End of Silence

A few highlights of my morning news read and e-mail inbox check.

• Krugman continues his case against the Bush Social Security push.
• Rollins continues his non-stop work schedule.

This story is getting a lot of play in the blogosphere today. Very surreal. I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to live in that society. I still need to see Team America.

There have been many days since the election when I wonder if I’m in the right place or not. Perhaps it’s from lack of sleep trying to meet a work deadline last night, but that feeling seems particularly strong after listening to/reading news over the last 24 hours.

For your consideration:

Gay teen expelled from high school – One more reason to be glad I don’t live in Dallas anymore. TCA was one of our rival schools when I was growing up. I’ve been there for basketball games, track meets, etc. They always did seem a more uptight than we were. That being said, I’m not sure that my alma mater would have done anything different. I’d like to think so, but I doubt it. His consolation is that he doesn’t need any of their crap at this point anyway. He already had a successful enough web design business before he started the site that got him expelled. I’m sure this kind of publicity will score him plenty of new contacts as he moves into the real world. Good luck, James.

U.S. missile defense test fails – The fucking thing never has worked and probably never will. What a colossal waste of money. Thanks, Bush administration. You’re a bunch of geniuses. Let’s keep sinking ridiculous amounts of money into a system that isn’t going to protect us. The only worse offense would be spending a bunch of money to invade a country, creating an insurgency that we can’t defeat in an attempt to counter stateless terrorism. Oh, wait…

Wal-Mart sued for selling Evanescence CD that contains obscenity – While I’m all for sticking it to Wal-Mart, this is a ridiculous lawsuit that should be thrown out of court. The parents should be fined for being dumbasses and the lawyer involved should be stuffed alive with copies of the “offending” CD until he admits he’s a money-grubbing pox on society. I think I’m going to sue anyone who actually listens to Evanescece for bad taste.

Since I used MTV News as a source for my last post, they’re also the source of what I’ll call “Headlines that should come as a shock to no one” today:

• Ol’ Dirty Bastard Died From Drug Overdose, Medical Examiner’s Office Says
• Erasure Singer Andy Bell Says He’s HIV-Positive

ODB dies of a drug overdose and the singer from one of the gayest bands of the 80’s is HIV positive. At least there are some things that we can rely on.

Retired Army colonel, 70, sent to Afghanistan – I don’t think I really need to comment on this one. It pretty much speaks for itself.

Wow. Of all of the items, even I feel I’m being a bit harsh on the second to last one. See what no sleep and paying attention to current events does to you?

I posted a few months ago about my dismay that airport police at ABIA are now conducting random searches of vehicles driving up to the terminal. In the very same post, I linked Bruce Schneier’s site. He’s a well-known security expert who gives very good explantions of why random searches are ultimately ineffective.

Fast forward to today – I’m a frequent reader of John Perry Barlow’s blog and noticed that he hadn’t updated much lately. Today’s update explains one of the reasons. His experience goes a step farther than what I blogged about at ABIA. At least you’re simply directed away from the terminal if you refuse. Thankfully, he and co-founder of the EFF, John Gilmore are fighting this affront to the 4th amendment for the rest of us.

As a completely random aside, I googled for “i fought the law” because I couldn’t remember the name of the artist most often associated with the song. It was, of course, Bobby Fuller. However, he didn’t write it. It was originally written and performed by The Crickets, as in “Buddy Holly and”. It was written after Holly’s death. The link responsible for my musical enlightenment appears to belong to a site about the roots of the Grateful Dead. Those who know anything about JPB know that he was the lyricist on several Grateful Dead songs. How’s that for a little Internet daisy chain?

Robert Cringley, geek reporter extraordinaire, was one of those people who predicted a win for Kerry because the youth vote was underrepresented in the polls. The reasoning was that the polls weren’t getting the kids with no land line and just a cell phone. Well, we all know he was wrong and he admits it and tries to explain why in this column. But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is the last half of the column:

Back to the election. If the experts are correct, the 2004 election results mean we now live in a country where morality is apparently the major concern of people. Am I wrong, or is the same thing not true in Iran? And if our morality is in fundamental conflict with their morality, which side will be willing to sacrifice more to obtain what they view as their just end? I can tell you it ain’t us.

Back in 1986 I talked Penthouse magazine into giving me an assignment to write the story: “How to Get a Date in Revolutionary Iran.” The premise was that hormones are hormones, and those wacky kids in Tehran, most of whom could still remember the Shah, had to be finding some way to meet members of the opposite sex. So I headed off to Iran to find out the truth. If you are interested in such stuff, the only time a single man and woman not from the same family could be together in private back then was in a taxi (he being the driver), so all the teenage boys who had or could borrow cars turned them into taxis. This, of course, put all the power in the hands of the woman since she could see him but he had to take pot luck.

I eventually finished the piece and decided to go see the war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man’s Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that’s exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.

It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.

Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.

Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can’t really stand in that part of the world. But of course President Bush, who may think he pulled the switch on a couple hundred Death Row inmates in Texas, has probably never seen a combat death. He doesn’t get it and he’ll proudly NEVER get it.

Welcome to the New Morality.

Damn.

On a related note, maybe all of those voters worried about moral values, protecting “the sanctity of marriage” by writing discrimination into the Constitution, and promoting abstinence-only sex-ed should start looking for some other things to worry about.