If you can't read, at least watch the damn movie

I remember a time when Americans NEVER referred to our country as our "homeland." Homeland was something archaic, something that europeans might have said in the 1930s.

There was a time in this country when the phrase "free speech zone" would have made people giggle. It was 1999.

A president of the United States resigned over allegations of illegal wiretapping and other abuses of executive power.

I remember thinking that the Gulf of Tonkin business was frightening, but so long ago, and just grouped it in with the Maine. Anyway, people were different back then, surely we wouldn't just abandon rational thought and enter some kind of hysterical state.

I remember being taught these lessons in school. There was a real sense among the older generations that they'd seen all these things happen, been fooled and they wanted us to be wiser than they were.

War is a racket. And the men running the con get all the spoils. You and I get lied to, shot at, spied on, shat on, and if we speak up, we get arrested.

If you don't know who Emmanuel Goldstein is, at least see the damn movie. It should have been called 2006.

In 2006, advanced data-mining systems click up a red flag when you look up the transcripts of Osama's latest tape. (actually I can't even find the latest tape.)

Islamic terrorism is by no means "the most dangerous threat our country has ever faced" as you'll hear on any AM radio station. It's not even close, and it's an insult to all who have died protecting the republic from actual danger to say that it is.

Occaisional exception

If you've been around enough animals, you know that every so often, maybe one in fifty or one in a hundred, an animal you know displays what might be called "genius." I have been lucky enough that in my life, I've lived with a couple such animals. They seem more human than dog/cat/horse/whatever. They are remarkably easy to train, understand exactly what you want of them most of the time, and just seem incredibly smart.

I was stumbling along and found a blog entry that was a eulogy of such an animal. His name was Tito, and he was just a dog after all, but he seems like a fine dog.

And it makes you think. I suppose we'd all like to think of ourselves as that one special specimen, the one who invents, understands, who excels over the others in our species. But the fact is, most of us aren't, and you have to go through a whole mess of dogs before you meet a Tito.

A modest proposal

I was reading a well-footnoted paper called Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the origin of war, and at the end of the otherwise very well thought out paper, the author wandered off on a tangent, but it is a beautiful tangent:

An unacceptable--even mad proposal--would be to swap out the whole Iraqi population with Texans and rapture believers. It's not impossible from a logistics point of view (the US moves 25 million people through its airports in about a month). The Iraqis would get a place where the power was on all day-- which would improve their "income per capita" perception enough to shut off support for war and related disruption. The Texans would have oil, which would certainly make them happy, and with no fighting they could patch the country up in a year or two. If there really are as many people looking for the rapture as the polls show and some rapture leader got the idea that being closer to the Holy Land was a good idea, a voluntary population swap might be oversubscribed.

But then what would you do? The US doesn't need a 51st state in the Mid East full of people looking for the rapture no matter how much oil it has.

Sounds like a winner to me, and just imagine how great Texas could be with no Jesists, and all the hummus you can eat!