To George

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.