I don’t want to comment on politics today. Too much depressing news out there, about war, health care, and Copenhagen. I might comment later. Not now.
Anyway, I think I’m supposed to be doing other things. I’m giving an oral presentation on my thesis — and yes, for those of you who think otherwise, for a bachelor’s degree in political science a thesis in necessary — tomorrow.
Who am I? Why do I have a blog, and why should you read it? Can anyone blog? These questions plague me now that I have a blog beyond facebook. Of course, the question ‘who am I?’ has long plagued me, as it should. But now, let me use a blog to study that question.
Anyone can blog. Not everyone can blog well; it takes a skill with words, with an audience (is there one?), and with a use of sources, or, on an opinion-based post, a consistency with an open mind to any responses. I’m under the impression, because I read as well as write, that a good blog has to keep its audience interested. Not every post has to be interesting to every person — although I try to make all posts applicable in some way to everybody — but there has to be something interesting for everyone. So, what am I writing about here? By ‘who am I?’ I mean, I think, what would I write about here. The answer is that I write about the past, the future; education, family, politics, and the frequently intangible things that make up our world.
Why should you read what I have to say? Well, that is up to you. You may know me; at this point, I think you do. So I hope you read because something here interests you.
Congress and football. Or maybe it’s, football and congress. I’m not sure it matters, even if there is a difference. What’s congress up to, you might ask? Glad you asked. “a House subcommittee approved legislation Wednesday aimed at forcing college football to switch to a playoff system to determine its national champion“. There was a no vote, by Rep. John Barrow, D-Ga., who thought “we have more important things to spend our time on”.
Really congress? Great. Good job. I’ll agree with John Barrow on this one. Mind you, this isn’t nearly as troublesome as the fact that, back in July, there was a bill in congress to ban mermaids, and other halfbreeds. Another effort to delve into science fiction? I don’t think so. Senator Brownback was serious, and he’s tried to introduce this bill before.
Another one for the record books? I won’t even try to predict what they think of next. Some legislation about proper words during the ‘holiday season’?
According to Andrew Sullivan, the Associated Press says that
[Afghan President Hamid Karzai] said it will be at least 15 years before his government can bankroll a security force strong enough to protect the country from the threat of insurgency.
Great. Can we leave now? I can’t think of any reason we should have our military there at this point.
When is a dead person not dead? [Insert joke answer here]
Robert Lanza, M.D., might suggest a dead person is not ever dead. In fact, he does suggest that. He’s not the first to suggest that; Buddhist philosophy beat him to the punch by many hundred years. And he won’t be the last to suggest that. Lanza says that quantum physics says that, “Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling – the ‘Who am I?’- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn’t go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed.” And, there are multiple universes operating on the same plane in time, and different planes in space (no, this isn’t science fiction), and death does not happen in any of these universes.
According to Biocentrism [the theory of multiple different, simultaneous, universes], space and time are not the hard objects we think. Wave your hand through the air – if you take everything away, what’s left? Nothing. The same thing applies for time. You can’t see anything through the bone that surrounds your brain. Everything you see and experience right now is a whirl of information occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything together.
When a body dies, when it expires, the energy doesn’t expire, according to Biocentrism, and Lanza. That’s hardly a new idea. But it’s an idea that negates the need for religion, rather than accentuates the need for religion. If you, or the energy that is you, continues to live that energy has to go into something, or be somewhere. So if we sit around wondering if your energy, that was you before you died, has made it to heaven or to hell, the answer is neither. That energy is still out there floating around somewhere, and to label it as either heavenly or hellish enemy takes away from the fact that it’s on Earth somewhere.
Palin, Palin, Palin, get your Palin here! That’s about all I ever hear out of the media — unless it’s Tiger Woods’ turn, or ACORN, or something else that gets its week’s worth of attention. Palin, though, never goes away; not since she became something to talk about 16 months ago. So, when I read David Corn’s latest Mother Jones article, I had a reaction worth commenting on. The article, “Palin’s Latest Ethics Flap”, is about how, since her resignation as governor, Palin has not been held accountable in the ethics complaint filed, while she was governor, about Alaska Fund Trust and personal financial gain for Palin. My reaction to the article, and this is the important part, was “so what”; you who know me know that I care about ethical behavior, both in and out of the government, etc., etc., etc.. “So what”, I thought, not because I don’t care, but because there seem to be more important causes (John Yoo, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush).
It becomes inevitable that one “so what” could lead to another. I retract my reaction to the Sarah Palin article, which matters as much as if she were actually still in charge of a state, or a corporation, or anything larger than a household — it even matters there. My “so what” reaction is exactly what’s wrong with the system. If Palin has ethical issues, should we not care because Bush was worse; if Bush has ethical issues, should we not care because Hitler was worse? Like Andrew Sullivan does every day in his journalistic pursuit of Palin, we have to care.
Issues are not dealt with in binary. There is right and wrong, but right and wrong exist along a flexible continuum, as time changes. At our current place in history, it is wrong to be a government official (at least, in our form of government) who does not act within the rules of law. More importantly, and this applies to Palin, Bush, Cheney, and others, government officials who make mistakes need to, have to, be able to admit to those mistakes and improve as the system desires them to improve. That, we are lacking.
It is my duty as a citizen to examine our politics. I want to look at portions of politics domestic and international, but to say that is not enough; all politics is either domestic or international, or a mix of the two. There’s a few things going on, and while I like to write about great universal, timeless, concepts, perhaps some understanding of things as they always are will come from looking at things as they are (and this, incidentally, might give an understanding of Obama’s favorite: things as they are vs. things as they should be. So, let me try to keep some order to this, first domestic, next, international.
There’s a lot happening domestically (and internationally) but most of what is happening is so obscured by the never-ending health care debate that it’s hard to notice, despite the hours of trawling of political news I do every day, that there’s anything else going on. However, Andrew Sullivan will be happy to remind you that gay rights are an issue. (Gay=LGBTQ in that statement — Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning). Me? I don’t want to touch the issue at the moment, but I’m going to. I view gay rights as the struggle for our generation. I can’t pinpoint what or who has chosen this issue, because like women’s rights (c. 1920) and racial rights (c. 1960) there is more than one cause. This is, and this will be, our civil issue. We can fight this issue, or we can accept that it is a struggle of our generation; we can believe in equal rights or unequal rights, but I don’t think we can avoid it. It will come; it has come.
Next up: Obama’s wish list. I mean, the wish list he made on the campaign trail, and he made the goal of his first year in office. Health Care, Education, Environment. Health care is abonimably slow (thanks, congressional Republicans). I have no doubt it takes a long time to write a 1,990 page health care bill, but that House bill was done before Halloween, and it took the Senate until today to decide that the health care bill isn’t about abortion (the measure to ban Federally funded abortion failed). Perhaps we’ll all end up with the health care system the Founding Fathers/Boston Tea Partiers/Patriots/Revolutionaries had — none — after all, that seems to be what the current Tea Partiers/Teabaggers want. As a side note, the House bill, and current, incomplete, Senate draft, have health care changes going into effect as late as 2013. I’m not terribly worried about that; it takes time to organize the system they have devised with various Secrataries and Commissioners, and time to get the insurance companies and states on the same page. Nonetheless, chew on that date for a moment.
Education: I think Obama passed some nice legislation for K-12 education (?) but it slipped so quietly through the cracks that I haven’t seen anything about it several months. Also, it doesn’t help California’s abysmal higher ed problems. I’m sorry, for all you that thought that a great way to be a productive citizen in your life might have something to do with going to college.
Environment, or as Jon Stewart likes to call it, Cap’n Trade, is an issue that has been in congress for months and never gets anywhere. There’s a UN-sponsored conference on climate change that has far fewer google hits than Tiger Woods over the last 30 days. Maybe that shouldn’t be too surprising as long as 18 percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the Earth. Anyway, domestic and international efforts on climate change aren’t going well.
Do you want to know what’s happening internationally, besides a climate change conference that isn’t nearly as well-researched by people as knowing how many mistresses Tiger Woods has? Probably not; I know I don’t want to know.
We are told we have “commitments”—not a very cheerful expression—in three continents, and that it is in consequence of these “commitments” that we must keep three army corps ready for immediate expeditionary purposes. On what principle are there to be three rather than two or eight? I had hoped that the formulation of some definite principle governing our military needs would be a prominent feature of any scheme of Army reform submitted to the nation. I suppose the principle on which the army corps have been selected is, one continent, one army corps. Well, Sir, I should like to look into that.
or, as Arianna Huffington has put it, in a more modern but perhaps less majestic way, Obama and Sartre have crossed to form a “No Exit” strategy from Afghanistan. That, to say the least, is discouraging.
Also in the Middle East, Israel is having severe personality problems. I have commented on this before, elsewhere, but it is worth noting here that 1)Israel has the right to defend itself if attacked, 2) the United States would doubtless support Israel is Israel is attacked, 3) because of this no country would attack Israel unless Israel provokes it.
I can assure you that’s not all that’s going on in politics, because politics is ever-changing. What does it have to do with us? While we’re in a democracy, quite a bit.
It is time for me to join the blogging world. Up to this point I have used facebook as my primary medium for communicating with the world — at least, over the past four years, since facebook became ‘the thing’ that’s been true. I’m written many notes, mostly worldly commentary, and shared many links, since that has become an option. I’m somewhat embarrassed to have written that I joined facebook when it was (and still is) ‘the thing’, because I usually disassociate myself with the norm and do exactly what other people don’t do. However, facebook has been a compelling way to spend my time, wondering why exactly I’m spending my time that way, but, importantly, facebook has kept me in touch — theoretically — with people I would otherwise not have kept in touch with. People from high school, elementary school, and several college classes.
And so it is that now I have a blog, because facebook is great for status updates but not great for blogging. Then again, I have never been much of a blogger, because I have never had a blog (no, proboards forums do not count). As with the rest of my life this blog will contain a little of everything (I think, I can only guess what the future holds). And, as with the rest of my life, I don’t say everything. I expect there will be some social (political) commentary, some comments about stupidity, and perhaps intelligence, some updates on my life as I age, and some links to other sources that may be more exciting to read than me.
I have a long way to go before I am anything near as prolific as John Scalzi (by the way, read his book The Android’s Dream, because it’s the weirdest thing since Equus, which is a different story, that perhaps I shouldn’t tell) — however, this isn’t a contest with Scalzi or anyone else.
The Dole Blog 