Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Direct military action in Haiti: A bad idea

While I was working out the other day in the gym, I noticed on the news that the Haitian Ambassador to the United States was requesting that the United States send troops over to Haiti. This would not only put American lives at risk, it would also be pointless. There is no need for troops in Haiti. If there is civil unrest as a result of the earthquake, it is not the United States's business to go waging wars wherever we please, putting lives of troops who often had no options but the miltary at risk.
It's bad enough that we have troops over in Haiti already as guards for aid workers, and we don't need to put people in even more danger. Why should people who are so brave just get thrown into the meat-grinder as if we are playing Civilization II? Forget it, Obama this is real life. With real troops. With real lives.

Business Class: A Slippery Slope

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, one's intelligence, and hence occupation are predetermined at birth, ranging from Alpha Plus to Epsilon Minus. Having those as young as 12 (7th Graders) choosing careers is the beginning of a slippery slope. There is an old Arabian proverb which says "Let a camel stick his nose in your tent, and soon he will be all in".
Fascism, which has been described by Benito Mussolini as "the corporate state", is a political system where not only is all government criticism supressed, but one's career is determined by one's aptitude, not one's interests. This view is also espoused in communism, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Having a class where students are indoctrinated to be good workers for a corporation is not only fascist, but plutocratic as well. Apparently, businesses in Delaware are involved in the creation of the curriculum. If businesses are involved in this, don't you think it would be in their financial interest to have students indoctrinated to be good workers? If we have corporations getting the government to increase profits instead of educating students, one will be stuck with a stupid populace with no idea how to (and no desire to) revolt against the totalitarianism expressed in dystopian novels. Having a business class in middle school is letting the nose of totalitarianism into the tent of democracy.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Fahrenheit 9/11

Based on Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian novel whose title is based on the autoignition temperature of paper (Books are banned in this book.), Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 gives a chilling expose into the events in the Bush administration surrounding 9/11. It shows how close the Bush administration is to the Saudi Arabian royal family (16 of the 20 hijackers were Saudi), and just how poorly the Afghanistan War was managed. Did you know that we sent a mere 11,000 troops over to Afghanistan originally. In addition to giving Osama bin Laden and the Taliban a 2-month head start to hide out in the mountains, we TRAINED the Taliban back in the 80's to kill the Soviets. It also documents the Bush administration artificially raising terror alert levels to control the populace using fear. Sounds an awful lot like TERRORism, doesn't it? It also exposes the lies surrounding the (pat)Riot Act, the Iraq War, and why we flew the bin Laden family out of the country three days after 9/11 without even asking them any questions. It also investigates how the Bush administration censored 28 pages of the 9/11 report, and how they're very shady about how the administration failed to connect the dots, and how he spent 42% of his time on vacation. At the beginning of the movie, it uncovers the shady aspects of the 2000 election, such as the fact that the person at Fixed Noise (Fox News) who called the election for Bush was Bush's first cousin, the fact that Bush's family had ties to the company which made the voting machines, and many more. It uncovers the near-dictatorship we had under President Bush and his cronies, and how shady the previous administration was. It's the best horror movie I've ever seen