Faith

Faith is a Great and Powerful Wizard saying "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain".

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

It is not familiarity that breeds contempt, it is the realization that someone is screwing you over that breeds contempt, and familiarity often reveals that.

Joke e-mail

I'm fairly staunchly democrat, and I have a few friends who are pretty solidly republicans, at least they pretend to be, and who seem to think it's funny to send me these joke e-mails that put down the democrats. Okay, most of them are pretty funny, but the point is that they're not based on factual information. That's the main difference that I see between the republicans and the democrats, although I worry that the some democrats may lower themselves to the level of republicans and thus prove me wrong.

Anyway, the main difference is that the republicans like to make jokes at the expense of their opponents. Think back to the 4th grade for a second. You're with a group of kids, and they start making fun of another group of kids. You don't want to be made fun of, so you make a mental note not to hang out with the kids who are being made fun of. This is another basic way in which we have evolved to think, and the republicans try to take advantage of this. They know that there's no rational reason why any intelligent, middle class, human being would vote in someone who would take their money away from them, so they try to turn attention away from that and use ridicule as a way to dupe people into voting for them.

That's the way I see it anyway.

LeRoy.

The Big Piñata

I see Iraq as being like a big Piñata. First Iran took a swing, they hit it, but didn't break it. Instead, they sent it swinging and it hit Kuwait in the head. Then G. Bush Sr. took a swing, and he did break it either, although he did damage it. Then G. Bush Jr. took a swing, and he busted it wide open. Now all the kids, Iran, Al Qaeda, Dick Chenney and Halliburton, and Muqtada al Sadr, are rushing in to grab as much candy as they can.

Aging Research

I think aging research is one of the most dangerous things going on in our society today. At first glance, it appears to be a good thing, trying to figure out how people age so that we can better treat the ravages of old age, maybe even prevent it. The problem is that aging is very closely related to dying, and if people don't die, then there won't be any room for any new people. Remember, life is like a merry-go-round. People have to get off before more people can get on. Basically, the quest to stop the aging process is a selfish attempt by some people to stay on the roller coaster longer.

I see two main possible scenarios happening if people do discover how to halt aging, and make no mistake about it, they will figure it out.

The first scenario is that the drug, assuming that it's a drug, is made available to everyone. Maybe it will be free so everyone can have it, or maybe it will just be cheap enough that most people will have it. Maybe it will be made available to the whole world, or maybe just those people who are loyal to whoever supplies the drug, it doesn't matter. The point it that the world will eventually reach a state where the world is full of people who won't die, at least not through aging. At that point, people will have to stop having children.

That's a little bit of an exaggeration. You will need some children to replace those who die through accident or aggression. Each person living will still be able to have two children, on average. It's just percentage of your life that you spend raising kids will be much smaller (assuming that we don't also slow down the rate at which kids grow up). That means that at anyone time, a much smaller percentage of the people will have kids, which means that kids will be spread much further apart, geographically, and won't be able to play with each other.

At least, that's what I was initially going to write. Now that I'm actually writing it, I realize that you could put all of the people who are currently raising kids in the same area, then the kids could all play with each other. There's a couple of other options also, but the point is that kids will be able to play with each other as they're growing up, and that's obviously an important part of development.

So maybe the only downsides to this scenario is that, one, for most of our lives, there won't be any children in our lives, and two, a lot of people who would have been born won't ever get the chance.

The second main scenario is that this immortality will only be available to the very powerful. I actually think this is the more likely of the two scenarios, after all, someone is going to control the drug, and why would they make it available to everyone else? These people will never lose power.

More than likely, the secret to making this drug, if that's what it is, will get out. There will probably be a couple of different power centers that will control the drug, and they will probably be at war. And the people who will fight this war? These people who have the drug can still die through violence, so you can bet your sweet hiney that they're not going to risk their precious lives. It's much better to risk the lives of the poor slobs who would die eventually anyway. They're lives are much more expendable.

And how will these immortals get the rest of us to fight for them? Probably through patriotism. There'll be a lot of rhetoric about how we all have to "stand united", about how these other people are killing our people, and about all of the evil things they're doing, and we'll believe it. There'll be name-calling on the radio, and putting down the "yellow-bellied liberals" who are afraid to fight the enemy.

Okay, I'm getting a little off topic here. Eventually, one of these powere will beat out the others, and then we'll all live happy lives, carefully looked after by these wise immortals who only have our best interests at heart. What a joyful world it will be then.

Also, my daughter is getting hungry, so I have to get her something to eat.

The End.

Training Iraqi Soldiers

I think that training Iraqi soldiers might be a mistake. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Romans do the same thing with the barbarians back around the first half of the first millennium? And didn't the barbarians then use that training against the Romans and defeat them? It's inconceivable that no one in the current administration is aware of that. I see a couple of explanations for what we're doing:

1) I'm wrong, and I should just keep my mouth shut.

2) Bush is trying to please two groups of people, those who think we're a great nation perfectly justified in stomping on our supposed enemies, and those who don't like seeing a lot of people killed so that companies like Halliburton can make a lot of money. In order to win both groups, he needs to end this war before too many people figure out the real reason behind it, and he needs it to end in an apparent victory so that those take pride in America's strength aren't disappointed. This is the only way the Bush administration can think of to accomplish both. Come to think of it, that's the same reason why the Romans trained their enemies to fight.