The Common Sense Amendment

The Kentucky Lethal Injection Case

2008-05-19T17:01:00.002-05:00

For those of you who have not seen or read about the decision in Baze vs. Rees (553 US 2008), the US Supreme Court upheld Kentucky's method of lethal injection as constitutional. Oddly enough, the condemned inmates who brought the suit did not argue that capital punishment in and off itself is "cruel and unusual" in violation of the 8th Amendment (it isn't), rather they argued that the three drug compound used to carry out the procedure, as well as the lack of an anesthesiologist, EMT and nurse, made the procedure so fraught with potential difficulties as to create the opportunity for "distress" and "unnecessary pain".

It was a pretty clever argument for the petitioners. By arguing against the lethal injection cocktail, the same mixture being used in all states that currently have the death penalty and the Federal Government, and not the procedure itself, they opened up several potential avenues to get their murdering hides off death watch.

One of their more ingenious arguments was that absent a nurse, EMT or anesthesiologist there was no real way to make sure the first drug, once administered, was doing its job. The first drug, sodium thiopental, is designed to basically knock you out and make you unable to feel your own death. Petitioners argued that you needed a medical professional to make sure it worked and the condemned was really out of it, otherwise being awake for your own death is "cruel and unusual". Fortunately for them, the American medical community, EMT's and nurses associations all have standing ethical guidelines prohibiting their participation in capital punishment. Had the Court upheld this request from the condemned, it would have effectively banned capital punishment in the United States on a technicality. Nice try, better luck next time.

The petitioners also requested the Court order the states to find a new lethal cocktail, arguing that the present three-cocktail mix takes too long to inject and suffers from the aforementioned problem of unreliability in observation and confirmation of unconsciousness. They also argued that the tubes could become clogged. Not that it ever has, for they present no documented instance in support of their contention, but that it could. They therefore contend that it would be better if the states were ordered by the Court to adopt a new one-dose mortal martini. Since, as aforementioned, every state in the nation which has capital punishment on the books uses the same three-dose lethal injection method, and they admit there is no new one-dose injection waiting in the wings, the Court rightfully dismissed this as a stalling tactic and an attempt to get the Court to become a "Board of Inquiry" with authority to perpetually reexamine the death penalty every time someone argued that a better method had been developed, stripping the State's of their sole Constitutional authority to do so. They realized that if the Court had ordered the States to go to a one-dose method, without any scientific basis to do so, indeed, without any such drug currently available, it would amount to a moratorium on the death penalty while such a drug was created, tested and undoubtedly filed suit against in state and federal courts. Justice Clarence Thomas, as usual, brilliantly observed;

It is not a little ironic—and telling—that lethal injection, hailed just a few years ago as the humane alternative in light of which every other method of execution was deemed an unconstitutional relic of the past, is the subject of today’s challenge. It appears the Constitution is “evolving” even faster than I suspected. And it is obvious that, for some who oppose capital punishment on policy grounds, the only acceptable end point of the evolution is for this Court, in an exercise of raw judicial power unsupported by the text or history of the Constitution, or even by a contemporary moral consensus, to strike down the death penalty as cruel and unusual in all circumstances. In the meantime, though, the next best option for those seeking to abolish the death penalty is to embroil the States in never-ending litigation concerning the adequacy of their execution procedures.

The "text or history" about which Justice Thomas spoke was the original meaning of the "Cruel and Unusual" punishment prohibition, which he elucidated by looking at every previous case against capital punishment upon which the High Court had ruled. The Court has never invalidated a method of execution on the grounds that it was "cruel and unusual" because the Court has never found a method of execution in the United States of America to be "tortuous". In the opinion, the majority was divided into separate concurring opinions and one united dissenting opinion. Only Justice Thomas took the time to explain why, using tried and true original intent methodology, lethal injection could not be "cruel and unusual". Basically, it is because we never impose "super-capital punishments".

Back in the day (a very research-y term I know) death was a proper punishment for a whole host of offenses. Certain crimes in Europe; like lese-majesty, high treason, witchcraft and mariticide, that is, crimes that were seen as pernicious to the entirety of the social order, were punishable by super-capital punishment. These kinds of punishments were designed to inflict severe pain on the victim as he was dying and to destroy his body in the process. In essence, the punishment was designed to be a "fate worse than death". It was a "cruel and unusual" punishment. He quoted In Re Kemmler (136 U.S. 436, 446; 1890);

“Punishments are cruel when they involve torture or a lingering death; but the punishment of death is not cruel, within the meaning of that word as used in the Constitution. It implies there something inhuman and barbarous, something more than the mere extinguishment of life.”

This was designed to be a brief overview of the holding in the case, for a more thorough understanding you must, of course, read the 97-page decision your-own-self.

US Military Casualties in Comparison

2008-05-15T21:20:00.001-05:00

A little something for the people who like to pretend they care about soldiers as an excuse to end the war in Iraq. This especially applies to people who think that President Bush has grossly mismanaged the War on International Islamic Terrorism and produced terribly high casualty numbers in the process.

I will let the numbers speak for themselves:

US Military Deaths 1992-2000 under US President Bill Clinton: 8,807
US Military Deaths 2000-Present under US President George W. Bush: 10,946

So, to elaborate more fully, under President Clinton's "Peace" Presidency we lost 2,139 less soldiers than we did during President Bush's two-front wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush secured two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan and President Clinton bombed and Aspirin factory in the Sudan. President Bush became the first person in modern history to conquer Afghanistan, President Clinton attacked the Balkans (and put good soldiers lives at risk) to cover up an affair and his subsequent impeachment.

These numbers show that by all accounts the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most well carried-out, well-executed and most precise operations in military history.

You won't see that on your nightly news, because they're too busy trumpeting each and every combat death as further proof that we cannot win despite the lowest casualty figures of any modern military campaign of this size or scope.

Source: US Department of Defense

NYT endorsements are out (be still my beating heart)

2008-01-24T21:59:00.000-06:00

The New York (High Crimes) Times has endorsed John McCain. As if any more proof were needed he's not a Republican, or a Conservative. So, he's locked up the virulently left-wing leak state secrets and troop movements to our enemies to undermine the President newspaper vote, (though don't accuse it of bias) what more to come I wonder? If he gets the Washington Post endorsement, we'll know that it doesn't consider him one of those naive and pernicious American mercenaries who already got it too well.

To steal a quote, the problem with quoting "intellectual" mainstream Democrats is that when you do, they accuse you of mudslinging.

YOU are not progressive

2008-01-24T19:20:00.000-06:00

Attention Democrats, all of you. Attention FDR worshiping academics, Noam Chomsky acolytes, college students for "change", the news media, interest groups, cheering throngs for Clinton, billionaire financiers, etc.

You are NOT progressives. You never have been. There is absolutely nothing progressive about what you do, what you want, the American you want to see built, or your policies.

You are, at best, regressive.

True progressives were John Stuart Mill, who argued for private property and the rights of the citizen. True progressives were men like Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to enshrine a system of a government which governs best is one that governs least. Progressives were men like John Locke, who argued for the contract with government, and against the foundations of monarchy.

We have been successful in recent years appropriately tarnishing the label "big l" Liberal. People came to associate your cause, correctly, with reversing all we and the founding fathers had worked so hard to create. We had managed to associate, in the popular consciousness, the term "Liberal" with the altar of weakness, the shrine of UN-worship, the excesses of government, the fear of an independent citizenry, the revulsion at the concept of individual self-defense, militant atheism, disrespect for tradition, disregard of values, hatred of America, the cult of child murder, and an overriding collectivist mentality that, to quote Hillary Clinton from "It takes a Village", wanted to set up giant telescreens around the city telling you the government's preferred method of raising your children.

Seeing that the term "Liberal" had reached this point in popular consciousness, they began to refer to themselves by a term we all learned in schools. They were now "progressives". They were the scions of the reformers who fought to limit working hours for women, extend the franchise, change the Constitution, outlaw liquor, enforce reasonable standards of work and wage for the poor and urban dwelling. They were the heirs to this. We, the Conservatives, were like the forces of old.

Here's the problem, we have come to the point where as a nation we enforce human rights laws, enforce reasonable standards of work and wage, tax punitively, redistribute wealth, punish companies that sin against their employees, etc. We have reached that point.

Needing something to do, these "liberals" spend their time trying to create new human rights, not content with the ones we have now. The law of diminishing returns being what it is, we have already reached the pinnacle, so the only way we have to go is not up, but to go back around, to head down the other side of the curve.

We have the best performing, highest quality, most equitable, more efficient health-care system in the world. Foreigners come here for health care (drive to the Canadian border and look at the Canadian license plates in our clinics, then drive across and look in vain for American license plates in their clinic parking lots). Something is not right, though, because hospitals make money. And since medical care has suddenly become a human right, that's unfair.

True progressive reformers fought to break the private sector from the yoke of absolute government control. To free the people from central planning in the capital. To create a system where an individual could function independently of the state. Modern liberals are working the other way around, like the clock hitting midnight and heading back to 1, and are now working to put healthcare under the suffocating grip of the state. To put it metaphorically, true progressives are trying to let you design a house, modern liberals are demanding all families live in an identical one. Classic progressives worked to make the family and the individual the masters of their fate, modern liberals are working to put a government accountant in that role. Classic progressives fought for individual rights, to make a man's name mean something. Modern liberals invented the social security number, to help the government better keep track of your movements, and remove the problem of names altogether.

There is nothing progressive about you.

Classic progressives worked to guarantee, like the Second Amendment to the Constitution, the right of the individual to defend himself independently of the state. To be an armed, fully participating member of society. Modern liberals are working as hard as they can to take your right of self-defense away. They are working to make your self-defense absolutely dependent on the state. I respect the police, I am the son of a police officer and the grandson of a military police officer. The police cannot be everywhere, nor should they be, but modern liberalism is working tirelessly to put you at the mercy of an officer's reaction time.

There is nothing progressive about you.

True progressives fought for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Modern liberalism has embraced the death cult of abortion. It is no longer a "baby", it is now a "fetus". True progressives fought for the inherent worth every human has by virtue of being a human. Modern liberalism has decided that you are a life when your mother decides you are worth it. They play rhetorical games, calling human life "parasitic" and claiming that they simply want to make sure "every child is wanted". True progressives toiled to make every man a king, his own master, to free him from arbitrary autocracy. Modern liberalism has made a child the victim of the most arbitrary of decisions, with fatal consequences if they decide incorrectly.
The issue of stem-cell research, which we have been fully vindicated on, comes to mind. Conservatives argued that stem-cells should be used that do not require the death of any human being, or potential human being, and we were labeled as mad for it. In the back of my mind I believe that, even if it was subconscious, that the drive and support for fetal stem-cell research by the Democrat party was to create a market for aborted children. If murdered babies could be used to cure disease, then hopefully self-interest would take over and abortion would become sacrosanct to the public at large. Democrats are losing the abortion debate, evidenced by the numbers of women choosing note to have them, by the membership in pro-life organizations. This issue had to be a godsend (if they believed in one) to them, to finally make abortions necessary to our quality of life. To make them a moral necessity. They tried it before with the overpopulation arguments, but human kind is not so forward-looking. A cure for Parkinson's was a more immediate, tenable, justification for continuation of the cult of child murder.

It is much the same principle with radical environmentalism, which has decided that the advances of the last hundred years need to be regressed. We have scholars seriously debating the merits of "extinction-driven reproduction controls". It does not take much intelligence to see that the draw of the global warming hoax is that it justifies misanthropic policies and ideas that twenty years ago would have put you in the asylum for sociopathy, but now is treated as a legitimate belief structure.

There is nothing progressive about you.

True progressives recognized the value of lively, free, open debate. If a man is afraid to speak, he is not free. True progressives ended censorship, detested thought control and propaganda. The citadel of modern liberalism, the university, wrote the book on propaganda. They created speech codes, protected classes of people legally exempt and protected from opposing thoughts, created Orwellian programs to indoctrinate incoming students on how they should "feel", how guilty they are, what they are responsible for as members of one race. True progressives rewrote the definition of treason to make corruption of blood forbidden, modern liberalism has embraced race-guilt and happily disseminates the falsehood to anyone who listens. Universities have, in reality, become centers with fully operating reeducation centers for violators convicted of opposing abortion, speaking out against homicide bombers, supporting Israel, believing in Jesus. True progressives believed the entire country to be a free speech zone, modern Liberalism has created the free speech zone on campus, twenty square feet on the plaza, and any document posted outside of it must be approved by the regulatory commissars to be completely sure it is not "offensive".

If I sound angry, believe me I am. I know what true progressivism is, and I know what these charlatans are today. Every time I hear someone refer to themselves as a "progressive" I want to inform them that they are, in fact, regressive statists.

True progressives recognized the worth of every individual, on his merits. Modern liberalism has embraced the soft bigotry of race-based admissions and affirmative action. I don't understand how many of these people, be they black, women, etc. can take this the way they do. You are being told, by the benevolent white elites, that you can't hope to compete with white kids, therefore you need the state to order colleges to let you in, companies to give you jobs, the state to give you welfare, because we know best. If you don't believe in any of this, you are obviously a knuckle-dragging Conservative, the people who are actually responsible for your plight. They create these protected classes of people, protected from criticism, from opposition, from free and fair competition, and then blame us when the statist model fails and they learn that when you do not require merit from people, they don't develop any.
We're the racists for recognizing that you don't need the state to be great. Real progressives said you were born with it, modern liberalism has decided it is a gift from the omnipresent government.

This will be updated, infrequently, as more issues come to my mind, or as I get angry when some autocrat decides he's actually a progressive.

My choice for the next four years

2008-01-23T10:27:00.000-06:00

Now that Fred Thompson, my candidate, is out of the race for the White House I am left with a decision that is not easy to make. This is one of those deep, soul-searching, meaningful, major decisions that will be with me for 4 years at least, maybe 8. I think you may have an idea what decision I am trying to make.

I am trying to decide whether I want to be a racist or a misogynist.

See, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are the only real democratic candidates running for president. John Edwards is running for the VP spot again, but this time he has a protected class of people opponent in Hispanic New Mexico Governor and former Clintonista Bill Richardson. How can the eternally tolerant and perpetually guilty Democrat Party not put a Hispanic on the ballot? More on this later...

In the lead up to the Democratic primaries the media was abuzz over whether America would be willing to elect a black man. When Obama won Iowa, we heard that America might had finally maybe sorta kinda overcome its latent racism and voted for him. Immediately afterward, often in the same breath, we heard that America was unwilling to elect a woman, probably due to some ingrained misogyny (I love false dichotomies). When Hillary won New Hampshire, we immediately heard from the sympathetic Democrat-controlled media that maybe America's latent racism had magically resurfaced (and our misogyny disappeared), and now we were voting for the white woman over the black man.

Never once, of course, did old media ask whether a Democrat voter was voting for Obama or Hillary on the basis of their announced positions (of which there are none unless you count constantly repeating "change" so often I thought I was out front of a McDonald's downtown where that one panhandler always stays). No, the only possible reasons for voting for Hillary over Obama was because you were too racist to vote for the black guy. Conversely, the only reason to vote for Obama must likewise be because you are too old-fashioned and misogynistic to vote for the white woman.

One of these two people will be the nominee for President, I hope it's Hillary (she's VERY beatable), but Obama has no record, no substance, and no idea that I can't flip open the "Communist Manifesto" and find in under a minute or two (Tax the rich! Increase regulation! End the vicious cycle of wealth and prosperity! It's all so terribly novel).

So, leading back to my original statement, should I be a racist or a misogynist? I am not happy with the current crop on Republican candidates. Only Thompson said what I knew to be true. I could never vote for McCain. Paul is insane. Huckabee is a Democrat who is only a Republican because he believes that anyone with a belief in God has to be. Romney was a lib until he got into office, whereby he decided to be the Conservative in the race. I fear that this may be the first race in my lifetime where I cannot in good conscience cast a vote for President.

When the election comes around, it'll be RINO vs. Workers of the World. Whether the DNC candidate is liberal messiah Obama or heir-apparent Clinton is not too important to me. What is important (okay, not important, humorous) is what the media will be calling half of America when it comes around. No matter what the result, there will be near-constant talking-head pontificating. It will go something like this:

Alphabet-soup network interchangeable host: "Now that Obama/Hillary is the Democratic nominee, it leads us to a very interesting question."

Talking head 1: "That it does Mitch (Mitch is a good name for a host), is America ready for a black/woman president?"

Talking head 2: "This is important, because Obama/Hillary is really trying to play up in middle-America, where many believe that latent racism/misogyny will be a stumbling block."

Talking head 1: "Indeed, as we know the Democrats fear that Republicans will pull out dirty tricks on Obama/Hillary to pander to their base, which is suspected of being very receptive to such racist/old-fashioned rhetoric."

Talking head 2: "And many feel that if you go to the polls and vote against Obama/Hillary, especially after the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, you are either mentally ill or the DNC is right, and America is just to flawed to elect a black man/woman like Obama/Hillary."

Alphabet-soup network interchangeable host: "Are you saying that anyone who votes against Obama/Hillary is somehow a racist/misogynist?"

Talking head 1: "I think at this point the evidence points inescapably to that conclusion."

Talking Head 2: [nods in agreement]

I sincerely hope that Hillary gets the nomination and asks Richardson to be her VP nominee. That way when I don't vote for them, I can be a misogynist AND a racist at the same time!

Tax the Children!

2007-12-10T11:48:00.001-06:00

A Doctor in Australia has advocated that the government impose a carbon tax on families to offset the toll on the planet that life (human, that is) takes on innocent mother Earth. He advocates sterilization procedures to bypass the tax, and mandatory condom use otherwise.

This is officially the most outrageous thing in the history of mankind.

Ever.

If there is one constant in the universe, it is that leftists the world over are leftists first. Their answer to everything is taxation and then government control. One of the reasons the whole global warming hoax is being perpetrated is that it justifies everything, every social program, every new tax, every new form of government control of individual rights and responsibilities. While Germany and Japan are scrambling to find new ways to increase their plummeting fertility rates, the advanced world is trying to find ways to wipe itself out. It would be ridiculous if it didn't garner such widespread support.

Democrats constantly accuse of us being the "party of the rich" despite the fact they have more millionaires and are more likely to have inherited their wealth than earned it, so I think we should call them the "left-wing fear-mongering party of taxing the poor, the children, and anything else that moves".

As a refresher course, here is a list of everything that causes or aggravates global warming:

Childbirth
The Elderly
Private health care
Private property
The US
Republicans
Private enterprise
Deforestation
Small arms ownership
Wealth
Capitalism
Pollution
Electricity
SUV's (except when celebrities and Democrats drive them)
Trucks
Shipping
Sports teams
Cows
Pigs
Chickens
Armadillos
Cheese graters
Computers
Blogs
Breathing
Asphalt
Astroturf
Blinds
Hunting
Wax candles
Catholics
Protestants
Jews
Mormons
Eastern Orthodox Christianity
Musli....wait, they can't be responsible for anything
Immigration
Emigration
Building a wall across the border
Pamphlets (except when they warn about global warming)
Artillery
The US Military
Airplanes
Hammers
Screwdrivers
Curtains
Door knockers
Hotel room keys
Class rings
Cell phones
Book publishing
Ink cartridges
Bankruptcy
TVs
Radios
Clapping
Lightbulbs
Israel
George W. Bush
Barbers
Thinking
Cracking your knuckles
Brushing teeth
Backflips
The Charleston
Moonwalking
Dick Cheney
Mass Transit
Walking
Bicycling
Cars
Happiness
Sadness
Anger
Depression
Surgery
Exercise
Running around in circles
Running up stairs two-by-two throwing open the door and shouting "HAHA! Caught you Margaret!"
Et cetera

Anyone who has followed the global warming mass hysteria will find how anything and everything causes global warming (as long as humans do it) and anything and everything must be controlled to stop it.

Ridiculous

Phase 7 rears its ugly head

2007-11-17T16:01:00.000-06:00

Anyone who reads this blog regularly will remember my post entitled "Please excuse me from Socialized Medicine" in which I cataloged the phases Socialized Medicine goes through as it slowly collapses in on its own inefficiency eventually destroying itself (and the people unfortunate enough to live under such a system). You can read the original post HERE.

Go back and read Phase 7 of my post, about how the government starts requiring people to live their lives a certain way because by controlling the medical system it controls you, and then read this article HERE.

President Bush, idiot genius on YouTube

2007-11-05T03:48:00.000-06:00

It always amazes me the doublethink people are capable of when discussing President Bush. He is either a brain-dead moron who can't even tie his own shoes -OR- a brilliant manipulator on a global scale.

Here is my reason for this little entry. Earlier I was checking out the Onion's "Inventory" archives, where they post "Top" whatever lists of "Depressing Summer Songs" or "truly original movie soundtracks" or whatever. I am a big fan of lists, don't really know why, but I like seeing how other people organize information and present it, though not in the boring accountant way but more in the this is an interesting way to look at the best movies of all time type of way. Anyway, I came across an article about "musicals you can really sing along to". I found The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas amongst them. For the uninitiated, Whorehouse is a truly awesome musical about a whorehouse (in Texas!) which mostly minds its own business, because the town and the sheriff are in cahoots with the brothel. Well, a dogooder finds out about the "chicken ranch" and starts a national media craze about it mostly to draw attention to himself and show how deeply troubled he is by the whole situation. (The song, "Texas, has a whorehouse in it! [Lord have mercy on my soul!]" reveals the whole situation...find it on YouTube, better yet, just go rent the movie).

The best song and dance in the musical though is hands down "the Sidestep" played by a wonderfully footloose and ornery Charles Durning as a fast-talking and quick moving Governor who excels at never, ever answering a question directly. (Not to mention his awesome ability to put his hat on sideways, then quickly turn into it so the hat falls on his head when he runs off). This song, which you can watch HERE, is a classic.

On the comments page I discovered that virtually everyone was referencing this song and the Governor's performance to President Bush. "This was written for him" one commenter said, "though Bush ain't as smart as him". Another poster compiled a collection of pictures of President Bush and played the song on top of it while talking about the "Military-Industrial Complex" and all the billionaires making cash off the dead in Haliburton's war for oil. (Yawn)

For the love of God people, it's just an old song from an old play about an old governor who, like most all politicians, avoids making a statement about a controversial issue until he has talked it over with his advisers and his pollsters.

That got me thinking on a deeper level, though. Some posters were talking about how they modeled the governor in Whorehouse after the President when they did local performances of the play. Others talked about how this was Bush uttering platitudes but never answering questions. The thing they're missing, though, is that the Governor is portrayed as a very intelligent and quick-witted guy in the play and the movie. He out-thinks, out-smarts, and out-dances every reporter he comes into contact with.

That leads me to believe that most of the people who saw the clip have never seen the movie and immediately jumped on the "Bush is stupid" bandwagon to feel all warm and fuzzy with the other idiot posters. Others, who have seen the movie, may fail to make the connection between how smart the Governor is in Whorehouse and how stupid they believe President Bush to be, but since it allows them to call Bush stupid they ignore it.

Enter doublethink.

He is portrayed two ways by his detractors:
1. An imbecilic moron who can't tie his own shoes, form a cogent sentence, pronounce "nuclear", run a tight ship, or have an original thought.
2. An evil genius who outsmarted the Europeans, tricked the all-powerful and all-knowing United Nations, subverted a genius like Tony Blair, and invaded Iraq (which was sovereign, in case you forgot) to get the precious oil for Haliburton; in the process creating a massive, overarching conspiracy that would have required the duplicity of thousands of government bureaucrats, officials, and general people who are supposed to be so much smarter than him.

This is doublethink, plain and simple. If Bush is an idiot, not just an idiot, a low-IQ dimwit with the mental capacity of a dried turnip, how could he have concocted a scheme to throw the entire world into chaos to get precious oil (which we import more of from Canada than we ever did from Iraq, and whose profits are going to, SURPRISE, rebuild Iraq)? "Well", they say, "it was his advisers. Brilliant neo-cons like Rumsfeld and Cheney! Puppetmasters!"
If Bush was under their control, then, how did he manage to not let the secret details of his secret machinations slip out during his speeches to Americans and the world? If Bush is as thoroughly stupid as his detractors claim him to be, there is no way he could have not failed to give up the ghost during the lead up to the war.

So Bush is entirely stupid, yet a brilliant mastermind. He can't tie his own shoes, but he can manipulate the world into a war for oil. He can't eat a pretzel, but he can trick the UN. He can't say "nuclear" but he can secretly arrange the "murder" of innocents around the world to fulfill his evil ambitions. He even brought down the twin towers, ya'know.

People seem to have no problem accepting these two mutually exclusive ideologies at the same time, these pleasant falsehoods that allow them to justify being routinely, and often painfully, bested by a man they abhor so completely. Every time they think they have him, he has something new waiting on them. "Oh well," they say "he's so stupid he won't be able to manage the war anyway" right after he "started it by engineering the attacks on 9/11".

Another aspect that gets on my last nerve and then tap-dances across it is the self-congratulatory way in which they mock the President. Here is a re-enactment:

Lib 1: "I called Bush evil"
Group: [Ooh's and Aaah's]
Lib 2: "Well, I called him Bushitler"
Lib 1: "Wow! Because he is both Bush AND Hitler!"
Group: "Whoa, new and exciting!"
Lib 3: "I am going to post a video of President Bush on YouTube using unflattering pictures of him, then I am going to spell out 'Nu Q Lur'."
Lib 2: "Mocking his way of pronouncing nuclear!"
Lib 1: "That's a brilliant idea!"
Lib 2: "Wait, according to the dictionary, 'nuke-you-lur' is an older pronunciation of 'nuclear' and completely acceptable..."
Libs 1+2: [silence]
Lib 3: "But Bush is so stupid, he would probably mispronounce it no matter how it was spelled."
Lib 1: "That's true!"
Lib 2: "Why don't I go onto YouTube, find something wholly unrelated to Bush, like a car commercial or something, and add a comment about how it is all Bush's fault that the car was taken off the market because he cares more about enriching his gang of criminal cronies than he does about healthcare for the workers who made it!"
Lib 3: "Because he does only care about the rich!"

If you think this is a stretch...you're wrong. Cruise around YouTube for five minutes and you will find postings everywhere, on every conceivable topic, about how stupid Bush is, about how he caused X or hates Y. And you will find it in a painfully self-congratulatory manner. The entrance exam in "Bush is stupid" YouTube Mensa apparently requires you only to find a video and link it to Bush, then you're bloody brilliant.

In my student newspaper here at Pitt I saw a column with two columnists expressing their opinions about current events. One article they covered was President Bush visiting the wildfire sites in California. One of them opined that, basically, Bush was trying to show he was not a complete incompetent by visiting the site of the fires, trying to make up for Katrina, which he horribly bungled. The other "noticed" that Bush chose to visit an area where most of the homes destroyed where owned by white people. This proved Bush hates black people. The logical tap-dance necessary to share these two ideas is astounding. On one hand, if President Bush had not shown up it would have been "Bush doesn't care, is incompetent, stays away not to look like an idiot" so when he shows up it is "Bush hates black people".

Doublethink, (noun): Thought marked by the acceptance of gross contradictions and falsehoods, especially when used as a technique of self-indoctrination (George Orwell, 1984)

Candidate Caricatures

2007-10-25T23:01:00.000-05:00

Around election time the media begins to solidify caricatures around the major candidates. Normally these caricatures look something like this:

The Democratic [sic] Candidate: Brilliant, Charismatic, too brilliant to be believed, populist, foreign-policy genius, mender, accountant, etc. (Interestingly enough, this is the same terminology used to describe Kim Jong-Il)

The Republican Candidate: Knuckle-dragging ancient white octogenarian Christian fundamentalist who hates children, despises his parents, and is so stupid he can't tie his own shoes with a guidebook and a civil-service assistant.

Note that these are over generalizations, of course, but they do fit the pattern. Whomever the Democratic candidate is (Hillary) the media will go out of its way to show us how unbelievably brilliant he (she) is. We will hear questions like "Is Clinton too smart to be President?" or "Given Hillary's amazing domestic record, will she not appeal to middle America?" and "Can middle America relate to a successful, intelligent female president?" [You don't have to try too hard to see what assumptions about us Red State yokels are inherent in these questions].

I have noticed the caricatures are beginning to congeal. I noticed this because all the newspaper editorials and media pundits are beginning to all say the exact same thing about the respective candidates. This means they all got the DNC memo, watched the Saturday Night Live impressions, and generally met at Hollywood/New York City coffee shops to discuss the plight of the working class over their $12 mochachinos.

Without further ado, here are the caricatures for the top candidates:
Rudy Giuliani: "Liberal" Republican, obsessed with 9/11, anti-union, mediocre, cruel.
Media's Favorite Story: Daughter supports Obama

Fred Thompson: Old, white, and tired. As a Conservative former Hollywood'r, media loves to ask if Conservatives are hypocritical for supporting him, or if the presence of a grand total of two Hollywood Republicans (he and Reagan) somehow disproves Neo-lib Hollywood elitism.
Media's Favorite Story: His "Trophy" wife

Mitt Romney: Religious zealot with great hair. Charismatic, but only in a "religious zealot" kind of way. Good looking, but in a "religious zealot" kind of way. He's a Mormon, which means religious zealots in the GOP can't support him, because their Jesus is better than his Jesus.
Media's Favorite Story: His lack of a second, or third, wife.

John McCain: the "good" Republican (because he's not). Has very hawkish foreign policy has driven the fawning media away from him since the campaign, gone is the love when he was a pro-child murde...I man, pro-choice, anti-Bush, anti-business, pro-Union Leftist in a nice suit.
Media's Favorite Story: When did sell out?

Barack Obama: Charismatic, charming, "Magic Negro", the new JFK, brilliant, uncorrupted.
Media's Favorite Story: He doesn't wear an American flag pin! (That means he's a centrist)

Hillary Clinton: So smart she can...well, smart. Smartest woman in America. Umm, healthcare?
Media's Favorite Story: She's gonna use Bill!

Al Gore: Nobel-prize winner. Genius. Realizes that Global-warming is a more dangerous issue than terrorism. (Number of terrorist attacks in the US during Bush's term: 1, number during Clinton/Gore's: 4. Number of times the environment has distinguished all life on Earth: 0.)

These caricatures are about to solidify. Once they do, they will follow the candidates around for the rest of their natural political lives.

What I am up to

2007-10-20T00:40:00.000-05:00

I thought I would deviate from my normal pattern and write about what is going on in my life right now.

I have two papers due at the end of this term. One deals with Japanese Politics and the other is a research-intensive paper that I am writing comparing Japan and Germany's normalization of military forces following their defeat in World War II, and their subsequent return as power players on the world stage. Not exactly the most fun I have had, but it keeps me busy (oh how does it keep my busy).

On a more exciting note I have decided to pursue the Doctorate (Ph.D.) in Political Science. The Master's at Pitt is considered terminal, meaning it is not meant to segue into a doctoral program upon completion. As I have taken classes at Pitt in my Master's program I have come to the conclusion that it is not exactly what I wanted. It is a great program with some great people, but the final paper for receipt of the Master's is only thirty pages in length. That to me seems like stuff I used to write back as an undergrad. I came to the conclusion that if I wanted truly academically rigorous coursework leading toward my being able to pursue independent research to publish original ideas in my field, then I had to go for the doctorate.

My program of choice, actually my dream program, is the Ph.D. in Government/dual Master's in Security Studies at Georgetown University (yes THAT Georgetown, the one in DC). There is a professor there by the name of Dr. Victor Cha, he (literally) wrote the book on North Korea. He is currently the senior advisor to the President on North Korea in particular and East Asian affairs in general.

Not much academic has been done on North Korea since it is an isolated rogue regime that is hard to get into and do the appropriate research on. I find the regime absolutely fascinating, especially given its nature as a closed state, its complete domination of the press and public discourse, its militant propaganda, Stalinist tactics, and precarious position as the last truly dystopian state in the world. I read everything I could find on the country, and given my love of dystopian literature (e.g., 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, etc) it seemed like this was a place Orwell could have been talking about when he wrote his masterful opus.

Getting back to Dr. Cha, since he is one of the few professors who has written about, and been, to North Korea, getting to study under him would be a major academic and professional coup for me. Getting to do research with him would be even more amazing. As you can imagine given his credentials, he is a hard man to get in contact with. After emailing him several times with no response, I finally took the direct route and called his office at Georgetown. After talking with the admissions director she took down my information and sent it on a more personal level to the good doctor. He emailed me back, but it was the what I think to be "thanks for contacting me, good luck, hope you make it, see ya" response. There was nothing too specific in there. I am debating emailing him again with my C.V. attached to see what he thinks, the worst he can do is delete it.

[On a humorous side note, after talking to the admissions director she sent me an email BCC'd of what she had sent to Dr. Cha. I asked her to mention that I was a "Boren Scholar" since the NSEP Boren Scholarship is extremely prestigious and has thus far opened a great many doors to me since I received it. She acted like it was a weird request to make and said she would do it. When I got the BCC'd email she had wrote that "Mr. Holmes is a born scholar!". I quickly emailed her explaining the error and she apologized, way too much I think, for the error and corrected it in an email to Dr. Cha. I emailed her afterwards trying to apologize for coming off rude on my part. Her apology was almost Japanese in its depth.]

I am actually applying for a transfer from the MA program to the Ph.D. program at Georgetown. I figure that if my Master's work doesn't transfer (it doesn't) and the Ph.D. has a built-in Master's along the route then this MA is kind of superfluous. Oh, and for those of you who are not aware, you actually do not have to have a Master's to get a Doctorate. I get that question all the time.

I have no idea how this will go, and in a bad move on my part I do not have much in the way of backup institutions. I figure that Dr. Cha is THE man in my field and if I fail to be accepted to Georgetown then where else would I go? I know I have excellent credentials, but Georgetown is one of the new Ivy's. If they do not accept me, then my chances of getting into a poison Ivy like Stanford or Harvard are equally as dim. All I can do is make a great application and hope my credentials impress the committee and that my research interests gain the notice of Dr. Cha. I should really look for backup institutions, but applying for Fillet Mignon and having to settle for Chef Boyardee macaroni seems like a poor trade-off to me.

Thoughts?

Saw it Coming

2007-10-12T10:41:00.000-05:00

Called it.

So Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, saw that coming. To me it is still frightening that such blatantly autocratic motives are what is considered "peaceful" nowadays. The award has become so politicized that it is expected that the panel will continue to award peace prizes to celebrities who follows the autocrat line. I expect once Hugo Chavez consolidates his dictatorship, he will win one as well.

Whatever happened to winning an award like the Peace Prize because you believed in small government, individual liberty, free markets, and self-reliance? What many of the recipients stand for is the polar opposite of these beliefs; an overarching, omniscient, omnipotent, collectivist, centrally planned monstrosity.

To me, the best part is still that Gore flew to Oslo to receive his Nobel Prize in a private, gas-guzzling jet. Way to set an example.

And the Nobel Peace Prize goes to...

2007-10-11T12:19:00.001-05:00

Watch for Al Gore to win the Nobel Peace Prize this Friday for his work to bring converts into the First Church of the Warming Globe. He will win despite the fact that half of all scientists think "global warming" is not man made, or not even happening; that more data show that CO2 emissions increase as the temperature rises, and not his assertion that CO2 fuels the increase; that ten years ago we were all being warned that we would be in a new ice age caused by "global cooling"; that he has repeatedly refused attempts to debate climate change, his most important issue, by notable opposition scientists on the grounds that he is too important to waste time actually having to prove he's right; and that his remedies for "global warming" can be pretty much defined as absolute control over every aspect of your life by the government to combat it (IGPC recommendations: mandatory abortions, removing the rights to own self-defense weapons, population controls, socializing business and industry, capping incomes, outlawing private transportation, taxing the wealthiest nations, and not allowing dissenting viewpoints).

Despite all this, he will win because "his heart was in the right place". To me, subjugation to absolute governmental authority isn't "the right place" but who I am I to argue with Norwegians?

He will be in some illustrious company: mass murderer and terrorist Yasser Arafat and chronic failure Jimmy Carter.

Illustrious company indeed.

Cartharsis of Stupidity III: Kanji and Sweater meat!

2007-10-10T22:15:00.000-05:00

I would like to recount an incident I had on the bus this morning, and relate a few universal truths.
Rule 1: Do not get a Kanji tattoo in either Japanese or Chinese if neither you, nor the tattoo artist, speaks the language. If you don't read Japanese or Chinese, odds are your drop-out tattooist doesn't either. I mean, he decided to be an artist, but not a real, make no money and get famous after he dies type of artist, but an artist who makes money during his own lifetime. There is a term for an artist like this, "sellout".

Most tattoo artist keep a book of Kanji in their shops for you to choose from. Often, the translations are incorrect, misleading, or downright crazy. They might say a character means "live" but the meaning may be as different between the English "live" (as in, "I live with my parents like my tattoo artist") and the English "live" (as in, "Is that a live bacteria on the tattoo needle?"). More often than not a linguist did not play an active role in putting this book together. Odds are, the closest a linguist got to the book was demanding that he actually get paid to verify the information (little known fact, tattoo artists don't believe you should get paid for your years and years of Japanese study to verify Kanji tattoos, you should do this for free.) [This might be why all tattoo artists I know will soon be tattooing "My tattoo artist likes dudes" if they consulted me for Japanese advice]

Case in point, don't get a tattoo you think means "Sweet" which actually translates as "sugar substitute". Don't get a tattoo you think means "angel" which translates more accurately as "Heavenly messenger of doom". I saw on a woman on the bus who thought her Kanji string translated as "Live, love, progress" but more accurately translated as "I live in a moving brothel".
Japanese can be tricky my friends.

Second, for all the girls out there:
I am single

No, I am, but I am kidding.

Why do women wear very, VERY short shorts and sweaters on cold days? Is there some kind of preservative effect in this? Do your legs look better when kept at Frigidaire temperatures? Is maintaining feeling in your legs not important to getting around? Just asking.

I can't let this go.

Why, girls, why?! You are shouting for all to hear "my legs are expendable, as long as my torso stays toasty." If you think it helps your figure, you know, the "important parts" kept warm, remember some guys like thighs, others breasts. Me? I am a wing guy myself.

Finger-lickin' good.

Text RIPOFF to 554554 on your Verizon Wireless Phone

2007-09-29T23:58:00.001-05:00

Do you ever see those commercials late at night for cell phone services that will send you jokes, naked pictures of "celebrities", or dancing anthropomorphic frogs singing inappropriate songs? I just wonder who actually uses these things? I mean really!
I saw one that was $0.99 a day for a joke text messaged to your cell every day. That is potentially about $30 a month, added on to your monthly phone bill (say $30 a month) that is a monthly liability of roughly $60 a month for one joke sent to your phone!

If you can afford to waste $30 a month on a once-a-day joke, I figure you can afford DSL internet service from Verizon for $29.99 and see all the jokes you want, plus all the naked pictures of "celebrities", and dancing anthropomorphic singing frogs for one reasonable monthly fee. Someone has to be buying these ripoff services because extremely annoying cartoon commercials don't make themselves.

Buildings and Roads

2007-09-25T17:40:00.000-05:00

This past weekend I went back to Amarillo for Bob and Sam's wedding and realized, for the first time in my life, that I could not be truly happy anywhere else. For me, this was a very odd epiphany, for I never live in anyplace long enough to form an attachment there. I was also, for the first time I can recall, sad to get back on the plane bound for Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is not my home, Amarillo is my home.

It started when I got on my connecting flight from Houston to Amarillo and this older gentlemen got on the plane. He was an older guy, obviously Texan, wearing a worn cowboy hat and intent on having a good time. The exchange between he and the flight attendant as he stepped on board went like this:
Old Man: "S'cuse me ma'am, can I get a seat on this plane?"
Stewardess: "I guess you can, if you have a ticket."
Old Man: "Well, I got one."
Stewardess: "Behave and I'll let you on."
Old Man: "Wait a minute, I can either enjoy my flight or behave myself. Which is it gonna be?"
Stewardess: "We want you to enjoy yourself."
Old Man: "Alright, I'll go take my seat and have a helluva time then."

The stewardess laughed and I was laughing, too. I hadn't heard people interact that way in literally years, not since leaving and returning from Japan. People up here in Pittsburgh don't interact that way. People on the streets never look at each other, never smile at each other, and never hold open doors for ladies. This is one of my most consistent issues, actually. In Texas if you hold open a door for a lady 99% of the time you will get a thank you and a smile, which makes it all worth it. Up here, whenever I do that I have a maybe 10% chance of getting a "thank you", and an even greater chance of getting an odd look. I know these women are supposedly "liberated" but for the life of me I can't understand why they won't let me hold open a door. It is part of my DNA, and I am not going to change it for anyone (plus it is the right thing to do).

After the elder gentleman made his way to his seat I said to myself, "God I miss Texas". That is the first time I said that to myself and really meant it, not as a "I would like to walk to a class without getting assaulted by hippies with protest signs trying to get me to join the protest against the bourgeoisie imperialists God I miss Texas" kind of way.

As far as the wedding goes. I have never had more fun in my life. My best friend needs to get married more often. All of my friends need to get hitched so we can have that kind of LAN Party and experience all the time.

What really got me emotional was riding out to Landon's house to see the shop and congratulate Megan and Landon on their engagement, On the way out a storm was rolling in over the plains and as the sky darkened all I could see was our own headlights, the road, and the near constant strikes of lightning on either side of us. I have always been enamored by weather, especially a good storm, and can remember sitting on our balcony on the sixth floor of the Imperial Towers apartment complex in Titusville, Florida, watching the storms roll in over the Atlantic and striking the control and Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA. In a city such as this, we get rain but no thunder. Light, but no lightning. I forgot how much I missed that.

I have come to the conclusion that as soon as I am done here I am going to find a way to come home, and stay there. I will still do what I love, traveling abroad, living abroad, studying politics and history however I can, but when I am done I want to be able to come back home to Amarillo and stay a while. Sometimes it seems better to not go "home" for a few days and not have to leave again than to take a short trip.

I never thought I would reach this point, honestly. I never thought I would think of places this way. Places are not what matter, it is people that matter. After the wedding I stayed at Dave and Penny's house for a night, in obligation to their generous offer of hospitality. The next night, since Jon was taking me to the airport, I stayed at Conner. I was struck by something, this was the first time I have ever entered Conner that no one knew who I was besides the people that brought me in (Jon and Jere). That was sad for me because Conner means so much to me, not only because it is the place I have lived longer than any other place in my entire life, but also because of the relationships I am so fortunate to have formed there. Conner is, despite my wishing for the contrary, just a building. Building's don't matter. What does matter is the people inside them. My memories of Conner would not be so nearly wonderful if they were not influenced by the souls I encountered therein, the relationships I saw inside.

For a brief while after the wedding ceremony, Jon, Jere, Megan, Landon, Dustin, Angela, Anson, Penny, Dave and I sat in Bob's living room and it felt great again. It felt like Conner again. It felt like home again.

Please excuse me from Socialized Medicine

2007-09-17T03:20:00.000-05:00

One of the major campaign themes this year, and indeed every year, is health care. Namely, politicians wonder what they can do to screw it up. The all-powerful federal bureaucracy is going to find a way to make health care free! It will be absolutely free! The magic government has found a way, you see, to make the laws of economics, supply and demand as it were, which apply to every single economic endeavor NOT apply to the health care industry. How did they accomplish this wondrous task? Don't ask, or you hate poor people and the elderly.

Let's take a quick poll:
1. How many people enjoy going to the DMV (for those of you in Arizona, the MVD)? Raise your hands, now.
2. How many people find the IRS to be a compassionate and helpful organization? Raise your hands, now.
3. How many people marvel at the efficiency of the post office? Raise your hands, now.

If anyone raised their hand when answering this question, they most likely work for the above organizations. In that case, you don't count and I will summarily disregard your thoughts (much like the IRS does to me).

Nationalized health care will accomplish three things. It will create a giant, and I mean GIANT, unaccountable federal bureaucracy that combines the efficiency of the Post Office with the compassion of the IRS and the service quality of the DMV.

Why is this the case? Because all three organizations are government agencies with no competition. It is a fundamental law (that even neo-libs can't argue against, try as they feebly might) that competition drives prices down when barriers are reduced. You can't get certified to drive by anyone else but the state DMV where you reside. You can't pay your federal taxes to anyone else but the IRS. You can't mail a certified letter through anyone but the US Postal Service. Because of these indisputable facts there is no incentive whatsoever for any of these agencies to increase productivity, lower prices, streamline processes, or improve customer service. Don't want to wait 3 hours in line at the DMV for a new license? Tough, don't get one then. Don't like dealing with a group of thinly disguised misanthropes who covet every last dime you earned? Tough, the IRS is it, pal. There is no incentive to deal with you like a human being because you can't go anywhere else, it becomes a government controlled monopoly.

How does this relate to Hillarycare? Very simple. The Demogogue campaign is heavily centered on forcing you to enroll in a health care plan. From a distance, this looks like it means you have a private plan or two and a government plan to choose from. It looks like, superficially, a choice plan for every American. Hillary even is calling hers "the Health Choices Plan." Unfortunately, voting for her, or Obama, or Kucinich, is where your choice in the matter would end, ultimately.

I will break this down in phases.

Phase 1: Once the government began insuring every citizen who didn't have insurance, or in the case of Hillary's or Edward's plans, forcing Insurance Companies to insure people regardless of their suitability for a particular plan, it would force these companies to begin hemorrhaging money. When faced with the prospect of going out of business entirely or raising prices, most companies will raise their prices. Americans, lured in by the siren song of "free" health care from the government, will be unwilling or unable to pay these premiums and will switch to the government plan. In ten years or less private insurance would cease to exist for 90% of the population.

Phase 2: The remaining 10%? They would eventually be forced into government controlled health care when the radical egalitarian zealots decided, like they did in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, etc, that no one should have private insurance because health care should not be a "business". The very market forces that work to keep business in business would be swallowed by the temporarily (I cannot stress this enough) cheaper and more efficient government-run program.

Phase 3: Once government has acquired the insurance companies that have gone bankrupt because of its own policies and absorbed them into their infrastructure there will be a temporary period of efficiency because the government is realigning the entire process and Americans are still getting used to the whole change. Congress will decide that since private insurance no longer exists in any real sense, it will make health care a "right" and institute "free" health care.

Phase 4: Americans, realizing that they can go to the doctor now without spending a dime, will begin going for even the most basic problems. The government's desire (see all main Democrat talking points on health care) for "preventive care" will send more and more people to the doctor than actually need to go. John Edwards actually says he would force people into the doctor's office for preventive treatment.

Phase 5: At this point the absolute law of supply and demand will be thrown on its ear and the market will shudder, horribly. The originally semi-low sum of $100-500 Billion the government originally allocated towards health care will no longer be enough. There are no longer private firms in the health insurance business to absorb (more efficiently, I might add) the costs of insuring citizens (and in many of the top-tier Demogogue candidates, illegals) the price of health care will skyrocket.
Nationalized health care pretends the laws of supply and demand don't exist, basically. When a service is made "free" demand will skyrocket but supply will remain the same. You cannot increase the amount of availability for health care except by building new hospitals and hiring more doctors or nurses. In order to meet the astronomically high demand for "free" health care the government will begin offering huge grants to lure people into the field attracting, in many cases, people who shouldn't be in the field but are allowed to pursue it because the government needs these people, and fast.

Phase 6: The prices for nationalized health care have reached such a point that the government begins reneging on the promises it made when it introduced the plan because it simply cannot afford to keep funding at earlier levels. It can raise taxes to 70 and 80% of income (like in Canada) but still be bankrupt by midway through the year. People will begin to notice, and complain, that they are paying exorbitantly high taxes for a service most of them hardly use. Additionally, the high demand but steady supply of health care services will force the government to introduce a rationing system for the care. A giant, unfeeling, number-crunching bureaucracy will begin deciding how doctors can treat, whom they can treat, how long they can treat, and when they must let a patient go. If a doctor in the service of the state decides that you are a goner, you can't go seek a second opinion because the doctor works for the only employer of his services in the country. His note will be your patient's death certificate. You have simply become too expensive to keep alive. (Don't believe me? Look here). When the government controls your life, and is directly bearing the burden for the costs of your life, it decides when that cost becomes too high for it to bear.

Phase 7: In an effort to control costs further, the government will introduce mandatory lifestyle orders on everyone. Failing to abide by these laws will mean termination of your enrollment in the socialized system. Laws controlling how much you can eat, how often you can drive, whom you can marry, how many children you can have, which "non-essential" treatments (like glasses) are allowed per life, etc. Since everything is conceivably related to your health and welfare, the government therefore has the authority to mandate how you live.

Phase 8: Sort of as a side note, phase 8 is the silent but most unfortunate aspect of the whole scheme. As the government consolidates all health care related matters into itself to control costs it naturally absorbs the pharmaceutical industry. Those drug companies that do not allow themselves to be annexed will find themselves unable to sell their products because the government, as the sole provider of medical care, refuses to pay the price they will accept. (I don't have time to go into this one again, see my earlier posts). Basically, if you believe that drug companies charge high prices to kill old people you are too stupid to be reading this and I would rather you go somewhere else, like MoveOn.org. The pharmaceutical industry charges the prices it does because it needs to recoup the costs of medical trials lasting ten years or more, research and development, grants to universities for their medical trials, etc. When the drug companies can no longer make enough money to stay afloat they will follow the same descent as the hospitals themselves. To make a long story short, say goodbye to medical innovation.

Phase 9: We have now reached the point where the government controls what you eat and where you go, has you on a waiting list a mile long for a basic procedure, can decide to euthanize you if it deems it cost effective, taxes you into submission, mandates what drugs you take and when, and last but not least will force you into these situations for "your own good".
In perhaps my absolute favorite vindication the Supreme Court of Canada, in a 2005 ruling, said that Canada's vaunted system, the one which Americans should try to emulate as we are so often told, was so inefficient, poorly managed, deadly (yes, deadly), and unequal that the government had to either 1) permit the development of a private system (!!!) or 2) rebuild the entire system. It was only one vote short of ruling the whole system so badly organized and operated that it was a violation of human rights! I LOVE this.

Michael Moore can go straight to hell.

Please excuse me from this whole plan. I would rather pay for my own service than subjugate everyone in America to such a draconian, inefficient, death-cult system as has sprung up in the rest of the so-called civilized world.

When did we, as a people, reach the point in our entitlement mindset that we deserve everything handed to us? When did we reach the point where we no longer believed that if we overeat, or smoke our whole lives, or take illegal drugs, we should have the rest of society foot the bill for our medical care? That is not compassion, that is an attempt to normalize bad behavior, and I want no part of it.

First Semester as a Grad Student

2007-08-23T18:26:00.000-05:00

My first graduate schedule is ready, I am pretty sure. I have one outstanding request left from a professor for permission to enter his Security and Intelligence Studies Course. The professor is renowned around here for being two things:
1) Old
2) Freaking awesome
So he is kind of like an old Brasington.

If all goes according to plan, my graduate schedule will look like this for Fall 2007:

Politics and Government of Japan
Sources and Methods in East Asian Research
Security and Intelligence Studies
Japanese IV

My credit requirements for the IDMA (Interdisciplinary Master of Arts) is an astoundingly short 27 hours (excluding language credits) with a 6 hour thesis (so it is really 21 hours). [See? I can do math]

Here are the guidelines, if anyone is interested...
I have to have 1 3-credit course on China since I am a Japanese specialist (at least officially as a Grad student). Most people who know me know that I am more interested in pan-Asian security and politics than I am just one nation.
Additionally, 6 credits have to be in pre-modern or modern history of East Asia (preferably focusing on the country I am "specializing" in).

Now, even though 27 hours is really quite short, I am still planning to transfer next year into the Doctoral Program in Public and International Affairs which is 71 hours (6 of which are for the dissertation, and 30 of which must be completed in residence). So I could do 30 hours at Pitt, and do the other 41 overseas while writing the dissertation. You never know how things will work out.

We'll have to see.

Things to do before I [insert death euphemism here]

2007-07-29T00:55:00.000-05:00

So no one can claim I reneged on a promise, here is my list of things to do before I die. This will actually be a good exercise for me, because though I love my spontaneous travels I also love having goals and guidelines. I guess I am a mass of contradictions, like everyone else. I haven't set a pre-set limit, so I guess I will write until I reach a good stopping point. I also realize that not everything listed is exactly reasonable, so any goal with a [U] at the end means I realize it is not exactly the most realistic thing.

Here goes:

Be a Presidential Elector
Serve as a US Ambassador [U]
Be elected to an office
Adopt a child
Write a novel
Learn to play the violin (my absolute favorite)
Study at a culinary institute
Pick up fencing again
Make enough money to invest in a cure for my sister's blindness
Frame money from every country I visit (so far, so good)
Never, ever lost contact with the people from Conner (they know which ones...)
Help Jere cure his benign conceit
Learn to read the characters of every major world language [U]
See "The Phantom of the Opera" on Broadway
Build my own house
Become functionally fluent in Japanese and one other language
Pick up acting again
Touch all 50 states
Visit all 7 continents
Visit the following specific places:

The Roman Forum (specifically the Senate)
The Imperial War Museum (London)
Angkor Wat (Cambodia)
The Forbidden City (Beijing)
The Great Pyramid at Giza
The Wailing Wall (Jerusalem)
Scotland (particularly Edinburgh)
The Demilitarized Zone from the North Korean side
The Kremlin (Russia)
The Bundestag (Germany)
Westminster Palace (Britain)
The Cemetery of the Allies (Normandy)
Ireland (all of it, basically)
The Vatican
Athens

Note this list may change (particularly with additions) as time passes.

A Carthasis of Stupidity 2: Burger-masters

2007-07-14T15:30:00.000-05:00

It caught my attention recently when Wendy's Corp. announced their new sandwich, the "Baconator". The sandwich has two beef patties, two pieces of cheese, and six, count them six, strips of bacon. This mammoth burger weighs in at 840 Calories, 460 of which come from fat.

Now it is no surprise that Wendy's announced a new, thoroughly unhealthy, burger. The Fast Food giants have to compete, but I wonder about this trend. Note I am in no way demonizing Wendy's, or the other fast food chains. Nor I am waving my finger like the ever-present regulatory commissars telling us what we are allowed to eat, where we can eat it, and why the government should set our meal plan. I am rather just waxing irrelevant about the future of the fast food bigger-is-better more-calories-for-the-dollar burger market.

One of the scariest places in the world to me is Carl's Jr., otherwise known as Hardee's. Their Six dollar burgers are downright frightening. You cannot go in there without being affronted by 2,000 calorie behemoths covered in bacon, five kinds of cheese, three burger patties, and (somehow) extremely bad-for-you bread. Eating there once would be grounds for your insurance company dropping your from the plan. I can even see insurance questionnaires asking "Do you eat at Carl's Jr.? If yes, thank you for your interest in US Health Insurance but..."

Carl's Jr. is probably the worst offender I have come across, but their new style of gigantic sandwiches is obviously appealing to the public. The other burgermeisters are not so innocent either.

I have a feeling that as with Carl's Jr.'s heart-attack with cheese, and Wendy's gluttonous triples, quadruples, and now sextuple bacon burgers, not to mention the incredible McDonald's "this burger is so small so how can it have 1,300 calories?" menus, I wonder what is next.

The trend in the market is obviously bigger burgers, made with lower quality materials to keep prices low, with even more calories packed on to keep them ahead of their competition. I think in the future we will see new, bigger, more ambitious sandwiches that challenge our already puzzled reactions to the existing ones.

It is not long for this world before out current sandwiches reject two slices of cheese, and instead have burgers with two slices of beef and three types of cheese per patty. Not content to let the consumer have a successful bowel movement, we will see triple patty six cheese specials. Americans today also consume far too much bread, we've seen the Atkins Diet, so I think Carl's will up the proverbial culinary ante by introducing a two patty, two cheese burger that forgoes the buns altogether. Instead of a toasted sesame-seed bun (which is becoming anachronistic) we will have the juicy burger held in place by two country-friend steak patties. Think about it? Chicken-friend steak looks like bread, well, it has the same color as bread, it is think like bread, and it perfectly fitted to hold the burger and the toppings in place, so why not have a Carl's double cheese chicken fried steak burger?

It has come to the point now that I cannot even eat at most burger joints anymore because I cannot stomach the idea of eating these culinary monstrosities. Once, on advice from a former Resident Assistant, I tried the Wendy's Triple Stack. I am not ashamed to admit I was defeated and could not finish it, and I was glad of it. I felt like a complete and total glutton for even ordering the thing. Some told me it was no different from a McDonald's double cheese burger, ordering two of those. I guess technically they are correct (the best kind of correct) but incorrect in that the McD's double cheese is far smaller and of lesser quality than the regular Wendy's fare. Having two McD's double cheeseburgers is still probably less food than a single Wendy's double. It could also be my imagination.

So, who's up for a salad?

Still not me.

The Democratic Plan for Iraq

2007-07-13T00:52:00.000-05:00

I have come to realize that there is one simple solution to the ongoing conflict against Islamic terrorism, and I thank the Democrats for bringing it to my attention. I understand now that I was wrong in this, all of this, and that in a seemingly unending conflict in Iraq we cannot fight indefinitely, so we must set a terminal deadline for out commitment there. We must set a date that requires the other parties in the conflict to accept that we simply cannot maintain an open-ended commitment such as we are promising now. Simple put, there must be a timetable for withdrawal.

The only way to do this is to follow the lead of the Democrats on the Hill, who are making courageous stands for what is right. Here is what we must do:

The Democratically controlled House and Senate must pass a law, overriding the President's veto if they must, setting a date for the end of conflict. To do this, the law must set a specific date for when Al Qaeda must cease attacking civilians, lay down its weapons, and declare cessation of hostilities.

This will serve three purposes. One, the overwhelming courage the Democrats are showing can be used to create a law ordering terrorists to stop attacking us. Second, the law will be enforced by the absence of the US military or any credible deterrent force. Third and finally, the law will show once and for all that the US accepts that fighting terrorism is a failed policy, and that the only way to fight terrorism is to not fight terrorism, and thereby show a strength of character that tells our enemies that we will unconditionally and resolutely ask our enemies to no longer fight us. If they refuse this request, we will completely understand.

Sound ludicrous? All I have done is rephrase the Democrats' stance on withdrawing from Iraq in realist terms. They use phrases like "strategic redeployment" and "diplomatic initiatives" to mean the complete and utter US surrender in Iraq. Do they honestly believe, in their cowardice, defeatism, and utter traitorous minds that we can order Iranian and Syrian terrorists to stop fighting? Can they be asked to lay down their arms? Can we just ask them to stop being what they are? Of course not. Anyone who believes otherwise is an utter fool.

By claiming that we will withdraw from Iraq on an artificial timetable they are simply telling our enemies they can begin renewed attacks with no fear of reprisal by a competent and trained fighting force on or after that date.

The worst part about this whole thing, to me, is the Democrats' basking in their failures and mass murder of others. They rejoiced, danced in the streets, celebrated into the night when we withdrew from South Vietnam (which, like Iraq, was a warzone in which we never lost a single battle) leading to the torture and executions of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who were guilty of the crime of not being communist animals. Edward Kennedy, a man whose mere name makes me cringe with disgust, is proud that he was on the forefront of allowing the Vietnamese Communists to murder countless thousands in Vietnam and, following our exit, laying the forefront of the eventual communist entrance into Cambodia. They advocate cowardice, and they are disgusting human beings for doing so.

When the Democrats talk of artificial timetables for withdrawal, or strategic redeployments, of "bringing the troops home" they are actually saying one thing: "we will not rest until we have made Iraq safe for marauding bands of murderous creatures, we have weakened America, and we have hurt this President."

The 4th

2007-07-04T05:20:00.000-05:00

The Fourth of July is undoubtedly my favorite holiday. More than anything else, it reminds me how lucky I am to be an American. I have been a few places here and there, around the world, and I have never been to a country that surpasses my own. I am, of course, biased, but I have every right to be.

I have seen the splendor that is my country, and I have seen the poverty. I have seen freedom, and as the son of a career law enforcement officer, I have seen those who have had that freedom taken away. I have seen those with plenty, and those with nothing.

All in all, I am extremely proud of my country, and its history. My favorite part of the National Anthem is the final verse, never sung and hardly known, but it sums up my feelings on this Fourth better than I ever could.

Oh! thus be it ever,
when freemen shall stand
Between their loved
home and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and
peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that
hath made and
preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we
must, when our cause
it is just,
And this be our
motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled
banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the
free and the home of the brave

I think given the situation in which my country now finds itself, this was the most appropriate thing for me to say. Originally I planned a long, multi-page posting going line by line through this verse and expanding and expounding upon my thoughts on each line. I had even written a few pages of it. In the end I decided that it would be a display of arrogance on my part to think I could make this Fourth more memorable than it already has every right to be.

The song, the Fourth, and the country can speak for themselves.

Technology inhibiting Chilvalry

2007-05-07T02:36:00.000-05:00

I recently realized while walking through the halls of Obirin University that technology has begun to impede chivalry, even in the smallest of ways. Now, the Japanese have no concept of "holding a door open for a lady" because the Japanese concept of politeness is that men go first, in order of seniority, and then the women go in a sort of gaggle.

Japan is a seniority-based culture, in their language there are multiple ways to say many things and the politeness level used, based on the status of the person to whom you are speaking, can change the verb considerably(this doesn't include "honorific" and "humble" forms of verbs, also with varying politeness levels). For example, if I wanted to say "My boss gave me something" I would use the verb "morau", but if I gave something to an inferior I would use "yaru", if he/she/it gave something to me it would use "itadaku". All these verbs mean the same thing in English, "to give/receive" but using the wrong one can seriously embarrass you or the person to whom you are speaking if he or she is of a superior social standing to you.

Now, most of that above was irrelevant I now realize but I wanted to give you some idea of the complexities of the seniority-based system. Whenever I do hold open a door for a lady they usually do one of four things (in order of frequency):

Apologize (the Japanese are VERY good at this) then walk through the door like they now owe me
Become genuinely flattered, then walk through the door (extra points if they bow multiple times while doing so)
Stare at me flabbergasted
Stab me with a chopstick

The Japanese have some idea of American, and by that I also mean Western, standards of politeness and have seen in American movies or TV shows men holding open doors for ladies. When they actually see a big, scary foreigner do it, for them no less, they don't know how to react. Some are unsure what to do, some are flattered, some think I am somehow inconveniencing myself on their behalf and they should therefore apologize profusely for it. (I feel required to also mention that the Japanese are also VERY good at making a show of how your inconvenience is also the single worst event in their lives).

Oftentimes I will explain briefly why I am holding open the door for them, so they don't follow me around bowing and apologizing. I simply explain that I am a man, and where I am from we hold open doors and let them go first. It is what we consider polite. Some of the other foreigners, from less civilized areas (like the North) will ask me why I don't just stop. This boggles my mind. I can't stop holding open doors because it is the right thing to do. Holding open a door for a lady is like adding sugar to tea, frying a steak, or saying "y'all", it is simply the way the world works, it's how things are done. I could no more cease opening doors for ladies than I could root for the Yankees.

Anyway, back to the original premise of said note.

Obirin, in an attempt to slow down the hectic pace of Japanese life, has replaced many of its normal doors with new automatic sliding doors. Never mind that these new doors are the slowest in the industrialized world and are not even remotely evenly placed so that one set of doors has two sliding components while the ones directly in front of it has only one, totally throwing off the feng-shui of the whole operation and driving my sense of style CRAZY...

Sorry.

Anyway, these new sliding doors have taken away half of my opportunities to hold open doors for ladies, which kinda irks me. It was one of my daily ways of spreading some down home culture to my Japanese hosts.

It, of course, wasn't their intention to remove this opportunity from me, it was their intention to disregard the laws of style by placing two doors completely UNEVENLY....sorry again...it was their idea to make doors that wouldn't slam and thereby break and shatter glass when the high winds come roaring through (sometimes Tokyo can rival Amarillo on the high winds front). Unfortunately, this modernization interferes with a little piece of chivalry I was trying to dispense.

I thought I finally had my birthday back...

2007-04-29T00:21:00.000-05:00

I have often said that one thing that would give me personal satisfaction when the death of Saddam Hussein came is that I would never, ever have to see an article on the news about the mass rallies for Saddam's birthday ever again. See, Saddam and I have the same Birthday, April 28, and I got tired of having to compete with him for attendees at my parties, loyalty of the masses, etc. So when Saddam went to the gallows I was ecstatic, not just for the millions of people he brutally ruled and the thousands he massacred, but also because my birthday would be mine from now on.

Then I read THIS.

Apparently I had false hope.

Top 10 Radio

2007-04-24T10:02:00.000-05:00

I hate Top 10 radio.

Let me explain. While in Japan and working I like to have music playing. People from Conner will remember that if my door was closed and some gentle or awesome orchestral piece was emanating from my door it meant that I was writing a paper. Now I try to listen to music while I study Japanese (insert your own observations about the intelligence of studying a foreign language while listening to American music).

Anyway, recently I have been listening to KGNC FM radio out of Amarillo, Texas. It is the country station I listened to at WT while I lived there. I discovered, though, that they play the exact same songs over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.

In the last month I have turned on the streaming station and come in either before, during, or immediately after (that is, at the trailing end) of "Wasted" by Carrie Underwood a grand total of 12 times. I'm absolutely serious. This is immediately followed by "I'll wait for you" by Joe Nichols, then we segue into "It just comes Natural(ly)" by George Strait followed by "Anyway" by Faith Hill, then immediately concluding with "Hillbilly Deluxe" by Brooks and Dunn.

Why am I annoyed? I like all of these artists, but I get tired of hearing these exact same songs over and over again. It drives me insane. I do not want to hear the same song this hour that I heard last hour. If I did, I would buy the CD and put Track 1 on repeat. (Ironically, this is probably the method I would use to drive myself towards suicide).

Is it really so much to ask that when a station says "We play non-stop ten in a row!" it doesn't mean "because we put the compilation track on 'repeat' and go to the bathroom".

Maybe I am the only one...

The Second Amendment

2007-04-19T01:48:00.000-05:00

"A well-regulated militia, necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

When the ACLU looks at the Second Amendment, they see only "A well-regulated militia" and argue that the Second Amendment only protects the militias of the several states, as it was referred to in the time of our founding fathers, and entitles them to bear arms.

When Conservatives, like myself, look at the Second Amendment we tend to focus on the latter part, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Why is there such a dichotomy between what we see in such plainly worded language? The Constitution clearly states that the right of the people to keep and bear weapons shall not be infringed by the Congress. The difficulty arises when the first clause concerning the militias is entered into the fray.

The reason we have such difficulty with this today is because by and large the militias of the several states have been disbanded in favor of a centralized, permanent United States Armed Forces. As the threats have become external, and the threat of internal rebellion more and more remote, there ceased to be a need for each state to maintain a militia to safeguard it from internal dangers.

In the time of the founding fathers there was no real "national" land armed forces except when the militias were called into the service of the United States, at which point they came under the command of the President and were funded by the Congress. In time a professional soldiering class was created to stand as the Army of the United States, but this was predominately an officer corps of trained and experienced men who could, when Congress called the militias into the service of the Federal Government, lead them.

Originally, the militias made up the bulk of trained men who would, if called up, become the US Army. Until that time, however, they remained under the control of their governors and state legislatures and took their orders and received their funding from them.

In many of these states all men were suitable for military service when they reached a certain age. It was in the vested interests of the founders that their potential soldiers be skilled with their own weapons, that decreases training when they are activated by the government. The Second Amendment encapsulated this idea: the well regulated militia, allowed to keep their own arms and be skilled in their use, to defend themselves and their property so that when they were called into service they would be ready to use those same arms in defense of their nation.

Why do I bring this up?

Many on the left read the amendment and, by not knowing any of the past associated with it, interpret it incorrectly. They argue that the amendment does not grant an individual right to bear arms, only the right of the armed forces to carry them.

I will wait while the ludicrousness of that statement sinks in.

Ask yourself this, why would the government need to insert an amendment into the Constitution guaranteeing the right of soldiers to carry weapons? Wouldn't that be like including an amendment guaranteeing the right of surgeons to use scalpels? Or the right of firemen to use water? The Founding Fathers used the Second Amendment as a guarantor of all citizen's rights to carry weapons because all citizen's were potential soldiers if the need arose. If you examine it logically you see how ridiculous it is to claim that the Second Amendment only guarantees the rights of the armed forces to carry weapons. Just think, what kind of army would they be without them?

Secondly, I read one argument were someone mentioned that being able to buy a handgun in a shop without any need is hardly "well regulated". Once again, this is serious misreading of the Amendment. The right of the people to keep and bear arms is not what is to be well regulated, the militia is to be well regulated. In this sense well regulated does not mean "the militia will get to carry regulated weapons" it means "the militia will be trained, organized, provided for, and kept ready so that when the need arises they will be ready". It is regulation of structure, not regulation of provisions.

"But all people are not in the militias anymore, so they don't need weapons."

Wrong.

If the Selective Service System tells us anything, it is that we males could end up in the armed services tomorrow, and we should be allowed to prepare for that.

Another concept is the "necessary to the security of a free state" section of the Second Amendment. What is a "free state" in this sense? A free state is a state where the people, and by this I mean citizens, are free. Free to elect whomever they choose for office. Free to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (Note that nowhere are we guaranteed happiness just for trying, sorry liberals). Being citizens we have the rights of a citizen but also the responsibilities of one. The rights are such outdated notions like freedom of thought, conscience, movement, occupation, and the absolute right to defend thyself and thy family from harm without having to rely on the state. The responsibilities are notions as serving on juries, being loyal to your nation, and also, if necessary, laying down your life for it.

Is the Second Amendment a guarantor of individual rights to firearms? Absolutely. To claim otherwise is to claim the Founding Fathers found it necessary to make sure the bulk of the armed services knew they were allowed to own guns (and all this time the standard ammunition was a pitchfork).

An inanimate object did not cause this tragedy

2007-04-17T11:17:00.000-05:00

As of this writing, I am anxiously awaiting news from two dear friends of mine who attend Virginia Tech. One has graduated, the other may still be a student there. He was an engineering major, and since the shootings took place in the engineering hall I am scared, I will admit. I am waiting...

It did not take long for the elites of the world to cast blame on American society for this tragedy, and I will rebut those accusations as best I am able.

It has begun.

Not less than 24 hours after the mass murder at Virginia Tech of 31 innocent people, cut down by a student using two semi-automatic pistols, the International Community has offered its sympathy to the American people while simultaneously insulting us. Foreign heads of state offer deep apologies for the attack and then criticize America's "gun culture".

You see, it is not Cho Seung-Hui that is to blame for the attack, it is the tool he used to carry it out, and that cursed Second Amendment Constitutional Right that one media outlet said American's "cling to" like some kind of outdated trinket. One even asked if American's freedom to defend themselves "is a case of freedom gone too far?"

The Europeans, whose gun laws are the strictest in the "free" world, were quick to point out that they do not have shootings like this, and in true form criticized us while simultaneously feeling our collective pain.

There is a reason, a clear and simple reason, why gunmen target schools for acts of violence. The reasons are:

Schools are filled with unsuspecting people
They create an atmosphere conducive to the killer's goals and desire for notoriety
It is illegal to defend yourself in a school zone

Schools, colleges, and Universities are "gun-free zones" that advertise to the criminal element that "no one here is able to defend themselves." Gun free zones are invitations to the deranged to use weapons at a place where they know the mass of students could not defend themselves.
I used to have on my dorm room door a simple sticker. It featured a hand gun with one of those "No!" crosses through it. The sticker looked anti-gun at first, but upon closer inspection it read "Gun-free zone, no guns allowed...I am unarmed, please don't hurt me."

It is possible that if some students possessed weapons, in their dorms or in their cars or elsewhere, they could have used them to stop this individual before he killed more than a score of people. Instead, they were all unarmed and easy targets for this madman. Gun free zones and gun control laws simply inhibit the free, independent, and law-abiding citizen's ability to defend his life, his property, and his family while enabling the criminal to use weapons to take them all more easily.

In a truly sad irony, not to long ago the University helped defeat a bill in the Virginia General Assembly that would have allowed students and employees on campus to carry weapons for their self-defense. Had that bill passed, I am confident this tragedy would not have approached the proportions it did. When the shooter stepped through the door with his weapons a student or professor could have killed or wounded him before he could continue. It will not be popular, but I will say it anyway.

The gun control advocate will respond "but if weapons were made illegal criminals could not get them either."

This is a sheer, and utter lie.

Simply examine the drug culture. What cannot be made or legally possessed here is made in another country, just across the border, and smuggled in. If guns were made illegal, completely and utterly illegal, the surge in violent crime in the US from imported illegal weapons would skyrocket as criminals became all too aware that American citizens were now completely unable to defend themselves.

The prime example is the United Kingdom. Since the UK completely banned personal handgun possession in 1994 after a horrible school shooting violent crime has not fallen, it has surged. Handgun violence has of course dropped, as it became harder for criminals to obtain them (no long, under patrolled southern border or smuggler trafficking routes along a huge coastline) but violent crime rates for all other means has increased significantly. A majority of home invasions, where a criminal breaks into the house and directly threatens the occupants, has doubled since 1994, and now, after the handgun ban, they are occur more often in broad daylight than at night.
In the United States home invasions and burglaries occur more often at night (except in states with strict gun control laws) because the criminal is aware that the house he chooses to vandalize may be his last should the owner be armed.

Why is there more, not less, violent crime in the UK since handguns were banned? Criminals in the UK know their occupant more than likely cannot defend themselves, and they take advantage of that.

Europeans laud their drop in gun crime, but completely overlook the surges in violent crime because it is not "gun violence." As if that were the only violation of the rights of man that mattered when determining the safety of the state. They have become so focused on one particular aspect of violent crime, that using a weapon, that they pay no attention to crime used without a handgun.

The right to self-defense is an integral, essential, vital element of the rights of a citizen. Seizing the tool of violence, while doing nothing to alter the sources of it, is a superficial gesture designed to allow a temporary feeling of alleviation of guilt while in actuality doing nothing to prevent it from happening again. A gun is a tool. Period. If will do nothing until taken in hand by a criminal to commit crimes, or as more often occurs around this great nation, by a citizen to defend themselves.

The Virginia Tech killer used a gun. It is tragic, it is inexcusable, and it is sobering. He could have used explosives, he could have used an automobile, he could have even hijacked an aircraft and crashed it into the campus. These are all ways terrorists and criminals commit their acts. The fact that a gun was used to commit this crime is no more relevant than the clothes he was wearing when he did so. Last year in the United States, more people died in traffic accidents than to handgun violence. If the news covered every traffic accident that occurred in the US we would be bombarded with images of body bags. The reason we do not see this is because we expect it, it is commonplace. Handgun violence is showy, unexpected. The reason we get so troubled by it is that we don't see it every single day.

To the Europeans I say this: a tragedy occurred today in Virginia, and I hope and I will even pray that those involved find all the peace that can be obtained in this world or the next. I will then say I adamantly refuse to listen to a criticism of our right to defend ourselves as some kind of indictment of our way of life. We have not abandoned ourselves to the mercy of criminals and the protection of the state. The rational among us do not blame the tool used to commit violence, we lay blame where it lies, with the criminal who did this.

Infringing on the right of the individual to protect himself, banning handgun ownership across the nation would simply insure, no, guarantee, that tragedies like this would be replayed everyday all over the country, with people becoming prisoners in their homes and at the mercy of police response times. It would guarantee that every day more people would fall victim to violence crime.

Then again, those instances of violent crime would be less "showy" and less of a story for a disinterested media to report. When all those awful handguns are taken away, more people will die or be victims of violent crime, but we all feel so much better about ourselves for punishing an inanimate object.

One of my very favorite lines of all time:
Person 1: "Did you know last year more than a hundred people were killed by guns?"
Person 2: "Would you feel better if they were pushed out of windows?"

My heart and soul go out to the victims of the massacre at VT. God bless, and may he also rest, your souls.

Anthony W. Holmes

Free Ride

2007-03-02T23:03:00.000-06:00

Well, it is decided. This evening, very late this evening in fact, I received notice that I have been awarded the Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship that I applied for at Pitt. Now, I have applied for it at all three schools but Pitt's offer was by far the most generous. They are offering me a free ride, that is, all tuition, fees and books comped and a yearly stipend of $16,000. I don't know about y'all but I can live very well on $16,000 a year when all my books, tuition, and fees are comped.

Now I just have to get used to living in yankeeville.

Accepted, yet again

2007-02-10T12:36:00.000-06:00

Well, make that two down, one to go. While in Hokkaido on vacation I was notified that I have been offered full admission to The Ohio State University's East Asian Studies Master's Program.

I have to admit I am optimistic. My GRE scores were less than stellar for someone of my ambition so I hoped my achievements, paltry though they are, and my good GPA would get me into one of the schools, at least as a stand-by offer. These schools are really good schools, highly selective in their fields, and my shot at getting into them seemed tenuous. Recently, though, I have been offered full admission into two of them, the only one on which I am currently now waiting is Kansas. Maybe soon I will hear from them.

If Kansas also admits me fully then I will be in the enviable position of choosing between all three schools. Then it becomes an issue of funding. Whoever offers me the most will get me, if any of them offer me funding at all. I still have not ruled out that I was admitted at the low rung of the guaranteed admissions ladder so no funding may be had. I will wait and see.

Hokkaido Vacation: Part I - Arrival and Meeting the Pavement

2007-02-10T11:39:00.000-06:00

If you are reading this then prepare yourself for perhaps the longest blog entry I have ever posted. From the morning of the 6th until the evening of the ninth I was in Hokkaido, the "Alaska of Japan" for the big snow and ice carving festival. I had a great time, and also coincidently learned that my boots have zero ice and snow traction (I greeted the ground more than once). I am posting the pictures now as I write this entry, so they should be up by the time it is posted. I think I will go day by day on this one, just to make all my rampaging thoughts better understandable.

Day 1, February 6th 0500 hours.
I get up early after having only four hours of sleep from the night before packing for this trip and force myself into the shower. I did not want to do this, my bed was so incredibly comfortable, more comfortable than it has been for some time. After bathing, shaving, and otherwise making myself presentable I get an MMS from my buddy Cosentino, my companion on my northward journey, telling me he is ready to go. He shows up and we are off to the bus stop.

We were flying out of Tokyo International, aka Haneda, which is roughly in the south central portion of Tokyo whereas we live in the far west of Tokyo, considered the boonies by the urbanites (we only have 17 billion skyscrapers and neon signs per square inch). We have to transverse Machida City to Haneda airport which is about a 3 hour trip worst case scenario so although out flight is at 1030 we are out the door at 0530.

Our first snag occurred when I bought a ticket from the Machida train station to Shinjuku, the world's largest train station. Normally I use my passnet card, a very convenient card that allows me quick access through the ticket machines and bills me directly so I don't have to carry around individual tickets and wait in line to buy new ones. Unfortunately, my passnet was empty and all I had was a 10,000-yen bill. Not wanting to break it so early on I scrounged up some change and bought a ticket on the Odakyu Line from Machida to Shinjuku. Since I never use tickets I put the ticket in my shirt pocket and forgot about it. When we arrived at Shinjuku thirty minutes later, and crushed by the morning commute, I get to the gate and cannot find my ticket. I check everywhere for it (except my shirt pocket) and after a good five minutes finally suck it up and tell the station master that I have lost my ticket. Believing me they do not charge me for the ride again and simply let me through the gate. As soon as I am through I find my ticket and rush back to the gate terminal to show the station attendants that their trust was not misplaced.

I ride the Yamanote Line around to Hamamatsucho station (which sounds great to say, doesn't it? Try it a few times) and transfer to the Monorail that runs straight to Haneda Airport. During the ride, again crushed by the morning commute of school children riding to a class trip leaving from the airport, me and Cosentino realize we have a deep seated dislike of monorails. Because they're cocky.

Think about it, a one-railed commuter device lording its single-railed superiority over other more bi-supported modes of transportation. Imagine the ego it must have. "I travel on only one rail, other trains need support. A regular train? Pah! Uses a second-railed crutch to do what I can do with one." That may be bad, but you should just hear what monorails say about subways with their third wheel. My lord, it never shuts up about that. "Three rails? You must be kidding! Does it need a walker, too?" Arrogant devices those monorails.

We arrive at Haneda finally and get through security with no problems. Security at Japanese airports always makes me laugh. When you go through the gate you remove your shoes, naturally, and due to the Japanese custom they bring you a pair of slippers to put on. These slippers are designed for maybe size 12 American, max. I am a size 14.5 so they don’t exactly fit. When they bring the slippers I simply point down and wiggle my toes, showing them that the slippers they’re bringing aren’t going to work. They officer usually looks down with a surprised look, trying to think of protocol in this situation (there isn’t one). After they stutter for a minute or so, I tell them it is okay and I am happy to walk through security in my socks. They apologize profusely and I strut through the security gate flashing my massive American…feet.

The plane we get on is part of the Air Do group, which flies from the main islands to Hokkaido, and that is about it. According to Wikipedia (always trustworthy) their fleet consists of only 5 aircraft, they don’t need anymore to fly the hour and fifteen minute roundtrip from Tokyo to Sapporo and back. The plane at once is disconcerting, it looks like it was made in the 50’s, complete with greenish-yellow 1970’s style Technicolor seat covers. I have my friend take a picture of the seating area, so we can prove we flew on “That 70’s Show Airlines”.

Actually arriving at Sapporo is where it gets interesting. For whatever reason, we don’t get the luxury of a gangway, instead they wheel up a stair-car for us to disembark on (no hope-ons, though you’re always gonna have some hope-ons). There was no apparent reason for this. There were open gangways and our jet was full-sized. We knew we were flying on a discount airline, we did not realize that our flight was so discounted that they didn’t pay rent at the airport. After walking down the staircase my buddy got sucked into the jet engine. I kept, just kidding of course, on going and we boarded the bus to take us inside the airport.

The 30 minute rapid express train from New Chitose Airport to Sapporo was mostly uneventful, though we did notice the weather was taking a turn for the worse. We did not realize it at the time but we would be under blizzard conditions for the entirety of the trip. The scenery on the train ride reminded me of home, by that I mean Texas, with rolling hills covered in thick blankets of snow. I even saw some farm houses along the rail side. I loved this, I have been in Tokyo for so long I forgot trees and countryside could exist, to see old farmhouses and expansive tree lines was a welcome site to behold. I pretty much sat there and absorbed as much as I could until we arrived at Metropolitan Sapporo.

Sapporo is the fastest growing city in Japan and well deserved, it makes sense. Unlike the urban sprawl of Tokyo which due to historical and other factors is an amalgam of streets, alleys, buildings, and people Sapporo was designed and built on a grid system. Therefore by knowing the grid numbers (North 5, East 6 for example) it is possible to know exactly where something is. In Tokyo the cities are divided into wards and cities, those cities/wards into districts, those districts into blocks, those blocks into buildings, and finally those buildings into units. None of this is done in a logical pattern, not even remotely. Building 10, for example, can be right next to buildings 45 and 109, depending on when it was built. Finding an address in Tokyo can be maddening. Seeing Tokyo from the air is also an experience, I maintain that is truly impossible for an American to grasp the sheer overwhelming size of Tokyo without having experienced it. It surpasses the grandest city idea you can imagine. It simply goes on into eternity on the horizon. Being out of that was quite a release.

We arrived in Sapporo and I decided out first goal should be the hotel room. While we were walking from the park that divides the city into North/South districts (much like Washington, DC) it began to snow, hard. The blizzard had arrived and we would be in the middle of it. There had already been some snow because the streets were completely covered and the sidewalks were in need of salting but it was nothing compared to what awaited us. Along the way I had to keep pulling Cosentino back to the group (i.e. me) because being the shutterbug that he is (boy, is he) he kept trying to delay our arrival in the hotel so he could begin taking pictures of the ice and snow sculptures. There would be plenty of time for that later. As we walked through the streets of Sapporo, navigating the grid to find our hotel, it was full-on blizzard time. Visibility was non-existent and the streets became sheer blocks of ice.

This is, coincidently, when I discovered that my boots have zero, read it zero, ice and snow traction. This is when I first began my legendary trip gag, falling down repeatedly (and painfully) as my feet flew out from under me on the ultra-slick ice that my boots could get no traction on. I ended up walking around in Sapporo like a two-year old just learning to walk. Leaning forward for forward momentum and watching my feet like a hawk for the first sign of slippage so I could correct myself before I became one with the pavement. This technique failed.

We finally reached our hotel, covered in snow from head to toe, snow sticking onto my friend’s beard making him look like a crazed wild man stalking the snow-covered forest with his shaggy hair, full beard, leather jacket and boots. He could have stepped right in from an outdoors novel, whereas I looked cold and frightened of my many more inevitable falls to meet Mother Earth. Did I mention I hate my boots?

I think so.

This ends today’s portion of this entry. The day didn’t end here, of course, but I will save the night’s activities for later.

Hokkaido Vacation: Going to the Snow Festival

2007-02-05T09:09:00.000-06:00

Well ladies and gentlemen the time I have waited so long for has finally come, Hokkaido!

I will be in Hokkaido from the 6th until the 9th to take part in the ice carving festival, otherwise known in Japanese as the "snow festival". While I am up there I plan to go and visit the Ainu, the Japanese aboriginals and hopefully ask them to play some music for me. Their music is characterized by deep, reverberant tones that echo mournfully over their instruments. One reviewer called it "hauntingly beautiful." I never pass up good music and hopefully they will indulge my foreign curiosity. Also I plan to head down, well up from Tokyo, down from Sapporo, to Hakodate. It is sometimes called "the San Francisco of Japan" without the hippies. Hakodate is an old, old port town back from the sea-faring days, and two of Commodore Matthew Perry's sailors on the expedition that opened up Japan to the outside world are buried in a foreigner's cemetery there. The town even features gas-lit street lamps! I am always up for a little nostalgia.

For those of you unawares, Hokkaido is the northernmost main island in the Japanese archipelago and the largest of all prefectures. I will be staying in Sapporo, the prefectural capital, where the bulk of the ice-carving will be taking place. Many of you out there who enjoy the occasional brew (or frequent, or too frequent, or way, way too much) will recognize the name Sapporo, it is home to the famous brewery that exports all over the world.

All that could make a four-day trip to an unspoiled wilderness to watch international experts carve tons of ice while also visiting an old port town and visiting aboriginals is going to all these places with a beautiful woman on my arm, since I do not have one of those I guess I will have to settle for my buddy Cosentino.

Accepted!

2007-02-02T03:36:00.000-06:00

Well, one down two to go.

As of this morning I have been offered full admission into the University of Pittsburgh's Interdisciplinary Master's of Arts in East Asian Studies. I have also been accepted into full-time status in Pittsburgh's extremely elite Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) studying East Asian politics and security (mostly North Korea).

Am I going to Pitt? Maybe, do not know yet. Although I have been offered full admission, which means the offer is mine to accept or decline not a standby offer in case another student decides not to come, I am still waiting on funding. I have three Foreign Language and Area Studies Scholarship applications out to all three universities to which I applied (Pitt, Kansas, and Ohio State) and they will determine where I go. If Pitt offers me a free ride then I will, of course, go there. If they do not but Kansas does then I will, of course, go there.

It is also entirely possible that I am a fluke, the bottom rung on the "guaranteed admissions" ladder. That means that although I was offered unconditional admittance, I may not be high enough to receive a free-ride in terms of funding. Time will wait that one out.

I should hear back within the next three weeks concerning Pitt's offer of funding. At about that time I should also have heard back from Ohio State and Kansas about general admission into their programs.

Anyway, now that I know I am definitely in one prestigious graduate school in my field, I am going out for some celebratory ramen (not the bad pre-packaged American kind, oh no, the delicious spicy real Korean kind).

Wish me luck on the remaining two applications.

Carving tons of Ice

2007-01-13T07:01:00.000-06:00

Y'all have heard of the big ice carving contests they have around the world, right? Well the Hokkaido International Snow Festival is by far the biggest, and this year I have tickets.

I have always wanted to see one of these shows, where artists come and receive tons of ice to work with. This year they are making a huge model of the old Edo Palace in Tokyo, which no longer exists. They are also making a huge snow slide for the kiddies (before you ask, yes I am going to ride it multiple times).

The festival is in Hokkaido, Japan from February 6th until the 14th. Hokkaido is often called the "Alaska of Japan" because of its stunning natural beauty, almost untouched preserves and mountain trails, and the often bitterly cold climate. It is 16 hours by rail using a sleeper car and only 5 or 6 hours via the Shinkansen (Bullet train). I really, really wanted to take the sleeper car so I could have the experience of spending the night on a train in a bunk as we went across northern Japan's amazing mountain ranges and forests. Unfortunately, in Japan domestic travel is more expensive than international travel, and the train was just too much. I considered taking a boat out of Oarai harbor about an hour north of Tokyo, but the price to get to Oarai, then take the ferry would be the same as the plane.

Finally, using my mediocre Japanese skills I went through "Air Do", a discount domestic airline (think of it as Japan's Southwest). I got a round trip ticket there and back for 31,000 yen ($250) and a hotel room in Sapporo, the capital, for 4 days for 15,780 yen ($150). In addition to the ice carving extravaganza, which takes over the entire town, I also intend to go out into the countryside and see some very old villages of the aboriginal Ainu people and then onto some really small Japanese towns that tourists never go to. Every chance I get I like to leave foreigner-saturated Tokyo and go out to see the people who work in regular, non-flashy jobs keeping the country running.

I will get pictures up as soon as I get back.

One Moment in Conner Hall Lobby changed my Life

2007-01-11T05:13:00.000-06:00

I was lying in bed last night and I began, as I often do, to wander into random thoughts. I rolled over in bed and saw my Japanese flag I keep on my wall and I began to think about the motion of events that led me here, and how had one of them not happened I would not be here today. It then occurred to me that I do not have the faintest idea where I would be had I not came to Japan, had the procession of events not led me where they have. I think I will recount some of those events now.

I am a political science major but my course choices were mostly interdisciplinary. I filled out the requirements for my degree plan but when it came to courses on the electives list I took classes in economics, culture, theater, and most importantly, history. Due to the lack of a truly interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts I choose the major that most strongly matched my interests, and with the most opportunity for elective courses, and built my own interdisciplinary program. In reality, my Bachelors will be in Political Science in name only.

As my undergraduate coursework went on and I had completed my liberal arts core it became time for me to specialize, so I didn't. Seriously, I never chose a specific path within Political Science for my courses. I took classes on national security, nuclear weapons, international relations theory, political theory, the presidency, etc. I had many other opportunities but when the time came I began to fill those slots with the aforementioned myriad of courses. As time went on I began to realize I had no specialty in anything.

The time came for me to enroll in a foreign language for my BA requirements. My choices were French, German, or Spanish. I took four years of Latin in High School so I was against the romance languages on the grounds that they wouldn't challenge me. The grammar, conjugations, and cognates are basically the same so I opted for German (had I had my choice at the time it would have been Russian, alas WT offers it not). I spoke with my adviser and she informed me that I might want to consider French, as it is the (second) international language of politics. I protested but eventually her reasoning won out, and I switched to French.

About four days before the start of the Fall semester I was walking through my beloved Conner Hall when I ran into the anime twins Kat and Brenda. I stopped to talk with them, as I usually did, and they told me that some professor on campus was (reluctantly) considering offering Japanese, but his prerequisite was 10 people to guarantee sign on to make it work. They asked me if I was willing to do it, it was a win-win scenario for both me and them. I sign on, the class makes after the census date, then I can transfer to French. They needed only one more person to make the class, well, make and they sweet-talked me into signing on. Believe me when I say I was initially very hesitant.

Japanese? Me?

I signed on, many from Conner Hall know why I did. Yeah, you do strange stuff when you are a guy.

I then found out that the professor teaching it was the much-feared Dr. Paul H. Clark. THE Dr. Clark. Scourge of the History department, failer of students, the Democrat-in-Chief on high. This only made me more worried. I had had exactly ONE run-in with Dr. Clark before, and it was over his various liberal postings on his wall outside his office when I was on my way to see the Brasington (peace be unto him). I made a comment about his checklist of the supposed failures of the Bush Administration (one of which was, "he has weakened the United Nations", to which I asked "that's a bad thing?"). Anyway, it almost got heated right then and there but I walked away.

When I discovered that Dr. Clark was teaching the Japanese class I almost dropped right then and there. I knew he was a hard-core Democrat, and I am a hard-core Republican/Conservative, so I was pretty sure our personalities would not mesh. Kat and Brenda won me over to staying and I figured I could stick it out until the census date.

The first day of class came and went and we delved into the four Japanese writing systems; katakana, hiragana, Kanji, and romaji. This was challenging. Not only did Dr. Clark give one extremely inspiring speech at the beginning of the class but he assigned homework that worked me over. I remember thinking, "wow, good thing I am not staying until the end." Then it hit me, I would leave this course which was not only mentally taxing but fascinating to go to a class on French? Huh? What was I thinking? I might just stay in here.

Then came the incident. Denizens of Conner Hall know this well, for I was so incredibly angry that I nearly lost it.

One day in class, after I had decided to stay the proverbial course, we learned new verb forms and the words for various recreations, like music listening. Dr. Clark and I had almost a few times got into it in class (remember, this was approaching the very heated Presidential Election of 2004) but managed to avoid it. As Dr. Clark went down the rows asking us one after the other "ichiban sukina ongaku wa nan desu ka?" [What is your favorite type of music] I answered "Classical" (I can never decide between classical and country). This exchange followed:
Dr. Clark asked me immediately "do you like Wagner?"
I thought and answered "Yes, I do."
Dr. Clark responded, "Ahh, so you are similar to a certain German who was also a big fan of Wagner."

The insinuation was extremely strong. If you do not know, Adolf Hitler's favorite composer was Wagner. Dr. Clark made a statement, in class, that I shared features with Adolf Hitler, because I was a Conservative.

I became so angry I became silent. I immediately retorted, "no, I think I do not share anything in common with that particular German Chancellor."
I remember seeing Dr. Clark's face then, he realized immediately that I got the reference and was not amused. As someone raised Jewish, allusions to Adolf Hitler because of my political opinions do not go well.

I left class, returned to Conner and threw my books down. I called my father and mother immediately and told them what had just occurred. At that point I was about to step out the door and go straight to the Dean of my college demanding an official censure on Dr. Clark (I knew that could deny him tenure, at that point I did not care).

As I stepped into the hall I ran into Bob and Dave, I told them what had just occurred. My rage subsided as we spoke, but I did not feel any better. I was still intent on seeing the Dean when an email came to me from Dr. Clark requesting an audience. Needless to say, I went to see him.
We talked for about an hour and came to the conclusion that we were both feeling the pressure of the election year, we were trading barbs, and that I might consider dropping his course if I could not play nicely. I responded that I was not going to sit there quietly while statements I knew to be false were spoken as gospel and that I have a right to be a voice in the class that says I do not agree. My official line was that I did not want students to think they had to agree with Dr. Clark to pass the course.

We parted, me intending to stay in his class and him intent on not having it out with me in a huge class argument. For the rest of that semester I considered dropping, and I had not abandoned the idea of going to the Dean if my grades magically began to slide. That did not happen, and for the rest of the semester hardly a word passed between us that was not absolutely necessary.

Begin Japanese II. I had just returned from the Presidential Inauguration in Washington and was back in class when Dr. Clark mentioned to a student that he would meet with him after class about the study abroad thing. I mentioned casually that I had always wanted to study abroad. Dr. Clark looked at me, thought for a minute, and asked "really?" Of course, really. He said "okay, we can meet later and talk about this." I then mentioned my whole life I wanted an NSEP scholarship, an extremely prestigious award from the Defense Department that basically pays the bills while you are studying under it. Dr. Clark smiled and told me to speak with him later.

Long story short, we eventually came down to three basic points: 1) For this to work I would have to postpone graduation, 2) It would be tough because I would not learn of the results of my applications until a day or so before graduation was to take place, cutting it very short, and 3) due to my finances I would have to get all three scholarships to have a shot.

One problem, the odds of getting any one of them were almost nil.

My three scholarships were the Bridging Grant, awarded to fifty students a year from all disciplines; the Freeman-ASIA grant, more money but to seventy students a year; and the big papa, the National Security Education Program David L. Boren Scholarship for study abroad and language study. The Boren Scholarship panel sifts through more than 10,000 applications a semester and awards only 50 at $20,000 a head. Financed by the government and carrying a promise to serve the people once you graduate, it is one of the most difficult grants in the world to be awarded. It is so prestigious that it can make or break you as a candidate for any job in the your field. Only the top students in their fields are awarded them. I was sure I had no shot.

Here is what really struck me as odd, to apply for an NSEP you have to have the permission of an NSEP adviser, that is, a former NSEP student who is now in academia and eligible to nominate new students for the award. I had always wanted an NSEP, as I previously mentioned, but guess who the regional adviser is for the NSEP grant in Texas? That's right, Dr. Paul H. Clark. Not only did I manage to stumble into a class that was going to change my future and send me around the world, I also stumbled into the class of the only person (unknown to me at the time) in the Texas panhandle who could nominate me for the award I so badly wanted. It seems too perfect.

Here is where my thought process stopped while I lay in bed, and new ideas came to my mind. Those three scholarships are awarded to less than 1% of eligible applicants. That means once they sift out the obvious "no's" and people who hardly tried, they are still dealing with thousands of applicants. Dr. Clark told me I was competing against all the me's in higher education.

Had I not received one of them, both of the others but not one, I would not be here. Period. I am not wealthy by any means, and my family supports a fully disabled child and a blind daughter. There was no way I could go without these.

Then came my greatest gamble yet. I received word that I had won the Bridging Grant in the amount of $2,500. I was still waiting on Freeman-ASIA. There were exactly two days till graduation for me, and I had to decide whether to take the chance on not getting the Freeman grant, postpone graduation, and be derelict for a semester without a diploma or go ahead with graduation. Had I gone ahead I would have forfeited my grants, should I be awarded them. I decided to take my chances and I canceled my graduation. Now I had to wait 2-3 months to discover if my gamble was worth it. Would I receive a Freeman grant making it possible for me to come and study in Japan.

I then remembered how truly random it is that I am here anyway. I had not had an inkling of desire to study Asia before I began Japanese language courses, I nearly quit over an argument, and I was delaying graduation on a less than 1% chance. Why on Earth was I doing this? What was my motivation? Honest answer, I didn't know. I was either fated to do this, or this is all random happenstance falling into perfectly delineated events. I was now working on a nearly full-time level with a man not three months before I was ready to demand a censure of. It amazed me how good he was. Dr. Clark is a true master in this craft.

Word came in the next semester that I had indeed been awarded a Freeman. I was on my way to Tokyo for a semester with enough money to barely live. Through his World War II in Asia class I became fascinated with what I was looking at. Dr. Clark was converting me to his area of study without really having to convince me of anything. It just began to happen.

It was surreal, to say the least, as I boarded that plane from Albuquerque to Tokyo. I kept running over in my head, as I do know, how extremely unlikely it was for me to be here. Had Brenda and Kat not suckered me into the Japanese course, to fill one slot to make the course for the semester, launching the Japanese program at WT. What would I have done if I had stayed in French? I don't know, but definitely not this.

The gist of this story is that all of this, my Japanese (and now Korean) language training, my Bridging, Freeman, and now my very prestigious career-making NSEP grant, my living in my own apartment in Tokyo, my travels to South Korea, North Korea, Kyoto, Nara, Himeji, and Hiroshima, they can all be traced to a single point in time when I agreed to enroll in a Japanese course just so it could make.

Now I am completing applications to graduate school in a field it never occurred to me to pursue. My graduate career, and my potential future, will be forever an outgrowth of that chance meeting in Conner Hall's lobby.

Is it really, truly, just happenstance that I ran into Brenda and Kat in the lobby and they asked me to take Japanese? Is it all happenstance that I agreed so it could make? Is it happenstance that I had a fight with a professor who now I owe more than I can ever possibly repay? Is it happenstance that one particular motivation for my enrolling in the Japanese class occurred the way it did? Do I really owe all of what I now have to a single.particular.random.event?

Truth be told I certainly don't know, but I think about it a lot now.

Here is a timeline of events:
1) Sign up for German, then switch to French.
2) Convinced by Kat and Brenda to enroll temporarily in Japanese program so it can make
3) Become fascinated with the program
4) Mention to Dr. Clark that I have always wanted an NSEP scholarship
5) Discover that Dr. Clark is an adviser, one of only a few hundred people in the US who can nominate a student for an NSEP
6) Apply for grants
7) Receive notice of Bridging grant, have to make my decision about whether to graduate or put it all on the line and wait, knowing that if I do not win Freeman I cannot go abroad.
8) Cancel my graduation
9) Receive notification that I have won the highly competitive Freeman-ASIA grant
10) Leave for Obirin University for a semester on two grants
11) Receive notification that I have won rare NSEP scholarship, $20,000 for one additional year
12) Faint

Meeting the Emperor for New Year's

2007-01-02T04:38:00.000-06:00

Note, if you want to see all the picture from my visit to the Palace, they can be seen HERE

Twice a year, on the Emperor's birthday and on the public celebration of New Year's, the Imperial Palace is open for well-wishers to come and greet the Emperor. This year, on January 2nd, I was lucky enough to be in Tokyo so I decided I could not miss the opportunity to see the head of state of Japan, the heir to the oldest continuing monarchy in the world, in person. If he wants to give us a blessing of a good new year, who am I to complain?

When I woke up this morning it was about 7. I am still getting used to hours of uninterrupted sleep and waking up rested in the morning. At that point I was wondering if I ever would go see the Emperor at all. In the back of my head was my brain screaming at me to return to sleep, but I shrugged it off and got up for the morning.

I was worried that I would not be able to find anyone to go with me to the palace, and I did not want to go alone like I did for New Year's. I emailed a few people with no luck but then remembered that Jackson and his wife Carol were in town still. Jackson goes to WT like I do and is at Obirin on a study-abroad program as well. We mistakenly believed that the Imperial shout-out was tomorrow but a check revealed it to be today, so I emailed Jackson quickly and he got back to me that of course he wanted to see an inbred ceremonial head of state (my thoughts exactly!) so we met up and headed on our merry way.

I will skip the boring stuff and get straight to the juicy bits. We arrived at Tokyo Central around 10 or so and made our way to the palace. As soon as we exited the station, however, we could tell that something major was going on. The station sits a good quarter mile from the outer moat of the palace (and the interior of the outer area is still spacious) but already the security zones were set and areas cordoned off. We found what we thought was the entrance and started working our way towards the center, following the crowds.

After a good ten minutes of this we crossed the intersection, passed over the outer moat, and began walking down an old section of the outer grounds that now is a little park. Here is where we also got our first look at the little Japanese flags they hand out to visitors. Since I was taking pictures, I did not take one from the guy in front of me, who looked actually quite hurt. I went back to him, apologized, and took my little hi-no-maru (Japanese flag) and proceeded on.

We got to the Imperial plaza and began to be put into lanes that zig-zagged back and forth to make the maximum square footage possible for the crowds, we moved surprisingly fast and were in not time at the security gate.

I was smart enough not to bring baggage but my cohorts apparently weren't so I went with them through the baggage line while their bags were searched and sorted through. After leaving that area we came to a second tent where we were literally searched and run over. I was run over with the metal detector first, then fully patted down, and then had my pockets checked thoroughly. It was the total package. It was not too invasive, fortunately, and I and my colleagues were soon on our way.

We then arrived at the site to see, the Nijubashi Bridge. For the unknowing amongst you, the Nijubashi Bridge is a set of two bridges that span the inner moat connecting the outside world with the inner world of the Emperor. You enter the first one, go through the massive stone gate, then do a U-turn and proceed across the second one. Why is this a big deal for me? Well first the bridge has long been a symbol of Japan, and many estimate that the classic photo of the Nijubashi bridge with the ancient keep behind it is one of the most photographed scenes in Japan. Second, the bridge serves ceremonial purposes now, and it used as the entry point for carriages and honor guards carrying dignitaries to the Emperor to receive credentials or discuss business. I want to one day cross the bridge as a dignitary, so to me it holds some meaning.

One cool thing was that in addition to the normal plain-clothed Imperial Guard on duty (in force) there were also the Imperial Honor Guard on display both on horseback and on foot. The ones on foot stood motionless, like guards at Buckingham, on stone platforms guarding either side of the entrances to the palace grounds and at important gates. They were sharp in their distinctive black dress tunics with gold embroidery, red service ropes, and gold duty badges. They are on guard when dignataries are present or when special court functions are in place. They are the elite of the Imperial Guard.

I didn't get a good picture of it, but to the left of the space between the two bridges is a road that leads to the visitor's palace, where guests of the state reside while in the country. It is supposed to be quite nice.

Once through the second gate and across the bridge we came upon the palace itself. This palace is not the residence of the Emperor, it actually serves more as his West Wing. This palace holds his library, study, throne room, and reception area for receiving official visitors, like the Prime Minister when a new government is formed or foreign ambassadors. It is also where the balcony is for the Emperor to meet the public.

The crowd was made up of quite a few foreigners, the official reason being that public interest has waned in the Emperor as of late except amongst the older generations. I didn't mind, it was all about the Emperor today. We had about 10 minutes to wait, so I began talking to those around me, including one Irish and British couple who couldn't understand how we got around in Texas without trains ("Cars" I said, "everyone owns one?" she retorted, amazed).

When the Emperor and his family did finally appear it seemed to be over before it started, he began speaking his short (very short) New Years greeting and then waved and was gone. I snapped a few pictures and was happy with the experience. I guess when you have 10 or so of these appearances to make a day they start to run together.

Afterwards we made our way out of the palace grounds and back to the real world. I tried once again, in vain, to get a picture of the old World War II privy council building on the grounds. This building was where the Emperor conducted war strategy during the war, and many important decisions were made there. I had to get a picture of it, but there was a barricade in the way. Luckily I was able to steal a picture from Jackson and I will host it on my site.

The day trip was a good 5 hours long before I made it back home, but I think it was worth it. How often do you get to see the world's only reigning Emperor?

New Year's in Tokyo (a Photo Essay)

2006-12-31T10:58:00.000-06:00

New Years, or Shogatsu (正月) is the most important holiday to the Japanese. The country pretty much shuts down between December 29th and January 3rd. On the night of New Year's families in Japan write letters to friends and coworkers, stay up all night to watch the first sunrise of the new year, and enjoy a well-earned vacation. I am too much of a softy to stay up all night for the new year, now that I am treated for my brutal insomnia I enjoy my sleep. Anyway, at about 7pm I decided to head out on a New Years pilgrimage to one of my favorite shrines in Tokyo to greet the New Year in the traditional Japanese way. Here is a photo essay of my experiences tonight.

I vacillated back and forth throughout the day as to whether I would go to a temple of simply sleep through New Year's as is my custom in the US. At around 7 I decided that I only live in Japan once (not at my current rate I ain't) so I decided to go ahead and do it. I called up my friends to see if anyone wanted to go with me, but they were all busy. My buddy Cosentino is in Nara and Kyoto (see my previous pictures on my SmugMug Account) and my other friends are homestay which means they have to spend the most important Japanese holiday with their host folks. That left me all by my lonesome. Sometimes you have to go solo it seems.

At 7:30 I started walking down towards the bus stop to catch the city bus to Fuchinobe, the closest train station to me. I didn't know if New Year's Eve counted as a holiday or not in Japan so I waited at the bus stop until after the first bus was supposed to have come on the "Weekends" schedule, when it didn't I realized we were on the holiday schedule. Since I didn't want to wait 30 more minutes I decided to schlep it the mile or so uphill to the station. I stopped in at Lawson's, my friendly neighborhood Convenience Store to give Isoka-san the gift I picked up for her in the US. Isoka-san is the friendly lady who has been a sort of default tutor to me since I arrived, always letting me practice Japanese on her and helping me feel out the place when I first arrived. Many of you have heard me mention her.

I began walking up hill to the next bus stop and wondered whether or not to go ahead and wait on the bus due to the cold, I decided not to and keep on. My brief delay did give me pause to take the above picture and realize this was turning into a Photo essay.

As I continued on my way up the hill I remembered there was a small shrine on the
right hand side of the street that I had never been to. I only ever passed it on the bus to the station. I figured this night would be as good as any to go check it out. I turned in to find the shrine deserted, and many of you know there is hardly anything creepier than a deserted place of worship. First place I went to was, of course, the purifying spring. All Japanese shrines have a purifying spring that is used to clean the hands and mouth before entering. It is designed to separate the sacred shrine from the profane outside. (This is a concept that permeates Japanese culture on the whole).

After cleaning my profane personage I headed to the main shrine, stopping to take some pictures along the way of the various statues found around a shrine.

Due to size restrictions on this blog, and the obvious need not to clutter it up too much, all of the pictures I took tonight will be on my SmugMug account, and the ones I really want to highlight will be here.

I memorized a prayer I wrote in Japanese to offer at the shrine. As you probably do not know the Japanese pray in a very standardized way at shrines. First you approach the altar and throw in a coin or two. This serves two purposes: It allows the caretaker of the shrine to support himself, and it serves to awaken the Gods. Coins impacting the altar have a distinctive sound.

After throwing in the coins to awaken the Gods and feed the family, you clap twice and no more ("two shall be the number of thy clapping, and the number of thy clapping shall be two...no more, no less. Only to two shall thou clap...") then bow, and say your prayer. My prayer was as follows (remember it, it will be said again at two more temples):

"I humbly ask for the following; health for my elder brother, peace for my younger brother, sight for my sister, peace and long life for the newlyweds, mercy to the innocent, safety for those who fight in the name of freedom. I humbly request peace and long life for my family and friends and that no harm come to them ever."

I then clapped twice again ("...for two shall be the number of thy counting. Not to three shall thou count, nor to four. Five is RIGHT OUT...") backed away from the altar, and bowed once again before going down the steps.

I found a small altar to an unknown deity. At first glance I guessed it might be Inari, a very important deity of rice, harvests, fertility, and foxes. This statue is missing the customary red bib that marks the respect this deity is given. It could also be one of the demon forms of Raiden (雷電神様) the God of Thunder, Lightning, and Protector of the Gods.

Whoever this deity is, he or she is important enough to have their own offering box within the temple compound. I took this picture, threw in a few coins, and moved on.

I got back on the main road and headed towards Fuchinobe station once again. As I approached I realized that I had never taken a picture of it, nor any other part of nearby to where I live. I took one or two pictures of the station and headed to the platform. By this point, it was becoming really cold.

It was about 8:30 or so by this point and the night was coming fast. I only had until midnight to make it Asakusa, my destination, before the lines all shut down.

I took a picture of the timetable, I don't know why. Probably because I was planning out my schedule in my head. I also took a picture of the platform at Fuchinobe, my usual train stop. The track on the left goes to Machida, the "big" part of my district of Tokyo, and the namesake of the whole Special Administrative Region. The track on the right goes to Yokohama (yes, the Yokohama). I took these pictures because I couldn't believe how deserted the train station was. Millions of people, about one half of Tokyo's 12 million people will go to a temple tonight to bring in the New Year, yet there was no one traveling by rail. I wonder if there was a massive carpool I was missing.

I took the train to Machida where I changed to the Odakyu line. Odakyu is a private line, whereas JR (previous pic) is public. To get to downtown Tokyo, the Skyscraper district, by JR takes going north seven stops or so then transferring to a eastbound train for 10 more. The Odakyu solves this problem by cutting across the system like the hypotenuse. Odakyu takes you directly from Machida to Shinjuku (the start of the Skyscraper district from our perspective) in about 5 stops on the Rapid and roughly 30 minutes.

I rode the Odakyu rapid to Shinjuku, listening to my iPod all the way. I arrived around 10 to once again switch trains to the Chuo Line, which cuts Tokyo in half. Shinjuku, by the way, is the busiest and largest train station in the world. The only superlative it does not meet is largest in size, which is owned by Grand Central in New York City. I tried to get a picture of the full scope of the size of the place, where I have gotten lost more than once, but I don't think I could do it justice.

In case you are wondering, that is not the wall in the background, just another train blocking your view of the never-ending train tracks.

After transferring yet again to the subway I finally made it Asakusa and my destination, Sensoji. Sensoji (浅草寺) is a temple devoted to Kannon, the goddess of mercy. Legend has it that the brothers Hinokuma Hamanari and Hinokuma Takenari fished a statue of the goddess out of the Sumida River in 628. They attempted to return it to the river but it kept returning. They took it as an omen and built a temple near the river and the site where the statue was recovered. Kannon, the Goddess, is a very important deity in Japanese Buddhism and her shrine is one of the most widely visited in Japan.

Before you can see the statue, though, you must first pass through the imposing Kaminari-mon, the Gate of Thunder. This gate, as the picture shows, is protected by two frightening individuals. On the left, Raiden (or Raijin) the Thunder God. On the right, Fujin, the Wind God. These two individuals are known as protectors of the Gods themselves and of the Kannon in particular. The massive paper lantern in the center serves to remind entrants of the thunderous nature of the guardians and the role they serve for her. To further add to the effect, the underside of the lantern hosts a large and intricate carving on wood of a dragon-spirit.

It may not have been the best idea to enter this particular shrine, heathen that I am.

Anyway I turned to walk down the long street that links the Kaminari-mon with the Temple itself so I could do what I went there to do, namely get in the HUGE line (that was growing by literally hundreds of people a minute) to make my way towards the shrine so I could make my New Year's prayer to the Goddess of Mercy herself.

I first had to cleanse myself, getting in the line to appear before the altar having not cleaned myself at the purifying spring would have been, shall we say, gauche. The police were out in full force at the temple. Which is understandable. Since 9/11, and previously the Tokyo subway sarin gas attacks, the Japanese have learned the value that extremely-high population gatherings like New Year's pose for terrorist strikes. The Japanese became more paranoid after 9/11 than we did in many respects. I never feared for my safety, but it was nice to see so many uniformed officers out at the gatherings.

I purified myself...again...at a strangely cool fountain, one that I am sure was not there last time I was at Sensoji about a year ago. It depicted a statue of a man encircled by a serpent of some type. None of the police officers seemed to know who he was, or they didn't want to take time out of surveying the crowd to pay attention to me (the latter is more likely).

The sake jars were also brought out for the event. For the uninitiated, Shinto holds the value of Sake highly, it even gets an honorific. Something about very potent rice alcohol makes the world go 'round I suppose. The Gods are said to enjoy it just as much as we do (well, not me of course, but some of you) so they are supposed to come down to inhabit the sake barrels on special occasions. Wealthy families like to pay for the construction and donation of personal family jars to patron shrines to both show off and add flavor and variety to the Gods choice of vacation barrels.

I can see it now, "We know you have a choice when selecting your sake jar for that brief respite from the daily grind, the celestial workload, the cosmic 9 to 5. We're glad you have chosen Nakamura's family sake barrel for your succor. We hope you'll inhabit us again in the near future. Thanks for flying."

After taking a few shots of the barrels it was time to get in line. Pictures of the line, you ask? No way, buddy. The line was growing by leaps and bounds every second I delayed, and if I wanted into the line before midnight and the bells start ringing, I would have to move quickly. I also figured most of y'all had seen a long line before and didn't need a photographic representation of it.

Once I made it to the altar though I followed standard procedure (Section 5, subsection 90, paragraph 4, line 6 of the Japanese Manual of Standards and Practices for Shinto and/or Buddhist Events) and offered up my prayer. The same one I offered to the local shrine in my home.

I also stopped by the smaller shrine to Raiden and offered the prayer yet again.

Once I was done with Asakusa I high-tailed it back home so I could get in before the trains stopped running, but I wanted to experience the toll of 108 bells. According to Japanese Buddhism, there are 108 worldly desires and they can be symbolically "broken" or driven away by the toll of a bell at a sacred shrine. I wanted to experience all 108, just take them in, and see what it felt like. I headed back to the same shrine at which I started but I was late and missed about 30 or 40 of them. As I approached the temple I discovered that they were letting pilgrims ring the bell. I hurriedly got in line for my chance to drive away a worldly desire. I tolled the bell thrice, once for this year, once for the previous year, and once for the year to come. (I don't know which worldly desire was mine to drive away but it may have been sloth, or good hair, or perhaps girl scout cookies). As I write this some three hours later they are still tolling the bell, waiting on the first sunrise of the New Year, where shouts of "Bonzai!" will fill the air I am confident.

Now, with literally dozens of greater shrines across Tokyo, why did I choose Sensoji? Most people go to Meiji-jingu, the shrine of Meiji the Great, Emperor of Japan and figurehead of the Meiji Restoration that modernized Japan. Many go to a Fire God's temple in Narita city, near the airport. More people head to Kyoto to the dozens of temples that are literally every block of that ancient city. So why Sensoji?

I chose Sensoji because it represented something I sincerely hope for in the New Year. Sensoji is a temple to mercy, kindness, and general warm-fuzzies. It is also a temple to power and protection in the incarnation of Raiden. I am a hard-liner on most issues, mostly because I need to be in the world in which we currently live. Living in a world of utopian idealism or socialist pipe dreams accomplishes nothing but weakening the country I love. I do hope for the day when we do not need militaries to defend us, do not need brave people to die for the freedoms many of us take for granted. Now, however, I know this is a violent world. I also know the world I hope for will never come. As long as we live in a violent world, Sensoji is the temple for me. It encapsulates my feelings exactly; a temple to peace and mercy with the backbone of strength and power. I prayed for my family and dear friends at the shrine to mercy, then prayed for the people in uniform and the civilians working hard to support them at the temple to Raiden.

Am I Shintoist? Definitely not. I figured, however, can't hurt anything. Makes me feel better too. (and I am pretty sure he is listening anyway)

Happy New Year.

CNN vs. Fox on Execution Day

2006-12-29T22:16:00.000-06:00

As news broke of the death by hanging of former Iraqi Dictator and Democrat's best friend...I mean, someone the democrats wanted the world rid of just as badly as we Republicans did Saddam Hussein I broke my normal policy and opened up CNN as well.

A few striking differences between the ways the completely unbiased CNN and that bastion of biased Republican-bedfellow FoxNews reported the same stories.

On CNN: "Tornado scare sends Bush running for cover"
On FoxNews: ""Bush seeks shelter during tornado alert."
On CNN the headline gives the image of a frightened Bush running with all his speed to a shelter, the FoxNews report is the truth, with no meaning or context attached to the story. The Fox story simply tells the truth, the CNN one embellishes.

On CNN: "Protests, Celebrations" marking Saddam's execution. Only problem is, the pictures showed 1 (ONE) protest, and three celebrations. CNN found it necessary, however, to put "protest" at the front of the story. Call me, well, normal, but shouldn't the headline be either in 1) Alphabetical order or 2) in order of precedence of each separate topic?

Just a few disjointed thoughts I had directed towards CNN, glad to know it still doesn't understand why it is losing viewers.

Look who will be in charge of Congress now...

2006-11-14T00:36:00.000-06:00

Well, I was wrong.
Very, very wrong.
We lost Congress completely. This is definitely what I would call "the worst case scenario" I outlined in my last blog entry. There are of course good things to go with the bad. The good is that now the Republicans can get back to their roots and stop spending like drunken Democrats. They can also get their collective spines together and go full-force supporting the war in Iraq and the policies against North Korea and Iran. If these two regimes think for a second that Democrats will weaken us (which they inevitably will) they will take full advantage of it.

Contrary to popular belief, we did not lose the election because of Iraq, we lost it because we stopped ruling like Republicans. Look at the Democratic candidates ran in the last election. The DCCC and the DSCC cherry-picked conservative Democrats to run in conservative districts. In some cases, much to my chagrin, they were more conservative than the Republicans they replaced. While I am optimistic that this will mean deadlock and friction within the Democratic caucus, I also realize that the Democrats realized that they can't continue to run towards the left in election time (and here I was enjoying their stinging defeats). They learned their lesson, so kudos to their campaign strategists. Also, the media-appointed poster-boy for the "get out of Iraq now" caucus LOST in Connecticut to one of the most staunchly pro-war candidates, Joe Lieberman. The referendum on Iraq appears to have failed with the anti-war candidates. The Democrats want you to believe that it was an Iraq referendum, but exit polls (which show, among other things, that many self-proclaimed conservatives who normally vote chose not to on this election, for obvious reasons) show otherwise. Look at the growth of Libertarian voters this last cycle, they were way up from previous elections. The reason? Conservatives going to the polls to vote for the Libertarians instead of the mainstream Republican candidate.

Now on to the very bad.

The old guard in the Democratic party, people like Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers are now in line to become the leaders of committees. Unlike their conservative candidates to win office, these people are as anti-military and stuck on stupid as their Vietnam predecessors. Look at who will chair the Committee on Intelligence now. One Alcee Hastings. Mr. Hastings served as a judge in Florida until he was impeached and removed by the United States Congress for agreeing to accept bribes from a defendant's family and associates in exchange for a mistrial and refusal to hear the case again. He was going to let two defendants go free on a $150,000 bribe and now the Democrats will put him in charge of the committee on Intelligence. Do you think he would sell out his country? Hmm, let us look at his record...

Next up is Dennis Kucinich. Mr. Kucinich was the ranking member of the Subcommittee on National Security, and he is now in-line to become the new leader. Rep. Kucinich is one of those who cannot quite get himself to believe that the US has a right to a military, he also wants to further delude our power base by creating an Orwellian-named and completely unnecessary "Department of Peace" which will....create peace, we assume. No word yet on how he will get Iran, North Korea, the Sudan, or various other autocratic states around the world to become more peaceful, but hey, we'll have a Secretary of it. The Democratic victory puts this man in charge of one of the most powerful committees in wartime, and he will most likely see to it that important military funding is denied (his voting record shows no signs of an attitude change so far). Departments of Plenty and Truth to come soon.

These two committee chairmanships are not all, but they are a good indicator of the direction we can expect our newly elected Congress to take. I just hope that the President has the capability and the stomach to veto their dangerous ideas before they become law, or that he can force through the most important parts of our wartime agenda.

I respect the public's decision, and I agree that the Republicans lost base and lost their way. I don't think that decision was right. Republicans didn't deserve to win, but Democrats always deserve to lose.

Election Day Thoughts

2006-11-07T03:32:00.000-06:00

Election Day, what I live for.

I know this will be a close race, but I am optimistic. First and foremost, I do not believe the Republicans will lose the US House of Representatives nor will they lose the US Senate. The reasons for this are varied, there is the Tennessee Senate Race where Harold Ford, scion of the state political family, is beginning to tread behind Corker who, as mayor of Chattanooga, earned a reputation as the "anti-Kucinich", a reference to Dennis Kucinich, the former mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, who during his tenure bankrupted the city on social projects and failed contracts, and then bragged about it. Corker, on the other hand, rebuilt Chatanooga's finances and is now running for the US Senate. The Democrats have tried turning the Tennessee Senate race into a bellwether on control of the Senate, but that bell isn't ringing quite so well as they had hoped. Harold Ford wants to be the Barak Obama of Tennessee, the problem is, like Obama, he hasn't done a thing but be elected to office. Call me old fashioned, but I still stick to the old adage that people should do something before ending up in Congress.

Next is the US House. Foxnews.com, that bastion of right-wing evil, is reporting that the Dems are leading the GOP 13% in polls (evil right-wingers, they must be using the poll to get more Republicans out to the polls to beat the Democrats! It proves they are biased). If you look at the poll data, however, you see that they polled 13-16% (spread) more registered Democrats than Republicans. I can't imagine how the margins ended up as they did, can you?

Thankfully, nationwide polls do not show anything in House races. US Representatives are not elected at large by the nation, they are elected in individual constituencies around the country. It doesn't matter one iota how popular Rep. Charles Rangel is in Brooklyn, or the margin by which he wins, he isn't elected in Louisiana. So polling in New York to determine the nationwide popular support of the GOP is disingenuous.

We, by that I mean the GOP, will lose seats in the House. It is going to happen. Thing is, we deserve it. We have not been true to principle on cutting spending, reigning in illegal immigration, nor fighting for individual rights. The GOP doesn't deserve a landslide, but the Democrats do not deserve to win anything for any reason. I want the GOP to remain in control, and I believe it will happen, but it will be close. A Democratic victory means an American-loathing love-fest with Europe and our enemies, and I will never uphold or embrace weakness in the face of our enemies as a virtue. NEVER.

My hope is that this election will put the GOP back on the right track, where it should be. Maybe it will serve as a wakeup call to the leadership that we need to get back on the right track politically or we risk alienating the base.

Best case scenario, the GOP maintains control of both houses, learns it lesson, and moves on. The Democrats continue to self-destruct as a party that has no message, no direction, no raison d'tre. If the Demo-gogues cannot regain power with the President as seemingly unpopular as he is, with their most far-left message to date, what can they do? Pack up their bags and go home? We can only hope...but then again, people like Comrade Pelosi need jobs because bellicose rhetoric that borders on the hysterics doesn't cut it in the real world job market.

Worst case scenario, the Demos win big. Say goodbye to the economy, because those evil GOP tax cuts that make the very rich pay 66% of their total income in taxes as opposed to 67% has to go. Say goodbye to strength on the world stage, it alienates our enemies, and no one wants that. Say goodbye to military morale. If the Democrats retake Congress the leader of the subcommittee on National Security will be Dennis Kucinich, a man whose overriding concern in life is to create a Department of Peace with funds siphoned from the Defense Department. Raise your hands if you want that guy in charge of the committee on National Security. (Can you see the questionnaire for that position? "If you want to be the Chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, please list all the ways you would like to see it undermined...") Say adios to our intimidation factor. Since the invasion of Iraq (which failed) Libya admitted developing weapons of mass destruction with North Korea (how do you think we found out?) and stopped, turning over all of their research on the subject. Saudi Arabia had democratic elections for an advisory body to the monarch (one of the world's few absolute monarchies had elections, in the Middle East, no less), and Syria pulled out of Lebanon.
Do you know what the single, overriding reason given was for this change of affairs? Middle Eastern intimidation because with the invasion of Iraq they decided they should play nice with us. The Demo-gogues want to undo all of that! "Sorry guys, we didn't mean to intimidate you like that. Sorry Libya, here's the weapons back, sorry Saudi Arabia, go ahead and disband the advisory council, our bad Syria, invade Lebanon again, our threats are meaningless." Democrats stand for liberty as long as it requires no actual effort (and the military cannot get any credit).

All of that will disappear when the Democrats retake power and begin to undermine us officially. The destruction of so many years of effort, so many lives lost to the purpose, is desirable so long as it hurts President Bush.

Good luck Mr. President, good luck Congress, we need you in control now more than ever.

On Atheism and the Scientific Method

2006-10-31T02:39:00.000-06:00

Recently I have been in an internal discourse on the nature of God and reality. Specifically, when I was having discussions with avowed atheists on the nature of their belief structure. One common response to my inquiries was that they do not believe in God because they believe "in Science". Since "Science" cannot decide for itself what it believes, and using the all-consuming term "Science" is intellectually dishonest, I decided to delve further. Through my discussions and internal monologue I came to a few conclusions:

1. Atheism is not scientific
2. Atheism requires the same sense of "faith" it derides in theism
3. Atheism cannot be held as a honest, tenable position in a direct discussion vis-a-vis the Scientific method.

The best thing to begin this discourse is through a definition of "atheism" and "theism". I am not grouping agnosticism in with atheism, nor am I grouping strict theism in with agnosticism. I am dealing with absolutes here, because delving into the gray areas would consume too much space and would likely lead me to an early grave.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, atheism is:

Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.
The doctrine that there is no God or gods.

Whereas according to the same dictionary, theism is:

Belief in the existence of a god or gods, especially belief in a personal God as creator and ruler of the world.

Now that the obligatory definitions are out of the way, I will move on to the crux of my argument. First, that Atheism is not scientifically valid.
The Scientific Method is loosely defined as a method whereas a problem is identified, relevant data are gathered, a hypothesis is formed, and that hypothesis is empirically tested. (Emphasis is mine). The empirical requirement states that the hypothesis must be tested by experiment with firsthand observation.

God, and theism, by their very nature are unprovable with empirical data. Science cannot measure whether or not a god or gods exist, and yet many atheists simply choose to believe that he does not exist, and then make the leap in logic that because they choose to believe he does not exist, that position is scientific. Furthermore, scientists formulate hypotheses as to the nature of the universe, life, and death in general and even though those hypotheses are absolutely unprovable by empirical data, they portray those beliefs as fact and scientific. Take, for example, the creation theory of the "big bang". Scientists believe that a mass implosion of cosmic materials was responsible for the birth of the universe, and that theory is supported by data that can be linked to that theory, but not absolutely linked to that idea. They then choose to believe that event occurred without outside "prime movers" with unprovable data.
I am, of course, not saying that the big bang theory is incorrect, nor will I say it is correct, because I don't know. When I watched the Kansas debate between "intelligent design" and "evolution" I had to raise an eyebrow in interest, both sides were arguing completely unprovable positions. They were likewise convinced that their position was the most apt to explain the phenomena. We can see, and prove by empirical data, that evolution occurs. Those species that are most apt to survive, survive. Those traits that are most beneficial to survival tend (no absolutes) to be passed on to the next generation and alter the species. What we have not seen is any species turn into any other. Period.
As you have probably guessed I am not saying that transformational evolution does not happen, I am saying that there is no evidence of it, and just because intra-species evolution occurs does not mean you can make a logical leap to trans-species evolution. There is evidence for one, provable evidence. There is no empirical data for trans-species evolution. Yet those scientists that choose to embrace the latter idea are simply choosing to believe in it, and supporting their belief with doctrines of faith they have renamed "supporting evidence".

Some atheists may counter with the notion that there may be no evidence for trans-species evolution, but it is more likely that evolution occurred than an all-powerful creator deity fashioned us and built our genetic code from the ground up. My answer, "Why?" Why is an utterly unprovable situation superior to another absolutely unprovable position? You may, once again, choose to believe one is superior, but you have not changed the fact that the positions are empirically impossible to test.

Science has a whole host of other notions that are empircially suspect but nonetheless are held to be scientific "fact". My personal favorite is the singularity at the center of a black hole. Because black holes seem to defy the notions of space-time like the third law of motion, "energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed." This is empirically testable and provable. However, at the center of a black hole there is believed to be an event in space time referred to as a singularity. A singularity is an event in space time where the laws of physics no longer apply. That's right, the laws of physics that bind and move the universe cease to exist at the end of a black hole. Why must this point exist? Because every attempt to explain this and other phenomena leads to another paradox where, for example, planets can't exist or there must be 45 dimensions (hyperbole, but effective). Since nothing can escape a black hole's event horizon there must be some point where space becomes infinitely dense and infinitely curved. I consider theoretical physics to be a hobby but since that's not what you are reading this for, I will move on. If most theories of black holes are correct, it is impossible to know what is at the center of the black hole since nothing can escape, ergo it is impossible to know what is there. Yet because of "observations" scientists make using (very sophisticated) instruments and laws of physics (which cease to exist at the center of the hole, anyway) they choose to believe that this event exists, pending further review.
Once again, the point, choice of belief over provable belief. Science "believes" in all manner of events, ideas, theories, and causes without proof to support them. It also considers its ideas superior to religion on the grounds that religion is "myth". Use of that term is a ad hominem, and logically fallacious. As I have demonstrated previously just because you can't prove it doesn't make it wrong, it just makes it open to choice and interpretation, like all manner of scientific theories.

I figure that what annoys hard-core atheists the most is that science cannot disprove God or theism in general, despite efforts. They attempt to portray each new advancement in medicine or science as a "nail in the coffin" yet the coffin is nowhere to be found and the pallbearers are in church. Despite all their efforts, they simply cannot prove that God does not exist, that he or she or it is not responsible for the gift of human reason or life in general.

You can choose to believe there is no God and you will be called "enlightened". Choose to believe there is no such thing as "emotion" and you will be ridiculed. Try this one out: Tell an atheist that you do not believe in emotions. They will inevitably say that's ridiculous. Follow these logical steps:

Science cannot prove that love, fear, or anger exist
You can see the results of these things, people cry, or laugh, or spend moments holding one another
The person could not feel anything at all, but rather be emulating things he saw his parents do
Where did his parents learn to do this? At one point did it become evolutionarily expedient to grow so angry that you lose control? Who was the first person to be angry, or happy, or sad? How did he or she know what it was?
If we hook up a person to an EEG and see increased brain activity in certain parts of the brain when someone is in love, or cries, or is furious.
If we hook up an EEG to a person praying we see increased brain activity in certain parts of the brain when we pray.
Demand that they explain why outward signs of anger (fury, rage, etc) coupled with brain activity prove emotions exist while outward signs of faith, like compassion, love, and feelings of peace coupled with increased brain activity do not prove that God exists.

The obvious response to this is that those events prove prayer exists, not necessarily God. But if prayer exists, apart from God, what is it for? Is prayer an emotion? Certainly not. The point is not to prove that God exists, because that is impossible. Rather our goal is to show that science and the scientific method take many things for granted that cannot be absolutely proven by their own standards. Yet, they choose to believe in emotion, and deride the existence of God, though there is no solid empirical proof for either.

A few notes. First, I am not a Christian nor am I any other religion. My religious beliefs are very complicated, I consider myself "Deistic" in overall persuasion though there are elements I believe in, or have seen, that defy a truly deistic stance. I absolutely am not a Christian or an evangelical, but I have a duty to academically and scholastically honest. I get very, very tired of listening to the so-called enlightened among us who assume that because they are atheists or they bash "organized religion" they are somehow elite and more intelligent than us. In every instance I have used this series of arguments, I have never left a man standing. Normally, they have no reactions, other than to point out that I have still not proven the existence of God. I usually retort that it is not my job to prove that, because it cannot be proven, my job is to make you accept that your decision to choose not to believe in God is not more intelligent than my decision to believe in one. Frankly, if you are an atheist you are making an absolute statement with no evidence (There is no God and I do not believe in one) whereas all I have to do is choose to believe in a deity with evidence that not believing in one is unscientific (I choose to believe in a God though I do not know if one exists).

Abraham Lincoln and the Camel Can-Can

2006-10-12T02:42:00.000-05:00

Today in my Japanese Modern History class we watched a brief video in Japanese on how modern Japanese perceive their world. We watched the video and it was somewhat reminiscent of the lighter History Channel specials which use a less serious approach to their subject (but that is Japanese television over all, mostly, and it is often so bad that it is unwatchable). The video was a nationally conducted poll on whom the Japanese consider their favorite 100 historical figures.

For most of the people listed the cartoon-like scoreboard would flash the name and then move on to the next person in the list. It would occasionally stop to highlight important moments or elaborate on people who were not Japanese figures with which the Japanese audience may not be familiar. Oddly enough one of the Japanese favorite historical figures was none other than vilified wartime President and now national hero Abraham Lincoln, one of the people for whom I have the most respect. I was, therefore, very interested to see what this special had to say about him.

When it began the mini-biography of Abraham Lincoln it cut to an actor portraying Lincoln...a short Japanese guy with no facial hair looking pensive and strolling back and forth in what was supposed to be the Oval Office (though the Oval Office hadn't been built yet, but I will forgive this minor transgression). Don't get me wrong, the actor wasn't bad, it was just very, very odd to see a short Japanese actor portraying the tall and lanky, and very Caucasian President Lincoln. From what I could tell, he was tall for a Japanese man but still short by Western standards.

As the mini-biography covered the Civil War, his birth, his life, his short stint in Congress, and his assassination it said it would cover, using the actors, one of the most singularly important events in his life. Since the whole video was in Japanese, with no English, I was ecstatic. I thought "How cool is this? To see Lincoln give the Gettysburg Address in Japanese? Or maybe they will show his second inaugural..."

I apparently gave the Japanese too much credit, because if there was one thing I have learned since living here, it is that Japanese television is horrible and they will always go to the most ridiculous, useless, irrelevant thing and use cartoony characters and egregious overacting. I would like you to guess, dear reader, what part of his life the Japanese special decided to portray as one of the seminal events in the life of the Sixteenth President...

His decision to grow a beard.

Yes, that's right. The singular most important event in the life of President Lincoln was not his eloquent call for reunification and an end to bloodshed, his wit and wisdom, nor his core principles as delivered on the battlefields of America. The skit began with Lincoln sitting as his desk rubbing his naked chin and talking to himself. He then begins to bang on the desk shouting about how boring he is. Then, his mother or first girlfriend or something (I was too dumfounded to notice) comes in and tells him he needs an image change, perhaps a beard? A short scene change later, Japanese Lincoln (Aburahamu Rincorin?) is stroking his new beard with confidence when the caption flashes something to the effect of "Lincoln's wife was insane". Mary Todd storms into the room, with a giant pair of scissors, comically huge, and begins to beat Lincoln mercilessly with them. In the next scene Lincoln is once again contemplating the newfound glory that is his beard when Mary Todd storms into the room, as she is want to do, and begins dancing behind Lincoln while periodically flashing her skirt to show her undies. She then proceeds to do some kind of utterly indescribable dance that resembles the Can-can while shouting, in Japanese, at the top of her lungs "I'm a camel, I'm a camel..."

Now I know why the Japanese inevitably made a pilgrimage to the Lincoln Memorial in DC when I worked there, they thought it was the US memorial to His Excellency the Nutcase-in-Chief and his wife doing the camel can-can.

I miss Battlestar Galactica....

The Slow Descent of Freedom in Russia

2006-10-10T11:16:00.000-05:00

This week independent journalism weeps for Anna Politkovskaya, a famous, some would say infamous, critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Ms. Politkovskaya was leaving her apartment in Moscow on Saturday she was murdered, execution style, and left for dead. It is believed she died immediately, and also that assassination was the motive as she was not robbed. There was one motive in her shooting, silence.

I am sure most of you know the story. I of course take special notice because as a political scientist and a fierce Conservative, I know how important media freedom is. Even though I grow angry at the attempts of mainstream American journalism's attempts to cast itself as a independent, risk-taking outfit that objectively reports the news, all too eager to tell us how it lives under the shadow of an apparent attempt by our President to silence, intimidate, and stifle it, I do not support nor do I condone state-owned media or a lack of competition in the marketplace of ideas.

In the United States there are competing ideologies available in the news market, whether you be left, right, center, or somewhere in the 60's where communism is still a good idea and the Soviets are winning the Cold War. In modern Russia, much like the Soviet Union before it, that freedom we so take for granted is under attack, daily. The murder of Ms. Anna Politkovskaya is but one piece of an overall narrative to this fact.

Anna Politkovskaya's crime, you see, is she was one of the harshest critics of President Vladimir Putin's campaign in Chechnya, the breakaway rebel state within Russia's sphere of influence. The insurrection has waged for decades now, and the accounts of atrocities, verifiable atrocities, by both sides are widely regarded as legitimate. Russia is found of chemical nerve-gas attacks on civilians believed to be harboring Chechen rebels, while the Chechens are often cited for the use of explosives hidden along roadsides, snipers, and suicide attacks. The government of Chechnya, currently, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Moscow. As such, no news gets in or out of the breakaway republic without the approval of a battalion of Russian censors, and anything deemed to upset morale, give away Russian positions or plans, or cast a negative light on Putin's operation is immediately censored and scrubbed.

Ms. Politkovskaya, despite warnings, continued to write and defy the bans imposed on her work by the government, she continued to criticize Putin for his usurpation of power (among President Putin's actions; he reorganized the government system so that all territorial governors are directly appointed by him, no longer elected, and the Duma, Russia's parliament, is bypassed completely; his rubber-stamp Duma passed Constitutional amendments removing the term-limitation provisions of his office and extending the term to seven years; he has already begun sanctioning statues of himself to be built around Moscow, ala Josef Stalin; and he has shut down most every independent newspaper in Russia on the grounds of preserving harmony within the new system).
President and former KGB Colonel Putin is not a suspect in the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, nor would he ever be, but it would be no small matter for him to order her murder. Many of his former KGB associates are now operatives in the renamed, but just as sinister, Federal Security Service.

What does this have to do, at the start, with President Bush and the American media? Quite simple, reporters in Russia braving life or death scenarios to report on the collapse of the democratic system around them under an aspiring autocrat are murdered; Ms. Politkovskaya is the twelfth such victim. For braving the consequences, she was murdered.

The American media wallows in its own self-importance. The American media routinely accuses the President of the United States of creating a culture of fear and intimidation in order to get them to cease reporting on his [choose one: failed policies; disastrous war; usurpation of constitutional rights; negative portrayals of his administration' etc]. The only problem is, they can't actually cite one example or name on instance of an American reporter exercising his or her rights under the First Amendment and being detained, questioned, imprisoned, or murdered. President Bush is fighting multiple domestic and foreign wars to secure the rights those self-righteous reporters accuse him of violating. Never has the President stated his belief and never has he ordered a reporter silences, even though the left-wing rags are almost a constant harangue of vicious assaults and vitriolic slander. Newspapers cry "censorship" when the President won't allow them to disclose troop movements, while they leak classified statements on terrorist-surveillance programs which are promptly received and used by our enemies to adjust their tactics. Even when the New York Times committed treason in the open forum there were no arrests, no detainments, no questionings. The culture of fear these high-minded useful fools find themselves in is one where they watch their subscription numbers plummet. The President would certainly have been within his rights to have called the entire editorial board of the New York Times before the Federal Court to answer for why they saw fit to publish classified data that they do not even deny was aiding the enemy, but he didn't. If this offense, so grave and so despicable did not get them in trouble then I ask you, what possible event could they draw upon to justify their near constant statements on their intimidation by the President? Simply, they have none.
The American media cowers behind the US military and the freedoms it protects, all the while publishing information that aids their enemies. They cry "censorship" when they are denied entrance to a White House dinner, while real journalists are murdered in Russia for fighting for democracy. They claim they are intimidated and kept in the dark, yet they cannot prove it and damn you for calling them on it.

I don't care in the slightest what Anna Politkovskaya's political views were. I don't care if she hated my President or my country, all that matters to me is that she died under the freedoms that our media hides behind to commit treason and advance a narrow political agenda of weakness and submission.

Anna Politkovskaya died for freedom; she was a soldier in the fight for democracy in her own country. Our media considers itself inconvenienced when it has to be neutral towards its own country's survival.

Castro, Chavez, and Citgo Petroleum (CCCP)

2006-08-13T02:52:00.000-05:00

Fidel Castro may be dead, dying, or in a state of recovery. His current situation is a mystery. I think fondly of his upcoming demise, and I am not ashamed of it. The dictator of Cuba has long been a monster, torturing dissidents, imprisoning democratic activists, and impoverishing his subjects through the anthropophagic disease that is Communism. Only at his death can Cuba be freed, and the Cubans, to their credit, will be the ones to do it.

Unfortunately, as we all know (except professors) even as Cubans rise up to overthrow the system that for so long has made them nothing more than human resources (to be harvested, processed, and discarded as such) with Fidel's passing we will continue to hear for years on end about how great the Cuban medical system was and how it is being destroyed by Capitalism. Later, as Cubans begin to rebuild their country and all of God's little Leftists make pilgrimages to his tomb in Havana and see the state of the country, they will inevitably attribute the surroundings to the recent effects of the capitalist transition, or to the American embargo, or to President Bush (the latter is inevitable in almost all things).

Do not despair, oh ye of the left, for there is hope! There is a shining savior upon the horizon! Look southward, dear fellow travelers and behold! Hugo Chavez of Venezuela will take you into his bosom.

The near orgasmic love that Liberals around the world have for Hugo Chavez almost guarantees he will take Castro's status once he dies, as the outpost of opposition to the United States in our hemisphere. Chavez has been working on this for some time with mixed results, although on the point scale for effort he earns an A+. The American media already has begun referring to him as a "humanitarian" whose "populist" message infuriates Washington. That's right, damn rights of the people are infringing on the President's plan to starve us all in the freezing dark.

This month Hugo Chavez began his reelection campaign in Caracas. Although he has already served two terms he got around that annoying little requirement by having the Supreme Court (which he dissolved and replaced with his own appointees) decide that since Venezuela was under a different Constitution at the time, which Chavez has had rewritten, he was not bound by the Constitution's requirements. The term of the President has been increased to six-years and has been given almost unilateral control over all appointments and dismissals. He is also almost guaranteed victory by a clever manipulation of the country's voting system. The Venezuelan Election Commission was dissolved and replaced with Chavez supporters, much like the Supreme Court, and the principle of the Australian/Secret Ballot has been for the most part removed. During the last election it was quietly made known that anyone who was a government employee who voted against Chavez would lose their job and benefits (under the guise of maintaining solidarity within the "revolutionary government") also, anyone who voted against Chavez and had a job with a company with a government contract would lose said contracts.

Well, so Chavez is consolidating power, the media is still a threat, right? Nope. Hugo Chavez, to the ecstatic response of participants on the BBC World Forum, shut down all independent news sources. The President made the bold claim that Venezuelans were "finally freeing themselves from the tyranny of corporate media" instead replaced by the tyranny of state controlled media...but at least no one is making money? The socialist credo of egalitarian misery once again bubbles to the surface.

How will American liberals respond? Well, Chavez is ready. He has outdone Castro, if that is possible, by the demagogic promise of cheap heating oil to American families during the winter. The Bronx lovingly took in the offer. As the cheap dumped oil made its way through the Northeast as a major propaganda coup for Chavez he seated himself in a nice position, residents will remember that it was CITGO, now Chavez's personal piggybank, that provided them with the oil and it will help to enrich the Charlatan of Caracas in the future.

What does the future hold? That is uncertain. Chavez is growing increasingly authoritarian atop the world's fifth largest oil supply. Will he use his increasingly authoritarian position to sponsor terrorism? Probably not in the United States, he needs our money. But he could, and would, use his windfall profits to support leftist guerilla groups seeking to bring down nascent democracies in his hemisphere. Venezuela’s dumping of cheap oil in the short term could seriously damage the American oil industry, which contrary to the beliefs of Howard Dean, are already operating to their best ability to bring cheap market-priced oil into our gas tanks. After the dumping on the market is complete CITGO could find itself in a very nice position as the rest of the oil industry struggles to adapt. Any attempts by the US to stop the dumping on our markets would be vociferously opposed on the pages of the New York Times and the Halls of Congress, as the “populist” message would be that the President wants to enrich his oil buddies off the backs of the proverbial working poor. There is also the possibility that any number of bands of leftist guerillas funded by the Chavez regime would eventually begin wagging the dog, with Chavez unable to influence their scope of operations. All in all, Chavez poses a danger to the American economy, our national security, and our energy resources.

Chavez wants to be the new Castro in the Americas, a recognized father figure of socialism. Chavez has a powerful resource to fund his revolution, though, something that Castro never had. And so long as we are energy dependent on outside sources we are going to assist him in doing it.

Implosion or Realignment?

2006-08-09T05:27:00.000-05:00

Last night incumbent Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman lost by about 10,000 votes in the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont, a fiercely anti-war candidate who arranged his entire campaign around Senator Lieberman's cardinal sin, supporting the President of the United States in a time of war.

We are being told by the Democratic establishment that this shows signs of reinvigorating the Democratic Party, bringing the message of the people to the White House, letting those Republicans know just how angry America is with Republicans and the President leading the country into war. Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont even went so far as to say that the Republicans should notice they have "blood in the water".

Personally, I do not know how the Democrats can be celebrating, they have basically just announced loud and clear that anyone within their party who supports the war on terrorism is a persona non grata. Senator Lieberman was the party's nominee for Vice President in 2000 and a contender for the presidential nomination in 2004, a much respected one at that. In less than 6 years Senator Lieberman has gone from golden boy of the Democratic caucus to disgrace and exile from the party's nomination list.

The Democrats' folly goes deeper still. Because a fiercely anti-war candidate has won a primary in a northeastern state we are supposed to believe the Americans around the country will be voting their Republican congressmen out of office and electing in a slew of anti-war Democrats. Huh? Both Senators from Connecticut are Democrats, and two of the state's five Congressman are Democrats. According to the elections commission within Connecticut, thousands of independents switched their affiliation from Independent to Democrat in order to vote in the primary. It is entirely possible that a group of fringe Liberal....I mean, "centrists", came to the conclusion that they wanted someone who shares their views on protecting American sovereignty and security, namely that we shouldn't, and switched to vote for their golden boy in the form of Mister Lamont.

Senator Lieberman, if he stays true to his word, will now run as an Independent. This has the potential of fracturing the Democratic vote between Lamont and Lieberman. Even if the vote is not fractured enough to allow the Republican Candidate to win (likely) there will be still be a campaign in the Constitution State on the meaning of war in an election cycle. For his part, Lamont will run on his platform of anti-war hysterics, while Lieberman will run on his record. Will voters in the Arsenal State vote to retain a man who has for years represented them admirably, or will they fall to the siren's song of a candidate who has no policy priorities for his state than a message to the President that Connecticut opposes the war on terrorism? Like single-issue parties, the fringe parties that focus on one, and only one issue in any given election year, Lamont's zealousness could be his undoing if the voters bypass the honeymoon period and realize that Lamont cannot deliver on anything except a regurgitation of left-wing anti-war tirades.

I personally do not know who to root for within the Democratic Party. If Lamont wins, my hope would be that the public would see how dangerous a force they are in American security, which would allow Republicans to run on the platform that Democrats cannot and should not be trusted with American security [very true] since their overriding goal seems to be to weaken American resolve during wartime. If Lieberman wins, it means that the Democratic Party could not muster the willpower to even stand and deliver on how they actually feel. The Democratic Party officially opposes the war in word and deed, and after they refused to officially assist Lieberman’s campaign or endorse him even though he was their party's nominee for Vice-President six years ago he still manages to win despite them, meaning the national party could not even muster the ability to mobilize their anti-war base around their supposedly most important issue.

It should be interesting to watch.

How can this be?

2006-06-06T01:47:00.000-05:00

I don't understand it, I am flabbergasted. I simply cannot fathom how this is occurring...
Canada has militant Islamic terrorists? They are home grown? They have had no contact with America or the other targets of Islamic extremism?

How is this possible? Canada has no troops in Iraq, it publicly denounced the United States for going in, in fact. The administration of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his successor, Paul Martin, worked tirelessly and publicly to make sure how shocked and appalled Canada was with the brutality and illegitimacy of the United States and coalition invaders. Canada is a self-described "moral superpower" who does not resort to force to engage enemies, it uses its superior linguistic and diplomatic skills to avert the aggression Canada's ignorant neighbor to the south resorts to. All in all, how can Canada be a target of these plans?

It is almost as if the liberation of Iraq is not the reason there is terrorism in the world, or that Western nations are targeted simply by virtue of being Western nations...I mean, I know it sounds crazy and illogical, nigh impossible even, that it could be that Western Countries do not create terrorism by attempting to liberate the oppressed and engaging in military action in self defense, which I know has to be the real reason. Terrorists are created by the aggressive imperialism of the United States. Countries that don't engage in such brutality, like Canada, will never be the target of such attacks of course....

Unless, of course, terrorism is about international power and not about the war in Iraq...which can't be the case...

Can it?

Everything I can get my hands on

2006-05-27T08:28:00.000-05:00

Recently I have begun reading everything and anything I can get my hands on about the DPRK (North Korea). The Kinokuniya bookstore nearby in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan has many floors and one devoted to foreign books, as is my custom, I navigate unfailingly to the politics section.

The Section on regionalism is outstanding, books by every conceivable persuasion covering every geopolitical hotspot on Earth. Since I discovered all of the books about North Korea I have once again found myself falling into the old bookstore trap: The bookstore wants my money, and I am more than willing to give it to them.

I have spent more than $350 there on books and resources about North Korea, and I would not be surprised if overall I had spent in the $500 range. The selection is just too good to pass up, and if I ever get tired of reading about Kim Jong-il (or "that loatheable pygmy" as President Bush calls him) I can always move on to something else. The problem is that there is little else going on that is as interesting as the North Korean situation. After I have exhausted the books on North Korea there will be little left on modern, interesting East Asian politics for me to read. There are books on the subject, of course, which I absolutely refuse to read. These works state, among other things, that North Korea only brutalizes its people and commits wholesale slaughter of activists for religious and personal freedom because of the United States. North Korea is struggling against American power and imperialism, you see, and therefore it is only natural that it would starve dissenters while the leadership lives in gluttonous luxury. Isn’t the US just awful? To my knowledge Noam Chomsky hasn't written on the subject yet, but if he ever does, expect it to be equally as vacuous and comical.

The problem is, and I hate to even say this as it sounds too simplistic to be accurate, that Asia has become boring. China has long-ago given up all but the police-state veneer of communism in favor of authoritarian market reforms, South Korea is a vibrant modern state, Japan is on the heels of a full-scale economic revival from the downturn of a few years past, and Taiwan is staying under the radar. In short, North Korea is the only interesting place among the major players in East Asia right now and it is only interesting because it is a horrible, authoritarian wasteland where downright comical propaganda attempts to extol the virtues of its equally despicable "dear leader".

Also as time has passed here in Japan, I have become convinced that I am ready to switch my focus from Japan to North Korea. I did not come upon this thought without reflection, though, and I confided in my academic advisor my worry that once I specialized in North Korea it was entirely possible that the regime would collapse, South Korea would absorb it, and I would be out of a job. "Not so," said he, "if that happens the US will be rebuilding North Korea and they will need you as much if not even more."

My desire to even study North Korea right now is equally as emotion based as it is reason based. After what I have seen, heard, and read about North Korea, I want to be a part of destroying the regime. I do. I want to play a role, no matter how small, in tearing down the machinery of the state which for so long has starved its citizens and murdered dissenters. The regime has crushed the legs of political activists, chained twelve men into a foundry and had liquid iron poured onto them for refusing to repudiate faith or heaven, and executed a mother who cried as she watched her sons torture and execution because, since she was crying, she obviously felt his death was undeserved and she was therefore a traitor.

I have already begun studying Hangul, the native Korean script, and hopefully I will more time to work on it over the summer. Right now I am still studying Japanese and will continue to do so in the hope that eventually I can become competent and move on to other areas of national security.

The most useful phrases in Japanese

2006-05-26T07:13:00.000-05:00

It is a well-known fact among the foreigners residing in Japan that the Japanese assume no foreigners know their language, leading to them, among other things, talking about the fat foreigner or the malodorous American literally right next to you. A side effect of this is that if you show that you know even a little Japanese, they immediately assume you know the entire language. So when I approach a convenience store clerk or a waiter and ask for something in Japanese, I have the accent close enough and those particular phrases well enough that they will begin chatting away or asking you very specific questions that you cannot get out of with a simple "maybe" or "I guess so" (Grammatically it does not make sense).

Because of this obviously problematic issue, most foreigners quickly learn the two phrases that are infinitely helpful in dealing with the Japanese world.

First: "Sumimasen", this transliterates as "Excuse me; pardon me, sorry, I'm cutting in front, please," and in some circumstances "thank you". This phrase is so versatile that it allows you to move among people easily, call someone's attention, or politely make yourself known if you happen to need anything.

Second: "Kekkou Desu", this is literally "I'm fine" but means "No thanks". This is quite possibly the single most useful phrase ever invented by anyone ever. At a restaurant, or a convenience store, or the bus station, or anywhere outside your own home, when you approach any of these people, or they approach you, and in your very limited capacity ask for something or check out, all you must do is listen passively for the sentence final particle "ka". "Ka" as a sentence final particle is an enunciated question mark, so when you hear "ka" you can immediately stop "hai"ing your way through the exchange and look to see what they mean. If they are holding anything, pointing to anything, or looking attentively at anything, they are asking you if you want something done or are in need of anything else. If you reply with "kekkou desu" this politely says "no thank you" and they will be very unlikely to ask you anything similar, since you have already made known that you are in need of anything more. This phrase has saved me embarassment, or holding up the line, more times than I can count, and I have only been here 2 months.
As the more astute of you may be asking yourselves, "What if they aren't pointing, looking, or holding anything?" then what do you say Mister Smarty-pants? Well, if this is the case, you can say, in the most neutral tone you can muster [and that is very important] 'maamaa' which is "So-so". The secret behind this is, if they aren't asking you if you need anything done, they are asking you what you think of something. If you reply with "Suki desu" [I like it] or "Kirai desu" [I don't like it] the next logical step is for them to ask you why you have those particular attitudes towards the subject in question, a very frightening experience. Saying "maamaa" effectively closes the conversation, as people hardly ever ask you why you are indifferent towards something.

Other useful phrases are "onegai shimasu; daijoubu; and Ii desu ka" "Onegai shimasu" is literally "Please give me your doing of something". This is important because this can mean practically to do anything, and is the stock phrase for ordering food, asking for help, getting a refill, buying a ticket, etc. 'Daijoubu" means "okay" or "alright" and works remarkably similar to the similar English expression. Since nothing else in the language does, I found this amazing. You can use, and I have used it, in every way I have ever used it in English. The final phrase is a very neutral "Is this okay?" Which is useful, obviously, for it's own reasons.

This ends your Japanese lesson for the day. Any questions, class?

I am back!

2006-05-25T07:51:00.000-05:00

Hey y'all, greetings from Machida City, Tokyo, Japan.
It has been 7 months! I haven't posted in 7 months. Wow, life must have gotten in the way.

I have decided to resume my blog on account of my being in Japan on a Freeman-ASIA Grant, a Bridging Grant, and a David L. Boren National Security Education Program Undergraduate Scholarship. I have enough money to live comfortably in Japan for my year and half and I have enough from other sources to travel around Asia and see, first hand, areas of the world vital to American National Security.

I cannot express my gratitude enough to the generous donors of the above scholarships, without them, there is no way I could afford to be here on my family's income. In the NSEP grant, I must say that I am especially thankful to the American taxpayers, because they footed some of the bill.

Nobel has spoken...

2005-10-11T22:34:00.000-05:00

Stop the presses!
Muhammad ElBaradai, the head of the United Nations nuclear monitoring agency the International Atomic Energy Agency has received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

Forgive me for asking but, what efforts?
The IAEA has a long and pathetic record on pretty much everything. During the lead up to the invasion of Iraq they managed to delay the United States and our coalition partners long enough for satellite imagery to see the weapons being moved to Syria's extremely fortified Bakaah Valley. The IAEA was also considerate enough to the Saddam Hussein regime to notify him at least 24 hours in advance the site to be inspected, what was to be inspected, and what they were looking for...and when they arrived they would wait patiently, sometimes hours, while Hussein's forces got the site "ready" for inspections.

In the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (which is neither Democratic, of the People, a Republic, or Korean since Kim Jong-il was born in southern China contrary to official statements that he was born on the sacred Korean mountain of Paektu) the IAEA managed to fearlessly be kicked out of the country when Kimmy (my pet name for the lovable psychopath) decided to reopen his nuclear programs.

In regards to Iran, the IAEA has taken the strong stance of, and I wish I was making this up, warning of the possibility that they might someday give them a stern warning (but not too stern) and might consider referring them to the UN General Assembly for a non-binding resolution, and if that doesn't work they will consider sending Iran to the UN Security Council for economic sanctions but will not seek authorization for use of force because "that doesn't work." In other words, the IAEA has threatened a nihilistic militaristic fundamentalist Islamic theocracy with...absolutely nothing. Hey, we will give them a stern warning, and they will not listen to us, but at least we will be civil about Iran's desire to kill every last one of us.

The IAEA and the United Nations in general are impotent and timid. In their desire to avoid war they are willing to do anything to keep from being seen as the aggressors, by anyone in the Western World. When the time was right for the IAEA and the UN to show some backbone in their dealings with tyranny, and especially when the time came for the IAEA to live up to its charter mission to fight the proliferation of nuclear weapons, they caved in to absolutism at every possible opportunity.

The Nobel prize in everything but the sciences has begun to be more and more politicized as of late. Former President James Carter's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for his strong and determined stance in support of dictators (he certifies their elections now, too) was the first sign. The Nobel Committee will continue to grant awards to those who advocate non-violence and endless bureaucratic posturing in place of determined stances of self-defense.

Vandalism, Plain and Simple

2005-10-08T23:34:00.000-05:00

I will simply never understand what possesses people to act foolishly or in mob mentalities.
Case in point, at the end of our Homecoming Game Saturday night (picking up a 7-0 season, I might add) when we beat Eastern New Mexico State in overtime, the crowd rushes the field (our field) and tears down the goal post!
Who in their right mind tears down their own teams goal posts? On their home field?
It is, quite simply, destruction of public property. As West Texas A&M University is a public institution, her buildings, teachers, and maintenance people are all publicly funded. Torching a campus building is the same as tearing down a goal post, the State, by means of the taxpayers, funded its construction and will have to fund to repair it.
I would not destroy what belongs to someone else, so is it too much to ask that others refrain from destroying what I, as a student and a taxpayer, will have to pay to repair?
What annoys me even more is that some people actually said "The administration put it in their budget."
Are you serious?
The State of Texas puts law enforcement in their budget, that doesn't mean crime is permissible; the United States funds a military, that does not mean you are permitted to attack it.
The other common answer was that the University ordered their police department "not to stop them." There is a good reason for that, too. When a mob is rushing you at high speed to tear down the goal post, the University would rather they not trample the police officers to death. The University was not ordering the Police to allow the destruction of public property, they were ordering their police not to attempt to stop a rampaging crowd of hundreds with two or three officers. They were ordering them not to sustain serious or near-fatal injury to protect a goal post.
We are a nation of laws, and not of men. We do not live by the arbitrary discretion of an absolute ruler. We live by rules codified in law. Those rules are not there because the state needs somewhere to spend money, those rules are there to keep stupid people from wounding themselves and others in dangerous and imbecile acts of mob vandalism.
And that is what it is, plain and simple vandalism.

Random Thoughts, Ranting, and a Catharsis of Stupidity: I

2005-09-18T13:36:00.000-05:00

I had an idea for a thought experiment on my webpage, with any luck I might receive federal funding to study it (they can fund the study of the flow rate of ketchup, they can fund my warped little mind). My idea was to sit down, play some good orchestral music, and start typing whatever came to mind, and not to stop until 1) I get tired or 2) I get committed. So without further ado...adieu....adyu....without further delay:
Alright, I live in a dormitory (sorry, a "Residence Hall", apparently the term "dorm" evokes images of drunken frat boys partying in a building across the street from mine, those images are deserved). To clarify, I live in a "residence hall" that is for honors students only.
How is a residence hall for honors students different from a residence hall for athletes? Athletic dorm is coed? Nah, we are coed, we are the eugenics dorm, take all the smartest people on campus, force them to associate with each other, and voila, domestic soap opera time!
Is it the lack of studying? Not that either, both us and the jock halls both refrain from studying. Us because we don't need to, them because the big words tire them.
Is it the lack of sleep? Not really, the athletes do not sleep because they have no intention of going to class, we don't sleep because of alarm clocks.
I hate alarm clocks!
Since our "residence hall" was built in the early 1940's, sound dampening technology was not exactly at the top of anyone's priority list, that technology was being used, for better or for worse, to save the human race from extinction at the hands of Germany and Japan (okay, okay, and Italy, but they were more like a yapping World War II chihuahua of death than an enemy). So my dorm does not have the best sound insulation, which means that when someone goes home for the weekend, like, oh, I don't know........DAVID K. ELLIS OF ROOM 10 CONNER HALL WEST TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY, and he forgets to disable his alarm, all of us near his room get to wake up at the same time (after the obligatory attempts to smother ourselves back to sleep with our pillows), congregate outside his room and get an RA to open his room and disable his alarm. It's a bonding experience, I assure you.
I have had dreams about kicking open a few doors, smashing the alarm with an unrealistically large and blunt object, and leaving it where it lay, to serve as a warning to future alarm clocks that disturb my well-deserved slumber.
That leads to me a to another point, why in the HELL do alarm clocks not deactivate themselves after, oh, I don't know, the first three hours or so? Sony Corporation can make a disc that holds gigabytes of information, we can send a man to the moon, we have even invested resources into developing edible underwear, but we can't build an alarm clock smart enough to realize that after an hour and a half that you might not be there to turn it off?
Seriously, if the alarm is still on after ten minutes or so, maybe you're not a heavy sleeper, my guess would be your either "gone" or "dead", in either case, your constant incessant beeping isn't going to do anything but piss off the neighbors.
If you are going to be gone for a day or more, deactivate the alarm, flip the breaker, do something that keeps the bloody thing from turning on at 7 in the morning when I am trying to sleep.
If you are going to die in bed, plan ahead, and turn it off, all I ask, otherwise you will be remembered as inconsiderate, and is that really how you want to be remembered?

It's Been a While

2005-09-06T14:46:00.000-05:00

I know, I know, it has been a while since I updated. I have a good reason for it, though, I am back in school on my last semester, I am working on taking the GRE and meeting with advisors for the prospect of overseas study...and in a reason that is not quite an noble as the former, I bought Battlefield 2 which now threatens to consume my life.

Schroeder Strikes Again

2005-08-22T17:40:00.000-05:00

German Chancellor and unabashed political opportunist Gerhard Schroeder is at is again, lashing out at President Bush and the United States as he leads up to a new parliamentary election.

On September 22, 2002 Schroeder and his ruling coalition of Social Democrats (the SPD) and Greens won reelection to a majority-coalition government by a scant 6,000 votes from about 49 million cast. Many of you may also remember, that in the run up to the election Chancellor Schroeder and his coalition were unpopular and all signs pointed to the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union winning control of the government and retaking Parliament.

So what happened?

President Bush is what happened.

In his reelection bid, the floundering Chancellor pulled a no-holds-barred attack of opportunity on the President of the United States and unleashed a deluge of anti-American political rhetoric hoping to draw out the socialist and communist crowd of disaffected voters. The Schroeder campaign became adept at employing every conceivable, and inconceivable, argument to drum up support. Chancellor Schroeder refused to support in any way, shape, or form to the Iraq invasion, and lambasted Americans in general for supporting it. The Chancellor also, in his campaign rhetoric, initially allowed his Justice Minister, Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, to compare President Bush to Adolf Hitler before forcing her to resign when even his staunchest political advisors (and the White House) cried foul.

He didn't stop there.

His campaign accused the President of carelessly overseeing a failing economy, and then purposefully causing international strife to remedy the issue; of being party to an industrialist program that caused drastic (temporary) climate change leading to flooding; and of a global campaign to sideline legitimate dissent.

It apparently worked, the gaps closed and Schroeder won a razor-thin victory over the CDU/CSU putting his Red-Green (Communists and Greens, an unnecessary redundancy, I know) coalition back in.

What's happening now?

The economy and President Bush are what's happening.

Chancellor Schroeder is once again attempting to play the Bush card in his reelection attempts, never missing an opportunity to lambast the President on every issue known to political reality. With rising unemployment (5 million in a country of 48 million in the workforce), ever increasing taxes, and a whole new slew of social programs, German voters seem to have had enough. In the SPD heartland of North Rhine Westphalia, the state (Lander) government was turned from the SPD to the CDU in May, for the first time in 39 years. If you need an equivalence, the Socialists losing the State of North Rhine Westphalia to the Conservatives is the equivalent of Utah voting for Ralph Nader.

The disastrous election for the SPD changed that state government's representation in the Bundesrat, the Upper Chamber of the German Parliament that is made up of State Government appointed Representatives. As a result, Chancellor Schroeder called for a snap election to reaffirm his government scheduled for September 22. When it began to look like the Socialists would lose due to dissatisfaction with the Socialist's inability to bring rising unemployment and welfare rolls under control, the Chancellor decided it was time to shift the focus to the President of the United States, the undisputed international boogeyman for leftists.

Recently the Chancellor said that military solutions to Iran's breach of treaty regarding nuclear energy and weapons developments should be unequivocally taken off the table, on the grounds that "we have seen that they're [military operations] are not suitable." In response, Iran announced they they would not, under any circumstances, end their nuclear enrichment activities. Germany's response to this was predictable of modern Europe, step up diplomacy and make sure no one thinks you are threatening them. As time passes, and the election draws closer, Chancellor Schroeder and his fellow coalition members of the Socialist, Green, and Communist government will step up the assault on the President and Americans in general. With Iraq a fait accompli and Iran the new European issue, it will be the issue de jure on which to attack the President to make up for your own deficiencies as a national leader.

Republicans are for the Rich, blah blah blah...

2005-08-20T13:14:00.000-05:00

Everytime a Democrat opens his mouth somewhere for some speech, we are greeted with the same recycled phrases packaged into a new soundbite-quality form. This is not a problem, except the media reports whatever trite and tired soundbite the Democrats say as some new epiphanic revelation that will forever change the political landscape.

Case in point, tax cuts, mainly, tax cuts for the rich.

The wealthiest Americans seem to get everything nowadays, don't they? Especially when Republicans are in power. It seems that every bill to clear Congress has at its core the hidden objective of cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans and shifting the costs to poor, lower class Americans.

Nevermind that poor, lower class Americans, such as I and my family was, don't pay any taxes at the Federal Level, and what is paid in income tax is returned in the refund; all that matters is that the richest Americans, who already pay 80% of all Federal Income Taxes, might be getting a break. Indeed, when one class pays so much in taxes and sits inside every conceivable tax bracket, pays taxes we have never even heard of, the Democrats are not lying when they say that the rich are getting a tax break, they just fail to volunteer the information that since the wealthiest pay taxes for practically every single thing they do, a slight reduction in tax rates will benefit them out of proportion to the rest of the population which hardly pays any taxes at all.

Many argue that if a person with a net worth of $1 Billion Dollars, like US Senator John Kerry, for example, pays $481 million in taxes, it obviously would not hurt him to pay $48 or $50 million in taxes instead, they still have more leftover than most people will make in a lifetime. While this is true, it would not necessarily "hurt" them, that does not excuse confiscatory tax policies.

We are a Capitalist society with elements of socialism thrown in to appease the wealthy academia who cannot get over having money. As such, our economy is not based around what we "need" or "should have", our economy is based around what we "want". Socialist and Communist economies are built around what people "need" and what people "want" is seen as a materialistic bane upon the greater collective glory of the working classes. Through this idea of glorifying the necessary and demonizing the discretionary, we are left with a society that exists to survive and refuses the greater earned comforts of living; in short, you exist to eat your next meal and to enjoy your service to the state.

My faults with the exclusive glorification of the necessary are simple, when used as the reasoning behind economic and social policy, it can be used to justify everything and anything.

This brings me to the crux of the entry.

When the Congressional Democrats and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) use the wealthy as a catch-all boogeymen for social and economic policy, there is nothing they cannot do. Think of it this way, we have been conditioned from birth by various forces to regard the wealthy as usurpers, people who have gained their wealth through ill-gotten means and who do not work for a living. Listen to a radio or television commercial during campaign season about economic policy, or the ad running right now in Texas by Philip-Morris Tobacco about the state education funding system that implies, rather bluntly, that the wealthy do not "work for a living" and therefore should not be included in any tax reform measures. What we are indirectly being told by our Congressional Democrats is that the wealthy are fair game for tax measures, just because "they are not hurting" by a tax increase (of 1 or 2 million dollars) justifies the act in its entirety.

Apply this to your own life via the classic "neighborhood stereo" example. You live in a neighborhood of 15 people, among the group, you are the only one who owns a new stereo system, it has a CD player, AM/FM tuner, 2 tape players, and digital out. Is this stereo a necessity? Even if you really enjoy music, like I do, you cannot claim that not having a stereo would endanger your life. Basically, what you are saying is that "it would not hurt you" to lose it. Indeed, the equality espoused by the American Left tells you that you are wrong for even possessing this device when your neighbors do not.

The Point stand as thus, when anything may be done on the grounds that it does not directly harm you, or that it does not harm you as much relative to the general populace, anything can be done. If Congress acted tomorrow to incorporate confiscatory tax policies onto the wealthiest Americans, as many of the "greatest" Democrats in the past have proposed, on the grounds that their "obscene" wealth could be better utilized by the Government, and that your loss of wealth did not hurt you as bad as what was being gained by the rest of the population, if you adhered to this logic you could not stop the Government from confiscating your stereo, your slightly larger vehicle, your four bedroom house when you have only one kid, or your high paying job.

Granted, this is a problem with all Representative Governments, President Thomas Jefferson warned us of this early on, it is not something we are going to escape anytime soon. I do not pretend to have the means or the intelligence to change human behavior, all I can do is hope that those reading this will pay much closer attention to commercials and liberal pundits and train themselves to listen to the hidden assumptions (and unspoken consequences) of their sort of reasoning.

And in case you are wondering, the 5 wealthiest US Senators are 4 Democrats and 1 RINO; rounding out the top 10; 6 are Democrats, 2 are RINOs, and 2 are Republicans. Here's the list:

Senator John "Working Man" Kerry, D-Massachusetts, net worth $1 billion (did you know he served in Vietnam?)
Senator Jon Corzine, D-New Jersey, net worth $300 million
Senator Herb "Farm State" Kohl, D-Wisconsin, net worth $270 million
Senator Jay "Unions are Great" Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, net worth $200 million
Senator Lincoln "Am too a Republican" Chafee, RINO-Rhode Island, net worth $51.6 million
Senator Dianne "Feminist" Feinstein, D-California, net worth $31.9 million
Senator Dr. Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, net worth $15.1 million
Senator Hillary Rodham "I'm a Moderate" Clinton, D-New York, net worth $12.8 million
Senator John "Free speech sucks" McCain, RINO-Arizona, net worth $11.4 million
Senator Elizabeth Dole, R-North Carolina, net worth $10 million

Now who on this list tells you over and over about the evils of wealth and about how well the government can be trusted to appropriate your money better than you? Who in this list tells you that you are wise enough to decide how to spend your money? Who in this list inherited their money and then tells you how to spend it? Who made their wealth themselves and trusts you to do it?
Ahhh, the elitism of the wealthiest politicians.

Three Laws of Protesting

2005-08-15T13:43:00.000-05:00

Everything in the world these days seems to operate along the lines of the three laws system; Newton's three laws of motion, Asimov's three laws of Robotics, and even Johannes Kepler's three laws of planetary motion. What we also see, is that three is a magic number for protesters as well, so with triumphant fanfare I give you; The Three Laws of Peace Protesting...

LAW I: When protesting for peace; in a conflict among nations, the entity with the most democratic or representative government, or the entity with the most international recognition and prestige, or the entity with the higher population or percentage of a "majority" ethnicity, is responsible for the conflict in whatever form it takes.
Translation: Whenever there is a conflict among nations; the wealthiest, the freest, or the country with a higher percentage of the population Caucasian (and especially Christian) is at fault.
Examples:

Falklands War: United Kingdom vs. Argentina, Argentina invades the Falkland islands, a United Kingdom claimed chain, unprovoked; ruling by international peace protesters, UK acted irresponsibly and illegally
Gulf War: Coalition led by the United States vs. Iraq, Iraq invades Kuwait, an autonomous and sovereign state, unprovoked; ruling by international peace protesters, coalition's actions are illegal and unjustified
1967 War: Arab Coalition vs. Israel, Israel invites Arab leaders to a peace summit, Arab states refuse to attend on grounds that Israel is not a legitimate state and invade on Yom Kippur, Israel defends itself and gains territory previously used to launch attacks against deep into Israel's borders; ruling by international peace protesters AND the United Nations, Israel is at fault for being attacked, must return all land gained in defense of the nation, and Israel's actions in self-defense are illegal and unjustified

LAW II: When protesting for peace, the indignities suffered by those with whom you are at war or conflict, suffered as a result of the self defense of the nation responsible as per the First Law, are always of greater intrinsic value than the purpose and outcome of your nation or state's self defense.
Translation: When at war, the personal and collateral damage one inflicts upon the enemy is always more morally important than anything the enemy can or has done to you, meaning the enemy is both justified and understandable in their actions against you.
Example: Even though the terrorist (insurgency) activity in Iraq comes from outside the country, they are justified in killing American soldiers and Iraqi civilians because Americans have humiliated them by defeating two Muslim armies in three years.

LAW III: When protesting for peace, no demands may be justifiably made by the country at fault as per the First Law because of the conditions present in the Second Law.
LAW III Corollary: Only demands made by the group in opposition to the responsible party as per the First Law are legitimate.
Translation: No demands made by the most democratic government (First Law) are reasonable or justifiable because the Second Law necessitates that government being responsible for all hostilities in the first place. The Corollary states that any demand made by Al Qaeda, international terrorism, or Communist Dictatorship governments are superior to any the United States or the United Kingdom makes and must be followed. This being the case, Al Qaeda demands for the destruction of Western Civilization are justifiable.
Example: Every peace protester who has ever lived, Israel must withdraw from Palestine, the US must leave Iraq, and the Taliban were heroic in their defense of their totalitarian regime.

The Official Castro Cuba Birthday Quiz!

2005-08-14T10:16:00.000-05:00

As you may be aware, or not, Saturday marked the 136th Birthday of Fidel Castro (okay, okay, 79th), and with no sign of Fidel doing the right thing and dying on the horizon, I figured it was appropriate to have a little quiz on the Dictator's life, and since the American liberal community loves to celebrate the absolute dictator's nationalized healthcare system over his petty indiscretions, such as pulling the fingernails off of dissidents to his rule and mass executing political rivals, I decided to theme this quiz as one that might appear on a Cuban Government Poll to those lucky enough to still live in the land of Castro, that lovable, hugable, free healthcare providing, monster that has brutally tortured all who present opposition to his rule.

Thank you for agreeing to take the time to answer this quiz at gunpoint concerning your unwavering love and support for Fidel Castro, don't forget our contest at the end of this survey, enter to win a free visit to one of your relatives being tortured in prison!

Question 1: Did you watch the President's two and a half hour speech to the nation yesterday concerning how American imperialism is responsible for the long lines at many of Cuba's excellent health care centers?
A. Of course I did
B. Wouldn't miss it
C. There are never long lines at our excellent healthcare centers, they may be stretched around a block or so, but it is worth it to experience the people's revolutionary medicine which is available despite American imperialism.

Question 2: Have you ever been incarcerated at a Cuban penitentiary?
A. No
B. No, but I have turned others in to the state who were
C. Yes, and I deserved it for betraying the principles of the Revolution that our glorious leader President of the Council of State and Ministers Fidel Castro Ruz put in place with his tears and sweat.

Question 3: Did you vote for Fidel Castro in the last election?
A. No
B. Yes
C. This is a trick question, we are not allowed to vote for President...good thing too! We are not qualified to make decisions concerning our own destiny, that is why the machinery of the state is here to make sure that only correct decisions benefiting the people are implemented!

Question 4: If you had to describe America, how would you?
A. Imperialist
B. Capitalist Imperialist
C. Counter-revolutionary military industrial Capitalist aggressors bent on undermining the people's revolution for the purposes of enriching their bourgeoisie supporters.

Question 5: Do you have anything to hide?
A. No
B. God no
C. Let's get this over with....and my fingernails just grew back after last time!

Thank you for participating in our survey concerning your unwavering admiration of President Fidel Castro, benevolent protector of the Cuban people.
If you answered "A" to any of these questions, you are obviously an Imperialist American spy attempting to undercut the people's revolution.
If you answered "B" to any of these questions, you are loyal, but not loyal enough, please report to any authorized medical center for reprogramming.
If you answered "C" to any of these questions, you are a fanatical supporter of our great leader...perhaps too supportive, are you overcompensating?...

The Fallacy of Peace

2005-08-13T16:21:00.000-05:00

For years we have heard it, much louder during the last three years with the War in Iraq, and we have heard it in the past, during the Vietnam War; what we have heard is a demand for "peace", what we have not heard is an understanding of what it actually is, or how we can achieve it.

"Peace" protesters operate under three major fallacies, these fallacies define their position and when closely examined, destroy their arguments as even remotely viable.
The first fallacy of the "peace" protesters is a lack of understanding of what peace is actually is, to the protesters, peace is nothing more than the dictionary definition of "absence of hostilities." If the United States did not have troops fighting overseas, if we were not fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in more clandestine engagements against Muslim rebels in the Philippines, there would be peace. Most of you already can already see how confused this position is, as far as our economy and our military readiness and operations levels would be concerned, there would be a "peacetime" economy or the military would be on a "peacetime" footing, but there would not actually be peace.
Was there peace before World War I when there was not an actual conflict occurring on the mainland of Europe? No, the region was referred to as a "powderkeg", ready to blow at any moment, every major decision of the major European powers had to be examined in light of the Serbian Nationalist problem. In a true peacetime environment, this would not be required, the potential for conflict negates the very existence of "peacetime", there are always hostilities somewhere.
To embrace the activist definition of peace would lead to a similar scenario to the Bosnian problem. What we would have would be foreign and domestic terrorists using our lack of immediate military readiness to plot, execute, and recover from attacks carried out against us and our interests, with no response. Our enemies would most certainly not be at peace, they would be on a war footing with an opponent not interested in defending itself.
The "Peace" activists demand a peace not attainable in the real world.

The Second fallacy of the Peace Protesters arises from the first, that peace is attainable, it is not. As long as humanity is a flawed species, some guided by honor whilst others are guided by greed, power, or prestige, there will always be armed conflict. This fallacy of peace is not understood by the Peace activists around the world because they have confused cause and effect in a very dangerous way.
To them, peace is possible when the causes of international strife and unrest are disarmed, emasculated, and made to see the error of their ways. To them, the side of the conflict guided by honor is the international Islamic terrorism network, and who is the party to the conflict guided by greed, power, and prestige? Why, that would be the United States and the countries of International Democratic Representative Government. Since we are the cause of the international power struggle, we are the cause of conflict, if we simply acquiesced to the demands of the "more deserving and pure" enemy, there would be peace.
They assume the enemy to be rational, they are not. The kind of peace the protesters demand is a peace of capitulation, brought about not by universal understanding, but by surrender...surrender of values, surrender of one's way of life, surrender of ideals. They do not understand how an enemy can dislike the United States unless it is the United States' fault for the dislike in the first place. Their minds are irreparably tied around an anti-American ideal they cannot fathom a world where we are not the villains. The "peace of capitulation" mentioned above is perfectly logical to them, our society is not worth preserving as far as they concern themselves.

The third fallacy of the Peace activists is that peace is bought on the currency of understanding. Understanding, tolerance, acceptance, capitulation, and negotiation through rational actors can bring about peace. There is no room for self defense or military action if it interferes with the above currencies.
This can be found best expressed, albeit illogically and laughable in its misunderstanding, the now famous bumpersticker that reads "Fighting a war for peace is like screwing for virginity." This statement is easy to deconstruct and destroy, virginity is a one time only existent, you either are a virgin, or you are not. They relate this to peace, you either have peace, or you do not. For this analogy to work peace would have to be a infinite existent, once it is attained it cannot be lost, and the reciprocal, once lost cannot be regained, like virginity. By their own logic peace can never be attained because it has been lost already due to centuries of unending conflict and war.
We can never attain the perfect peace that the activists demand, the kind of peace that would fit all the necessary criteria, and no amount of currency paid in understanding and tolerance will bring it about because you expect a reciprocity from the other actors.
This is another interesting point of the peace movement, has anyone heard the "peace movement" make any demands of the attackers? Thus far, in the war against our terminal enemy, the peace movement has demanded nothing but concessions from the targets of the attacks. The peace movement hears a demand from Al Qaeda or any of their affiliated terrorist groups, and immediately, unquestioningly, unfailingly takes to the streets to demand we adhere to it. It does not matter what effect the adherence to the demand would cause, they immediately demand we do it.
What happens when the United States or our democratic allies make a demand or show opposition? Suddenly, to the activists, we are "provoking" them, destroying a terrorist munitions factory "emboldens" our enemy, strong statements of self-defense "enrage" our enemy, questioning suspects with ties to terrorism "recruits" for the enemy.
If the activists assume our enemy to be adherent to the rational actor model upon which negotiation is based, the protesters do not demand our enemy follow the same rules, they expect us to come to the table in an inferior position (one which we have earned, in their minds, from the arguments presented in the second point). They want us to pay the price in tolerance in understanding, but it is anathema to them for us to demand the same from our enemy.

There you have it, the fallacy of peace and peace protestation, is built around a basic inability (or refusal, most likely) to understand the mechanics, realities, and definition of peace. They demand perfect peace in an imperfect world.

Whose Civil Liberties? Whose rights?

2005-08-12T12:36:00.000-05:00

The American Civil Liberties Union has been prolifically filing lawsuits recently against every conceivable measure designed to protect American citizens at home and abroad from foreign and domestic terrorism.

To a biased observer, such as myself, it appears as if the ACLU has adopted a twisted form of moral supremacy and relativism; in layman's terms, it seems as if the ACLU is arguing that the right of a terrorist to kill you is more important than your right to live.
If your right to live requires the threat of "racial profiling", then the terrorist's rights outweigh your own; if your right to live requires the police to step up random searches, then the terrorist's rights outweigh your own; if your right to live requires the sleep deprivation, rough questioning, and deportation of hostile forces and enemy combatants, then the terrorist's rights outweigh your own.

The ACLU argues the unconstitutionality of random police searches on subways in the wake of the bombings in London, even though Al Qaeda has promised to use that method again in the United States. The perpetrators of the attacks in London, young Arab Muslim males, are the same ethnicity as the attackers of September 11th, the USS Cole, and the Beirut Bombings...yet, to the ACLU, the searching of young Arab Muslim Males holding ticking backpacks or wearing overcoats in the middle of summer is impermissible and not at all dissimilar from terrorism.
Even when racial profiling is ruled out of the equation, the ACLU will not budge. Random searches are, according to Donna Lieberman, the head of the New York State Chapter of the ACLU, applied "in a discretionary and arbitrary manner" which leads to "impermissible racial profiling."
So, even when racial profiling is ruled out, the fact that searches are conducted by imperfect human beings makes them unconstitutional. As the gentlemen at Cox and Forkum put it so perfectly, "Today, a strategy designed to help ensure that such a calamity [terrorism] will not again occur has been converted to a bizarre race-discrimination issue."

The ACLU is hell-bent and determined to undermine every aspect of America's defense short of wholesale abandon, and they intend to use the courts to challenge every aspect of our defense as well.

How are we to defend ourselves? Well, the ACLU believes there are "constitutional" means of protecting Americans from terrorism. What are they? Well, they are apparently Constitutional, we know that much.
If one had to delve into the convoluted logic of the ACLU, they might never make it back to reality. If they were to return, one can easily assume what they would have found in the ACLU's proposals.

How do you protect Americans from terrorism? Redefine terrorism so it never happens...
How do you protect Americans from their enemies? Don't have enemies...(Sheryl Crow, January 13, 2003)
How do you protect Americans from domestic slaughter at the hands of foreign extremists? Through peace, understanding, social welfare, and progressive education policies...
How do you protect Americans from domestic terrorism? Weaken the domestic security services.
How do you protect Americans from future terrorist attacks? Release all suspected Al Qaeda prisoners held in US Custody on the grounds that questioning them "emboldens terrorists".
How do you protect Americans traveling on the nation's airports? Throw out the government's No-Fly lists.
How do you protect Americans traveling on mass transit systems? Search 80 year old women in loose fitting clothes, when the criminals see your progressive and inclusive method of searching (as long as you under absolutely no circumstances search a Middle Eastern male even if he is carrying a high caliber weapon visible through his pant legs) they will realize the error of their ways.

Sound ludicrous?
Not to the American Civil Liberties Union

No Apologies

2005-08-03T09:25:00.000-05:00

I have been more than a little annoyed at the tone the recent shooting of a Brazilian suspect in London by the Police has begun to take. Thus far, the Prime Minister of Great Britain has called the President of Brazil to apologize, an independent investigation has been launched, and protests against the "shoot to kill" policy of the British Metro Police against suspected homicide bombers has been carried out in Brazil.

From my point of view, the London Metro Police were perfectly within their rights to shoot to kill the suspect and PM Blair should not have apologized, by doing so he granted legitimacy to the arguments of those standing up for the Brazilian suspect's illegal and dangerous actions.
Here is the story; on July 22 of this year, Jean Charles de Menezes was seen by London Metro Police entering the London Underground System, he was acting suspicious so the Police went into question him. According to the reports, when Menezes was approached by the Police, he took off running through the Underground, jumped the turnstyle, and attempted to board a Subway car, where not days before several apparent homicide bombings had taken place. In an attempt to avert this from happening again, the London Police correctly opened fire on him using what the CIA calls a "zero reaction shot", a head shot that removes the ability of a suspected bomber from pulling any kind of trigger or other detonation device.
Later it came to light that Mr. Menezes was not carrying an explosive device but was an illegal alien on an expired visa from 2002.

So, as you have no doubt already figured out, Menezes was running because he was afraid the Police would discover he was an illegal in their country, and during the heightened security alert the choice to run to the Underground and away from the Police was not a wise one. They shot him, and they were absolutely right to do so.
Since the incident, the Prime Minister has called the Brazilian President to apologize, which should not have happened. The Prime Minister should have simply said that Brazil needs to keep better control of her students on Visas.

This whole episode has me really, really, annoyed.
An illegal on expired visa refuses to yield to police orders during a heightened security state, runs towards a method of public conveyance that has been attacked multiple times, gets shot as a result to defend the public, and the United Kingdom is considering paying the family of the illegal? They are apologizing for defending their citizens?
Even worse, in a political cause likely to be picked up by Brazilian Politicians and others around the world who believe that a terrorists right to kill you outweighs your right to live, the family is demanding that the Metro Police abandon their "shoot to kill" standing orders for suicide bombers. I cannot fathom a more dangerous decision, there is no way to successfully defend your citizens from homicide-suicide bombers without a standing shoot to kill order.
For their part, at least, the London Police have said they have no intention of abandoning the policy.
I would be sending a bill for the bullets used to the Brazilian Authorities. You cannot defend a nation while worried about ridiculous and dangerous politically correct policies designed to foster understanding and avoid confrontation.

Ambassador Bolton...I love saying that

2005-08-01T19:52:00.000-05:00

Today the President appointed John Bolton to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations bypassing the US Senate when they adjourned for the summer recess.

The Democratic response was quick and predictable, Senator Edward Kennedy, whose august career includes being dismissed from Harvard University when it was discovered he was paying people to take his tests and killing a woman in Chappaquidick Bay when he drove the car into the river while drunk and went home and attempted to get his cousin to take the blame, had this to say:
"The abuse of power and the cloak of secrecy from the White House continues," he continued "It's bad enough that the administration stonewalled the Senate by refusing to disclose documents highly relevant to the Bolton nomination. It's even worse for the administration to abuse the recess appointment power by making the appointment while Congress is in this five-week recess. It's a devious maneuver that evades the constitutional requirement of Senate consent and only further darkens the cloud over Mr. Bolton's credibility at the U.N."

Now, let me get this straight, Ted...the Senate Minority put in place by the American people for the last 5 elections votes overwhelmingly to allow a vote on Mr. Bolton but is not allowed to proceed because the Left-of-Lenin wing of the Party refuses to allow cloture and blocks his appointment, not even filibustering, but threatening to filibuster, and when the President uses the Constitutional power of recess appointment, that's an abuse of power?
The Democrats today are not even strong enough, they lack the courage, the ability, and the strength of will to carry out a full filibuster, all they do is threaten to perform one.
The Constitution is quite clear that the Senate has advice and consent powers, Mr. Kennedy says it is an evasion of the Constitutional powers of advice and consent to recess appoint Ambassador Bolton, yet this is coming from the same morally bankrupt individual who refuses to even allow a vote on his confirmation!
As for the documents the Democratic Senators are requesting, these are documents no Ambassador has ever been asked to turn over and every former Secretary of State has said should not be turned over. This is an attempt along the same lines as the article I wrote about "sovereignty", the Democrats hope that the electorate is too stupid to do any research. The new Democratic delaying tactic is to demand thousands of "documents" from any source imaginable and peruse each hoping to find one disqualifying piece of evidence. If none can be found, they will demand more until one is found. If nothing can be found, or they simply get tired of researching, they will call the nominee an "extremist", if, on the other hand, the Republicans refuse to turn over these sensitive documents, or get tired of sending them more, they will say the GOP is withholding "vital" information and filibuster.

I wait and welcome the day when Mr. Kennedy's immoral and unethical exploits are remembered more than his utter lack of service to any country or ideal other than undermining the United States.

A New Planet!

2005-07-29T20:55:00.000-05:00

FoxNews is reporting that CalTech in association with NASA have officially discovered a new planet in our solar system, bringing the total to 10!

For those of you who think that this discovery of a new planet actually brings the number to 9, who think Pluto is not a planet, Pluto has a moon, Charon, and if Pluto is not a planet it is the only moon with a moon. Pluto also moves independently of Neptune, making it highly unlikely it is a moon of that Planet. What is odd is that this issue comes up in the media all the time, but never in the scientific community, where I think it matters more.
The Lowell Observatory, in Flagstaff, Arizona, where Pluto was discovered maintains that with the 4 classifications of stellar bodies; asteroids, comets, satellites, and planets; that Pluto is definitely not the first three, so guess which one it has to be?

Anyway, CalTech researcher Michael Brown officially "discovered" the planet and has submitted a name for it to the International Astronomical Union, which governs the names of planetary bodies, but keeping with policy, the IAU has not yet released the proposed name nor approved it.
Estimates thus far say that the planet is as large as Pluto but may be up to 1 and a half times larger and is 9 billion miles from Earth.

Apparently the data was not supposed to be released until after the planet's name had been approved but a hacker got a hold of the information and threatened to release it prematurely, forcing Brown and his colleagues to hastily arrange a conference.
My proposed name, Janus, the God of Beginnings and Ends. I think it would be a fitting name for a new planet at the edge of our solar system, but then again, the Roman Gods have had a good run being given the singular honor of having a planet named for them, time to open it up to others....Norse, Chinese, Japanese...any of the great civilizations.
You can read the article here.

On a more personal note, Number III

2005-07-27T14:17:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I posted, things have been a little hectic lately.
Yesterday I had a LASIK exam with Dr. Boothe, an Opthamologist in Dallas who is pretty famous world wide in his profession, his office is massive and he has a genuinely accomodating demeanor, unfortunately the cost is outside my abilities right now, but when I do have the money for it, I will definately go back to his office.

I also reformatted my computer and have been troubleshooting, all that I hope explains the delay

The Triumvirate

2005-07-19T20:40:00.000-05:00

Senator Chuck Schumer, D-NY, came out in a Democratic response to the President's nomination of Judge John Roberts to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor saying that he voted against him in his 1992 nomination to the Federal Appeals Court because he refused to answer certain (irrelevant) questions concerning his judicial philosophy. Namely, the "Schumer List" which is a list of questions such as "Name 3 Supreme Court decisions with which you disagree" or "How do you feel about Roe vs. Wade." (You can see a full list of Senator Schumer's questions here)

Because the Democratic Party is now no more than a loose collection of 100 or so interest groups all competing for party-supremacy, and thereby weakening the party as a whole (but I have never been one to interrupt the enemy when they are making a mistake), legitimate judicial questions are irrelevant to them. Questions such as "Are you a strict constructionist or a loose-constructionist" and "Describe your view of the Constitution's separation of powers" take a backseat to questions designed to assure the party base of left of center groups that the nominee will play no role in interpreting law and will only hold the liberal line on practically every issue.

To these Democrats, especially Democrats like Charles Schumer, Patrick Leahy, and Chappaquidick Ted Kennedy (the latter of whom lives in fear that he might actually one day support the President on something), the Supreme Court is not a place for erudite review of the Constitution, but rather a bench from which the liberal view of the world can be enshrined away from the pesky powers of the elected branches and popular sentiment. To these Democrats, you do not take the law and see how it stands with the Constitution, you take your personal viewpoint and see how you can bend the Constitution to support it.
Were I on the United States Senate, and one day I might very well be, I would have 3 questions, just like Senator Schumer, but my questions would be relevant. I promise you now that if I am ever on the US Senate my three questions to all Supreme Court nominees would be these:

1) Do you feel that the Constitution of the United States is a "living document" that can be reinterpreted through the views of the Court or do you believe that it has meaning that transcends personal revision?
2) Are you a loose constructionist? That is, do you believe that the Constitution grants virtually unlimited powers to the government and rights can be inferred from the "intent" of the Constitution under the Necessary and Proper Clause and the 14th Amendment?
3) Does the United States Constitution describe Federalism in such a way that there are very few, if any, powers that the Federal Government cannot wield over the states? In other words, are most powers belonging to the States currently on loan from the Federal Government?

If the answer to any of these questions is "yes", I would vote "No".

The "Freedom Center" Fiasco

2005-07-18T01:31:00.000-05:00

As many of you know they are building a new "Freedom Center" at the World Trade Center site, but it has been perverted, the original intent of the memorial was to build a site remembering the thousands of Americans and others who died at the hands of terrorists at the World Trade Center.
But the New York intelligencia being what they are, the planners, financiers, and architects of the site on the board of directors had another idea, they have decided to make the new memorial 1/10th about the victims of 9/11 and 9/10ths about "Americas role in the world."
So in other words, the planners and "artists" of the new memorial have decided to turn the memorial site, using taxpayer money, into an exhibit on Americas role in "terrorizing, abusing, oppressing, and interefering" with democratic movements around the world. The liberals in New York on the board of directors have decided to turn the memorial into a "Blame America First" museum of retired Communist propaganda from American apologists who seek to show how America deserved to be attacked.
If you have any doubts, know this, George Soros, the billionaire financier of the Democratic party who compared President Bush to Hitler and Republicans to goose-stepping Nazi's has put billions into the museum and the New York Times newspaper recently ran an editorial calling the people opposing this practice of changing the museum into an Anti-American tirade museum, EVEN THE FAMILIES of 9/11 victims, guilty of abrogating the rights of the rest of the world!
As usual, the hate-America crowd took a building being built to honor the dead and turned into a mouthpiece for their vitriolic hatred of their own country.

Here are a couple links I would like you to check out:
This is a good cartoon about what's going on: http://www.coxandforkum.com/
Here is the most important one, there is a petition from a group called "Take Back the Memorial" that has so far collected 33,000 signatures (including mine) to the Governor of New York and the Mayor protesting this ridiculousness. Take a look.

Irony!

2005-07-14T15:35:00.000-05:00

Never let it be said that science is boring...
Wednesday's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association states that "Research Indicates that Medical Research is often Wrong."
In a related story, "Research confirms that Research causes cancer in laboratory mice."
You can read the article here.

Yes, Iraq was Sovereign...so what?

2005-07-12T22:42:00.000-05:00

I am so incredibly tired of hearing from Liberals and anti-War activists "Iraq was a sovereign country."
Odds are, they do not even know what the word means. They used the phrase "Iraq is a sovereign nation" over, and over, and over again during the prelude to the American invasion in an attempt, and in the hope, that Americans would be too ignorant to actually look the word up.
Iraq was sovereign, yes, I admit it!
Iraq was a sovereign nation!
It had Sovereignty!
But do you know what else it had? Iraq also had territory, people, and government!
You see, the liberals used the term "sovereign" before the war in the hope that the public would be both too stupid and too lazy to go look the word up, "Sovereign" is a cool word, I named my computer on my university network "Sovereign", but "Sovereign" is also an intimidating word to the non-political scientist, it sounds like an extremely important word that carries with it the ideas of legitimacy and moral standing.
Sovereignty, morality, and legitimacy are not coterminous, when the protestors were saying Iraq was "sovereign" what they hoped to illicit in the minds of listeners was "Iraq is a legitimate government". They were hoping people would think that since Iraq was sovereign, it was somehow criminal or unethical to attack them.
Here is the truth: Sovereignty is one of the four things you must have to be considered a state, to be a country you must have territory, people, government, and sovereignty. To be a nation you must have territory to rule; a population; a government to organize it all; and sovereignty, the ability to rule within your borders.
Under the universally accepted political science guidelines, Somalia can not truly be considered a nation, Somalia has territory, people, and a government, but that government is not Sovereign, it does not have the ability to rule within its borders and it is not seen as legitimate within its borders.
Now, as you can see, to claim that invading Iraq was wrong because Iraq was sovereign is absolutely ludicrous and misleading. To truly see how ridiculous an argument this is, take the sentence "We should not have invaded Iraq because it was sovereign" and replace the word "sovereign" with one of the other three qualifications a country must have to be a country, try "We should not have invaded Iraq because it had territory..." or "We should not have invaded Iraq because it has a population" or "It was wrong to topple Saddam Hussein because he led a government."
There you have it, Sovereignty does not entail legitimacy, it does not entail protection from outside interference.
For an even greater example, ask yourself what this world would be like if during World War II or the Korean Conflict protestors argued that it would be wrong to attack Germany or North Korea because Hitler and Kim Il-Sung were sovereign.
Notice I said Kim Il-Sung and Hitler were sovereign, because in dictatorships the leader is sovereign; he has the right to rule, he has the ability and the authority to direct the nation. In free and democratic nations, the people are sovereign, while their leaders have the authority to direct the nation, they have term limits and elections that hold them accountable to the people, who in the end have the ultimate authority over the direction of the nation through elections of candidates who have views which they support.

Retirement announcements?

2005-07-09T21:07:00.000-05:00

Foxnews is reporting that Chief Justice Willian Rehnquist may have been prepared to announce his retirement last Friday (July 8) but delayed it due to the terror attacks in London and the President's meeting with the G8.
Trying to fight two nominees to the Court at once? Possibly 3 if the President elevated Scalia or Thomas to Chief Justice?
Beautiful...
You can read the story here.

What part do they not Understand?

2005-07-07T11:06:00.000-05:00

The Al Qaeda manual recovered from a skyscraper overlooking Ground Zero in New York City says:

"To those champions who avowed the truth day and night ... ... And wrote with their blood and sufferings these phrases ...
The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate
regimes does not know Socratic debates ..., Platonic ideals ...,
nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue of
bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction,
and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun.
Islamic governments have never and will never be established
through peaceful solutions and cooperative councils. They are
established as they [always] have been -- -
by pen and gun
by word and bullet
by tongue and teeth"

Continuing on, the Al Qaeda manual states the hope that apostates and infidels will live in continuous fear, they pray Allah:

"... to make their women widows and their
children orphans.
... to make them desire death and hate
appointments and prestige.
... to slaughter them like lambs and let the
Nile, al-Asi, and Euphrates rivers flow with their blood.
... to be a pick of destruction for every
godless and apostate regime.
... to retaliate for you against every dog who
touch you even with a bad word."

Notice nothing in any of this about "may they perish who fight us in wars without United Nations consent" or "may the children be orphans if their parents are infidels who support the freedom of Middle Eastern peoples..."
Al Qaeda, their splinter groups, and their allies intend to murder every single non-Muslim individual, indeed any Muslim individual who lives and has adapted to life in the Western World, who does not share the Al Qaeda vision of poverty, isolation, theocracy, and dictatorship.
It is time that Europe pulled its head out of the sand, they did not attack Britain because they are involved in Iraq, the United States was not at war with Iraq before the September 11th attacks, they attacked Britain and Spain because these are Western Countries with a Constitutional Monarchy and a democratically elected Parliament, they were not officially Muslim, and they will not abandon their interests in the Middle Eastern World. The irony here is that the British Government has long been an apologist and supporter of Arab interests in the Middle East, many times actively working against Israel's interests to support the interests of one Arab dictatorship or another.
Let this be a reminder to those on a certain side of the political spectrum who failed to learn their lesson on 9/11 and who failed to retaliate during multiple attacks on American and Democratic interests in the 20th Century: They don't care if you understand them, they don't want you to "listen" and "make it better", all of your posturing about "understanding what led them to feel this way" makes you a useful idiot to their cause...and many of you blindly stand behind your false shield of moral superiority that you are not fighters, but humanitarians, and you do not need to fight, but to change the way America "oppresses" the Middle East, and as long as people like you are in positions of authority, the world will be a dangerous place.
Every attack against American and Democratic interests since 9/11 has been done by Muslim extremism, but due to some unfounded need and ridiculous sense of political correctness, you may not search a young Arab male going on board a one-way flight with a suitcase for fear of a lawsuit by some leftist organization that believes an extremist's right to kill you outweighs your ability to save lives if to accomplish that goal you make someone "feel bad" and "racially profile". Even one Democratic US Senator said "we are not looking for blonde Norwegians" when it comes to domestic security.
I truly cannot understand why in this, the greatest political, military, and cultural battle that should be Democracy and Freedom on one side and Fear and Oppression on the other, so many in my camp advocate weakness, fatalistic guilt, and the moral superiority of nihilistic relativism

Thanks to the BBC

2005-07-06T15:14:00.000-05:00

A few things, I will keep it short and sweet...
I removed the ads from my site since I was getting sick and tired of having to go in and filter out the liberal ads that Google seems determined to display, every time I would go in and filter some group, like NARAL (am I the only one who thinks that the National Abortion Rights Action League sounds like a group of feminist super heroes? Say their name in a comic-booky announcer voice really loud, you'll see what I mean...).
Anyway, I removed ads for NARAL, anti-Bush W's, sites asking you to write your Congressman to keep a "Right-Wing idealogue" off the courts (read: someone who just interprets the Constitution), and ads for various other left-of-Lenin groups; and after I wrote an article about the Department of Defense, low and behold, anti-War ads popped up and I refuse to host those. So I removed the ad code from my template and I feel less dirty now.
Second, for you "Global Warming" people out there, who quickly and efficiently changed from "Global Cooling" people back not 20 years ago, here is a good article from the BBC

Let the tirade begin!

2005-07-03T22:27:00.000-05:00

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman confirmed to the Supreme Court, unexpectedly announced her retirement July 1 and the battle for who shall replace her has begun.
It is my belief that Sandra Day O'Connor, the court's key swing vote who has sided with the liberals on the court on such issues as campaign finance reform, and whose name is invoked whenever an important issue comes before the Court where Conservatives feel the divide is too close and the chance for O'Connor to swing the Court against the Constitution is high, retired before the Chief Justice, who is ailing from thyroid cancer, as a final political service to the President and the Party that placed her in history.
First, I believe that the President will nominate a reliable, but moderate Conservative such as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or Solicitor General Theodore Olsen to replace the outgoing swing vote Justice.
Second, I believe that the President and the Republicans are doing this because they want the political groups and 527's, such as Moveon.org and everyone's favorite well-off corporate hypocrite George Soros, to begin the name-calling and fear-mongering against the moderate-Conservative replacement to occur at painfully high decibel levels.
The reason for this is brilliant. If a moderate Conservative is named to replace Associate Justice O'Connor, the liberal groups will come out en masse to harangue and attack the replacement, whoever it may be, the airwaves will be flooded with attack and support ads urging you to contact your US Senators and ask them to vote against the out-of-the-mainstream-corporate-hack-right-wing-ideologue that the President nominates.
Once this is done, the public will have heard ever conceivable attack against the moderate Conservative that is nominated, and the liberal groups will have exhausted funds, airtime, and rhetoric against the Associate Justice.
Then, Chief Justice William Rehnquist will resign, and the President will have carte blanche to name an Arch-Conservative, such as Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, to the Chief Justice's seat and the liberal opposition will be caught without adequate funds and political capital to attack the Chief Justice's replacement as vociferously as they would like, having spent it all, or a substantial portion of it, on the replacement for Justice O'Connor.
You may ask yourselves, "Why do they not simply allow the moderate to sail through confirmation to save resources for the Chief Justice?"
Quite frankly, because they can't.
George Soros, Moveon.org, and the Left-of-Lenin wing of the Democratic Party, see Conservatism as not just anathema, but evil, sadistic, arcane, ridiculous, and dangerous. They simply cannot allow a Conservative of any stripe to the Court, if the President nominated anyone who thinks Roe vs. Wade was an unconstitutional travesty, they must not only be defeated, they must be politically destroyed...even if they are truly moderate and believe that the Constitution does allow for certain matters of privacy to be kept to state regulation, they must be destroyed. Anyone who does not support abortion on demand up to any point in pregnancy, anyone who believes military law is independent of civilian law, anyone who does not envision the ACLU's religion and moral values free America, anyone who believes the Constitution as it was written and intended should be enforced, must be destroyed.
So, even a moderate such as Sandra Day O'Connor could not escape their vehemence were she appointed today. The groups must attack the President's nominee, whoever it is, to maintain their judicial tyranny, to establish by court decree what they cannot get through the channels of the people, as was originally intended.
And that is why O'Connor was the first to resign.

Back after a brief Hiatus

2005-07-03T16:24:00.000-05:00

I have returned after a bried hiatus attending a good friend on mine's wedding, there have been many developments in the world, especially what will be a confrontation with the President's naming of a new US Supreme Court Justice to replace outgoing swing justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Right now, that is not important, all that matters is I must once again congratulate my good, but politically misguided, friend, Paul White on his new marriage.
I was proud and honored to be a groomsman at his wedding, and I am also proud that I upheld my promise not to discuss politics with neither the groom nor the best man.

Adding six more vetoes...

2005-06-27T21:54:00.000-05:00

The BBC is reporting that several powerhouse nations, which until now were not granted any special power in the United Nations Security Council, have put forth a plan to increase the number of seats in the Security Council by ten, six of those are to be permanent.
As most of you probably already know, permanent seats are those which are granted veto power of the actions of the Security Council, right now the five permanent members are; The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, France, Russia, The People's Republic of China, and of course the United States of America.
It seems ludicrous now that a nation which is not only a rising economic competitor, but also a military competitor, like China would be allowed a veto over decisions affecting United States security, but at the time of the adoption of the UN Charter China's seat was held by the Republic of Taiwan, an ally firmly in the US camp. At the time it was seen that there would be four nations in the "American" camp and the Soviet Union in the other camp, Stalin was persuaded to allow this arrangement due to concessions from the Democratic nation's camp that each Soviet satellite (read: protectorate) state would be given an independent vote in the General Assembly.
This little history lesson was given in order to provide background for what I am about to talk about, increasing the number of permanent Security Council seats.
As time passed, even in the early days, it became evident that the four democratic nations would no longer be driven by the same goals and ideologies, France withdrew from NATO due to security concerns, mainly over whether or not the rest of the allies would come to her defense were Russia to become hostile; and China's seat was given to the Communists in what I consider to be one of the worst diplomatic coups by Communism in history, to this day the United States is not even allowed to recognize an ambassador from Taiwan under the arrangements.
So as our security situation has evolved, we have France openly taking bribes and receiving special favors from the worst of humanities dictators, Russia trading nuclear technology and other weapons systems with nations that are less than amiable to the West, and China buying such technology in an attempt to claim Superpower status to rival the United States.
Right now, those three nations; an unstable and corrupt social democracy, a communist dictatorship, and a "former" adversary which is slowly reclaiming its authoritarian bent, have veto power over vital areas of American National Security.
And now we are going to add six more.

As you may have begun thinking when you read the list of the UN Security Council’s current permanent membership, the nations represent the allied leaders (with the exception of France) during World War II with China added as a security buffer against a reemergence of Japanese militarism or Soviet expansion, that step blew up beautifully in our faces. The nations which seek to become new permanent members; Japan, Brazil, India, and Germany, are undeniably economic powerhouses and strategic pieces on the geopolitical chessboard. The nations seek what they believe to be their rightful place on the international table that has too long been held by nations involved in the Second World War.

As of the article’s publishing, the President has not come out against any nation’s bid to become a permanent member of the Security Council, which is seen as tacit approval by some and diplomatic pre-posturing by others.

I have a few criticisms of the nations in general being added as permanent and a few comments on the idea of expanding the Security Council’s membership at all.

First, a few criticisms of adding the four above nations as permanent members.

Germany: Germany is a nation still deeply distressed over its role in the Second World War and mistrusts uses of force. The use of force is a legitimate and incredibly successful tool in reshaping the world’s climate, but Germany feels that only upon approval by the corrupt and dictator dominated United Nation’s can any nation defend itself or its interests abroad. The Security Council exists to be the arbiter of world opinion for deciding upon punishments, sanctions, and the use of force, and it is no place for a veto from a country that views military force as inherently illegitimate.

Japan: Japan is a nation that has become an economic powerhouse and a distinct voice in calming regional tensions due to her brutal and militaristic past, her constitution prohibits military involvement in foreign conflicts and that article, Article 9, enjoys immense public support and the Japanese people have become dedicated pacifists, having given up “war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes”. Again, does this seem a good appointment to a body designed to ensure security?
There is a brief, but enlightening, article about the internal conflict in Japanese culture here

Brazil: Whether one wants to admit it or not, South America is a land of nations where corruption, dictatorship, and rebellion are all too common. Brazil’s neighbor Venezuela is home to President Hugo Chavez, a dictator sitting atop a substantial, and vital, oil supply for the west. In the past, President Chavez has showed an unabashed love of Fidel Castro and a renunciation of all things, and ideas, Western. What does this have to do with Brazil, you may ask? The communist influence on Brazil and South America in general is undeniable, and I fear that what happened with China or France could happen to our ally in the south. It is important to note that of the potential nations who seek to become permanent, I see Brazil as the least dangerous.

India: The geopolitical situation in the Indian subcontinent is fascinating to political junkies like me. India’s potential issue is the same issue with China, the numerous Indian Communist Parties, along with the left-leaning Congress party, are in control of the government as it now stands, and the previous government was voted out after a long run of prosperity and economic growth. Add to that the posturing India must maintain with China to the north, the ongoing struggle with Pakistan and the Kashmir region, and the US involvement in trying to stabilize that issue, and you see where India could use her significant power in the Security Council to punish what it views as opposition to India’s conflicts with her neighbors.

Now that I have diagramed what I view as the issue with the four candidate members, I will discuss the issues I have with expanding the number of seats in general. Any addition to the already bloated Security Council will only deserve to deadlock the body even more. Numerous diplomatic deals are necessary to secure passage of any significant piece of Security Council legislation, imagine the deal making and behind the scenes activities needed to pass legislation past a veto if the number is expanded further. Given the current state of world affairs, a stalemate would be the only outcome of council expansion, which would only weaken the body, not enhance it…and while I am usually a fan of weakening the United Nations, many lawmakers in this nation do now and will always worship at the altar of the United Nations, so weakening of that body could serve to hinder or harm American National Security which is something I will not advocate under any circumstances. On the other hand, a conceivable positive outcome of expanding council seats would be that the body, having been weakened, would further highlight the weaknesses of the ineffectual and bureaucratically choked United Nations, which could conceivably increase drive in this country to deny or weaken its power, influence, and standing in the United States.

A link of Interest

2005-06-27T21:42:00.000-05:00

Here is a short, but decent, critique on the defeatist nature of the modern media by the very erudite Neil Cavuto.
You can read it here.

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Tax Revenue..."

2005-06-25T20:24:00.000-05:00

Special thanks for Cox and Forkum (link at the side) for the Title
In the Supreme Court of the United States, 5 Justices completely and without cause, successfully abrogated private property protections of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Fifth Amendment states:

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb, nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process, of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." (Emphasis added.)

The question concerns the case of Kelo, et al. vs. The City of New London, et al. In the case, Kelo and the other joint petitioners refused to sell their property to the city in exchange for what the city considered to be "just compensation". Others in the neighborhood accepted the city's offer, the petitioners did not, so the city of New London, Connecticut, began condemnation proceedings against them.
Now, you may be asking yourself, "the Fifth Amendment says the private property may be taken for public use with just compensation"...you are right there, under the legal principle of Eminent Domain, a city, state, or the United States may seize private land for public use with what it considers to be a reasonable and just compensation, if you oppose their plan, you are without any real legal recourse except to argue in Court that the compensation proposed is not just, so you may get a little more money, but you are not going to stop development.
"So what is the issue here? Kelo is obviously going against precedent."
No they are not.
The City of New London was not seizing the land to build a library, a school, nor even a road or a police station, the city was seizing the land as part of an economic program to "revitalize the city" arguing in the case that the "Court long ago rejected any literal requirement that condemned property be put into use for the ... public." In other words, the Court long ago held that the Constitution as it is literally written does not enter into their decision on the topic of Eminent Domain!
Under the auspices of "Public Good" the Court ruled that if it serves the interests of the city economy to allow private interests to develop on land in a prime economic location, the city may seize that land and lease or sell it to Corporations or other private interests. This was Kelo's crux, not that the government did not have eminent domain authority, which it undoubtedly does, but that the use was not public as required by the Constitution.
I need to mention that I am a fierce supporter of Private Property rights, and I am a strict constructionist of the Constitution, I oppose attempts to use corporations and other for-profit entities as scape-goats to the American way of life...that being said, I absolutely reject the argument that the Constitution's framers, who wrote and spoke publicly about the need for private property protection, ever intended for the takings clause to be used a means for a city to enrich itself or provide economic revitalization. The framers clearly and unambiguously intended the clause to be used as a last resort to obtain necessary private land for use in building new city resources to serve the public, all of the public. A new shopping mall may rebuild a cities economy, but it does not do anything in the realm of the areas in which a state's police and responsibility lay, areas such as: education, community service and outreach, security, transportation, and utilities.
The Justices who voted to uphold the Supreme Court of the State of Connecticut's ruling in favor of the acquisitions were Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer with Justice John Paul Stevens writing the opinion of the Court.
The Justices who voted in the minority were Chief Justice Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia, and Thomas, the latter of whom wrote an excellent dissenting opinion.
It is worth noting that the 5 who voted to abrogate Fifth Amendment protections against the government's seizure of the land are the 5 "liberal" justices, who continually vote against private property rights but for privacy rights, failing to realize the without private property, privacy is a fleeting concept. These five are known well in Conservative circles as the 5 who attack private property rights and seek to expand the powers of the government to interfere with those rights.
The potential for abuse of this decision cannot go without elaboration, one potential abuse, and I thank my good friend Paul White for bringing this to my attention, is the potential problem of corrupt city, state, and federal officials taking bribes or kickbacks from companies seeking to gain access to good piece of land currently being occupied by neighborhoods. Another issue is simply that this decisions expands the powers of the government outside the realm intended by the founding fathers and authors of the Constitution, it is never defensible to use the Constitution to preserve a "freedom", "right", or abuse that was never there in the first place.
This issue is galvanizing, even my friends with whom I disagree politically understand how poor a decision this is.
I think Congress and local governments need to act to preserve and enhance private property rights.
There is more to come on this subject, of that I promise you

A Constitutional Detour

2005-06-21T18:11:00.000-05:00

Senate Majority Leader Dr. Bill Frist intends to once again hold another vote on the confirmation of John Bolton to be United States Ambassador to the United Nations, this will be the third attempt in many weeks to break the threatened filibuster against the President's nominee.
I say threatened because the Senators opposing Mr. Bolton, frightened to no end by the prospect that he will actually do something besides worship at the altar of the United Nations, have not been forced to carry-out a traditional filibuster. In what is known as the "gentleman's agreement" the Majority is not forcing the minority to "talk the bill to death" for hours on end until a compromise can be made. Instead they are allowing the minority to simply state that they will filibuster if an attempt it made to bring the nomination to a final vote, so in Senate parlance, they are denying Unanimous consent.
There are more than enough Democrats in the Senate to continually deny the Majority the 60 votes needed to break the threat of the filibuster, so unless a few Democrats get tired of not having an Ambassador plenipotentiary to the United Nations, or of dealing with the in-fighting, the United States will not have an ambassador to that body. I guess it is also likely that a few of the Democrats will decide that if a majority of the Senators approve a person it is inappropriate to hold him back by a minority vote, but there is a better chance of the Titanic pulling into New York harbor.
There is a way around this issue, and I think Senator Frist is setting it up for that. During his meeting today with the President the good Doctor said that he will attempt another cloture vote on Mr. Bolton, which the Democrats will deny unanimous consent to stalling the nomination yet again. But, if the Senate adjourns for so much as a day in a declared recess, like for the upcoming 4th of July recess, then under the Constitution of the United States the President can make a recess appointment without Senate consent until this Congress's Session is over in January 2006.
Article II, Section 2 states: The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.
After three times of the Democrats refusing to allow the nomination to come for a vote, it will be more politically palatable for the President to invoke the Constitution.
Senator Christopher Dodd, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, issues a statement earlier shaming the Administration for even considering this option. After all, when the Democrats are refusing to allow the will of the Majority in the Senate to go forward by using undemocratic methods, it is unthinkable for the elected Republican majority to use their majority in all branches of government to follow the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

Institutional Culture

2005-06-21T01:02:00.000-05:00

So far we have had missing documents, 765 kilograms of unaccounted for Plutonium, and security breached at Los Alamos National Laboratories, now we have reports that at the Y-12 Plant, which is the designation for the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, nuclear weapons' parts assembly facility, allowed as many as sixteen illegal workers to enter the facility's grounds as construction workers.
The independent contractor for many of these facilities, BWXT, which manages the Pantex nuclear weapons stockpile assembly and disassembly facility not far from where I go to College in Amarillo, Texas, apparently turned over the case to the Department of Energy's Inspector General's Office when it was confirmed that several illegals had entered the Y-12 facility grounds, though the IG Office says there is no evidence that the illegal aliens had access to any of the sites extremely classified materials.
My thoughts are still up in the air on the private contracting of nuclear weapons technology, although to date BWXT has a good track record, my issue is with the other facilities, like University of California contracted Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which are involved with absolutely vital national security issues, such as research and development into nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, as well as stockpiling and securing those same interests.
The security breaches at Los Alamos in the past, as well as the new discovery at Y-12, reinforces my longstanding belief that the nation's national laboratories should be removed from Department of Energy control and transferred to the Department of Defense, here is why:
1) The Department of Energy is a scientifically-minded Department, interested mostly in domestic and international energy issues, namely sustainable development and regulation of our current energy infrastructure, although it has been given the task by Congress of research and security into nuclear weapons, the institutional mindset is not there
2) The Department of Defense, despite its name, is primarily focused on war and military issues, like weapons design and national security. The Department of Defense has long had the institutional mindset, control, and policies necessary to secure the stockpiles necessary to national security
3) National Security issues should never, never, be contracted out to Universities. Institutions of higher learning are just that, institutions of higher learning, where I think the ivory towers fail to grasp the sensitive nature of the projects on which they are working. Scientists in China, Russia, or Iran are other scientists to them, seeking knowledge...not potential (in the case of China), declared (in the case of Iran), or untrustworthy (in the case of Russia) military enemies of the United States who would use our own research against us. Given the ideological mindset of many scientists and professors, and the knowledge qua knowledge nature of Universities, they are the last institutions I would contract to research and secure our country's most important research.
The Department of Defense is already the largest single government department in the United States, but it is decidedly more logical for the National Nuclear Security Administration to fall under the auspices of the Secretary of Defense and that department's institutional mindset than in the more civilian-minded Department of Energy.

On a more personal note, Number II

2005-06-19T02:23:00.000-05:00

Today was a good day.
After much less sleep than I would have liked, the family and I left out at about noon to head to Frisco, a nice suburb of Dallas, for some general shopping and food. As is expected, it took us an hour and a half to make it there, as traffic in Dallas is legendary, and not in the good way, either. We went to the Cheesecake Factory, which I highly recommend if you have fully functioning tastebuds (even if you no longer possess tastebuds due to an unfortunate accident, like a botched tongue ring implant, go anyway...I am sure the pleasure of those around you will get the point across). I had dinner and Carrot cake cheesecake with cream cheese icing, highly, highly recommended.
Also, as a stroke of luck that was not part of our original itinerary, I also signed on with T-Mobile wireless which offered a better deal than my previous service, Verizon. I do not dislike Verizon, in fact I have never had a problem with them and I would still recommend them for people who live anywhere but the Texas panhandle. As for me, I spend the vast majority of my time in the Amarillo area and Verizon has absolutely no towers of service in that area, which means my phone is as useful as a Democratic promise to crack down on Special Interests...I think that was a digression...I will return to my previous rant, now: anyway, the lack of towers means that when I turned on my Verizon phone it drank battery power, a brand new phone, 15-30 minutes of battery life, tops. Additionally, one to two bars and poor reception at that. I figured that I might as well pay for a phone that gives me service.
I just finished a book in the Splinter Cell line, while it was most certainly not the greatest book I have ever read, it was enjoyable and a decent distraction. It rekindled my desire to play the new Splinter Cell again that I had for a time quelled, I might have been able to resist but I found a fairly cheap copy of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, which I had to buy at the price offered. The new Splinter Cell is the latest in the Tom Clancy franchise, because of my national security and intelligence interests, the Splinter Cell games appeal to me more than they probably have any right to, but then again, I am still waiting for Montreuil-sous-Bois, France based Ubisoft to produce a bad game...at this point, I would be content for them to produce a normal run-of-the-mill game.

There is a lot going on the in the world today, that will be opined upon in a later blog, but for now, I think that my excellent day can end in peace.

The Iranian Dichotomy

2005-06-17T20:48:00.000-05:00

Well, elections were held yesterday in the Islamic Republic of Iran for the position of President, a position that is not exactly clearly defined or well understood by many in the Western world since Iran actually has what appears to be two distinct and competing governments, the government of the Executive operated by the directly elected President and the other religious institution-government overseen by the Supreme Leader of Iran, currently the Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-Khamanei.
For the most part the President runs the day to day operations of the government and the Supreme Leader handles the religious issues, although the Supreme Leader does have some say over appointments to the more sensitive ministries. There is even a special court that oversees Sharia, or Islamic law, that has judicial powers over such crimes as alcoholism and apostacy, for which defendants can be sentenced to death. The reason this is notable is that issues relating to normal executive matters are normally left to the elected executive, but the Supreme Leader has but to declare something to be a subject of Islamic Sharia law and his councils have authority. The level of intra-government contestation must be frightening.
This little background session on Iran's government has a purpose, today Greg Knapp, a local radio personality here in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex had Pennsylvania Representative and Vice-Chairman of the House Committee on the Armed Services Curt Weldon on his show. According to Congressman Weldon, who apparently is very well connected intelligence-wise, not suprising since he has a high ranking position on the Armed Services Committee, the Ayatollah Khamanei had planned several attacks on the United States in the period leading up to the Presidential election of 2004. One plan was to use a hijacked or otherwise ill-attained aircraft to fly from Canada and slam into a Nuclear Power plant. The reason this was put off, according to the good Congressman, is that the Ayatollah was worried that this would help President Bush get re-elected, and intelligence chatter showed a radical Islamic community desperate to see the President defeated. Apparently, once the President was re-elected, it was determined by the Ayatollah that this attack was no longer necessary as it would no longer serve their interests...especially with a President in office who shows little quarter to openly hostile terrorism.

On a more personal note, Number I

2005-06-17T15:33:00.000-05:00

When I worked for US Representative Mac Thornberry as an intern during the Spring of 2003 I created an account with the Wright-Patman Congressional Federal Credit Union, I did this for two reasons;
1: There were no ATM's on the capitol grounds inside the security zone other than the ones owned and operated by the Credit Union
2: Surcharge fees suck
I opened an account with them, and turns out they have excellent rates on a quite a few loans and other essentials, and they have a really cool check card design.
Well, since returning from my service with the Good Congressman, I have gone back to using my other bank account and have hoped that one day I could use the Credit Union's account again, I kept it open, but have done little with it. The Credit Union recently got a deal with four of the banks/ATM companies that put out the terminals to waive surcharge fees for five transactions a month. In the age of the check card (the best invention since money) five transactions are more than I think I would do in a normal month anyway.
So, the moral of the story is, now I can once again utilize my check card, use it, and flash the really cool check card design, and get more use out of the Credit Union account now that I do not have to mail deposits to Washington, DC and carry out other transactions through the mail that can be accomplished through the ATM, now surcharge free.
Thank you, Wright Patman Congressional Federal Credit Union!

"A National party no more...."

2005-06-17T00:10:00.000-05:00

Former Georgia Senator Zell Miller put it well when he said that the Democratic Party is becoming a national party no more, here is an article I wrote for an online political journal about the far-left darling of the disaffected Democrats:

Bernie Sanders, the Independent Vermont Member of Congress, is on his way to being a new threat from the far left this election season, as he held a religious revival-like meeting last month in his state which hounded, expectedly, Republicans, Business, and Capitalism in general.

Congressman Sanders is the Representative-at-large for the State of Vermont, and the only Independent who sits in that chamber; he is also an admitted Socialist who decries “Multinational corporations”, “the wealthy”, and various other necessary aspects of a free-market society.

On their own, none of this makes Congressman Sanders necessarily dangerous; it is the other aspect of his May Day celebration (besides the fact that there are still people out there who actually celebrate May Day…) that brings him to my attention. Congressman Sanders is set to run as an Independent from Vermont for the United States Senate seat being vacated by current Senator Jim Jeffords. If he is elected, he will most likely caucus, as he does in the House, with the Democrats. In the atmosphere of the US Senate, Mr. Sanders is a threat.

In the House of Representatives Mr. Sanders is one of 435 voting members in a Chamber with strict rules, and strict rules enforcement, where the most he could do was act as a gadfly during occasional one-minute speeches and to grill Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan about his disregard for the poor and the middle class, who he sees as being forgotten by Chairman Greenspan’s lack of rewriting economic policy to favor a centralized system of state regulation. In the Senate, however, Mr. Sanders would be one of 100 in a Chamber with an atmosphere built around congeniality and unanimous consent.

Right now in the US Senate we are witnessing not a filibuster, but the mere threat of a filibuster, keeping many of the President’s judicial nominees, as well as United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, from the floor. The mere threat of a filibuster was keeping ten of the President’s nominees from receiving floor consent votes; both the Senators refusing to and favoring a vote for cloture are being herded and persuaded by their party leaders, since he is an Independent, Mr. Sanders would be relatively free to act as a new Über-Obstructionist, even better, since he caucuses with the Democrats, Mr. Sanders could and would be used by the Democrats as an unofficial tool of the parties obstruction, for while Rep. Sanders is an independent, he is appointed to his committees by the Democratic Leadership, he caucuses with the Democratic Leadership, and he can attain virtually no power in a body designed to operate in a two-party system without the Democratic Leadership. The Democrats would use him as a very effective unofficial policy hitman while plausibly maintaining their independence of the acts.

Additionally, Mr. Sanders’ confrontational style, love of Congress-bashing, and tried and true socialist credentials add more reason to worry about his attainment of higher office. He prefers appointments to the Government Reform and Financial Services Committees, where his love of regulation and state centralized economics can be brought to fruition. He favors Nationalized Health Care, Free College Tuition, Protectionism, and, oddly enough, ending ATM surcharges.

Any summary glance at his website will reveal all; there is no problem in America that cannot be directly linked to corporations, the wealthy, or profit.

Granted, reality comes biting eventually, and even someone as far out of economic reality as Mr. Sanders is will eventually have to compromise his belief structure to operate in the Senate, but that does not mean he cannot do like other famous political darlings and wield the uncommon power the US Senate gives Senators to slowly advance his agenda. A threat of a filibuster, utilization of stalling tactics, or a seat on a compromise committee and instantly the minority will move to the left to accommodate someone it needs to maintain their filibuster threats and warm body total. The situation becomes even worse if the Senate sits 51-49 anytime during Mr. Sanders’ term, due to what Senator Zell Miller calls that “strange Senate math.” No matter which party is holding the majority this independent will be a sought-after commodity by the Democrats who will appease him by granting ground on some of his cherished political issues. All one has to do is remember Senator McCain who, during the 50-50 split that occurred after the 2000 elections, wielded enormous influence (and airtime) over the Republican agenda due to fears of his defections, fears that would eventually subside when Senator Jeffords jumped ship for the Independent position leaving the Senate 50-49-1.

An interesting bit of historical irony, that the Senator in the 50-50 scenario who gave Senator Tom Daschle a minority based Senate majority would retire to leave the Senate apparently in the hands of another independent that could influence the direction of the Senate in obstructionism and liberalism.

In any other state we might be able to discount Mr. Sanders run for the Senate standing as an independent, but as an "at large" member of Congress, he has already been elected, eight times, by the whole electorate of that state on his collectivist platform. We can hope that Vermonters do not heed his siren call of socialism and send him to the Senate, for as Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, Socialism is the "philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy," and those traits are already abounding on one side of the Senate aisle.

My First Blog

2005-06-16T12:50:00.000-05:00

This is my first blog entry, for what I hope will become a much more common procedure on my part. To those out there reading this, perhaps near to the current date or perhaps looking through archives, remember what I have to say is grounded in my firmest convictions.

First things first, a little explanation of my blog title.

"The Common Sense Amendment" is in reference to the old legislative parlance that says "The only things you cannot legislate are intelligence and common sense."

In my experience, that is very true. No matter how hard you try, no matter how much leeway is written into our laws, someone somewhere is going to get by the system, work their way around it, or receive millions of dollars in taxpayer settlements because they failed to incorporate even a modicum of common sense into their daily life.

This is evident in our warning labels (Warning, do not use hair dryer while sleeping), our lawsuits (An Oklahoma City man was awarded $1.8 Million dollars when he engaged cruise control on the interstate and went into the back of his Winnebago to make some coffee, failing to realize that "Cruise Control" does not equal "Drive Control"), and our political debates (Yes, members of Congress do pay into Social Security).

Now you know where I am coming from, hopefully, this will allow you to understand the rest of my frequent rants.