Bush bans people from watching him speak. Not because they were "terrorists" but because the College Republicans didn't want them there.

Ramble OnLeaves are falling all around, It's time I was on my way.
Thanks to you, I'm much obliged for such a pleasant stay.
But now it's time for me to go. The autumn moon lights my way.
For now I smell the rain, and with it pain, and it's headed my way.
Sometimes I grow so tired, but I know I've got one thing I got to do...

[Chorus]
Ramble On, And now's the time, the time is now, to sing my song.
I'm goin' 'round the world, I got to find my girl, on my way.
I've been this way ten years to the day, Ramble On,
Gotta find the queen of all my dreams.

Got no time to for spreadin' roots, The time has come to be gone.
And to' our health we drank a thousand times, it's time to Ramble On.

[Chorus]

Mine's a tale that can't be told, my freedom I hold dear.
How years ago in days of old, when magic filled the air.
T'was in the darkest depths of Mordor, I met a girl so fair.
But Gollum, and the evil one crept up and slipped away with her, her, her....yeah.

[Chorus]

Gonna ramble on, sing my song. Gotta keep-a-searchin' for my baby...
Gonna work my way, round the world. I can't stop this feelin' in my heart
Gotta keep searchin' for my baby. I can't find my bluebird!

Want to decide who wins the 2004 election? Check out this game. It is pretty fun, at least for political leaning folks.

The "Oedipally induced ignorance" of George W. Bush. Food for thought if nothing else.

Here is the start of my short story.

Nobody knows, the trouble we've seen./
Nobody knows, the wisdom we've gleaned./
Nobody knows, but us/
“Hey, mom.”
Susan didn’t turn around. Greg was never late. Never. Not once. She just kept driving. Damn. Damn country roads. She put the pedal to the metal; the blue mini-van shuttering as its left wheel popped out of a pothole and its underside knocked against the uneven gravel road.
“Mom,” Rune picked his X-men backpack up from against his shins and looked at it, Wolverine stared back at him, his claws jutting from his knuckles and forming an X. Susan turned onto the paved road that headed into Elkridge.
We are so late. “What honey?” she asked, looking back to check her blindspot as she switched lanes.
“Can I show these poems to people at school? Daniel doesn’t believe Dad wrote poetry,” Rune said, plunging his small hands into the backpack oh no, and coming out with a mess of no no, not that papers scribbled on in Greg’s wide, loose scrawl.
She pulled the van to the side of the road. Its been six months, keep your cool.
“HONEY Too harsh. Too harsh. Honey. Where did you find those?”
His glistening red lips smiled. He looked up to her and said, “In daddy’s desk.”
He opened his desk drawers. There are assholes out there who would kill for that “Those are your father’s poems. They aren’t yours,” No one should read them. They are his. His alone. she shifted into first and puttered back out onto the road.
She drove silently to Thames Elementary, the bell had already rung, and the children were lining up in front of their teachers in the crisp fall air.
Before the sentinels they come/
Cherubim with outstretched mittened hands/
Like the crosses, and stars of father’s Omaha Beach lament/
Yet young, worthy special sons/
Susan put the nest of Greg’s papers into the back of the van. Then she scouted around in Rune’s backpack to make sure nothing remained. There was a single remaining scrap of paper, a well-worn unfolded Burger King napkin with a poem etched into it in red ink. She stuck it into the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt.
“Love you mom,” he said, opening his door and hopping out onto the curb, painted blue to indicate where she idled was for student loading and unloading only.
She smiled, “Love you too pumpkin,” and he rushed to the third grader line headed up by Mr. Berkman, who waved at her as she gunned the engine and tottered away.

Last post for the night. Then I'm going to get to work, write my short story for Creative Writing.
Check this video out. It is pretty cute! I'm looking forward to Shrek 2.

Oh, and there is Sudan too.

LOOK AT THE CONGO AND RWANDA! 1 2 3 And so on.

The Christians are revolting. The Christians are revolting.

Oh, and Pakistan... Don't worry about Terrorist attacks there. That doesn't need to be covered.

Strange things are still happening in Saudi Arabia.

“There are other photos that depict incidents of physical violence towards prisoners, acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhumane," he said. “... It’s going to get a good deal more terrible, I’m afraid.”
the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.

Disgusted by torture of Iraqi's? You ain't seen nothing yet. says Rumsfeld!

This was an interesting article. Looks like love causes men's testasterone to fall and women's to rise.
In other news I finished the final. I feel like it went pretty well.
After the final I talked to an adviser about graduating and he suggested I go honor's track and write a 50-75 page honor's thesis. I'm thinking about it, but with 2 majors, a minorish thing, a frat, and learning to cook my own food (so I'm a bit pittiful at times) next year I'm not sure if I will go the honors rout.

Well. I have the last midterm of the week in about an hour. Wish me luck. Oh, cool stuff. The poet B.H. Fairchild is reading tonight. I'm going to go and watch. Should be fun!

The neo-cons. think Kerry is having a mid-life crisis.

POST SECULARISM- The era after Secularism. People realize faith/religion/the way whatever you want to call it can't be just an individual thing, but needs to be communal, and practiced more than 1 time a week.

US deaths since July 2, 2003: 555
(Pres. Bush announces, "Bring Them On")

"While through the streets of Argos
Grief yet more grievous grows,
With all our manhood gathered
So far from earth of Hellas;
As in each home unfathered,
Each widowed bed, the whetted
Sword of despair assails
Hearts where all hope has withered
And angry hate prevails.
They sent forth men to battle,
But no such men return;
And home, to claim their welcome,
Come ashes in an urn."

Well. Theological discussion group at 6:30 as normal. Here are the Questions.
The Questions
1. How would life be different if Jesus had never walked the earth?
2. Is/should martyrdom be antithetical to Christianity? (aka He died for us, why should we now die?
3. Are there more things to this world than your dear philosophy oh dear horacio? By this I mean can Religion/God/Faith/Grace/etc. be explained logically?
4. What is more dangerous to one’s faith, Atheism or “Satanism”? Why?
5. If faith is judged by the fruits it yields then how does the Eugene Christian community stack up?
6. Is God’s wrath a thing Christians should avoid talking about? Is wrath like Martyrdom and should be kind of dismissed with the coming of “buddy Jesus” (to quote Dogma)

Rape in Iraq.
Strange enough though the media is calling it "A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee." I would think being that the female was a "detainee" the sex was not consensual... Just a thought.

Wil S. Hylton interview with Colin Powell

Here is the stuff I found most interesting.

A few weeks ago, I went to see Colin Powell in his office. The room was tiny and the light dim. An Asian lamp on his desk cast a faint glow onto the walls, and the shades of his windows were drawn, giving the room a padded, womblike feel. Everything was in earth tones. When I commented on the warm ambience, Powell shrugged his considerable shoulders and said, "Yeah, because I have stuff lying all over the place." It was true. He was surrounded by a jumble of paperwork and clutter. The bookshelves behind his desk were jammed with old photographs and volumes of world history, some upright on the shelves, others crooked and diagonal, halfway to falling off. In one corner, a podium was pressed against a window, as if he had been practicing a speech to the drapes, while in another corner his suit jacket was slung over a cherry valet stand, hovering above the floor like a ghost. In place of the jacket, Powell wore a dark blue windbreaker with the words BOYS & GIRLS club on the breast. He sat behind his desk with a calm, curious look.

had come to see Powell because, for several weeks, his closest friends and colleagues had been telegraphing a story to me. Powell was finished, they'd said. Exhausted. Frustrated. Bitter. He was uncomfortable with the president's agenda and fatigued from his battles with the Pentagon. His reputation had been stained by his speech at the U.N. in February 2003, when he insisted that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and as the journalist Bob Woodward has noted in Plan of Attack, he was despondent about being cut out of the war plan in Iraq. In the months since those humiliations, as the body count mounted and the WMDs never appeared, his enthusiasm for the job had waned. His enthusiasm for the whole administration had waned. As his mentor from the National War College, Harlan Ullman, described it, "This is, in many ways, the most ideological administration Powell's ever had to work for. Not only is it very ideological, but they have a vision. And I think Powell is inherently uncomfortable with grand visions like that." Or as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said of Powell's disastrous speech at the U.N. last year, "It's a source of great distress for the secretary." Or as Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, put it, "He's tired. Mentally and physically."

Oh, he would say, it's easy to talk about "ending states" when you've never been sent to end one, when you've never watched a man split apart in a rain of shrapnel. But for an old grunt who's been on the front lines, who tromped through the elephant grass in Vietnam, who took a punji stake through the foot and saw ears cut off as trophies, who had slept beneath the aching odor of a fifty-five-gallon oil drum stuffed with burning human feces, for a man like Colin Powell, the path of diplomacy had a battle-born allure that no draft-dodging neocon could possibly comprehend, and he meant for them to know it.

And then it came. Like a political earthquake, September 11 shifted everything, and Colin Powell found himself on new ground—on the far side of American policy, gazing across the Potomac at the Pentagon, at Rumsfeld strutting across the Parade Grounds with his granite jaw thrust skyward, Cheney and Wolfowitz tagging behind. Suddenly, the president, who had campaigned to reduce the U.S. military presence overseas, planted his feet firmly in the war department and began hurling verbal hand grenades around the globe: "axis" of this, "evildoer" that, drawing lines in the sand and preparing for combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, branding Syria and Iran and North Korea as potential targets, severing the lines of communication with some of our oldest European allies.

But if Powell's capitulation seemed complete that day, if his U.N. speech had the aura of pure surrender, then like so many things in the Bush administration, it was only an illusion. Because since then, without much fanfare or publicity, Powell has scratched and clawed his way back to a position of some significance in the White House. He has pulled the reins on Taiwan, quelling its tensions with China, has used that leverage to gain China's assistance on the escalating North Korean crisis, has opened the first real line of diplomacy with Libya in more than thirty years (and, in the process, has begun a real disarmament there, as opposed to the artificial disarming of Iraq), has helped persuade Russia to engage the Iranian nuclear crisis, and has kept American troops out of Syria and Iran, all against the fervent objections of his adversaries in the Pentagon.

His position in the cabinet, then, is more tenuous and less tenable than ever. In order to keep his power, he cannot seem to have it. This became apparent from the moment I hit my seat. With a great sigh, Powell launched into a meandering soliloquy, and for the next hour he scarcely paused, speaking endlessly and yet saying very little, drowning out questions, pausing only to inflect his tone upward for a moment, allowing me short opportunities to grunt or nod or say little more than "Yeah" or "Uh-huh" before he would steamroll onward, eyes twinkling.

I arrived at Wilkerson's office on a sunny winter morning, hoping he could shed light on Powell's undercover influence and the assortment of successes he has managed lately, against the odds, beneath his veneer of irrelevance. I hoped, for example, that Wilkerson would be able to illuminate Powell's efforts in Libya, where he began a diplomatic process, long before the war in Iraq, to open dialogue with Qaddafi, something that Armitage told me "required us to beat down the protestations of those in the administration who did not want any discussions with Libya." (Asked about the same thing, Rice had said, "Um, I don't remember it really that way.")

What I didn't expect from Wilkerson was the rest of the picture, a glimpse of the venom with which Powell and his staff have come to regard their adversaries in the Pentagon. But almost as soon as I asked about the relationship between Powell and the neocons, Wilkerson crouched forward in his chair and said, "I make no bones about it. I have some reservations about people who have never been in the face of battle, so to speak, who are making cavalier decisions about sending men and women out to die. A person who comes immediately to mind in that regard is Richard Perle, who, thank God, tendered his resignation and no longer will be even a semiofficial person in this administration. Richard Perle's cavalier remarks about doing this or doing that with regard to military force always, always troubled me. Because it just showed me that he didn't have the appreciation, for example, that Colin Powell has for what it means."

Before I left, I wanted a sense of Powell's plans for the future. I was wary of how to phrase the question, though. It seemed safe to assume that Wilkerson had not been dispatched to announce the end of Powell's career in this article, at this particular moment, and if I asked him outright whether or not Powell was planning to quit, I could put him on the spot. He might wind up saying, as Powell did, "I never speculate on that" or "He hasn't announced a decision." So I phrased the question differently.
"Being inside the building," I said, "is there as much expectation that this will be the end of Powell's tenure as there is outside the building?"
Eight long seconds of silence.
"Um," Wilkerson said, "I've known him for fifteen years...."
I nodded.
"My considered opinion is that he is..." His voice trailed off. "He's tired. Mentally and physically. And if the president were to ask him to stay on—if the president is reelected and the president were to ask him to stay on, he might for a transitional period, but I don't think he'd want to do another four years."
Wilkerson fell silent again.
"He seems tired," he said.

Man, I'm sticking with this quote still


This is from Aeschylus' Agamemnon
"While through the streets of Argos
Grief yet more grievous grows,
With all our manhood gathered
So far from earth of Hellas;
As in each home unfathered,
Each widowed bed, the whetted
Sword of despair assails
Hearts where all hope has withered
And angry hate prevails.
They sent forth men to battle,
But no such men return;
And home, to claim their welcome,
Come ashes in an urn."

Oh, by the by all the pictures I had posted on this site no longer work. I guess sam was right, but instead of breaking the camera he broke the internet.

Wow. Americans are sick people. Look at this CNN poll.
Is torture ever justified during interrogation?
Yes 47% 92378 votes

No 53% 105016 votes
Total: 197394 votes

47 bloody percent! This is a bit scary.

from bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from great courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency;
from complacency to apathy;
from apathy to dependence;
from dependency back again to bondage."

- Sir Alex Fraser Tyler
(1742-1813) Scottish jurist and historian

The correlation between sexual encounters and cars.

BERLIN - BMW drivers have more sex than owners of any other cars and are much more active than Porsche drivers, a new German car magazine has found.

The German magazine “Men’s Car” found in a survey of 2,253 motorists aged 20 to 50 published in its inaugural May issue that male BMW drivers say they have sex on average 2.2 times each week while Porsche drivers have sex 1.4 times per week.

Following BMW drivers were Audi (2.1), Volkswagen (1.9), Ford (1.7) and Mercedes (1.6). Drivers of foreign car makes were also behind BMW with Italian cars (2.0), French (1.9), Japanese (1.8), Swedish (1.6) and Korean cars (1.5) trailing after.

Among women, French car drivers were top with 2.1 times per week followed by Audi (2.0), Italian (2.0), and BMW (1.9) with Porsche again at the bottom of the scale at 1.2 times per week.

NIGERIA
Zamfara Government Orders Demolition of All Churches
Governor Ahmed Sani of Zamfara State, has ordered the demolition of all churches in the state, as he launched the second phase of his Sharia project yesterday.

Speaking at the launch in Gusau, the state capital, Governor Sani disclosed that time was ripe for full implementation of the programme as enshrined in the Holy Quran.

He added that his government would soon embark on demolition of all places of worship of unbelievers in the state, in line with Islamic injunction to fight them wherever they are found.

Hmmm... Why isn't this news?!?

John Kerry has new ads that are positive! Really good stuff, check them out if you have a chance.