attached to your family’s name, could he? Are you that base, that vain that you would let this tragedy, this catastrophe continue, so as not force upon you the difficulty, the shame of saying: “I was wrong.” Three little words that are such an affront to your pride that you would let hundreds of thousands die to save you from the humility required to utter them. Do you seriously believe in the notion that what you did was right, and would you, if you were able to make that decision again, knowing all that you know now, would you choose the same course of action? Does the burden of what you’re responsible for at all bother you? Does the thought of the children that are dead because of you keep you up at night for even a minute? Do you believe, do you seriously believe that all of this is justified by the phantasmal specter of terrorism? Michael Jason Williams, Gregory Paul Sanders, Jay Thomas Aubin, Lori Ann Piestewa, Ruben Estrella Soto, these are not numbers, they are names, the names of people, Americans killed by your decisions, and there are over 3,500 more just like them. I fail to believe that Hassan Hashin, eleven, was a threat to this country, or Had Naam Mhebs, fourteen; or Afra Hashin, eleven; or Zhra Ali Hsen, eight. I cannot believe that these children were a threat to the security of this country. These names are but a handful of the scores and scores of thousands who have died in the past four years. Nagham Abaas Nahi, an eight year old schoolgirl killed by an American bomb, paid for by our tax dollars and dropped on your orders, in the town of Al-Taheria Al-Mahaweel on April 2, 2003, was most definitely not a terrorist.

Theology and Mortality

2007-04-20T15:10:00.001-07:00

Nothing packs the same devastating wallop, a powerful blow to the gut, like the realization of the inexorable march towards death. For as long as I’ve been able to comprehend such things, I’ve known, in an abstract way, about my mortality. However, knowing that, and being able to say “yes, I know I’m going to die”, is much different from comprehending the real implications of such a fact. Knowing that at some point, exactly the same as right now, be it tomorrow or in 2073, there will be a moment when I draw my last breath, think my last thought, see the last image that I ever will see. Nothing has ever felt worse than thinking those thoughts, imagining how it would be like, ever since I first fully realized that, when I must’ve been eleven or twelve. The only thing I can hope for, the only thing I can want is that when the moment comes, to not be afraid, to actually want it to be over, to accept the ultimate. It is hard for me to imagine how it would be possible for me to not be afraid, to want such a thing as that. I can’t imagine anything worse than facing that final hour accompanied by a pervading fear of that last breath.

It gives me some comfort to believe that this, all this that is life, with its peculiar topography of peaks and valleys, is not just an aptitude test, set up to judge us and determine where we should place our reservations in the hereafter. I don’t understand why a god would create conscious beings, and endow them with traits in such a way that it knows, and in a sense even causes, every thing that this being would do, given the situation that it would be placed in, all the variables controlled absolutely by and perfectly understood by the god. Only a sadistic god would create people that it knew would end up in hell, which, I suppose, might very well be the case. Why should a god necessarily be benevolent? Sure, people prefer the idea of a perfectly good god, but what about god-hood makes it necessary for it to not get a kick out of flooding the world, just for the hell of it, or turning people into pillars of salt?

The beliefs and rituals of religions don’t jive with the way I think the world works, from my admittedly limited experience of it. A god capable of creating something as majestic as the universe, ought not care about who sticks what body part in whose orifice. I don’t think that such a god would be so insecure as to require our unquestioning devotion. Such a god shouldn’t care what day of the week you worshipped it on, or what name you called it by. Such a god wouldn’t care if you ate pork, reptiles, amphibians, shellfish, beef, or any other food that’s considered taboo by at least one religion. Such a god would have no reason, nothing to do with arbitrary laws. A god as mighty and as awesome as the one that many people claim to believe in, would not be so vain and insecure that it felt it needed the respect of such a tiny, insignificant group as the human race, a group of beings that would owe their very existence to it.

All it Would Take

2007-04-20T15:08:00.000-07:00

I am here, all of us are here, because of an incomprehensible chain of a series of events, each of them as vital as any other, any of which, if they had happened to happen differently, would’ve negated our existence. If anything, any part of it, no matter how seemingly small or trivial, hadn’t happened, I would not be here right now. Possible, someone else would be here in my place, or no one would be here at all. If at the moment of conception, or to be a little more accurate, and pedantic, slightly before it, your father had sneezed, which caused him to shift his position ever so slightly, the lucky sperm that won the race, and specifies half of your genes, would’ve been a different one than the one that it was. That different one would only share half of its genes with the one that it actually was, which would’ve caused the child that resulted from that conception to share only three fourths of its genes with you. While that child would be similar to you, more so than any siblings you may have, it would not be you, it would be a different person, it may even have been of the opposite sex. So a sneeze, caused by a grain of pollen, could have prevented you from existing. Or if a comet that some ancient king took to be an omen, had been struck 78,391,326.0067 years ago by a meteor the size of a grapefruit, which shifted its orbit ever so slightly, and caused it to plunge into the sun 60 million years later, which caused the king to decide that he war he would otherwise have started wasn’t that good of an idea as he first thought, which caused a person who would’ve been killed to give birth to a child who’s great-granddaughter murdered one of your distant ancestors. The tiniest event causes ripples of changes to spread throughout the universe, each of these changes causes its own ripples, and these chains of changes have the power to alter the course of history. If almost anything, no matter how seemingly insignificant had been different in the past, the present would be a different one. Everything that has happened up to and including now relies upon similarly long, complicated, winding, and drawn out chains of happenstance and extraordinarily unlikely and improbable events. What I have trouble getting my head around, is the thought if my sense of me, my ego, would’ve been removed from existence, or if it would belong to someone else.

Ontological Proof of No God

2007-04-20T15:06:00.000-07:00

Ontological Proof of the Non-Existence of God

The creation of the world and the universe is the greatest, most marvelous achievement imaginable.
The merit of an achievement is the product of its intrinsic quality and the ability of its creator.
The greater the disability or handicap of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.
The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.
Therefore, if we suppose the universe is the product of an existing creator, we can conceive of a greater being, one that created the universe while not existing.
Therefore, god doesn’t exist.

Darfur

2007-04-20T14:13:00.001-07:00

I try to do my best to keep abreast of what's going on in the world, even if at times it can be totally overwhelming, depressing, heart wrenching, and soul crushing. There are far too many things in this world that are not as they should be, many profound injustices. The steady unrelenting march of news stories filled with accounts of murder, massacres, torture, bombings, imprisonments, and a litany of other abuses can be numbing in its monotony. The reality of wars that have been seen to take tens of thousands of lives has, I'm sorry to say, become commonplace, a seemingly normal, unavoidable aspect of humanity. It isn't very often I can learn of something I would have deemed unimaginable, a cruel relic of some past age, but which is being perpetrated as we speak (or more properly as I type and you read), and while the entire world turns a blind eye. I had heard of what's going on in Darfur, and I thought that I had a good, if broad, understanding of what was happening there. I had no idea the magnitude of the scale of that genocide, it can only properly be called holocaustal. Using Google Earth to get an aerial view of that region, and the immensity of the criminal slaughter becomes starkly apparent. To see where thousands upon thousands of villages, schools, homes, mosques, etc., have been levelled, is to see how horrific it really is. Being able to go from a vantage point where you can take in that entire region, on down to being able to discern the remnants of individual buildings is a singularly eye opening, yet gut wrenching experience. It allows you to gain an appreciation of what it means to say 400,000 people have been killed, and another 2,500,000 have been forced from their homes. How the world can stand back and do nothing more than condemn it using words not nearly approaching the strength or harshness that the situation calls for, is beyond my comprehension. I can't even begin to understand why we do this, why people find it necessary to judge someone inferior on account of their race, and deserving of execution. These things have always been a part of the world, and will probably always continue to be a part of it. I don't know if there's a more disheartening thought than that.

The Possibility of Genocide

2007-04-20T13:45:00.000-07:00

Right now, we have about 160,000 of our fellow citizens, men and women whose prerogative is to defend this country, but who find themselves caught in the middle of a civil war that has engulfed a country that we have no business being in, one that has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the security of the United States of America. Of those scores of thousands of our soldiers, at least three come home every day in flag draped caskets. Every day, several hundred Iraqis are killed, by bombs, gunmen, mortars, executions, being mistaken for insurgents, or caught in the crossfire. As of today, 68,141 people have been reported killed, a number compiled by going through news reports spanning more than four years, adding up the total incident by incident. That number is certainly a minimum, and many more times that number have probably actually been killed.

As much as I hate to admit it, George Bush may have a point. I fear that it is the presence of so many American troops, that while doing nothing to improve the civil war, may be the only thing standing in the way of all out, full blown genocide. Already, sectarian death squads roam city streets, setting up roadblocks to check people's ID's, searching for those that belong to a different sect, so as to summarily and systematically execute them. In the past year, more than 30,000 people were reported killed in an explosion of ethnic, sectarian warfare. That is almost half the total reported killed in four years of constant fighting. If every foreign troop, at this point almost entirely American, was to leave Iraq, it may become the equivalent of a Middle Eastern Rwanda, with tolls that might dwarf the already horrific ones that we're seeing today, as different populations do everything possible to exterminate the others.

This leaves us with an intractable dilemma: do we continue with our open ended support of the war, despite the thousands more deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars that course would ensue, or do we abandon the country to a fate that we have prepared for, risking letting it be absolutely consumed from within? One thing that must be done is to demand accountability from the cabal responsible for this monstrosity, such people as George Bush, Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and their ideological compatriots. Ultimately, it is up to the people of Iraq to reject violence and constant internecine warfare, but it takes only a relatively small group of dedicated people to derail that process of peace and reconciliation. Yet it is us that bear responsibility for creating this situation that exists now. Possibly, the best of many awful solutions may be the partitioning of Iraq into three autonomous regions, one for Kurds, one for Shiites, and one for Sunnis. This segregation of the country may be the only way for the violence to eventually end. Yet this option is still fraught with danger and many possibly insurmountable difficulties. There are no good options available, each one involves many more deaths, and much more time, given what is happening now, that's unavoidable. The best one would be the one that leads to the least number of deaths, and the one that might eventually lead to a nation, or nations, that has a degree of stability, and is able to function without constant foreign military support. Nothing good can happen...

To George

2007-03-05T16:56:00.000-08:00

For too long, no one has stood up and said that this is not right, that it is wrong, and I will take in no part of it. The only thing separating the Dick Cheney’s and George Bush’s of this world from the mass murderer’s of this world is proximity. They weren’t the one’s holding the knife or the gun, but still, if it wasn’t for them, it never would have happened. The scale of what they have done is orders of magnitude beyond even the most horrific of mass or spree killings, or the most prolific of serial killers. Mr. Bush, surely you can’t still believe that what you have done is right, you must have, at some point realized that engaging in this war was a mistake. How long ago was it that you realized you made a mistake, and how many people have been killed since then? How many of our courageous fighting men and women will be struck down, because you can’t say three little words, “I was wrong”? How many Iraqis, Journalists, Contractors, how many people has this war of yours already destroyed? Some 3,500 coalition soldiers are dead, in all you’ve taken by your actions maybe four hundred thousand lives. That is your legacy. The destruction of that country, and all of those many, many lives that are gone now, that is what you will be remembered for. I bet daddy’s proud of you now. You sure have showed him, haven’t you? You’ve gone and finished what he didn’t have the stomach for. This is your legacy, your contribution to the world; this is what will define your name. Does any of that bother you? Do you care that you will be counted alongside Saddam Hussein, as a tyrant, a torturer, and a killer? Do you care that as a direct result of your actions, a direct result of decisions that you made, scores of thousands of people are dead?

On the War

2007-03-05T16:55:00.000-08:00

The defining feature of our era is without a doubt the so called Global War on Terrorism, and, more specifically, the war that is ongoing in the country of Iraq. It was almost six years ago that the precipitating act for most of the relevant events occurred, which was the mass murder of nearly three thousand people, on the eleventh of September, 2001. The men responsible for that doubtlessly deserve to be held to account, but they don’t, nor have they ever, resided in Iraq. Because the administration of George W. Bush was so passionately inclined to subject that country to the full force of the American Military, we let the men with actual culpability slip away into the night, where they can continue to plan for more attacks. Four years ago a contingent of mainly American, with a few Brits and others thrown in for good measure, tanks, hummers, armored personal carriers, and the like rolled into Iraq as “smart” bombs fell upon the country. That month-long opening salvo saw ten thousand civilians killed. That is over three times the number of innocent people that were killed on 9/11. Those people were just as innocent, just as undeserving of that fate as the unfortunate souls aboard the four airliners, and those working at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Even the soldiers that were killed, maybe 45,000 of them, what misdeed of theirs warranted the fate to which they were consigned? They did nothing wrong, they were only defending their country, their homeland from foreign invaders. Motivated by patriotic fervor, or the desire to protect their families, they were just as innocent, just as undeserving of such a fate as anyone else. After the fall of Baghdad, after Saddam no longer held the reins of Iraq, after MR. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished”, what then? The war, the killing continued on relentlessly. The loss of soldiers continued at the steady pace of at least two a day, that being broken only by periods of intensification and escalation. It soon became clear that the primary justification that Mr. Bush Gave for this war was as spurious as his electoral victory. Saddam, and Iraq, was not in possession of any biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. There was no link to Al Qaeda, to the people responsible for the three thousand American deaths suffered six years ago. The terrible toll continued, and continues to climb higher every day. Each year has seen more people killed than the year preceding it, and now the situation has grown beyond anybody’s control. There is not one person who can stop this war; there are far too many separate groups and players. No one is in control, not George Bush, not Osama Bin Laden, not anybody. The only thing that can be done is to mitigate as much as possible, the violence that occurs. We must try to draw down, to ease the religious and ethnic tensions, and do whatever is necessary to bring about an end to the killing. The people that perpetrated this atrocity, the people that unleashed this upon the world must be held to account. It must be shown that in a civilized world, actions and events such as these must not be allowed to take place, and the people that would commit them, must not be allowed any power.

On Possibility, Eternity, Genius, and an Infinite Monkey

2007-02-18T20:39:00.000-08:00

Any bounded possibility, given an infinite amount of time, can be considered not only an eventuality, but an absolute certainty. This follows because infinity is not merely a big number, it's an insanely, massively, enormously, gigantically bigger number than you can even begin to imagine. If you place a limit on something, no matter how large or liberal that limit is, that thing will happen not just once, but again, and again, and again an infinite number of times if it's given an infinite amount of time to run its course. For example, novels generally have from 60,000 to 200,000 words. That's a large number, but it is still as far from infinity as three is. The English language has, and this is very approximately, 988,968 words that have ever been written down or uttered. This information allows for some calculations to be done. The number of possible ways to write one word is the number of words, precisely 988,968 possibilities. If you were to write two words, the number of possibilities is the number of words times itself, or 988,968^2. That number works out to 978,057,705,024 possibilities. So the total number of two word combinations that are possible is somewhere in the neighborhood, though slightly less than, one trillion permutations. The number of possible two-hundred-thousand word novels is easily deduced from mostly similar steps. You take the number of existing words and raise it to the power of the number of words you have, in this case 988,968^200,000. So there are 988,968^200,000 two-hundred-thousand word English language novels possible, though many of those would be incomprehensible nonsense, but everything up to 200,000 words is in there. Everything that’s been written by, and could have been written by the likes of William Shakespeare, Douglas Adams, Ian Fleming, Stephen King, or anybody for that matter. Each masterpiece, and each masterpiece greater than anything that’s been written, but not yet written, exists in the realm of possibility. There is a limit, the limit is massive, it’s huger than huge, overwhelmingly, mind-bendingly big, but it can be reached, given enough time. This goes for anything, given infinity, or even just a very long time, every thing that is possible will happen, and it will happen over and over again. This especially goes for music. There is a limit to the different patterns of One’s and Zero’s that can be burned on to an audio CD. The information on a compact disk is stored in areas of pits and lands, one’s and zero’s, offs and ons. There are about two billion different pits on a CD, and each of those can be in two different positions. The equation for figuring the number of possible permutations, the absolute upper limit to musical creativity is around 2^2,000,000,000. One should never forget the power of exponential growth; if not for lack of resources, rapidly dividing bacteria would soon consume the earth in their greedy, sexless orgy of cytokinesis. Now most of these CD’s would be static, noise that didn’t resemble a thing, but buried in the monstrous heap you will find every one of Pink Floyd’s records, and the ones they may have made if there situation were only a little bit different. That assortment of CD’s would contain everything there has been, and everything there could be. The same goes for DVD’s, movies, and TV shows. There’s a limit for everything, possibilities aren’t infinite, and eventually you will run out of ways for things to go, if the experience is placed under any bounds or limits. There’s a limit for CD’s, books, poems, shows, and anything else you might want to define. Given a bound, a limit, and more time than can be imagined, the possibilities of existence will play themselves out, everything will happen, and everything will keep happening, over and over again, ad nauseum, trapped in a penitentiary of eternal time.An addendum:
Take the hypothetical case of the monkey banging away on a keyboard for infinity, what are the chances of said simian coming out with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or maybe the King James Version of the bible? The bible has some 3,566,480 individual characters, though I’m not sure whether or not this includes spaces. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, which one can multiply by two to account for capitalization. So a monkey (or maybe perhaps a president) hammering away on a keyboard would have 52^3,566,480 different ways of writing a book of that length, and one of them would exactly match the King James Bible. Searching through all of the reams of pages to find the bible would take beyond an insanely long time, but it would be of a finite length. Anytime you have a limit, something that constrains the dimensions of whatever it is you’re considering, you reduce all of the different ways it can be to something that’s finite, a thing that will eventually come to an end, or be forced to repeat itself.

Genius’s substance lies not in one’s ability to make arise from whole-cloth, but in finding the path of what’s already there. As I’ve gone over, there are a finite number of possibilities when it comes to something that varies. All of these possibilities exist, but most are, and will remain, unfulfilled. Genius lies in the ability to pick out the great from the chaff, to find the path through the space of possibilities that leads to the most moving novel, or heart rending poem. The genius is not a creator, he is a discoverer, one who unveils what was already there, but hidden from the light. Just as a sculptor doesn’t make a statue from a block of marble, the sculptor’s job is to remove the bits and pieces obscuring the masterpiece that has been there since the block was created. As there is a block of marble that represents all of the possibilities, there is a space of possible novels, of possible combinations of words, and it is the erudite author who maneuvers its way through the space that is mostly made up of random nonsense, until he finds a gem. Answers are out there, they just need to be found, found and separated from the gibberish and the misleading ones. Possibility is finite.

( UPDATE: 4/20/07: I wrote this before I discovered Jorge Borge's essay "The Library of Babel", it deals with basically the same topic. It relates a universe composed of every assembly of characters that can be fit into a book of a set length. His ruminations on the subject were remarkably in line with what I wrote. There are a few online Library of Babel simulators that one might find interesting.)

On Love

2007-02-18T15:47:00.000-08:00

There’s a quote about love, that most mysterious of human emotions, that I’ve come across that seems to be apt for how I’ve been feeling recently. It’s from a British author named Neil Gaiman, and it is as follows: "Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love". I’m beginning to think that he hit the nail on the head with those words. Love is something that when it works out the way you would like it to, not even morphine can beat, but as is more often the case, things don’t go quite as well as you might like. What is it that lets us give so much of ourselves over, to vest so much of our well being in the whims of another, someone who may or may not be worthy of such a tragic responsibility? This emotion can give you the highest high, but like many drugs, it can at times be unrivaled in the agony, the misery, the absolute unrelenting torture that it can bring to bear on some unlucky fool caught fast in its grip. Love has caused me to lie awake all night, my thoughts racing from one awful thing to another. It has caused me to be able to do nothing else than lay curled up in the darkness crying, with a hollow, empty feeling that’s almost too hard to bear. Love that doesn’t work out the way I wanted it to has caused me in the past to go hungry for days, solely because eating didn’t cross my mind. Love’s such an awful thing, I wish I could go without it, and without the pain that inevitably follows behind it, but I still haven’t given up all hope that someday, things may work out, and while there’s still that little bit of hope, I must continue trudging my way through life, until I collapse under the weight of the world, or love finds a way to work out.

On the Fading of Outrage and the Inevitability of Atrocity

2007-02-18T14:09:00.000-08:00

Eventually, things will change. The outrages of today, the assaults on human dignity, the atrocities, and the crimes against humanity will pass into the pages of history, and reading of them will become an academic exercise. Already, for people today, learning of the holocaust doesn’t bring the bite, the pile driver jab to the stomach that it ought to. The machinations of Nazi Germany’s effort to exterminate, to engage in the whole sale bureaucratic slaughter of millions of people deemed unworthy for life, don’t inspire the horror in people that it should. That anything could ever transpire on such a scale, that the human species is capable of that should be terrifying, it’s something that should never lose its power. No matter how much time passes, the fact of the holocaust should always be able to move people to tears, to nausea. Nothing going on today rivals that crime, but there are many crimes today that, while not meeting those epic proportions, are still shockingly brutal, horrific, and, for lack of a better word, evil. What word, if not “evil”, should be used to describe the act of half a dozen men pinning a bound and blind folded man to the ground, while one of them saws through his neck with a knife like someone carving up a Christmas roast or a Thanksgiving turkey? What word, if not “evil”, can describe the maneuvering, conniving, and scheming of people to invade a country, placing hundreds of thousands of their fellow country men at risk, and killing thousands of entirely innocent people in the most brutal ways possible, for reasons not entirely clear and motives not entirely pure? If doing that while knowing that it would destroy lives, families, and futures, unleash a torrent of atrocities, torture, massacres, and countless other misdeed, if doing all of that is not evil, what is? How might something like that not be evil, but two men who love each other getting married is? All of the evil acts of today will fade with time. Eventually, they will lose their power to inspire the raw, unfiltered emotions that they do, in all but a small number of people. They will be replaced with the crimes of their own time, the only thing we can do is try to make sure that the inevitable future atrocities aren’t as barbaric as today’s and those of day’s past. The best we can hope for is to make it impossible, or at the very least harder for tomorrow’s Saddams, Bush’s, Hitlers, Stalins, Nixon’s, and Pinochets to do what they do best. If we are able to ensure that tomorrow's crimes don't exceed or even equal those of today, and those that belong to history, that would be the most success we might realistically hope for.

from A Letter on the Candidates

2007-02-17T20:17:00.000-08:00

The next national election won't be until November of 2008, but already, it's impossible to get away for a brief respite from people talking about who will run, who might run, who could win. who should win but won't, who shouldn't run but will, and on and on, all about a contest almost two years away. You know that in my opinion, the party that's not as bad, are the Democrats. The candidates that they have are a very interesting, very diverse group, without a doubt the most diverse field that there's ever been. There's Hillary Clinton, the wife of our former President Bill Clinton, who's our greatest living President. Barack Obama, a first term senator from Illinois who's father was from Kenya, who has many people excited in the media. Bill Richardson is the Governor of my little state, New Mexico, who is Hispanic, and probably the most qualified out of any of the possible choices. There's also John Edwards(former Senator), John Kerry(Senator who lost to Bush in 2004), Tom Vilsack(Governor of Iowa), Dennis Kucinich, and other contenders. Usually every presidential candidate is a white male, but already the Democrats have a woman, a Hispanic, and a black running, along with the usual ones. This is unprecedented, and very surprising. The Republicans on the other hand are stuck with the usual tired, old, white guys.
People can't stop talking about Barack Obama, but I think that it's not because they like him as a possible president, but they enjoy the novelty of a black guy who actually stands a chance of winning. I personally like Obama, I think he'd bring a fresh start to the political arena, but I don't know if he has the right qualifications, the necessary amount of experience. He's only been a Senator for two years. I also don't know if there's much more to him than a good looking, charismatic smile.
Hillary has got a huge political machine backing her up, and she has the benefits of her husband being a former president. Other than that, she's not a very remarkable person. Many people dislike her, and won't vote for her no matter what, so I don't think she has much of a chance. She's much too divisive, and this country doesn't need another divisive figure after enduring the horrors of Dubya.
Bill Richardson is the most qualified, with the most experience. He's competently governed this state for the past few years, he hasn't caused any type of large scale catastrophe. He has continued to meet with North Korean officials because he was the Secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration. North Korea has continued to develop its nuclear weapons, and that situation is probably the most dangerous one today. When dealing with the diplomatic chess game, he is the go to guy. Recently, he helped negotiate a ceasefire in the Sudan-Darfur war going on, after he met with the President of Sudan on his visit to that country. He doesn't have much of a chance because he doesn't have the name recognition, or the media behind him, but I do think that he may be the best option for the President.
It would be hard to find someone who would actually do worse than George Bush, so I think that anybody will probably be an improvement. over him.
There was an interesting thing that I saw. If Hillary Clinton becomes President and she gets reelected, which is a possibility, a member of the Clinton or Bush family would've been running the USA for 28 years (if you want to count the Vice Presidency, the number's 36). Such a streak is something that worries me. It is too reminiscent of an aristocracy, people inheriting their leaderships. It ought be shaken up a bit.

Letter on the Victory of Good O'er Evil

2007-02-17T20:14:00.001-08:00

What follows is a letter I wrote to a friend on Nov. 9 about the Nov. 7 Elections.

I'm not sure if I can even start to describe how happy I am about what happened Tuesday in the elections we had here. The republicans lost the majority that they'd had for the past four years in the senate, and the past twelve in the house of reps. Finally, there'll be somebody there to stop Bush before he does too much more damage. It isn't that the democrats are very much better, they're just incredibly less worse. They probably won't do many good, productive things, but they won't do nearly as much bad, destructive things. With luck, I'm trying not to get my hopes up, there is the possibility that Bush, and Cheney, and the whole diabolical cabal might be impeached and thrown out in disgrace. Already, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense is out. I'm hoping that many more will follow. After so much bad news for such a long time, this provides the first glimmer of hope that I've had in a long time, and for that, I'm happy.

On God and My God and All That

2007-02-17T19:50:00.000-08:00

If there is a god, one that created all of existence (save for itself, I think. A god that existed would necessarily be part of existence, but it couldn't create itself), then it would follow that such a god wouldn't be absolutely perfect in every way, as is posited by the many people that believe in it. A perfect should be content merely to exist, in need and in want of nothing. What could possible disturb the perfect god's equilibrium to cause it to want to create the universe? The act of creation would mean that god had a desire, a need for something, something that it didn't have. A perfect being would have everything it needed, everything that it might possible want. Therefore, at the very least, god's not perfect, because in desiring something, it lacked in something, and lacking is an imperfection. To most people, the idea that god isn't perfect isn't very appealing. Though just because it's not what you want it be, it doesn't follow that perfection would have to be a quality of a being that may have created the universe. Many times, I have heard people relate something similar, or sometimes identical, to an argument named Pascal's wager, after the French mathematician. I used to hold it in high esteem, but since then its irredeemable flaws have become apparent to me. In its basic form is that if there is a god, and said god exists, then you get rewarded with eternal, infinite bliss in paradise or heaven. If, on the other hand, you don't have faith, and there's one, then you get rewarded with eternal hellfire. On the other hand, if there is no god, no matter what you believe, you get nothing, because death only provides you with oblivion, faithful and infidels alike. So given the choices of getting nothing, losing in effect everything, and gaining all the pleasure in the world, the rational mind would go all in on the chance that god exists. Most of the wager's flaws arise from holding many unfounded assumptions, the most egregious being that belief is rewarded and disbelief is punished. Why should you assume that? What justification is there other than that's the most common thing for people to believe? A god that rewards skepticism and punishes believers with a vengeance is at least as imaginable as the traditional conception. Likewise, it's perfectly easy to imagine a god that rewards everyone, or punishes all, or doles out sentences at random whether somebody's a believer or not. That any of these are possible destroys the integrity of the wager, in my opinion, irreparably. It also assumes that belief is something that can freely be chosen. That's something that's very hard for me to accept. No matter how hard I try, it would be impossible for me to believe that George W. has been a great president, or even a capable president. I really do understand the appeal that religion holds for people, it provides a concrete foundation and ready made, clear cut answers to almost all questions (Why X? It's god's will). It is a means of escape, a way to get through the day, because it holds the promise, the allure of better things to come, if only you follow some rules and engage in some rituals. I wish that I could throw myself into religion. If that were possible, it would make my life very much easier, but I can't bring myself to it. To be able to believe in something, I'd have to think that whatever the religion said was the way things actually were. From my experience of the way the world works, it's impossible for me to believe that Jesus arose from the dead, or there was a worldwide deluge, or any of the countless other myths that form the basis of most religions. The beliefs and rituals of religions don't jive with the way I think the world works. A god capable of creating something as majestic as the universe, ought not care about who sticks what body part in which hole. I don't think that such a mighty being would be so insecure as to require our unquestioning devotion. Such a god wouldn't give a damn about what day of the week you paid reverence to him on, or by what name you called it. Such a god wouldn't care if you ate pork, shellfish, beef, or any other food. Such a god wouldn't care how you shaved your beard, or the length of your hair. Such a god would have nothing to do with arbitrary laws for agents it created and controls. A god as mighty and as awesome as the one believed in by so many people, would not be so insecure and vain that it needed the respect and fear of such a tiny, insignificant group as the human race.

Rough Draft Commencement Address

2007-02-17T17:57:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I suppose that I'm supposed to speak about what the last four years have been like, how I've changed, how things have changed, and what the future may hold in store. So, to get all of that out of the way, the first two years were great. Suffice it to say, the last two haven't been so good. Due to a cluster fuck, a perfect shit storm of inept, incompetent, tyrannical, and bellicose administrators, arbitrary standards dictated by a goofy child president, and a concerted, systematic effort by others unknown to destroy and dismantle, figuratively and literally, our school, they have succeeded in removing one of the best alternatives that used to be available for students who needed one. We have seen the almost total replacement of the staff, including some of the best and most dedicated teachers I've known. As a result of this, there has been a precipitous decline in the effectiveness of San Andres High School as an institution. The school that I chose to come to, the school that I enjoyed coming to, no longer exists, and it is a fucking shame that students like myself have one less good option available to them. If I was not able to go to the school that San Andres used to be, my time in High School would've been much more of an ordeal. But there are larger issues facing us today. For the past few years this country has been on a dangerous course. Most egregiously, we invaded a country in a war of aggression. During the Nuremberg Trials the Chief American Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson said this: "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." We started this war over four years ago, and in the intervening months, things have progressively continued to get worse. We've been fighting longer than we did in WWII, we've lost more soldiers than the number of people who were killed on 9/11, and the number of Iraqis who have been killed in those four years is on the same level as the number who were killed during Saddam's 24 year reign of terror, and a hundred more are killed every single day. The monetary cost of all this is approaching half a trillion dollars, with another two billion dollars more every week. The reasons we're there have changed too many times too count. We've abandoned all to readily and whole-heartedly many of the ideals fundamental to our country's being, the 800 year old right of Habeas Corpus, one of the cornerstones of western democracy, has been discarded with hardly a murmur. We stood by as our government abandoned thousands in the hellhole that New Orleans became after Hurricane Katrina drowned that city, killed two thousand people, and displaced hundreds of thousands more. Our government has decided that it is okay to keep people locked up, for years, without charges or recourse to the law; that its justified to use torture, as a routine interrogation tactic. Right now, any one of you can be stripped of everything, every last right that you have, based on a presidential whim, and consigned to the solitary confinement of a naval brig, until you're deemed no longer a threat. From the response to 9/11, to the unmitigated disaster of Iraq, the Valerie Plame affair, the Terri Schiavo circus, New Orleans and Katrina, Warrant-less wiretapping, torture, abu ghraib, Nigerian Yellow Cake, the Downing Street memo, the bankrupting of the treasury, and so many more than can be counted, these last few years have been much worse than anything that occurred in even the Nixonian era, but that is not the worst of it. We, as a nation, have grown complacent. We do not get outraged, even in the face of such blatant transgressions that we've been faced with. There have always been tyrannical, belligerent, and corrupt people in charge, but we've failed to rise up to the challenge. There weren't people in the streets, there were no protests, no widespread instances of multitudes of people standing up and saying, "This is wrong. I will not be a part of this. I will do whatever I have to stop it." An overwhelming majority of people oppose the catastrophe that we created in Iraq, but there have been no occupations of student union buildings or recruitment offices. The vast number of protests have been reserved to standing on the sidewalk, holding signs in the air. The political tide is turning, but we failed to meet the challenges of the chronic crisis we have. The thing that we must do now, is demand accountability from the people who've caused so much damage. In order for us to regain this country's soul, those people must be impeached, they must be indicted, and they must be incarcerated. If lying about a hummer in the oval office justified an impeachment trial for the last guy, lies that have lead to in excess of half a million deaths surely justifies much harsher measures for this one.

A Fragment On Iraq

2007-02-17T17:48:00.000-08:00

I think that the course the war in Iraq has been going will stay pretty much steady, at least until this presidency is over. The people in charge are too stubborn and too dug in to admit they were wrong and pull the troops out, and they won't be allowed by the rest of the nation to really escalate things to try to pacify the country. When it comes right down to it, whatever happens in Iraq, life will continue much the same as anything here. The stakes aren't high enough to make people care about it. It's a different type of war than WWII. Back then, losing would've meant the US would probably cease to exist as a nation. That's why we were willing to go all out. Now, if we stay the course, things will stay the same, if we pull out, things will stay the same, so there's not an incentive to do anything differently. Nothing will change for people in the US, whatever the fuck happens in Iraq. My prediction is that because of that, we'll keep doing what we've been doing until a vast majority of the people become weary of the whole mess, then they'll say we accomplished the mission and bring most of the troops home, leaving a few dozen bases just in case we ever need to go back, or use it to go after another country.

On the War and the Passing of Saddam

2007-02-17T17:43:00.000-08:00

There seemed to be something disturbingly morbid and ghoulish over the way the news channels were eagerly waiting for Saddam to be hanged. On CNN, they were proud in saying, "even if the news comes in during a commercial break, we'll cut out of it so you'll be the first to know that he's been executed." I can't say that I didn't welcome news of Saddam Hussein's hanging, he is a man who deserves as much as anybody that fate. Although I fail to see what good it'll do. He was a brutal dictator, and unfortunately there are many dictators who are deserving of what he got, but very few of them reach that point. It's a little reassuring knowing that at least one tyrant met his end where he deserved it. Too many have escaped justice. This year, Slobodan Milosevic and Augusto Pinochet were two dictators with many deaths to their blame. They died naturally; it's fitting that someone who created such violence should receive it. Is there more justice at the end of a rope than there is in a jail cell? I don't know. My personal opinion is that it's better to leave them to rot in a cell. I think that this'll only inflame tensions, and make things worse. I am horrified at the numbers of people killed and hurt in this war, there has been no justice done. This war is sickening, it's revolting, the people who planned it, and executed it, they deserve a rope of their own as much as Saddam did. Even though it may have been justified, or at least justifiable, I can only see how this will only inflame people's anger, and cause even more violence. On Christmas another milestone was reached. The number of American soldiers killed passed the number of people who were killed on 9/11, 2,973. This war is now more of a disaster, at least for the American military, than 9/11 was for the nation. Although, such a comparison doesn't seem very accurate to me. American soldiers wouldn't be analogous to people killed on 9/11, if anything, the best comparison would be to the men who hijacked the airplanes. To compare 9/11 and the Iraq war, you'd have to look at the number of civilians who've died. Recently there was a study done that aimed to find out how many deaths the war has caused. It found that there were 655,000. That number is insane. For every American that's died, as many as more than 200 Iraqis have been killed. Astoundingly, I still hear people try to justify it, they say it was the right thing to do. I just want to scream at those people, "what is wrong with you?! Are you insane!?" It's infuriating. It's also infuriating that even though an overwhelming majority of people in this country have realized that it was the wrong decision, they aren't willing to do anything about it. They don't want to do anything to try to bring it to an end. They don't want to do anything to hold people accountable for unleashing this monster. All they did was wait four years to elect a different political party into power, and remarkably, it looks like that won't help in the least. Bush is looking at the option of, instead of drawing down the number of troops, increasing it by 20,000 or 30,000 soldiers. That will only raise the number of people killed. It's disgusting. It's frustrating, seeing such devastation unfold, and being powerless, completely unable to do anything to stop it, to ameliorate it in any small way.

If there is one good thing you can say about Saddam, it is this, in spite of the indignities that he was made to suffer in his last moments on this earth, he carried himself to the end with the most dignity that could be expected of someone in his position. During his life, it is true that he was responsible for some cruel, evil barbarities, but in the face of taunting hecklers as he stood on the gallows with a noose around his neck, he took on the aura of dignified respectability. I am sure that he's cemented himself as an image, a figurehead, a hero, even a martyr, in the minds of many people, and not just the ones who have supported him all the way. I saw the video, the full one that was released and depicted the entire sordid scene. I am against executions for anybody, be it a low-life criminal gangster, or a deposed president, I would even choose to have perhaps the worst monster in the history of the world, Adolf Hitler, locked up for the remainder of his natural life, instead of showing him to the gallows, electric chair, guillotine, gas chamber, or firing squad. However, in states where people do face that penalty, it is usually administered in a bureaucratic way, aiming for something approaching justice. Saddam's execution more closely resembled a mob lynching from another era, than one where the purpose was to try to bring about justice. No one should face a jeering crowd in the final seconds of their life, except maybe Glenn Beck, I hate that fucking man.

On Torture

2007-02-17T17:37:00.000-08:00

In the Global War of Terror, people have questioned how far we should go in interrogating suspected terrorists, and at which point we should stop. How harsh is too harsh? One of the scenarios that the pro-torture camp employs is, "say there's a nuclear bomb in New York City set to go off in three hours. We have a person in custody who knows where it is, but the only way to get him to tell us is to attach a car battery to his testicles." In such a situation, what should we do, and what type of legislation should we have to deal with it? Ignoring the astronomically improbable likelihood of such a situation ever occurring, I have come to what in my opinion is the best solution to an untenable problem. Torture, in any and all forms should be illegal, and prohibited. However, if a situation such as a nuke in New York City were to occur, people would do what they had to do to prevent it from going off, including torture. In the investigation that would hopefully follow such an incident, if it was determined that the torturers were acting in a way that they felt was justified, than they ought not to be prosecuted. However, if we were to legislate guidelines to using torture, it would be used and abused in situations that did not require it. If it is kept absolutely illegal, it will only be used as an absolute last resort in the direst of circumstances.

On Import

2007-02-17T16:06:00.000-08:00

In this world of ours, this wonderful, decrepit, horrific world of ours, there are people. Not only that, but there are many people, very many people, billions and billions of people. There are short people and tall people, fat people and thin people, various shades of brown and pink people, people who pray to Allah, people who pray to Satan, people who pray to no one at all, and even people who pray to Joe Pesci. Some of them are presidents, a few are kings, some are senators, and some are bakers. Some of these people are mechanics, clerks, dentists, nurses, teachers, thieves, drug dealers, and pimps. Some of these groups are more numerous, and some are famous, infamous, and unknown. Some follow the flock, and some are trail blazers. All of these people matter just as much as any other, all of these people matter just as little, and all of them are equally worthless. At the end of the day it doesn't matter the size of your house, or your number of friends, your salary doesn't matter, nor does the party you vote for. No matter whether you're the pope, the president of the united states, or an unemployed alcoholic, the world will go on whether you're there to see it or not, whether you want it to or not. The sphere of matter that we live on called the earth would continue to make its merry way around the nuclear fireball known as the sun, whether we continued to live on it or not. What happens matters not, and what doesn't happen matters just as much. Anything is as right or as wrong as anything else, and it couldn't be any other way, nor should it, because anything else would be just as random, just as arbitrary, and just as impenetrably ineffable as it already is. Everything is the most important thing in the world, and nothing is. Whatever you do is right, because whatever you do is the only thing you could have done, it's the only way it could have been, and there is no point in arguing that, unless you are, in which case it must unavoidably follow that arguing it's the right thing to do, just as surely as a hangover follows a drinking binge.