Let The Earth Shake and the Heavens Tremble...

Nineteen months have passed since I last performed that arcane act, blogging.

Now let the fires be lit, the mead poured, the earth shake and the heavens tremble, along with various other ominous events! For the Doctor...has RETURNED!

Okay, now we're done with that. Why am I blogging again? Because I like writing. I enjoy channeling my fury into eloquence. Even if I don't manage eloquence, I do avoid a stroke. And there is so much to be furious about...

When people say "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention," they irritate me. Outrage as a constant state of being loses its panache. Such people quickly become people who focus their lives on their rage-sad, pathetic people. And yet, occasionally, in that same way that unpleasant family members sometimes have a point, these rage-centric people have it right.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, for example. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." It reads pretty clearly, right? It's so rare to find good, common-sensical legal language.

In the face of this, however, our illustrious President has decreed that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to communications. Oh, he hasn't said that directly, mind you, but consider this: in a hearing this past Tuesday, September 18th, the Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, declared that the administration has no need to obtain a warrant to surveil electronic communications wherein the content of which may be about the target of a terrorism investigation.

Think about that.

The Bush administration has already said that if any part of an electronic communication is outside the United States, they believe that no warrant is needed for government surveillance to take place, and act accordinly. Given the structure of global communication networks, this means that all email, most long-distance telephone calls, and pretty much any time you use a computer connected to the internet, the government can look at what you are doing, record it, copy it, transmit it, and use it against you in court, with no oversight, no checks, no balances, no restraint. Given that mobile phones, since they transmit through the air, have always been deemed unworthy of Fourth Amendment protection by the courts, that leaves very few areas of your communicating life that the government cannot pry into.

Now, the government argues that if they have a belief about what your are talking about, that strips your remaining Fourth Amendment rights from you. If I live in New York and call my brother in Arkansas on a land-line telephone, and he picks it up on a land-line telephone, there is nothing stopping the FBI from recording every second of that phone call. My call might be useful to a terrorism investigation; why not listen in? This is the same logic as is used in the Bush Doctrine: we reserve the right to preemptively attack any country that may become a threat in the future. Spain may be a threat someday; why not attack?

Because that way lies madness. This is logic twisted to consume itself, not an action taken to defend our security while preserving our rights. The administration argues that the rights of the American citizen are being protected, but there can be no confirmation of that fact, not even by the elected representatives of the people charged by our highest law with the power and responsibility to provide oversight. We must simply trust those in charge.

I am not one to cite the words of the founders as holy writ; they were flawed, human people, just as we are. The were a brilliant group, but occasionally we encounter situations they did not, could not, have anticipated, and our government must adjust to improve and better serve human freedom. Nonetheless, their words have depth, and meaning, and power, and sometimes they describe situations we deal with today that they would have understood perfectly.

Two hundred and thirty-one years ago, the founders of this nation put forth a list of grievances, a series of abuses they had suffered under the yoke of the King of England and his servants. Among the reasons for rebellion was this: "For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments. For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatsoever."

President Bush has abolished many of our most valuable laws in dismissing portions of our Bill of Rights. He has altered fundamentally the form of our government, claiming unimagined unitary power, explicitly ignoring the demands of coequal branches of government. And why should this end? We do not stand up. Our rights are stripped away and we are notified by the news and we shrug our shoulders. What is it, I wonder, that most people now believe makes us Americans? It cannot be our freedoms and our rights, for they are clearly not valuable to us.

Is it only the power our government wields in our name? Is that glorious reign of Presidents who stride the earth, knowing that they control the fate of all humanity all that we celebrate now?

I hope not. I hope that we can earn the respect of our inheritors by, at last, taking the opportunity life puts before us to set things right. President Bush should be impeached, whether it is the last year or the last month or the last hour of his Presidency, and we should write our judgment in the immortal books of history: no President is a king, and our Constitutional rights are not for any President to take from us. And if there is a measure of justice left in our country, we will see a new appreciation for what truly does make us special as Americans, a new birth of freedom, as the current occupant of the White House begins a lengthy prison sentence.

Somehow, I doubt that we will see so just an end to this nightmarish chapter in our history. All that can realistically be hoped for is a group of legislators who will seize their own power and make clear to the next President that Bush's changes are not lasting. Perhaps a return to the constant conflict that the founders arranged in lieu of perfect leaders will be enough.

The second item I wanted to write about is also rather dramatic, but I somehow doubt that I will be as eloquent in my vehemence, because frankly, I've spent a lot of it on the crap you've just read. Nonetheless, there is a hideous abuse afoot, and you should know of it, because your name is attached to it, Mr. and Ms. Joe/Jody American.

In Iraq, if you are a contractor for the private military corporation Blackwater, you are that rarest of people: someone who is literally above the law. The United States government, you see, employs tens of thousands of military contractors, mercenaries, to work in Iraq. The exact numbers are unknown, as the U.S. military freely admits that it has no idea how many armed mercenaries we are paying to roam the country. It could be 20,000. It could be 50,000.

50,000 privately employed mercenaries policing a country we are trying to rebuild might not actually be a bad thing, but for one point: there is no law or structure governing or directing these mercenaries. The Coalition Provision Authority explicitly exempted military contractors from Iraqi law with CPA Order 17 on June 17, 2004. Police on the street in New Orleans exercise power over citizens in the name of society's protection, but just the same, they are subject to arrest when they commit crimes. A Marine on the streets of Baghdad operates under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a code of law comprehensive enough that adultery is a crime punishable by jail time.

A Blackwater mercenary on those same streets, however, can do whatever he pleases, whenever he pleases, with no fear of reprisal. There is no arrest for him to face, no justice system. This is the freedom we have brought to Iraq.

Is it any wonder, then, that Blackwater personnel are said by the Iraqi government to have indiscriminately murdered civilians on no less than seven occasions? After allegedly murdering an Iraqi driver just outside the Interior Ministry this past May, Blackwater soldiers had Iraqi government soldiers surrounding them with automatic rifles in their faces. The Blackwater soldiers could not be intimidated enough by this circumstance to be persuaded to give their names. They know exactly where they stand in the society that we have created.

It is almost certainly too late for us to repair the damage we have done to Iraq. They may have a stable country again one day, but it will probably take a generation or more. What we can take from this is a series of lessons on how to do better next time, because there will be a next time. There will be another war, and there will be another time where we must build a peace. We should start now to develop the laws and structure that will govern that effort, or the only things we will teach will be what our Blackwater ambassadors have already taught the Iraqis: that America has no respect for the dignity of others and that only through strength and violence can dignity be maintained.

Peace out, homeys.

That old chestnut: Humor

I think I've averaged about a post a month before. In case no one's noticed, my New Year's resolution for my blog was to slack more. Go, me!

But, as so often happens, circumstances compel me to blog. Anger hasn't motivated me this time, however, nor has atypical bright shiny optimism. Instead, I've noted in the past two weeks a barrage of ridiculous news. Ever since that peculiar Saturday where the Vice-President shot a dude in the face, I've noticed a sharp rise in news that's just bizarre. Some of it's funny, some tragic, but most of it is just cases where people really, really need to be mocked. Not only that, but I feel the need to repackage the work others have already done in my own almost-unique brand of reportage. And so, without further ado and in no particular order, I give you The Dr. Suspicio List of Crazy Shit That's Happened (for February!):

• Cheney, just in case you haven't been kept apprised, appears to have had a couple of beers before going out shooting with buddies. Aside from being just silly and dumb, it also brings into stark focus the fact that the only reason that Cheney doesn't have a Yale degree in common with Bush is that they have heavy alcohol abuse in common instead. And drunk driving arrests, as well! Yay! Seriously, how did we elect these guys again?
• Okay, on to the actual weird shit! Paris Hilton was at a fashion show (actually, the show's after-party, I believe) in London on the 14th when PETA members made an appearance and pelted the nutty Ms. Hilton with "flour bombs." How fucking far gone do you have to be to think that physically attacking a person only peripherally related to an issue you care passionately about will make a difference? Pretty far, yeah? So how far past that do you have to be to think that dousing them in flour will do it? And did I mention that this "attack" took place outside the Cuckoo Club?
  
• When you hear the name Clay Aiken, what comes to mind? Anyone? Anyone? Well, apparently the reality that he is simultaneously a (perceived) good singer and is gay comes as a hysteria-inducing shock to nine of his fans. So much so that they are considering a class-action lawsuit to get their money back, claiming that Sony has engaged in deceptive advertising. Apparently they believed that the promotion of a "virginal, asexual" character means that they get to sue him because in real life, he's actually gay. And has sex. (At least the members of this freakish ennead have had the good sense to conceal their identities.)
• On to funner things! One Bill Tierney, formerly of the UN weapons inspection team assigned to Iraq in the late 1990s, revealed to National Review this week that he enjoyed a unique resource in his work: "God is my intel." Apparently, this guy managed to hold a serious job while utilizing visions, dreams, prayers and hunches in deciding where to direct his efforts-and believes that history will bear him out. The New Republic jokes "God is my weapons inspector" will become a new bumper sticker; I think such things might be even funnier than the ones I see saying "Don't Worry, God Is In Control." At least he's a former weapons inspector.
• Speaking of the National Review, I just found a book review on their site. They call Jimmy Carter's latest book "A Nasty Piece of Work." Even I think he was an ineffectual fuckup of a President, but really, can you imagine him as anything but a sweet old man? These guys can, apparently, writing that he has "an inner core of awfulness."
• Now let us turn our attention to the 6th Congressional District of Ohio. State Senator Charlie Wilson is running as a Democrat...kind of. He was considered a serious candidate until he turned in the requisite signatures list to get on the ballot. There were 96 on the original list; after examination, only 48 were valid, and Ohio requires 50 to get on the ballot. The Washington Post now lists the district as the 2nd most likely in the country to switch parties and says that a write-in campaign may be his only remaining hope. My only hope is that The Daily Show noted this and gave this guy his requisite ribbing, because I obviously have more competence at gathering signatures than this guy does.
• The South Dakota House has just finished passing House Bill 1215 with the changes the South Dakota Senate made to it, sending it to Governor Mike Rounds' desk. The bill bans all abortion in the state, with exceptions kindly made for circumstances where the mother's life is at stake. The Governor has stated that he's inclined to sign it. ...wait a minute, that's not funny! Shit! These guys think that with Roberts and Alito on the court, Roe vs. Wade might finally be overturned, and they might be right! Or maybe not. Maybe they'll get backhanded and it'll be hilarous. Either way, it's an armpit of a state.
• Speaking of that armpit of a state (and reaching back a ways for more comedy), did I mention that Tom Daschle is considering a run for President? Apparently he hasn't learned two key lessons: A, that he's a vacuous centrist with no people skills, and B, that sucking up to Republicans and then losing your house of Congress doesn't get you a Democratic Presidential nomination. Dick Gephardt proved that point.
• Cruella de Vil is running for the Senate! Oh, wait, that's Katherine Harris. The New Republic has a full-length article on her this week, though-and on how miserably she's doing. The latest polls show her trailing the formerly shaky Democratic incumbent, Ben Nelson, by fifteen points. Not only that, but the White House is quite lukewarm on her, and the GOP is afraid she'll drag down Republican candidates around her. We have Hackett, they have Cruella. But she's got staying power, and that's what matters-at least so far as my amusement is concerned.
• Let me wrap this sucker up with fun from that bastion of hilarity, Utah. The Utah Supreme Court removed Walter Steed from the bench of the Justice Court in Hilldale, Utah. Apparently, shock of shocks, Mr. Steed isn't just a Mormon but a practicing bigamist! After 25 years of service on the court and a 14-month investigation, the Utah Supreme Court just won't stand for this anymore! (In case you're wondering why it took 14 months of investigating to discover this, the man has 3 wives and 32 children between them. Obviously, this is a difficult thing to uncover.) Other handy fun facts revealed by this little episode: Mr. Steed isn't just a judge, but a part-time judge/part-time truck driver, Justice Court judges in Utah are not required to have any legal training whatsoever, and his three wives are sisters.
  

Well. That's quite enough crazy for me.

Just remember, kids, the stupid people will only win if we let them breed. (32 children. Jesus, we're behind.)

Am I hallucinating?

At the top here, for your consideration, is a comparison of two photos of our esteemed President. The left is a photo from last Wednesday, December the 14th. The right is a photo from Saturday, December the 18th. Is it just me, or is he perhaps losing all the color in his hair?

This has (again) been a bad few days for George Walker Bush (so bad that I doubt anyone could fault him for his hair going white in the midst of it), and I revel in his suffering. I revel in his suffering so much so that when I flipped on CNN this afternoon and saw Wolf Blitzer with a big white-lettered panel at the bottom of the screen reading "IMPEACHMENT?" I genuinely wondered if I was hallucinating. Impeachment has been in the back of my mind for a long while. Bush has certainly committed a plethora of impeachable offenses during his reign, but the likelihood that enough members of Congress would actually have the testicular fortitude to call him on it seemed slim. Until today, I guessed that the odds that he would find himself impeached stood at between 10 and 15 percent. Despite Wolf Blitzer and his speculations, I still say it's unlikely-but the numbers are rising. I call it at 20% today. Maybe we'll be lucky enough to hit the jackpot.

If you're reading this blog, the odds are, you already know why Bush should be impeached. The odds are that you agree with me and that this is familiar territory to you. Nonetheless, the rage boils within me, and just as it did after Katrina, it must be heard.

Bush did do some good things in recent days. He finally said that he was responsible for the intelligence failures. He asked for the nation's patience on Sunday, admitting that the work in Iraq that still lies ahead will be difficult, but must be done. Both were something that he should have done long ago, but even late, they were good things to say. For a moment on Sunday, watching his speech, I mused upon the possibility of some genuine reflection creeping its way into his brain. A remembrance of the things he said and did over the days before immediately made me suspicious of such a possibility. The things that have come to light since then crushed it entirely.

Our President has said that we do not torture.

Alberto Gonzales has argued that the Geneva Convention does not apply to "enemy combatants." Thus, if the Geneva Convention restrictions do not apply, if we don't call it torture, it isn't legally torture. What do we call torture? Pain that causes organ failure or death. Nothing short of that is torture. This is bullshit, of course. Attaching jump leads to someone's balls? That's torture. Waterboarding someone-a practice so terrifying that the toughest person it's ever been applied to in our current war on terror was begging to confess in two and a half minutes-is torture. Torture degrades its victims, degrades its practitioners, and degrades the people it is said to be done in the name of. It also generates unreliable information, leaving it a practice that only the viciously thoughtless will employ in all but the most unthinkable of circumstances.

The President's lawyers have argued that his constitutional power to make war is "plenary"-that is, perfect, complete, and absolute. The President himself has said, in an interview with Bob Woodward, that "the most interesting thing about being the president" is that "I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

I will Article I, Section 8 your ass, Mr. President. "The Congress shall have Power...To declare War...and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water." The Presidency is not an office invested with the powers of an Emperor. The President does, in fact, have to give explanations-every four years at election time, and every single day to the Congress and Courts of the United States of America.

The President has said that in this new age of terrorism, the Executive requires the power to act speedily, tracing the communication of people changing cell numbers, acting over the internet, and all the other difficult-to-trace methods of modern technological communication. He has also given us assurances that such broad authority will only be used to target those affiliated with Al Qaeda.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 created a secret court to provide intelligence wiretap warrants. It also allowed for the Executive to wiretap without a warrant for 72 hours in emergency cases, requiring them to notify the FISA court at some point within that 72-hour window, which would then either grant or deny the right to continue the interception. The President already had the power he is now claiming-the only difference is that he wants the Judicial Branch entirely out of the equation. Additionally, the actions of the Bush Administration have demonstrated precisely why no President should ever be allowed such unfettered power:
-Within the Pentagon, a classified group called the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) was formed in 2002. Without warrants, they have gathered a database (called the "Talon" database, of all things) that includes "threat reports" regarding antiwar protest organizers. A spokesman for the Pentagon has said that all information gathered is gathered legally and regards “protection of Defense Department installations, interests and personnel.” One threat report is on a Quaker meeting that CIFA infiltrated.
-The Patriot Act gave the FBI the power to demand information with the use of warrant-free "national security letters." Previously, they were for terrorism suspects alone, but the wisely-crafted Patriot Act let the FBI issue them to citizens suspected of nothing. If one was investigated using these letters and found to be innocent of any crime, policy used to be to destroy all the information gathered. In 2003, President Bush decided that all data gathered should be put into permanent databases and shared throughout the federal government and, in some cases, with private industry.
-FBI counterterrorism teams have spent a great deal of time since 2001 investigating and infiltrating violent Al Qaeda sympathizer groups such as Greenpeace and PETA.

To all of this, there is but one answer: the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable search and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the palce to be search, and the persons or things to be seized.

Or, as I prefer it, "Fuck you, Mr. President."

After a previous blog entry, I was spoken to by someone that I previously thought had a rather admirable sense of balance in political thinking. He informed me, with the implication of a threat, that my statement of enjoying the President's political difficulties upon the milestone death of the 2,000th soldier in Iraq might be misinterpreted as celebrating the death of people sworn to protect my freedom and safety and thus might make me "the enemy." Thus, I will make this as explicit and unambiguous as I can.

The First Amendment gives me the right to say anything I please. I can, if I so choose, say celebratory things upon the death of people sworn to protect my freedom and safety. Such statements would not make me an enemy of America. Only upon taking action to threaten the safety or freedom of my fellow citizens would it become legal or right for there to be any action taken against me. Even then I would be entitled, as any human being within the borders of the United States or any territory it occupies is, to my Constitutional and human rights.

I do not so choose. I respect the men and women who have chosen to take up arms in defense of an ideal. They put their lives on the line for a cause which has faltered and, in some sense, forsaken them, and yet they are still there, ready and willing to suffer and die to defend America. The failures of the current era are not, for the most part, theirs. They are the President's, and ours. We as citizens have not done our duty to maintain our own system of government, and so the military has been abused by an Executive run amok and a Congress and Judiciary too weak to claim their own Constitutional powers.

I do choose to celebrate the pain of a man I consider an utter criminal, the President of the United States, George Walker Bush. At the beginning, I thought him merely an arrogant jackass, a man so impressed with his own luck and wit because he was oblivious to the circle of family and friends who had carried him through his life, weakening him while he thought he was growing stronger and wiser. An arrogant jackass made President of the United States, however, quickly becomes a criminal, and so he has. He has lied to the American people to convince them to follow him to war. He has sent American soldiers to their deaths while aping their service on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. He has illegally spied upon the American people, egregiously violating the very freedoms he claims to be protecting. He has endorsed the kidnapping and torture of innocent people abroad. He has endorsed the creation of a system of secret prisons around the world. He has claimed the right to classify American citizens "enemy combatants" and strip them of their freedom and their rights on his own authority, with no judicial recourse or Congressional oversight. He has appointed unqualified fools to positions where expertise is the difference between life and death for thousands. And still he has the audicity to claim, as he did Sunday night, to be "serving in freedom's cause."

Am I an enemy to this kind of a President? I most certainly am. I proudly am. He is a shortsighted, vicious, arrogant, petty, ignorant, hypocritical fool. I see his face these days, and I see fear. I see a realization that perhaps, just perhaps, this is a series of blunders that no family or friends can protect him from. I see a tinge of panic, of worry, and to this, I say, it is good. The guilty should panic. They should worry. And they should suffer.

If there does come a day in which George Walker Bush is removed from office, or resigns in disgrace, he will on that day suffer greatly. Our country will finally stop its suffering, and it will begin the slow process of recovery from the damage he has done, repairing our own ills and reviving the friendships aroud the world that he has hurt, reassuring them that we are not all like that moronic Texan. And I will raise a glass, toasting the future of a country I see as the world's brightest hope, and celebrating the pain and anguish of a man who deserves everything he gets, and far, far worse.

A profound sense of being fucking tired.

When I started blogging, I wanted to write about government and about my thoughts on government. I didn't want to write about my private, personal life. I've always had an aversion to that impulse that people seem to have with their blogs to publish their innermost lives, secure in the illusion that the internet provides anonymity. I don't like the idea of strangers reading about my life, and I've always worried, quite arrogantly, about the danger such information might pose to me later in life.

For the past couple of weeks, I've wondered if there is a connection between my state of mind and the current state of the world, however. It may be nothing more than projection and self-delusion; such things are common with me. Or maybe a fragment of what's going on in my head comes from the way the world is turning right now.

I am depressed. I've been depressed for a very long time, but only really accepted it relatively recently. And in a similar fashion, the world seems to be overwhelmed of late with apathy. We live in fear of disasters. Terrorism, hurricanes, that unknown danger looming just over the horizon or around that corner. Nixon dealt a horrible blow to the American populace's wobbling faith in government in the 1970s, and it's been bleeding ever since. Bush seems poised to end that faith completely, if he hasn't already.

The world is bleeding. Families are running in Darfur, running from the Janjaweed, raiders on horseback straight from the Bronze Age, backed by air support and the diplomacy of a government intent on keeping out food and medical supplies. The corpses of children lie on mountainsides in Kashmir, covered by snow, called victims of an earthquake; with more than 3 million left homeless, an estimated 100,000 dead, and the United Nations struggling to raise a paltry $272 million in aid, they are truly victims of neglect. Rebels fight on in Chechnya, caught between a hideous ideology of perverted Islam and Russian foes that have made clear that surrender does not mean survival. The French are still picking up the pieces of weeks of arson riots, sparked by racial tension and the frustration of promises unkept. The Gulf Coast is still picking up the pieces of what has been called the most anticipated disaster in history, and help is dwindling as people are forgotten amidst the chaos. People are starving on our streets, starving in the richest country in the history of the world. And somewhere, in the darkness, men torture in our name with water and wire and chain and cold, and we are told that this must be done to keep us safe.

We look away.

Some of us mutter something to ourselves, that someone should do something. Others promise to send some money, sometime. Mostly, we say nothing, and the frustration and worry and fear build up inside us. What happened in France was a symptom of exactly this. Frustration builds upon frustration, until in an uncontrolled spasm of wanting to do something, we scream THIS IS NOT RIGHT! We do not know what is right. We do not know what to do to fix it. But this isn't how it was supposed to be. The future was supposed to get better, not worse. It was supposed to offer hope, not just a bleak landscape into which we might hope to duck and dodge the worst of everything.

Is this just in my mind? Part of me says yes, and part of me says that the Republicans are losing support by the day in this country, but the Democrats aren't gaining it. No one knows what to do or say or even to hope for, except the amorphous platitudes of "hope" and "freedom."

Every generation complains at the loss of the golden age of their youth. Every generation, to one extent or another, says that these damn kids are ruining everything. To a certain extent, the complaints are grounded in something; the world changes. New ideas are introduced, some old ones are discarded, and some people miss them. Some people simply miss the times when things were new, and pine for those moments that will never come again.

So what of our era? People still pine for whatever glory days they imagine existed, but almost all of their complaints fall short. We haven't forgotten the secrets of our ancestors. We still invent new marvels. We still have writers who can touch our souls with their words, drawing out laughter or tears. We still have voices who can play the human heart like a violin. We still have teachers, painters, scientists, doctors, the ideals of their professions and the decency of good people.

But what of politics? Leadership? Where are our Thomas Jeffersons, our George Washingtons, our Theodore and Franklin Roosevelts, our James Madisons and Abraham Lincolns and John F. Kennedys? Where are the people inspiring us to greatness?

We have lost them somewhere in a sea of bureaucracy and money and obfuscation. Instead of bold declarations, we have press releases and apologies and refusals to commit. Instead of inspiration, we have desperation. In our foolishness, we have elected fools, and when faced with the panic that there is quickly coming a point where no excuse will cover that ugly truth, all that we can find in the faces we search for leadership are beads of sweat popping out of their brows.

There are wise men and leaders among us, but we have made a society out of crushing them. To be idealistic is to be a fool, we teach our children. To strive to change the mighty juggernauts of government and business that we have created is madness. Look out for yourself, your family if you have it, but everything beyond that is beyond your control and somebody else's business anyway. Fill out your forms, get to work on time, pay your taxes, swallow your frustration and your pride and know that if you complain, you're the one causing the problem. Everyone can mouth platitudes about our freedom of speech and how ridiculous it is to stifle dissent against our government's policies...but what does a child learn when she sees her parent's dissent against the policies of McDonald's stifled? Would you like a condescending sneer with that?

We are left with apathy as the only answer. Those dying children on tv are someone else's business, and if they aren't gotten to, it's too big for me. I know these tax forms are too complex and confusing to understand, but if I complain, I'll just draw their attention. Why should I vote? Nothing ever changes anyway... We try to fill that great gaping void in the center of ourselves with numbing apathy, and it works.

It works for a while, anyway, but frustration has a way of bursting to the surface. We need to find those people among us who can help and push them to break free of all the bullshit their potential has been covered with. We have to find a way to do the right things. If we're depressed as a world, it's the same as any individual; we have a responsibility to fight through it, to cut through the despair and the weakness and DO WHAT'S RIGHT.

As for me? I'm the worst kind of hypocrite. I fantasized for a long time about being one of those people, those great politicans who actually served the people and did real politics, instead of the corrupt, moneygrubbing politics that are so common that people have forgotten there's any other kind. I cannot find within myself the strength to fight through my depression, and the knowledge that this weakness is no one's fault but my own only fuels my self-hatred. I have spent sixteen months trying to honestly find a job in government, serving the people. All I have gotten is the lowest-level job working for a candidate for State Delegate who deserved her eventual defeat. I accepted the position in a moment of weakness, placed there by someone who knows someone instead of earning the job honestly. I placed the dream of a career in politics ahead of the love of a decent woman, so much so that she thought it would be wrong to give it up for her. It was the height of arrogant foolishness. I am not one of those people, and in place of foolish dreams, all I am left with is my own weakness and the knowledge that the only way I can live is to make my peace with it.

I hope someone will be stronger and wiser than I. The world needs such people.

A fresh week.

I've been told to blog. Encouragingly, desperately, plaintively, threateningly. And so I blog.

Last week was a damn hard week for the Bush administration. His Vice-President lost his Chief of Staff to a criminal indictment, Karl Rove still stands under threat of further investigation, he lost his Supreme Court nominee, and the number of the dead in Iraq passed 2,000.

I certainly cheered at all that, enjoying the suffering of people I loathe in a wholly unhealthy way, but what else happened recently that escaped our notice?

• Indiana saw one state senator's crusade to legislate our way into a brave new world cut short: Senator Patricia Miller (a Republican, but really, you'll learn in short order she's insane, so her party affiliation isn't really the issue here) introduced a bill into to Indiana State Legislature to limit artificial insemination or any other method of getting pregnant that's not sex to married, heterosexual couples. Said married, heterosexual couples would have to apply to a judge for a "gestational certificate," providing (among other things) a “family lifestyle” dossier detailing their participation in church activities, and demonstrating that they've never been convicted of any of a list of crimes, from murder to acting in a porn film. If you'd like to read a draft of this insidious bill, have a gander. The penalties for violating this new law were to have been heavy fines and the possibility of some jail time, but apparently some Indianans have read their Huxley lately, and Ms. Miller withdrew her bill in the face of a horrendous backlash, saying only “The issue has become more complex than anticipated and will be withdrawn from consideration by the Health Finance Commission.”
• In the House, a bill is being considered regarding how to spend the recent surpluses generated by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big government-aided mortgage companies that help many people get their first homes. Nicely, the bill under consideration will direct that the money be put into a fund which can be tapped by nonprofit organizations to build affordable housing in the Wrath-of-God-ravaged Gulf states. Eventually, the fund would also be used to build housing for the disabled and elderly folks around the country. Not so nicely, the bill is now looking at being modified by House Republicans so that nonprofit organizations will not be able to access the fund if they engage in voter registration activities, even nonpartisan ones. You can help the poor to live, or help them to vote, but not both. It ain't quite Brave New World, but it certainly is anathema to people who value democracy and human decency.
  
• A recent amendment to a Senate military spending bill authored by John McCain, forbidding "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of any detainee held by U.S. forces anywhere, was passed by an unusually wise Senate, 90 to 9, three weeks ago. Last week, Cheney came to McCain and asked him to rewrite the amendment and exempt the CIA, gutting his own amendment. In fact, let me restate that, because this cannot be emphasized enough: The Vice-President of the United States went to a respected Senator who endured over a year of torture during wartime and asked him to allow the CIA to torture prisoners abroad. For whatever batshit insane reason, he declined. The President has not altered his previously stated intention to veto the bill containing McCain's amendment; Bush has not vetoed a single piece of legislation in his five years as President, but the need to maintain the ability to torture people is apparently so essential that he's willing to go out on a limb for it.
• Just for amusement's sake, Republican Zombie Ann Coulter was also busy in the last couple of weeks, appearing at the University of Florida to give a speech in which she said that "[Democrats] are always accusing us of repressing their speech. I say let's do it. Let's repress them." Just in case any clarification of her intentions was needed, she announced, "Frankly, I'm not a big fan of the First Amendment." She also called Democrats "fascists" during a Fox News appearance on October 27th, demonstrating one of my personal favorite idiocies.

Crazy isn't anything new. Hell, I babble about it all the time. I list this list, though, because it re-demonstrates the need for keeping a tight rein on the stupid. It is happening in some places-the parenting license bill was forced to be withdrawn, after all-but Bush and Cheney haven't been impeached yet. Miller might win her next reelection campaign back in Indiana. And we all tolerate lying, cheating, stealing, and generally being assholes without those doing it getting fired, arrested, or even just told to their faces that their assholes.

We ought to be better about that.

And as an addendum about being better...it's come to my attention today that a guy in Florida has made it his personal crusade to end what he percieves as needless police chases. The man's daughter was killed, an innocent bystander hit by a suspect's car in a high-speed chase, so you can't help but feel for him. Nonethless, his method of going about it is all wrong. We don't need criminals knowing that if they flee, the police are legally obligated not to pursue.

We need the Carpoon.

Developed by genius cop Sgt. Markku Limingoja of Oulu, Finland, the Carpoon is exactly what it sounds like. And no, I'm not kidding.

Buon giorno, all.

Ahh, back to the old grind.

What does it say about our country that I am now not even the least bit surprised that Bush's team in charge of determining who was best qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice decided that the most qualified person was the head of the search team?

And to think that the worst example of Bush's cronyism reared its ugly head only weeks ago... We expect kindergartners to learn from their mistakes, but not Presidents.

Oh, and how is it that, once again, I end up agreeing with George Will?

Something positive, at last.

It's been long-awaited, long-delayed, and undoubtedly will no longer live up to the hype I've mustered for it, but, nonetheless, I type.

Almost two weeks ago, NASA announced the beginning of a new plan to return us to the moon by 2018, laying the groundwork for a manned mission to Mars. (The press release is here, and more information will be available for a little while here.) The proposal has been greeted with a great deal of skepticism and derision, particularly in the face of the nightmarish damage done by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Why are we thinking about spending more money on space, it is asked, when so many things demand our attention here on earth? Why are we talking about risking more lives in space after the Columbia has been destroyed and our shuttle fleet has proven too unreliable to continue flying? The New York Times even published an editorial entitled "The Dark Side of the Moon," listing reason after reason why this is a bad, even ridiculous, idea. (I'd link to it, but the editorial is now part of the pay-only portion of their site. Assholes!) In it, Robert L. Park decried the costs and said that human space exploration is over; robots can find the information we are searching for and, after Mars, "there is no place humans can go in a foreseeable future." All this proposed expense, he says, is just a political hot potato, put out by the Bush administration so that the next guy can be the one saddled with the blame of ending human space exploration.

Why, then, should we spend money for human beings to ride fire to the stars?

I have been pondering the answers for days. The costs of rebuilding after Katrina and the knowledge of the Columbia's dead are powerful arguments against it; they weigh heavily against the gleeful joy of exploration that spaceflight brings to mind. If pushed hard enough, the fear they engender can crush that joy-but fear is rarely a source of wisdom.

Republican government is an ideal. It is supposed to be the rule of the peoples' representatives, chosen for their adherence to the peoples' dreams while having the wisdom to avoid their baser instincts. It falls short much of the time, so much so that the ideal has been forgotten in many minds, and only the failings are left to define government for them. Frustration and anger at government then lead to the belief that the very concept of government is itself an evil, and lo, you have a modern conservative. I do not, of course, share this belief, but anger is certainly the primary emotion I feel when I look at government actions today. Anger at the arrogance, frustration at the stupidity; conservatives and liberals alike feel it, and we are all dragged down by it sometimes.

Spaceflight is hope. That simple truth is the greatest argument for it. It is one of the greatest expressions of the ideal of government that can be imagined: together, we have strived, and struggled, and fallen, and risen once more, and finally made real a dream as old as humanity itself-to reach out our hand and touch the heavens. Who can look at the images of Earth taken from space, of Neil Armstrong walking across the surface of the moon, of the images of distant galaxies taken by the Hubble telescope, and say that they feel no stirrings in their soul? Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, a Saudi astronaut, said of his flight, "The first day or so, we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day, we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth." Who can read these words and say we should not have gone?

A few, of course, and they do, but they make up a tiny minority even of those who say that we should not return to space. Even those who no longer want to risk lives for exploration find it difficult to denigrate the achievements that have already been made. Almost no amount of worry or fear is enough to dampen the inspiration and pride that that memories of that July day in 1969 raises up in our hearts.

Dreams and pride alone are not enough to justify a return to the moon, however, or a journey on to Mars and beyond. An understanding of the risks, the costs, and the potential gains are necessary, or else an inspiring pursuit can quickly become folly.

The costs in terms of resources are really quite basic. Contrary to many critics' claims, NASA is not talking about spending a single extra penny on their new initiative; instead, they are talking about reallocating their budget towards this end. The primary reason for this, I would imagine, is to defeat opponents' arguments of frivolous spending and to try to move forward in an atmosphere where almost all government spending is subject being called frivolous. This is, of course, wrong. Not nearly enough money is spent on space.

NASA's current budget is $16.2 billion a year, out of a budget of over $2.4 trillion-less than a hundredth of our tax dollars. When Kennedy gave his famous "we will go to the moon" speech at Rice University in 1962, he justified the expenditure with an apt comparison: NASA's $5.4 billion per year budget was "somewhat less" than was spent that year on cigarettes and cigars. Today, we spend $16.2 billion on space and over $25 billion on poison. Perhaps the two should keep pace.

The risk, then, is little, but what of the gains? Science is not a pleasant topic for those who demand concrete, expectable, definable gains, because it is one of the greatest demonstrations of the universe's irritating refusal to be what we want it to be. It is not simple, safe, or obedient. It is dangerous, uncertain, and confusing. It is, nonetheless, wondrous and, in small pieces and at odd times, understandable. Scientists cannot tell us what we will find out there. We may find more information about our planet's beginnings. We may find life so different from ours that it staggers the imagination. We may find nothing but dust and ice. We may find that aliens have latched on to the Voyager probes and have been feeding them false data for years and that Neptune is actually a giant frozen serving of Chicken Saltimbocca that was put there as a defense against Galactus. The danger, the worry, and the beauty of it all is that we simply don't know.

We can, however, point to past benefits that have come from space exploration. Technologies developed for, and in, space, are used every day: scientific instrument calibrators made in orbit without the hassles of gravity and air pressure, radiation shielding, MRI technology, self-inflating rafts, firemens' lightweight air tanks, advanced semiconductors. Athletic shoes use padding from moon boots. NASA aerodynamic models are used to make better golf balls, for fuck's sake! And, to boot, we've gotten a better idea of the age of the solar system and how often we're going to have to deal with the danger of life-ending-sized asteroids. We have lost lives in the pursuit of space, to be sure; the Apollo 1 disaster, Challenger, Columbia, and others have cost us eighteen lives. How many have been saved because of their sacrifice? How many people have survived cancer, strokes, fires, shipwrecks, car accidents, that wouldn't have? We can never know an exact number, but it is enough.

Future space exploration may yield more advances and more wonders, or it may not-but the risks are worth it. NASA's astronauts are willing. Are we?

Frontiers still beckon, and the hearts of the greatest of us still yearn to find out what is there. Contrary to the pessimism of the the Times editorial I pointed to earlier, there are many places to explore within our reach. Callisto orbits Jupiter, and has a 10-kilometer-deep salt-water sea 200 kilometers beneath its crater-ridden surface. The craters may tell us of what has passed through our system; the sea may hold single-celled life, or more complex life, or none at all-but almost any liquid water has potential enough for us to look. Io is another of Jupiter's satellites, the most volcanically active place in the solar system. Our own volcanoes churn up all manner of geological wonders-and fertilize soil that quickly teems with life. Titan, orbiting Saturn, is the only moon in the solar system with a real atmosphere, primarily nitrogen (95%; Earth's is 78%). Volcanoes explode with water and methane and ammonia instead of lava. Neptune's moon Triton also exhibits this cryovolcanism in plumes up t0 8 kilometers high, and geological data points to significant internal heating. The water and the heat together may have made an underground liquid sea possible, creating an even likelier birthplace for life than on Callisto. And Jupiter's Europa, perhaps the most enticing of all of the outer moons, has another liquid sea beneath its surface, kept warm by Jupiter's gravity causing tidal friction. It also has an atmosphere, a very thin one only worthy of the name in the scientific sense-but it is a thin layer of oxygen. Astronauts might well explore Europa and build a base there using some of Europa's own natural resources.

These examples are the product of just a few minutes of research on my part, and I can't even be called a space enthusiast, merely a supporter. The experts will be better able to tell us where it is most likely to find life and where it will be easiest to begin building colonies, but there are places to go. The unknown beckons to us. Life may be there waiting for us, and if it is not, knowledge will be, and we will all be the better for it.