gwax's rumblings

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?

Christening a new sec­tion of my www server, where I will keep infor­ma­tion that I deem to be impor­tant to make pub­lic, I have put up a copy of the Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the treat­ment by the Coalition forces of pris­on­ers of war and other pro­tected per­sons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq dur­ing arrest, intern­ment and inter­ro­ga­tion. The thing has a long title, but I wanted to put it all in there so that there was no bull­shit­ting around. Suffice it to say, this isn’t pretty. I’m sure that most of you out there know that the Geneva Conventions say no tor­tur­ing but that’s pretty much what we’re sys­tem­at­i­cally doing to peo­ple we deem valu­able in Iraq. If we’re going to set our­selves up as the police of the world shouldn’t we at least obey the world laws? Isn’t this the kind of thing that we went into Iraq to stop?

UPDATE 2005-09-23: I have removed the report from my infor­ma­tion folder because I real­ized that I don’t actu­ally care about the report. I care about the inci­dents described, but not the report itself.

As of late, I have taken to lis­ten­ing to Rant Radio’s talk radio shout­cast stream. Their modus operandi appears to be free­dom of infor­ma­tion, which is an issue close to my heart. This is just a plug, but I encour­age you to take a look (or lis­ten rather).

If you don’t want to bother with their web­site, you can just tune in [64k|24k].