gwax's rumblings

I’ve been irked at President-elect Obama since he voted in favor of FISA but now I hear that he might kill day­light sav­ings time. Now, you may recall that I pas­sion­ately loath day­light sav­ings time and abol­ish­ing it would shift Mr. Obama closer to my good side. Mind you, not screw­ing with my time twice a year does not quite make up for giv­ing away my rights but it is a small step in the right direction.

I caught a bit of the cov­er­age of Saddam Hussein’s trial this morn­ing on NPR on my way to work and it led me to for­mu­late a pre­dic­tion for Iraq’s future. The most inter­est­ing part of what I caugt was that, today, Hussein asked that he alone be held account­able for the actions of his regime and that the other defen­dants be acquited. To some Hussein’s request might seem like a noble effort but I’m inclined to sus­pect that Hussein is a fairly clever guy with ulte­rior motives. My pre­dic­tion is this, Saddam Hussein will try to get his accom­plices off and be impris­oned in Iraq–it is where he is a crim­i­nal, after all. Once the US has extri­cated itself from Iraq, allies of Hussein will retake con­trol of the Iraqi gov­ern­ment and free Hussein (not nec­es­sar­ily in that order). Saddam Hussein will then rule Iraq once more and the US will look like the bunch of idiots that we prob­a­bly are.

In short, I pre­dict that Saddam Hussein will rule Iraq again within 10 years, prob­a­bly sooner.

Seems like it’s prob­a­bly not real, but if it is I’d totally vote for him for president.

Because I see so many other peo­ple com­ment­ing on this elec­tion pol­i­tics things I want to weigh in with my view on the mat­ter. This “great divide” in our coun­try is between a whole bunch of peo­ple that are all exactly alike; the so-called-liberals are act­ing out in exactly the man­ner that they always crit­i­cize the so-called-conservatives for. Both par­ties are fight­ing for the same socio-economic sys­tem and they only dif­fer on the spe­cific moral issues that they would like to fight over. It’s a one party sys­tem and one of your can­di­dates won; quit your bitch­ing about pathetic lit­tle “issues” and start pay­ing atten­tion to what’s actu­ally wrong with our culture.

Well, the elec­tion was yes­ter­day and I voted; it was kind of cool I guess. Last night I went over to Burton-Connor to hang out with Nick and watch the results come in; the hang­ing out was more inter­est­ing than the results, which is kind of sad. It’s been pretty much dead­locked and it still is, with nei­ther can­di­date claim­ing vic­tory, though it looks like Bush has won. In the end, I only care a lit­tle bit because I see it as a one party elec­tion where we are vot­ing between Rich Capitalist A and Rich Capitalist B. I am just so dis­il­lu­sioned that I don’t really care. Maybe if Bush wins he’ll drive this coun­try into the ground so fast that no one will be able to hide that rich peo­ple own our gov­ern­ment. Ok, I’m done being cyn­i­cal and sar­cas­tic; back to apa­thy. George out.

I con­tinue to notice that every time any indi­vid­ual is accused of ter­ror­ist like actions, they are said to have Al-Qaeda con­nec­tions. This makes me won­der, which of the fol­low­ing con­clu­sions is cor­rect: in order to be a ter­ror­ist one must obtain their Al-Qaeda mem­ber­ship card, we only care about Al-Qaeda ter­ror­ists or we want to blame all ter­ror­ism on Al-Qaeda to give it a face. Al-Qaeda, the real world equiv­a­lent to Command & Conquer: General’s GLA.

While we’re on the topic of Al-Qaeda, I know the guy that runs the al-qaeda.net web domain. He’s a nice guy actu­ally, half Egyptian, but no ter­ror­ist, mainly runs the domain as a lark so that he can send and receive email by it. I’ve been try­ing to con­vince him to turn the domain into a group blog so that we can all have fun with the thing.

I guess the point is that not every­thing Al-Qaeda is evil (at least the larks aren’t) and I don’t buy that every­thing ter­ror­ist is Al-Qaeda.

In case you haven’t heard, ex-president Ronald Reagan died yesterday.

It’s finally hap­pened, I’m start­ing to give a damn about pol­i­tics (guess it had to hap­pen some­time). You might notice that I’ve added a few more blogs to my links on the left (that’s where I turn for my body politic and I will prob­a­bly add more as I start read­ing them). I try to get a decent spat­ter­ing of dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal points of view so as to be able to make my own opinions.

In case any­one cares, here’s my take on var­i­ous polit­i­cal issues right now: We’re wast­ing tons of money on a war that we shouldn’t be fight­ing. We’re bul­ly­ing the rest of the world. We’re ignor­ing most of the prob­lems that exist in our own coun­try. We’re return­ing cap­i­tal­ism to the hell that it was more than a cen­tury ago. Our edu­ca­tion sys­tem is going down the tubes. The aver­age American cares more about pop cul­ture than his or her own well being. (Needless to say, these are all bad things in my opinion).

That should serve as decent ref­er­ence for any­one that wants to know my views. Oh, and I don’t like to asso­ciate myself with any party because I believe that giv­ing a name to my belief sys­tem gives the name power at the expense of my actual beliefs (why can’t democ­rats and repub­li­cans do what they believe in and not sim­ply fol­low the party line?).

This recently came in through AIM channels:

May 19^th is national gas boy­cott day. With gas prices on the rise, some­thing must be done to send a mes­sage to the gas com­pa­nies. If no one in America buys gas on the 19^th the gas com­pa­nies will lose an esti­mated $45 MILLION dol­lars! If you’re not happy with pay­ing over $2.00/gallon please do not buy gas on May 19^th. Please re-post this so that it will be able to reach as many peo­ple across the coun­try as possible.

I guess that means don’t buy gas tomor­row. A lit­tle late in toss­ing the post out what with the boy­cott tomor­row. Mind you, I haven’t ver­i­fied the sta­tis­tics so don’t yell at me if they’re wrong and if it mat­ters to you, check them your­self. I don’t really know if it’ll do any­thing but we can all go one day with­out pur­chas­ing gas, so why not?