The issues that are important to me.

As I commence my earnest search for a presidential candidate this upcoming year, I will be looking at a few things, including, but not exclusive to, these:

Children and education: What is the candidate's stance on child health care? pre-school programs like Head Start? No Child Left Behind? school funding reform? delinquency policies? vouchers? bussing? scholarships? foster care?

The "morality" (I use that term loosely and a bit pejoratively) issues, like abortion and homosexuality. AKA, how invasive will they prove to be in our personal lives?

In the economy, how pro-corporation will they be? Will they discontinue the trend of raping unionization? Will they stop giving big business and the rich tax breaks? Will they try to decrease the effects of the military-industrial complex and the iron triangle? (This last one is sort of a throwaway... nothing will be done, but it's still good to hope, neh?)

And, most importantly, when the fuck are we getting out of Iraq? What is their stance on how to reduce the massive deficit?

Something to keep in mind when thinking of "Palestine."

"Hamas on Thursday called on the UN to rescind the 1947 decision to partition Palestine into two states, one for Jews and one for Arabs.

The group said in a statement, released on the 60th anniversary of the UN vote, that "Palestine is Arab Islamic land, from the river to the sea, including Jerusalem... there is no room in it for the Jews.""

Source.

Nationalism: A feigned necessity?

Throughout history leaders have taken advantage of Nationalism to rally the people into doing things that they would normally stray away from doing. Which leads me to wonder, is nationalism just a tool exploited by leaders to exploit us?

I'll give an exmaple of what I mean. September 11th is the most obvious though by no means the only example, but it does the trick either way. 9/11 was a horrific event that reshaped the course of American history. Following "a day that will live in Infamy" we've entered into a war on terrorism which brought us to Iraq and Afghanistan. Everyone seems to have forgotten, but support for both of those wars was absolutely overhwhelming. Even on the night of 9/11 people were crying for military action. I'm actually proud of the Bush administration for showing restraint in the face of that kind of stress. The nationalism that formed in the 9/11 aftermath to me was great, people came together and just sort of worked things out. Yet there had to be some kind response, cue in the wars. The Afghanistan war was "popular" with the American and people, and more or less we won it, but the Iraq war is a completely different story. Nationalism was used by the Bush administration to rally the people into Iraq, and it worked wonderfully. Later people feel they were conned into it, like they were betrayed by their leaders into a way. People fail to realize is that they were betrayed by their own emotions, and by patriotism, George Bush has the power to move troops, but it was by the will of the people that he moved them. I firmly believe we'd be in Iraq right now whether the phrase WMDs was ever muttered or not. Now that the feelings of patriotism are waning the world is becoming a giant clusterfuck. This example shows the power of nationalism and the downside it usually offers.

It is a widely held notion that America is "The most powerful nation in the world" and everyone seems kind of proud of that and never wants to lose that. This phrase is actually the main reason for this post. When the power of the United States is challenged everyone gets riled up. Everoyne is afraid of what'll happen if we lose that post as most powerful. I am also one who believes we should maintain our power, and I feel feelings of pride just thinking about the idea, but it is this thinking which leads to ethnocentrism and"America: World Police". Then just the other day I was reading "The Serpent Queen", the second book of "The Mallorean" a very enjoyable series of books by David Eddings, and the story is about a question group of individuals trying to recover a King's son, most people in the group are from a different nationality and background, yet they all work seamlessly together. Obviously this is a book and it can be shaped to the Author's will, but there is no sense of nationalism, it's more polarized into a good vs evil type of thing. Then I thought "What if America wasn't the strongest country in the world?" my mind immediately projected images of doom and gloom, but I didn't understand why, and then I realized, we would just be like everyone else. When I go on vacation in the Carribean, Canada, or even Mexico, they aren't living in a dead society fearing for their lives. The lives of the people is unchanged, almost completely unaffected by the intentions of other nations. It is the bickering of governments that makes Nationalism dangerous. Almost everyone is patriotic and thinks that their country is the best, and this makes for a diverse world atmosphere in a good way. It's only when channeled by the government that tempers flare beyond managable domain and people begin to die. It seems like without government's exploiting their people--I'm not pointing fingers or naming names, it is done by everyone government, every leader, and it may even be unavoidable--the world would just have a lot of super-intense soccer matches. Now this assessment is probably a little Utopian, but I feel it holds some weight. It seems if Governments focused on the domestic front, that the world be more secure than it is now.

Now a bit of a disclaimer:
Of course this is the analysis of my mind of the world. I fail to take into many factors such as trade, taxes, the global economy, and the nature of human beings, but it is an interesting point on nationalism, on how it is used to use people. It may or may not be a necessary evil, but I'm not in the position to test it, and if I was I'm not sure I would want to make that drastic a change--that's another thing I've noticed, people absoutely despise change--. Also, this post lacks the focus and clarity of a organized paper, so judge it accordingly.

Good ol' Doctor Death.

He has served his prison term and is now free. I was too little at the time to really care or understand the significance of Jack Kevorkian, but I did read an interesting article about his effect on the assisted-suicide debate. I'm gonna emphasize some points I think important.

Assisted suicide debate has passed Dr. Death by
Jack Kevorkian's back, but here's why we shouldn't listen to a word he says

By Arthur Caplan, Ph.D.
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 10:19 a.m. ET June 1, 2007

The last time I saw Jack Kevorkian was April 23, 1994, in a courtroom in Pontiac, Mich.

Oakland County prosecutors had charged him in the death of 54-year-old Janet Adkins of Portland, Ore. The charges were assisting in a suicide, murder and delivering a controlled substance for administering drugs without a license. I was there to testify that what he had done to Adkins — providing her with his "suicide machine," which she used in the back of his 1968 VW van parked in a dark campsite to end her life — was both immoral and a gross violation of medical ethics.

Kevorkian, who became known in the press as "Dr. Death," was found not guilty. A few years later he was asked by Thomas Youk, a 52-year-old who had trouble breathing and swallowing due to advancing Lou Gehrig's disease, for help in dying. Kevorkian injected him with a lethal dose of potassium chloride while videotaping the ghastly proceedings. He sent the tape to "60 Minutes," which aired it. This gave prosecutors incontrovertible evidence that Jack had gone from assisting in suicides to personally killing people. He was sentenced to 10 to 25 years for murder. After serving just over eight years, Jack is back.

I believed Kevorkian was a very dangerous killer then, and I still believe it now. He helped dozens of depressed and disabled people die without trying very hard to convince them to live.

That day in the Pontiac courtroom, he stared and scowled as I said that it was unethical for a doctor to help kill someone they barely knew, who was not terminally ill and who was still enjoying a good quality of life. Adkins had been told she had Alzheimer’s but it was not clear how many months or years of quality life she had left when she used Jack’s jury-rigged death machine to infuse a lethal dose of drugs into her bloodstream.

All this matters because now that Kevorkian is out of jail, he has said he plans to reinsert himself as a vocal participant in the ongoing debate in America over assisted suicide.

No doubt he will get an audience. There are plenty of Americans who still, incredibly, view him as a hero. And the media loves him, too, knowing the audience-grabbing power of an unrepentant killer. (++ for truth)

To be fair, there are those who admire Kevorkian as the lightning rod who changed how Americans view both the care of the dying and assisted suicide. After all, didn’t he bring these issues center stage in courtrooms, state legislatures and the media? No one else did more than he did to promote assisted suicide.

Fanatic, not leader
But I do not see him this way. He was more of a fanatic than the founder of a movement. A zealot who could rally public opinion but could not shape it.

You see, Kevorkian believes in suicide on demand. He thinks that doctors have an obligation to help anyone who decides that their life is not worth living, whatever their reason. Some of the 130 people he helped die had no terminal illnesses. Some were clearly depressed. Others had histories of mental illness. Only a few got any counseling. Kevorkian helped them all to die.

Kevorkian’s problem was and is that he likes death way too much. The enthusiasm he brought to his cause was always deeply troubling. No doubts, no ambivalence, ever seemed to cross his mind as he dispatched his victims. The fact that he helped some to die within hours of meeting them, the fact that he would turn a disabled man’s death into a national spectacle by giving a tape of his murder to "60 Minutes" — never mind that they used it! — and the fact that he never seemed to try particularly hard to talk those who came to him out of their decision to die made him morally suspect then and hardly worth hearing from now.

There are other reasons besides his fanaticism and moral obtuseness that we don’t we need to hear anymore from Jack Kevorkian.

When Kevorkian went to jail, polls showed Americans were not sure what to think about legalizing assisted suicide. They still are not. According to an Associated Press poll out this week, 48 percent of people said assisted suicide should be legal; 44 percent said it should be illegal.

Debate has passed him by
But the debate has grown more sophisticated than it was when Kevorkian was offing people on TV.

The citizens of Oregon legalized a form of physician-assisted suicide in 1997. Proponents said the biggest obstacle they faced was Kevorkian and what he had done. They convinced people to vote for legalization despite Kevorkian, not because of him.

Critics who knew of Kevorkian's seeming disinterest in those he helped to die worried about abuse of the vulnerable and dying in Oregon. However, the passage of the carefully crafted Oregon law seems to have accomplished the goal of giving the terminally ill the option of controlling their death without encouraging them to die.

What is so interesting is that almost no one who asks for a lethal dose of medication actually does end their life. The Oregon law requires a determination of terminal illness by two doctors, counseling and a waiting period before a doctor can assist in dying.

It was the Oregon law, not the actions of Jack Kevorkian, that shook the complacency of the medical and nursing professions in that state and across the country. And it was the rise of palliative care and hospice as an alternative to rather than as a result of Kevorkian that has made dying a less horrifying prospect all over the United States.

We are far from ensuring a dignified and pain-free death for every American. The Terri Schiavo case was a stark reminder that your right to control how and where you die is not beyond the meddlesome grasp of pandering politicians and religious harpies. But we know now what we did not know when Kevorkian went on his assisted-suicide rampage — that we have a duty to make dying bearable and to ensure that each person gets the support, technology and pain control they wish.

The fact that Jack is back is no cause for celebration. The world of death and dying has, thankfully, passed him by. There is still more to talk about but not much useful that Jack Kevorkian can possibly say.

Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., is director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive© 2007 MSNBC Interactive

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18948499/

It's tough these days.

Christ, looking back at my last few posts, I'm kind of embarrassed. They're awful. I don't even know what I was thinking.

Anyway, I do know what happened: things these days go too fast for me to keep up with. If I wanted to stay even moderately up to date, I'd have to post three, four, five entries a day. So for now, I'd say this blog is on indefinite hiatus. At least until I can figure out a better way to get out what needs to be gotten out.

Time to leave.

You know things are bad when the Pope says there is nothing good coming from fighting terrorists.

Looks like even the "religious right" is starting to pull away from Iraq. Maybe they've got the right idea. Virtually everything has been going downhill for a long time. I was willing to put more stock in the situation, viewing the progress the surge has been making, but damn, I'm tired of the whole situation. The skill level of this administration has been lacking of late. This is frustrating.

Time to work on turning things around.

The media and their bullshit.

Let us see... I'm sure everyone knows by now I fucking hate the media. They're a bunch of cocktards with stupid agendas, totally against the actual function of their jobs, which is to tell the NEWS. Normally, I just ignore the bullshit, because I've really come to expect it. But sometimes, like now, I just can't handle it.

Let me put it short and simple: the surge in Iraq is working. How do I know this? I dig, hard. Because I like to know the truth. And truly, I would be the first to say, "GOD DAMNIT YOU'RE RETARDED" if I thought that it wasn't. But it is.

Technically, how do I know this? The information is BURIED. By dig, I'm fucking serious. The MSM hides basically all positive information about Iraq. I hit upon this particular subject from a post at Ace of Spades HQ. Yes, it's a conservative site. But he's one of the more objective ones out there, preferring to ridicule the fucking stupid than play partisan.

Back to the story, the surge is working. Death tolls are down all across Baghdad, but it's virtually impossible to quickly and easily find this information. In fact, it's buried in stupid ass articles titled "Death Squad Leaders Seized in Iraq." Search for that, and you'll probably come up with articles very similar to this:

Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2007
Death Squad Leaders Seized in Iraq
By AP/BRIAN MURPHY

BAGHDAD, Iraq—U.S.-led strike forces seized suspected Shiite death squad bosses Tuesday in raids that tested the fragile bonds between the government and a powerful militia faction allowing the Baghdad security crackdown to move ahead.

The sweeps through the Sadr City slum were part of highly sensitive forays into areas loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has ridiculed the 2-week-old campaign for failing to halt bombings by suspected Sunni insurgents against Shiite civilians.

Al-Sadr withdrew his powerful Mahdi Army militia from checkpoints and bases under intense government pressure to let the security push go forward. But the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki also worries that al-Sadr could pull his support if he feels his militiamen are being squeezed in Baghdad.

The pre-dawn raids appeared to highlight a strategy of pinpoint strikes in Sadr City rather than the flood of soldiers sent into some Sunni districts.

Bombings have not slackened off, with at least 10 people killed in blasts around Baghdad on Tuesday. However, an apparent success of the clampdown can be measured in the morgues: a sharp drop in the number of bullet-riddled bodies found in the streets of the capital, victims of sectarian death squads.

The number of bodies found this month in Baghdad _ most shot and showing signs of torture _ has dropped by nearly 50 percent to 494 as of Monday, compared with 954 in January. The figure stood at 1,222 in December, according to figures compiled by The Associated Press.

"We have seen a decrease in the past three weeks _ a pretty radical decrease," said Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq.

Many Sunnis have long alleged that most of killings were by Shiite militias, such as the Mahdi Army or rogue elements within the Shiite-led police.

The U.S. military said the raids targeted "the leadership of several rogue" Mahdi Army cells that "direct and perpetrate sectarian murder" _ an apparent reference to execution-style slayings and torture. At least 16 people were arrested.

"My sons and wife were very terrified," complained Muhannad Mihbas, 30, who said his brother and six cousins were taken in the sweeps. "Does the security plan mean arresting innocent people and scaring civilians at night?"

Odierno declined to comment on whether there were special tactics governing the Sadr City sweeps. "We will go after anyone who we feel is working against the government of Iraq," he said.

U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell told Al-Arabiya television that forces "will increase our operations in the coming days," but noted that the security crackdown in the capital should continue until at least October.

Added Odierno: "We will keep at this until the people feel safe in their neighborhoods."

Also Tuesday, a roadside bomb southwest of the capital killed three U.S. soldiers assigned to a unit based in Baghdad, the U.S. military said. A fourth Ameridan soldier was killed near Diwaniyah, a mostly Shiite town 80 miles south of Baghdad.

Iraqi authorities, meanwhile, have arrested a suspect in the attempted assassination of Shiite Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi, an aide said.

The aide said the arrest was made after reviewing security camera video from Monday's blast, which ripped through an awards ceremony at the ministry of public works and killed at least 10 people. Abdul-Mahdi suffered leg injuries.

The aide declined to give any further details about the arrest or the suspect. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media.

Abdul-Mahdi is one of two vice presidents. The other is Sunni.

In the southern Qadisiya province, Iraqi security forces said they captured 157 suspects linked to a shadowy armed cell called the Soldiers of Heaven, or Jund al-Samaa. The group was involved in a fierce gunbattle last month with Iraqi forces who accused it of planning to kill Shiite clerics and others in the belief it would hasten the return of the "Hidden Imam" _ a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad who disappeared as a child in the 9th century. Shiites believe he will return one day to bring justice.

A U.S. Apache helicopter was shot down in the fighting, and two U.S. crew members were killed.

Meanwhile, state television reported that 18 boys were killed when a car bomb exploded in a park in Ramadi, and Iraqi and international officials were quick to deplore the slaughter. But questions about key details of the report emerged just as quickly.

Iraqi police and state TV said the attack occurred Tuesday. Later, police said it happened Monday.

The confusion grew deeper following an announcement by U.S. forces that 30 civilians and one Iraqi soldier were injured by flying debris Tuesday when troops intentionally detonated 15 bags of explosives found in Ramadi.

The news first broke after nightfall when it is too dangerous for local journalists to check the reports independently in Ramadi, a Sunni insurgent stronghold 70 miles west of Baghdad. Western reporters normally tour the area only as part of military patrols. Much of Ramadi is under effective insurgent control, and even the police have difficulty establishing the facts in bombings and assassinations.

Unless you're looking for it, you won't find it, and you can't tell me it's not intentional, for political and partisan motives. This bullshit will be the death of America.

The Surge

Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy seems to be showing remarkable results. Talking about defeat and retreat while we have not finished playing out our hand would represent an unprecedent capitulation by the US to an enemy in the field -- and not an enemy like Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviets, with a military that should frighten us -- but an enemy that has so little support and so few combatants that they dare not show their face to American troops in the streets of their own cities.

Plan B should be victory by another means, not defeat by surrender to terrorists.

From Captain's Quarters.

An interesting article.

Not just for its obvious consequences, but also it's more underlying issues. Read it.

Obamination
Demercrats item by Erik Rush

How many Americans would vote for a presidential candidate who was the member of a church that professed the following credo?

1. Commitment to God
2. Commitment to the White Community
3. Commitment to the White Family
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence
6. Adherence to the White Work Ethic
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”
9. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the White Community
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting White Institutions
11. Pledge allegiance to all White leadership who espouse and embrace the White Value System
12. Personal commitment to embracement of the White Value System.

The question is rhetorical, of course. The answer is that such a candidate wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected dog catcher (apologies to America’s animal rescue and public safety personnel) let alone President, because that candidate would be instantly branded a racist, among the most vile and frightening of white supremacists.

And those holding the branding irons would be 100% right.

Yet, in the “About” section of the U.S. Senate website for Barack Obama, Democratic senator from Illinois and contender for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, it states that Obama and his family “live on Chicago’s South Side where they attend Trinity United Church of Christ.”

So…?

Well, to say that the Trinity United Church of Christ (http://www.tucc.org)
is afrocentric in the extreme would be a gross understatement. It’s not simply afrocentric, it’s African-centric. In fact, one could argue that this organization worships things African to a far greater degree than they do Christ, and gives the impression of being a separatist “church” in the same vein as do certain supremacist “white brethren” churches – or even Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.

Shocking? An overstatement? An overreaction?

One can see for oneself on the Trinity United Church website, which is replete with confirmation of what I present here. What follows is an excerpt from their Mission Statement:

“We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian… Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain “true to our native land,” the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.

“Trinity United Church of Christ adopted the Black Value System written by the Manford Byrd Recognition Committee chaired by Vallmer Jordan in 1981. We believe in the following 12 precepts and covenantal statements. These Black Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered. They must reflect on the following concepts:

1. Commitment to God
2. Commitment to the Black Community
3. Commitment to the Black Family
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence
6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”
9. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the Black
Community
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and
Supporting Black Institutions
11. Pledge allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value
System
12. Personal commitment to embracement of the Black Value System.”

Sound familiar? Of course it is, since it’s identical to the 12-point list at the beginning of this column – the one from the theoretical white supremacist candidate’s church; the only difference is the substitution of the word “Black” for “White.”

Trinity United Church of Christ’s congregation also claims to hold to a “10-point Vision” which is similarly afrocentric, or if you will, separatist. Again, like the Nation of Islam, a white separatist church or the Branch Davidians, Trinity United more resembles a cult than a church. Only this one has as one of its most prominent members a serious contender for the White House.

And George W. Bush’s born-again Christian status scares people?

These revelations, of course shed all the light we need on Obama’s inscrutability; since before he announced his candidacy, both the Right and Left have commented on the lack of information vis-à-vis just who Barack Obama is and what he’s about.

From The Chicago Tribune, February 06, 2007, Column: Against Middleclassness? by Rich Lowry. “Vallmer Jordan, a church member who helped draft the precepts, said they were designed to empower the black community and counter a value system imposed by whites. ‘The big question mark was racism,’ he said. ‘Black disempowerment was an integral part of that historical value system. It became increasingly apparent to me that we black people had not developed our own value system . . . to help us overcome all we knew we had to battle.’”

“A value system imposed by whites…” Is Jordan speaking of the value system that kept families together and promoted morality, industry and integrity, or the one imposed by liberal dependency pimps since the Civil Rights Movement?

True enough that many blacks did abandon values; again, this was due to the corruption of the black clergy by white socialists and their black foremen. Trinity United seems to have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Gravitation toward an Africanized “year-round Kwanzaa”-based pseudo-Christianity seems less of a solution than returning to the moral and social conservatism Blacks held prior to the aforementioned socialists gaining their stranglehold in the black community.

So is Obama seeking to be our first black president, or our first stealth black nationalist president? You see, were he a run-of-the-mill insincere Christian of convenience like Bill Clinton, Obama might belong to a run-of-the-mill, lukewarm, large nondescript church. But he doesn’t. He belongs to a church which is (as I indicated before) blatantly afrocentric and even suggests the supremacy of Africa’s descendants in America.

Granted that the Left will have no qualms about this highly questionable affiliation, but what about all of the American swing voters to whom Obama has built broad appeal by presenting himself as sort of a generic, open-minded moderate Democrat (as Bill Clinton also did, by the way)? Are they going to go for a candidate whose heart is actually closer to that of a refined Black Panther?

Trinity United clearly embraces things African above things American. The content of their website makes this undeniably clear. Aside from this tack being divisive, separatist and calls into question its adherents’ identification as Americans, if they’re looking for values, they – and Obama – would be better served by looking to modern political conservatives and traditional Christianity than retrograde African precepts and the Democrat Party.

Obama’s affiliation with this church, if I must call it that, should be as alarming to the American voter as a Republican candidate for president belonging to the Aryan Brethren Church of Christ. Any argument against this assertion is politically-correct delusion, reverse discrimination and a hypocrisy – a very dangerous one.

Source

Pretty interesting, no? It's astounding the hypocrisy that plagues every level of our government and society.

Darfur as a Fashion

Thousands of people being killed, and for what? Useless desert and some oil, political control over a garbage country. These people are suffering horribly by the hundreds of thousands. We must pay attention to them.

But... face it: "protesting" against the "genocide in Darfur" has become fashionable, all the cool kids are doing it. What makes the suffering in Darfur any more special than the suffering of EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD? This is not an isolated incident. What does it take, sheer numbers to get people to pay attention? And really, it's not paying attention, it's hopping on the fucking bandwagon. If the majority of the people "involved" reallyknew what the fuck was going on, they wouldn't have just started to pay attention to .00001% of the real fucking world, nevermind the 99.9999% of the world that is completely ignored. What, do we think that just because so many people are saying "Oh jeez, that's so terrible, we need to do this and this and this and this" means that "this and this" are viable solutions, just because they seemingly solve one problem? Let's start at the top:

The main goal of people is to write Congress, Governors, etc., to increase pressure to solve the problem and stop the deaths. Seems reasonable, right? Yeah.... right up until you look and see that the US has been outstandingly the most providing country, allocating more than $1 billion to relief. Relief for some symptoms.

From what I've seen, and I beg those who REALLY care to correct me, is that's where it stops, the bandaid. No real solutions. Because no one REALLY cares. It's easy to write a letter saying "Oh this is bad, fix it" and give some money. It's even marginally easy to hold rallies and raise awareness. But in brutal reality, results matter, and telling people bad things are happening doesn't make those bad things go away. Which is actually what some of the less retarded and more devoted people use as an argument for stronger action, and I applaud that. However, some things are still being blatantly ignored.

Like the fact that the UN, the pillar of modern society, has consistently procrastinated, along with all the other "Unions." That all across the world there are people suffering just as badly, and have been for longer periods of time. That right now, there are people that want to get rid of the western infidels, and that right now, we're a bit entangled in trying to solve that issue.

More to the brutal point is that fact that Sudan has no value to the United States as a country and a government. It's a useless sandpit with some oil in the south. And why is all this shit happening there anyway? Because of hateful people? And if we just go in there, it'll stop all the hating? What are the real underlying causes is the real question, and how these causes can be addressed is the real answer. Darfur is hemorrhaging gash right around the aorta of the damn country, and we're stuffing it with gauze! What the fuck does that do? And here we are, the brilliant Americans, stuffing in more fucking gauze with our awareness groups and fundraising. Where are the god damn surgeons?

Now chill out, I do not want the gauze stuffing to stop. In fact I strongly urge everyone to keep going; the more gauze, the slower the bleeding. But I want to emphasize the fact that the god damn battle doesn't just stop there. People walk for an afternoon, people sign checks, people write on message boards, all in support of Darfur, ignoring pretty much everything else and neglecting to take in the big picture. We have to KEEP PUSHING. Don't focus on one fucking part of the world, focus on the whole thing! Don't fight suffering in one place, fight it EVERYWHERE. Think of the people on this planet, not just in Sudan, but in Haiti, and North Korea, and Iraq, and the Eastern Block, and in our own damn country, who do not have our easy lives. Look at the big picture, and think: how best can these be solved? Macromanagement or micromanagement, and how well-suited am I at each? Am I suited at all? Don't join the fucking bandwagon, become aware of EVERYTHING, and choose YOUR OWN battle. The widespread suffering of a region is no worse than the suffering of the starving or diseased in any other part of the world, so why point the spotlight on just the one region that everyone else is?

This close-mindedness is not good focus or making a difference, it is escapism. We are escaping from our responsibilities by saying "Oh I pay attention to Darfur, so my quota is met." But when everyone else is paying attention too, it makes it fucking easy.

And nevermind the fact that while we're throwing our money into Darfur, education is in the shitter in this country, and social security is too. Everyone has fucking lost their minds in the government, with pork and civil suits and Iraq and campaign bullshit, and we're taking the easy way out of our responsibilities. Disaster is everywhere, and has been for a long fucking time, and people are pouring money into a HUGE problem that not only would take a bazillion dollars to solve RIGHT NOW like everyone wants. But hey...

Congratulations, you care. You can now ignore the world.