September 2007

I have been extremely busy with work and haven't had much time to post. But I am listening to Air America and the Stephanie Miller Show on the way to work, so I get my daily dose of angry liberals and what is going on in the world. Speaking of which, Stephanie tends to feature Bill O'Reilly heavily during her "Right Wing World" segments. I've never seen an episode of The O'Reilly Factor, but the clips she plays on her show are astounding. The man is not even remotely interested in intelligent conversation or in considering alternate viewpoints. He cares about one thing - his own opinion. He also shamelessly plugs his own news network. I've never seen an episode, but only portions. I did find a neat segment in which Ron Paul attempts to give O'Reilly a history lesson, which, of course, O'Reilly wants nothing to do with. Check it out:

O'Reilly knows no bounds in his stupidity. Notice his core assumption about Iran: that if any other country hostile to the US has nukes, it is cause for pre-emptive war to prevent that country from obtaining those weapons. If O'Reilly's reasoning were correct, then our troops should move into Iran today. If O'Reilly's reasoning were correct, then the US should have gone to war with a "surrogate" of the USSR back in the 50s and 60s when the plutonium weapons-grade technology was adapted for warfare. Who cares if Iran gets nukes? We know they're not going to use them due to the blowback or retaliation factor. Dropping a nuke will inevitably create self-destruction for the one who begins the dropping. Israel has nukes, and more nukes than Iran has got. All Iran wants to do with its nukes is come to the table with the other countries in the region that have nukes and use that leverage to gain a more prominent place in the region. Are they going to actually launch those nukes? I seriously doubt it, because they don't want to get themselves killed. Their chief rival, Israel, has plenty of nukes, and when they run out, you can bet Uncle Sam will probably foot the bill for what they need to continue on.

Another thing I've been thinking about lately is whitewashed American history. All the history texts I had growing up always made me feel like the USA does no wrong, is always to the rescue, and could never inflict the world with greater pain. Think about it. Why is the US always the good guy? Can such a thing even be possible? I believe that those who believe that the US is the greatest country the world has ever seen are naive. But as I thought more about it, there are "dark moments" in American history, and the way our whitewashed "official" history deals with them is by minimalizing them, and maximalizing other related events. Take the atomic bomb droppings for example. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were unarmed, civilian targets. There was no military advantage to using nuclear weapons on those cities. I think those bombings were social experiments as well as military experiments. The US just wanted to see what would happen if a nuclear weapon was deployed on flesh and blood. It was a cowardly attack that killed tens of thousands of people instantly, and ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of others (fallout radiation, sickness, etc.). So how does official American history deal with it? We focus on the cultish behavior of the emperor and of Japan as a threat to the whole world (that's a favorite of today's neo-cons), etc. We seek a means to justify the use of such a terrible weapon. Sadly, no country who has ever possessed nuclear weapons has deployed those weapons in warfare... except the US.

In other related events, I found out that my step-sister's husband has entered school for a master's degree in... get this... "National Security Studies." He wants to join one of the Fourth Reich's most holy and blessed institutions upon graduation: the FBI, CIA, BATF, NSA, DoJ, DoHS, etc. (Now that I list out all the institutions which provide "preventative" security, it just dawned on me how paranoid US leadership really is). I guess I'm not surprised this sort of thing exists, but I am very surprised that folks actually move to California to attend such a thing. No matter your political bias, it seems like this sort of degree is ephemeral. What if a Democrat gets into the WH and much of this is re-vamped or even cut? What if Ron Paul is elected and all of that goes away entirely? Whatever one may say about the degree, at least I can add that with him going to school for this, now there's at least two people in the family with totally useless master's degrees which can only be taught and conferred through extensive brainwashing (his, and mine - Biblical Studies).