The Elections are A-O-K, how we got there is B-A-D

You would have to be a fool to not want the Iraqi elections to work out. Iraq has always been one of the more progressive countrys in the mideast, this dispite Sadam. It is does not have a history of religious fundamentalism, most of the jihadi's come from Saudi Arabia, or Syria.
The election is not really over yet since days will elapse before results are known, and we dont know exactly who is counting the ballots. Nobody who voted really knows who they are even electing. They voted for parties not people. I don't have a problem with that as long as the men in the smoke filled room, and there are lots of them in Iraq, are not trading votes the way they have been dividing up power.
The problem that Iraq is left with is that dispite the election, and the 8 million people who risk their lives to vote, and dispite all the flowery speaches about sucess, 3 more Marines got killed today in Iraq. 29 people died yesterday during the elections. And after the votes are counted the jihadi's, who are passionate belivers that God and His victory is on their side, will not simply go home.
Basically the mess that Iraq is will still be there. In April of 1971 Nixon was asked about when US troops would be out of Vietnam. He said that he wanted to make sure that the government of South Vietnam and a defense force capable of defending the country and that all US POW's were returned home.
I think that the continued presense of US forces present Iraq and the US with a perfect catch 22. Occupatin forces are the prime reason the isurgancy exists. To remove them, however, would be to created a force vacume and that could be filled with open rebellion.
However I find the continued lack of faith in the average Iraqi to be disturbing. I believe that the removal of US forces would not dump Iraq into civil war. It would cut the legs out from under the insurgent position. And to withdrawl after the vote count is done would be the perfect political time. Since victory could be claimed and the insurgents could not legitmatley claim that they chased the US out. It would be a master stroke both at home and abroad. It would go along way toward redeming Bush and the US in the eyes of the world.
But I do not think that this will happen. I think that we have no real intention about leaving Iraq and so this event will pass, like all the other events of the past two years, and things will go one sputtering in confusion and the madness will grow deeper.

Halo 2

Halo 2 was a nice bit of digitized blood-sport. However the ending was a bit too clifhanger for me. It would be like ending Star Wars with the X-wings taking off to attack the Death Star :

Wedge: Look at the size of that thing.

Roll end credits

I am sorry but having the big battle scene be killing the head brute is not epic enough for this epic game. There needed to be something more bigger, giganticer, hugerer, excitinger. and largester. I know the whole point to video games is not really entertainment but product sales and a good game not only generates sales of current product but also insures future sales. And a hook is a hook is a hook.

Another point is that there is so much doublcrossing going on that, as a soldier, I gave up on keeping sides straight. It quickly devolved down to "if you are infront of me I am going to kill you." And why arn't humans double crossing, two-faced, slimes, hell that is one of our defining characteristics! I think the next installment should be a rogue human element that starts to cause trouble for the ol Master Cheif. So we end up with bits of the Covenent and bits of Humans fighting against other Covenent and Humans.

Spunge Bob and James Dobson

For those of you who do not know Mr. Dobson consider yourself lucky. I find his lack of faith disturbing. He is one of those people who claims to be a Christian and at the time shows his utter lack of confidence and faith in Christ. Basically is is always running around like a chicken with his head cut off about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket. "EEEEK my faith in maker of the universe is so low that I fear EVERYTHING!!!!!!!"

Now he is claiming that Sponge Bob Square Pants is gay. I have news for Mr. Strange Dobson Scardypants. Sponge Bob is a cartoon. He does not actually live in your TV. The TV is only an electronic machine designed to convert electronic signals into light.

That being clarified "Sponge Bob Rocks!" He kicks Dobson's ass in both an ethical and spiritual sense. It is very telling when a cartoon character is more of a Christian than a real human being. I know that Dobson's prime beef with gay people and homosexuality in general is that he is one and simply can't sqaure-pants that with his lack-of-faith.

The difference between a true follower of Christ and a pretender is that the true believer stand firm in the storm, unaffraid and confident, leading by exampl, while the pretender runs around blaming everyone for his life accept himself.

Change not the Square Panted Bob!

Why Social Security should not be privatised

News Broadcast from 2030:

--Newsguy: The market took yet another tumble today after a poor jobs-report for the 3rd qaurter. Combined with investment loses in Florida and gulf coast relastate due to rising sea levels the market is down 15%. The CEO's of six of the firms who handle private retirement funds for the Federal government have petitioned Congress and the White House to bail them out, thus securing the retirement incomes of millions of Americans.

Investment CEO: With the market at current levels the only way we can gaurentee sollvency is the the Fed to help us out--

This is the future if we privatise Social Security. Privatising simply adds a whole new layer of unaccountable management ontop of the existing system. And sets up a system that where the investment firms will have little reason to fear bad investments since they know that they can always feed at the Federal (the tax payer) trough incase things go south.

Review of The Passion of the Christ

You'd have to be a cave man to not know the storyline of this film. Jesus, viewed by us Christians as God on earth and..well..the Christ, is finally gotten rid of by the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate; the end.

Now I have seen all sorts of renditinos of this story. There is The Greatest Story Ever Told, Ben Hur, Jesus Christ Super Star, The Last Temptaion of Christ, and on and on and on. Because these films are about the earthly life and death of a Diety to 1.5 billion people, they all have a bit of contraversy.

So here comes The Passion of the Christ. Jesus, dispite the scurging, has never looked better. This guy is prime beefcake. I had no problem with this films violence. To argue the film is bad because of he violence I would argue back then movies like The Killing Fields, or Platoon, or The Godfather, or Saving Private Ryan, are all poor films since there is a lot of violence.

What happened to Jesus and thousands of other Jews at the hands of Pilate was appauling. Pilate had a long term as governor and crucified loads of people. The only liberalism noted in the Roman army, was the liberal use of torture, dismemberment, and butchery; all ladeled out with Nazi-like efficiency.

This story is not about being historically accurate though it is, by far, the most accurate portrayal to date. Sorry but it is. The violence in this film is a metaphor for how mankind deals with truth. Some people have called this movie anti-jewish. Well that is plain silly since Jesus was a Jew. I didn't get any anti-semetic feelings from this film. It is nice little film that trys to get you to put yourself not in Jesus position but in the Roman position. It wants you to see yourself as the persecutor.

My pastor was disapoionted that it ended the way it did. He wanted what came after. And for Christians the resurection is the more important thing.

But so what. I think it took skill to crank out a movie, that dispite being spoken in Latin and Aramaic could gross as much as it did. It speaks to the power of the story, and the skill of the actors and filmaker. I am not going to argue whether Gibson is a crank. His brand of super-orthodoxy is silly. But I can't let his faith cloud how I felt at seeing the movie. I liked it. So I give it an 8.

Hubble Hub-bub

The decision to cut funding to resupply the Hubble is insane. The Hubble has been another in a string of non-manned space ventures that have proven to be worth every penny. Our current view of the universie inwhich we live, is based in no small part of observations made by the best telescope ever made. The hubble kicks the ass of pretty much all earth-based telescopes. Like the Voyager twins, the Pioneer boys, Viking I and II, Spirit and Oportunity, and finally the Cassini-Huygens mission, Hubble is leading the way to show the best way of doing early-exploration....But to hell with all that robot crap!

We want "boots on the ground"; sort of an Iraqi Freedom policy in space. I know that the costs are gigantic, the risks spectacular, the return on investment lowsy, and logistics of sending men to Mars nonsensically quixotic. But we are the country that bulldozed natives and dynamited our way through Panama to join oceans. We blew the crap out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just to show'm. We walked on the fucking moon! If we can kick Hitler's ass, then by god we can kick space's ass too. We can envision Buck Rogers, and light sabers, and Ewoks with rubber teeth. We built an actual model of a theoretical, conceptual, spacecraft that might be able to get us to Mars. Hell has anybody seen Mission to Mars? If we can make a movie we're halfway there!

That is the subtle approach to space exploration the Bush administration seems to be bent on. So here is a message to the big P about his tilting at the windmill of space.

STOP SPENDING MY HARD EARNED MONEY ON CRAP LIKE THIS YOU EMPTY-HEADED WIPER OF OTHER PEOPLES BOTTOMS!
GO BACK TO GETTING GI'S BLOWN UP IN IRAQ AND STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM SPACE. UNLESS YOU WANT TO LAUNCH YOURSELF UP THERE. THEN I'M ALL FOR IT!

What JPL should be doing is developing a robot to explore the White House to see if any intelligent life exists there; and if so what that life is based on. If the Hubble crashes to Earth because of that backwoods, Texas GI-kill'n, scumbag, I vote for "End Times". We can all look down and see how much Bush and his bunch of hypocrites can fuck up Hell. Of course hell, for Bush and his hypocrites, is ruled by the devil manifesting himself as the duel image of Bill and Hillary Clinton...forever.

Evolution

For those of you who feel like taking a bit of a plunge into the digital domain of high-tech genomic and evolutionary sciences please Google "Avida". This will take you to CalTech and there Digital Evolution Lab. They have developed software that spawns mini-programs, similar to computer viruses, that can be controled. They use these the same way others have used Bacteria and Viruses in the quest to determine if Evolution is everything it states that it is. What they have discovered is that Darwin was pretty much right on the money.

You can download the software free of charge and do your own genomic research. Of course it requires some information that I don't have. But I was able to take a single organism and see how many variations I got after 50,000 generations.

Read Discover Mag. Jan 2005 to learn more. Ironically the main source of bug detection and beta testing has been the Creationist community. They have been so bent on proving the program flawed that they have litteraly taken it apart. The problem for them is that, though they have found the odd bug or two, by and large the program seems to be solid. What makes the program rock is that you can, in a matter of hours, crank out genetic mutations and new spieces of of mini-programs over thousands of generations. Read the article to get a better picture of it.

Bush league all the way around

If Bush was trying to galvanize all those who think he is the biggest oppresor of liberty and freedom in the US, then he did a bang-up job. I would say to the the President, "Okay cowboy! The judgment you just passed on other leaders and nations is the judgement to be passed on you. And how you measure others will be how we shall measure you."
To me his speach was a joke, since his administration not only deals with the scum of the earth, it actively supports them. Saudi Arabia, over the years has been and is the largest backer of militant islam. So we invade Iraq and have the crown prince of Saudi Arabia over to the ranch for tea. We target the Taliban, who's only finger in our eye was not giving up Bin Laden, while actively supporting the dictatorship in Pakistan that not only bankrolled the Taliban, but also has built atomic weapons and threatened to use them on India.
Then the toad Chenny talks about Iran as a big threat. To who? Good God almighty our buddies in slime pose far more risks to the earth than Iran. Again I ask you, who has nukes, sold atomic technology to others, and actively supported terrorism? Pakistan that is who. Who has tens of billions of dollars of the most advanced militray hardware in the mideast? Saudi Arabia has all that. Militant Islam was initially spread by Wahabi's. Where did they come from? They were the cheif clerics that lived in the desert with Abdul Aziz Bin Saud, the founding king of Saudi Arabia, and father to the ailing king Fahad, father of the dude Bush likes to have over the ranch. The rulers of Saudi Arabia are inextricably linked to Wahabi Islam.
Getting back to Bush's speach. He made it pretty clear that the only way we can keep our freedom is that he says it is okay. That is 1984. You have an endless war against terrorists so you can justify the errosion of freedom.
Also his well crafted remark about "freedeom" regarding retirement is a swipe as Social Security. And we all know sooooo well how retirement worked before Social Security: well actually we don't since none of us were born then. How it worked was something like this. If you were rich you got old and died rich. If you were middle class you got old and had to live with your kids and died poor. If you were poor you starved.
Now for the hard part. If people are going to protest the man please do us all a favor, and A: Do it in DC or NYC, and B: do it for weeks and months on end. Protesting in America is done like a softball game, or b lock party. "Hey lets do a protest. Afterwords we can go to Starbucks and get a Latte!"
If we want to bring this regime down there has to be millions of people in the streets and it has to last for weeks or months at a time. And, get this, there has to be an actual plan that the protestors are espousing, not just a "we hate Bush" plan.

Boring ho-hum old news that the media is tired of...

Death toll in Tsunami is now passed 220,000. With 166,000 dead in Indonesia alone.
Lead international stories for CNN, Fox, ABC NBC CBS the BBC and Al Jezzera

CNN: Iraq car bombing kills 25
Fox: Violence Escalates in Iraq
CBS: Suadi Cleric Warns Pilgrams about violence
ABC: Car bombs rock iraq
NBC: Bombings in Iraq
BBC: US prepares of Inaguration
Aljezzera: California executes prisoner

Old news is news not worth hearing. And how many Americans are still missing? 2,500.

Ho well who cares. For some reason 2500 dead in New York is news for months and years ,while 220,000 die in Asia and "hurry up when is the Super Bowl?"

American Religion II

I find nothing in the actions of the current President or his party to be demonstratably Christian. Other than using the name of our Savior and his church as a weapon of political power. The reason the United States is so God fearing and devout is that our faith has not been corrupted by the state. Europeans, for centuries, have had to contend with states deriving their power from God and so there is enormous religious cyicism there. It seems we wish to follow them. If the goal of my fellow Christians is to destroy our bond with Christ Jesus there is no surer way than to petition the corrupted powers of the Earth to intervine on His behalf. As if our God were nothing but a idol needing protection. At the fall of Troy, Aenius had to rescue his gods from the fires. St Augustine, in City of God, points out the stupidity of worshiping gods that need to be saved by men. My God needs no such saving. He does the saving.

Gonzales Evasive and a silly-head

Listening to the confirmation hearings of the soon-to-be Attorney General, one would think that Mr. Gonzales is being confirmed as the Presidents lawyer instead of the peoples lawyer.
The Attorney General is the lawyer for the entire nation. He should not be the lap dog and lacky of a President. If the Administration is doing things that run afoul of the law it is the AG's job to stop them.
Too often this most important law enforcer is reduced to a political hack and an excuse maker. I also found Gonzales' answers to most of the serious questions to be non answers. This is hugely troubling when it concerns whether he thinks the President is above the law. According to Gonzales, the President is not above the law unless there is a really good reason. And who determines that? A weegee board, the bible, voices in Bushes head?
Lastly his refusal to comment on the legality or non-legality of the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib is indicative of his desire to remain a loyal lapdog as opposed to the naiton's law enforcer.
To confirm this man would be yet another black mark on a nation that seems bent on suicide. I don't want to live in a pretend democratic republic. I want to live in an actual democratic republic. There is only so much law you can strip away before a nation falls. Without justice a nation cannot exist.

Religion in America part 1

The results of the past election is not a shock to me. Nor are the reasons behind it a shock. I sent a letter to Air America, a network I like to listen to and mostly agree with...mostly. This letter was sent June 6th 2004. Too bad nobody listened.

Dear Randi,

You do the Democratic Party, my party, a disservice, to insult Evangelical Christians. My savior tells me to "go and make desciples of all the nations." This being said I think that Christians in this nation have not, and are not attempting to hijack a political party. It is the other way around. The Republican party apparatus seeks to use Christianity as a tool to attain more power. It uses faith the same way George III used it. As a means of control and as an exuse for terrible acts of cruelty. Unfortunately some who are weak in faith fall prey to the suductive, faustian bargain, that they are forging.

Thankfully our founders wished to keep government out of faith. To safegard their own faith and the faith of all the citizens, from the earthly corruption that predictably comes from the mingling of, as Augustine would say, the city of the Earth with the city of God. As a Christian I believe that each city, for now, is mutually exclusive. Only God can unify them and the hand of man will have no part in that.

It is a great falsehood to think that Christianity needs something as trival and fleeting as a civil government to survive and thrive. For even an Earthly superpower is as nothing compared with that which cast the foundations of existance.

I will vote Democratic because theirs is a more humane approach to nationhood. And is, because of that humanity, a stronger and more lasting solution to earthly problems. Yet I would never say that the Democratic party is on God's side. Saying that of either party is an insult to the Divine.

Please stop insluting Christians as if we are all a bunch of ignorant hicks. Everytime you do that you push more and more Christians into the hands of a party that has nothing to do with Christ or His teachings.

Spencer S. Hsu of the Washington Post has reported -

"D.C. officials said yesterday that the Bush administration is refusing to reimburse the District for most of the costs associated with next week's inauguration, breaking with precedent and forcing the city to divert $11.9 million from homeland security projects."

Well well. Who is surpised by this? This in a nutshell, is the clearest definition of a conservative Republican. You see my fellow Americans Democrats will tax you and then try to give you your moneys worth. They may succeed or they may fail. Republicans will tax you and then do nothing for you. Here our illustriously kind leader is demanding that a city where one in 5 people live in poverty, has to foot the bill for his inaguration. Should the poor people fee proud that money that was earmarked for fire departments and emergency responders is now going to keep and buch of Bush loyalists safe?

Bush is a disgrace and should be impeached. He is the leader of nothing but a failed presidency. The sooner the loser goes the better. Someone tell me where to mail my egg so it can get thrown at his stupid limo,

HaberBlog Begins

Well this is an inauspicious non-event. A Blob! er...Blog! Well I have to thank my bro Mike for all this.

Thank you Mike for putting all my insane emial pontifications into one hell-hole.