It has been awhile since I have posted here, but I am once again riled up at things various and sundry in the world of politics - and especially having to do with education. The recent teachers strike has pointed out just how broken our system is, and I will both support and criticize the teachers and the administration of the school systems. Everyone should, until they are intent on improving the system which our children's future, and thus our future, depend upon! Look for more in a day or two, and have a great coming October!

These things ring true.

The problem with the ends justify the means

For decades,
and largely without the knowledge of the American people, the powerful, elite
ruling class in this country from both political parties has approached foreign
and some domestic policy with the philosophy that the ends justify the means.

And, in the
short term, this policy can make sense when looked at with the cold hard logic
of expediency. But the problem is not the short term – it is the long term. And
it is the long term which is now coming due.

Once again,
oil is one of the easiest examples to make as our oil policy is largely in the
public record. When you look back at our history with oil, specifically in the Middle
East, it is easy to see that we have chosen the steady supply over every other
consideration, especially the moral ones.

We did not,
and still do not care who we do business with, as long as the business is
steady. After all, the security of the nation is at stake. And, of course,
trillions of dollars in profit for American business and whoever holds the
property rights to the oil fields.

On the
surface, it seems like a reasonable payoff. The problem is, the ends that you
are getting to are rarely the ones seen by the military and political planners
of America.

The ends to
them were a fairly short term goal – ensure the supply of oil after WWII, and
do whatever was necessary to accomplish that. Allow the oil companies to act as
a monopoly and let them squash any competition. Make the military an active
partner, but more than that arm and support the people who will ensure that
unending stream of black gold.

Unfortunately,
the end they saw as a short term goal has now had long term consequences,
consequences which neither party feels compelled to tell the American public
about, or the depth of the crises which we are on the verge of suffering.

Modern
Islamic terrorism is a response to the situation which the ‘civilized’
countries have put the oil bearing countries. We do not have a good history in
this regards. We overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in the
1950’s, we supported Egypt and Saudi Arabia as they continued with some of the
worst human rights records in the earth, we supported Saddam as he was gassing
his own people, and did not object until he attacked another oil bearing
country.

Now, I am
not a conspiracy buff, and I don’t think there is any grand conspiracy where
our energy policies are concerned.

But there is
no doubt now that those policies do have alternatives – there is no doubt as
well that they have consequences. The Israel situation is not directly related
to oil, but the bulk of the terrorist threat to the Western Nations comes from,
and is financed by countries that supply oil, be it to the Western or Eastern
bloc (America and Europe or Russia and China).

So what have
our leaders done to educate us on this? Well, they’ve mentioned raising the CAFÉ
standards once or twice. Ask yourself the right questions, and then wonder why
the people with access are not asking those questions. Well, I’ll tell you one
reason – they can all afford gasoline.

It’s going
to get to a point where the rest of us can’t.

New Perspectives

The moon was secluded by the earth's shadow on a recent night, and it is at such times that a new perspective can over come you, as you watch the shadow creep across the full, bright disk of the moon. As the line of the shadow moves, the true shape and feel of the moon becomes clearer - not less clear. The light is red, and instead of a disk, which is what you usually see when you look at the full moon, you can clearly see that it is an orb; the shape is more defined, and the details easier to see.

At times, and in different ways, perspectives can change in an instant. But all it takes is a few clouds, or a distraction to miss that change in perspective. It can involve many things - personal revelations, or revelations on a larger scale - but once seen something cannot be unseen. It is then to choose it, or to choose to ignore it, that becomes the question.

From different sources, and from different types of people I have heard rumors about Barak Obama being raised as a Muslim and a terrorist because he attended school in a majority Muslim country, Indonesia. In point of fact, it was elementary school, and not any type of religious school, or madrassa as fundamentalist Muslim schools are known.

But Obama claims Christianity as his religion, and there is no reason to doubt him any more than you would doubt George Bush when he says he is a Christian, or any other person that says that. With each person, you look at their actions, and decide if what they say is the truth. That is true with people on a personal level, and just as true with people on a public level.

Several things bother me about this. The first is, it is an easy sidestep for the black issue. We don't care that he's black, the bigot can say with a straight face, it's that he's a Muslim - a terrorist.

Well, what if Hillary or John Edwards had been raised overseas and been sent to a public school in a Muslim country - would they then be called a Muslim, with the implication that they were automatically in league with those people who wish to do us harm, and who attacked us on Sept 11th?

I think that we all know the answer to that.

The second thing is what that idea does to the idea of Islam. One of the main tenets of Christianity is not to judge, lest you be judged. That does not mean if you have proof that someone is a thief or a liar or cheat, you should not judge their actions. What it does mean is that no matter what a person's religion, or color, that person is not more inherently evil than any other person, and no more likely to be a terrorist, and should not be judged on anything but their actions.

I do not support Democrats generally, nor do I support Republicans, for they are in my opinion much the same beast. They both say some things that I like, and neither say that which I truly want to hear.

Mr. Obama does not have as long a political public record as the other two frontrunner's for our next president, but to assume that he is a Muslim because he is black and went to a elementary school in a predominantly Muslim country is bad enough - to then assume that if he is a Muslim he is a terrorist, which is the direct implication of these rumors, is despicable. Even if he is a Muslim, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that, for the reasons stated above, what difference should that make? People are individuals, and a Muslim is just as likely as a Christian in this world, or a Buddhist. And they are all just as likely to be people without mercy or compassion.

A Muslim is not a terrorist - he is a fanatic that has been fooled into a deformed branch of that religion, just as Timothy McViegh, who triggered the Oklahoma city bombing, was not a true Christian - he had simply been seduced by a radical sect of what is a good religion.

I won't say that Mr. Obama is my best hope, for though his rhetoric does sound good, he does not tell me the specifics that I want to hear; one example, and the most glaring on the Democratic side, is that for every gallon of gas we as American's buy we are funding our enemies.

We are funding them directly. Is that hard to understand? The message was sent loud and clear by Bin Laden's choice to use all Saudi men in the attacks of 911. The roots of the fundamentalist sects of Islam go back to the roots of Saudi Arabia, to the Wahabi sect's which allied with the Saud princes to gain power. And the Saud princes wielded the power of the American military machine after WW II.

Nothing is easy in these modern times, and we have not seen the worst yet, but to understand the basic dynamics of the situation you must peer around the corners. And to do that, you must realize the power and the danger of oil. A hundred years ago, it was no big deal. But as our thirst for it has grown (and the world's thirst), and as the oil powers have systematically crushed any potential competition, the problem has grown largely unseen by those who live in the first world countries.

What needs to be said, and I can understand why no candidate says it during the campaign, is that we fund our enemies directly, because the people we buy oil from are direct funders of our enemies. This is not hard to understand, and it is not hard to prove. But it is never pointed out by most of the media, or by any of our major politicians.

On the Republican side? Well, it is the same with oil - don't talk about that subject, there's simply nothing we can do, not one single sacrifice we can make to try to conserve. They haven't even asked us to carpool, for the love of God, as they did in the seventies during the oil embargo.

But the Republicans also say that they think Government should leave the indivdual alone - that personal freedom is our right, and that the Government has no right to say how we live our lives. But they don't hesitate - they do not hesitate - to put a person in jail for growing a plant. Half the countries to the south of us are in near ruins because of our drug war, and we have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world because of it. Afghanistan is teetering on the brink of failure bacause the money from the opium crop is directed, by our policies, directly into the hands of criminal and terrorist organizations, and the immigration problem is exacerbated tremendously by the same thing.

And yet no one says, "These are plants - coca, opium, and marijuana - just plants."

Perspectives shift and change - sometimes in time, and sometimes not. Look at your own conceptions of the three people who will most likely become our president, and then look at where we are as a nation. We got here through decades of policy, and a few years effort will not be enough to stop what is coming. The shadow is beginning to creep over the full moon, and events will be rushing upon us in the years to come. Perspective often comes at a horrible price - it comes at the time of the flood, or the tornado, or the crises. No matter who is elected President, I can only pray that that that person will finally begin speaking the real truth to us.

But if we don't demand it amongst ourselves, how can we demand it demand it of our leaders? How can we expect it of them, if we can be fooled and tricked so easily?

There Comes a Time

There Comes a Time

There comes a time when a person must look at circumstances in life and make a decision. We are all human, and as every major religious work says explicitly or implicitly, we are by design imperfect beings – we muddle about, and we make bad decisions, or good decisions for the wrong reasons.

The former is worse than the latter; but every day, we are presented with an opportunity to grow and to change for the better – as Jesus said, you must be born again of the spirit. That is not simply saying some words, but has a much deeper meaning echoed by other religious texts – that to become a better person in the image of God, you must judge how you react to
these life difficulties, when a decision must be made.

Will you look at your own self interests, or the interests of the community? If you are in a bad mood, will you take it out on the people who surround you? Or will you do your best to conceal your bad mood in an effort to make someone else’s day better.

When the gun is pointed at your head, and the demand is information that will send innocent people to their deaths, what will you decide to do? Two vastly different scenarios, but with one enduring theme – putting other people before your own needs.

Of course, we are all human, and many of us must learn as we go along. Those who seem to know instinctively have been few and far between, and they have been the saints and the holy people to us.

Most decisions by most of us in this country will be of the more mundane sort – if you are in upper management will you actually push as hard as you can to get the best wages and benefits possible for the people who make the profits? Or will you simply shrug and say, ‘Oh, well.’

As simple as a laborer treating people with respect, and meeting life’s derisions with the knowledge that he knows what is truly important – love, and compassion and mercy.

Every day as we walk through life, we will make bad decisions and good ones. The trick is to look around the corner, and see how those decisions apply to others – the trick is to do what you can, and simply treating people with those guiding principles mentioned above is a gift greater
than money or power; if you have those things, and you have money or power or then attain it, you should not be able to stop yourself from using your influence or wealth to help others.

But sometimes – sometimes, the thing you must do involves realizing that this life is indeed an illusion to what comes next – when your decision means your very life and well being. Sometimes you must duck and run, but at other times, when those chips come down to the last one on your side of the table you must push it outwards with the simple knowledge that by the world’s definition you lose the game.

But to the true definition of life, you win the game. Every person that died because they would not turn over other innocent people, every person that died by the cruel, evil hands of the oppressors, whoever they might be, were looked at as fools by those oppressors.

But those who died saving others, as Jesus did, as others have, will be looked upon differently in the next existence. Of that I have no doubt; it is something which God designed into us, to be able to willfully ignore our own well being for the well being of others. It doesn’t happen all
the time, and it doesn’t happen all the time with every person.

We can only pray that it happens more and more often as we go along.

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The Trap

Our problems in Iraq are now becoming apparent to more and more people; the problem is that people on both sides of the political aisle are speaking the truth. Take the simple debate of withdrawing troops; one side of the political aisle says that if we withdraw, Al Quaida will claim victory.

The other side says that if we stay, Al Quaida will continue to say that we are occupying a mid-east country for oil, and Al Quaida will continue to use that occupation for recruitment purposes.

The problem of course is that both things are true. No matter what we do, Al Quaida will claim either victory or moral superiority. It is the nature of the insurgent struggle that they should do this. It is also part of the struggle that either option now has no clear ending, and neither option has a good ending in sight.

We can stay, and we can keep the violence tamped down to an unreasonable level - but the tensions that exist between the Sunni and Shiite populations of Iraq will not simply disappear in the next year. What good will it do, if we stay there for ten years with 30,000 American troops dead and a couple hundred thousand wounded if when we leave they devolve into civil war anyway?

On the other hand, if we withdraw completely or withdraw to isolated bases and use our troops only for force protection, training, border protection and anti Al Quaida operations and hundreds of thousands more civilian deaths mount from the escalating civil war, who would think that was a good solution?

I doubt the Iraqi's would, and once again Al Quaida and other extremists would use our actions against us.

The bleak truth is this; no matter what we do our enemies will use our actions against us, because we have painted ourselves into a corner and few actions we take can be justified. The reason for that is the reason for the war in the first place.

I do not care about the arguments of weapons of mass destruction, or whether Saddam was a bad, evil person. There was a reason he had the resources to pursue those weapons, and there was a reason the US Government at one time supported Saddam - just as we now support many other horrible regimes, the Saudis among them.

That reason is oil, and it is never mentioned in the debate about Iraq.

Ask yourself why that is, and you will begin to see the true problem that all the ancillary problems stem from; the President himself talked of our addiction to oil, and has not mentioned it since. Neither has anyone else in any meaningful sense.

I watched on the public news tonight the names and faces of 12 soldiers who had died in Iraq, young and middle aged, white, black and Hispanic - they died for country and freedom, but the reason they were sent to the deserts of Iraq was because of one thing, in the end - and that thing is our addiction to oil, and our willingness as a nation to do whatever it takes to keep that supply flowing freely.

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The Cup is Half Empty

It is easy for me to see why so many American’s do not vote, but for some

reason it is a fact rarely mentioned by the press; this continues to puzzle me, but in fact if you listened to the press, you would think the country was split fairly evenly between voting republicans and democrats, with a bit of

independent thrown in.



But that is not the case; that only describes about half the country. The other half do not vote, and rarely even follow politics. They simply look at things having to do with the government as they look at the weather - sometimes it is good, sometimes it is bad and hopefully most of the time it won’t interfere with the way we live our lives at all.



Now more than ever this is becoming true; the last of the old ways are

beginning to fall to the wayside; the effects of our country's institutional racism will be with us for a while longer yet, and we have work to do there, but in that area as in most areas of civil rights, things are better now than they were in the past, and continuing to improve.



They are good enough, in fact, that a lot of us have decided these areas no

longer require our attention. They have been on an upward climb since the

fifties and sixties when actual battles over issues of color and sex were

necessary, and that climb has been aided by activists for these issues and

others.



But as always, in every generation there is a need for vigilance, there is a need for paying attention to what our political leaders are doing. The people in America who do not normally pay attention need to awaken on some level - if you have children, or care about people who do, then you need to be aware of exactly what our elected leaders are doing in the long term interests of our country.



Those interests are not being served now by either party, and they are both knowingly squandering our resources in ways which will not help us in the long run - indeed, seen from a hundred years in the future, I think it will be obvious that the major policies we support as a nation are steering us directly towards disaster.



On this website, and at many others, these problems are being discussed by non partisans. When you listen to the people of either party, though, please pay more attention to their actions than what they say. It has been a ploy in American politics for many decades now to say one thing, and then simply ignore that promise once power is attained.



The easiest example, and the most pertinent is that of our energy supply. Al

Quaida is funded in large part by those countries which we call ‘allies’ in the

middle east; the simple fact is that every time we buy a gallon of gasoline we are helping fund our enemies.



What makes this so egregious is that our government and leaders have not

done one single thing to address this issue; they do not talk about it, they have not raised the gas mileage standards yet (and the amount they want to raise them will do us no good), they have not even tried to get people to use car pools or other means of avoiding cars.



There are not many explanations for this behavior, and there are even fewer that explain why both of the major parties are complicit in this behavior. They are not easy conclusions to come to when thought through, but they are reality at its core.



We can do much to eliminate this travesty, but our leaders have not lifted a

single finger; in the meantime, lives are being lost and the enemy is

winning - and they are getting richer than ever, every time we buy gasoline.



But that is the rub; it is not just our enemies who get richer, and who we continue to fund - it is international and American companies as well. Simply look at the profits from the major American oil companies. It is easy to see, from their point of view, why they do not want to give up their monopoly.



And yet, that is exactly what must happen.



When I see someone who I think will actually address that problem and the others that we face, then I will vote - but neither major party candidate has any trust stored with me; I have been an observer to long, and take a dim view of the current state of government. That knowledge has soaked down into the public, with the result that half the nation believes quite accurately that if they did vote for either viable candidate it would not make the slightest difference in the way the country is run.



Of course, that is just a theory - but so far, the democrats in the Senate and Congress, despite their big talk of 'making changes', have done nothing of import, and continue to do just that - nothing of real importance.



I don't care if they can succeed - they haven't even tried.

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