One of the basic realities of American life is that all of us have to deal with beliefs we disagree with.
   -Eliza Byard

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President Bush has proclaimed that he would like to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, but he claims he is waiting upon a ruling by the Supreme Court on how to treat the prisoners held within.

This is rank ingenuousness of the worst kind.

He did not wait for a ruling by the judicial system before creating this prison that was explicitly placed in Guantanamo Bay in order to be outside the jurisdiction of the United States judicial system, so the butt-blanket he is trying to knit now using the excuse of the lack of a Supreme Court ruling is beyond idiotic.

Are his supporters and the base of the right wing really so stupid as to buy this along with the sudden pressure in both houses of Congress to pass anti-gay marriage and anti-flag burning amendments as true commitments to their fundamental beliefs?

Anyone willing to do the math in a non-idological fashion has concluded that the United States lost the “moral high ground” when Guantanamo was decided upon as an extra-legal location to hold prisoners.

“Moral equivalence” has no place in a world of propoganda and Orwellian-speak.

We have descended into a Hell of our own making, through our own ill-considered actions.

No matter that we are all “on the same side”… that “side” has perpetrated acts that we proclaim are morally repugnant when performed by those we call our enemies. Are they not repugnant when we ourselves act in that fashion?

Choose…. hypocrisy or moral equivalence, for there is no other option in the deadly zero-sum game that our so-called “leadership” has created for us with our consent, a consent given voice through our votes for President and our Senators and Congressional Representatives in 2004.

Every nation has fallen from its peak, from thousands of years BC to the twentieth century, the fall of empires can be traced easily to over-reach and hubris.

Sadly for the nation I love, I foresee that within twenty years our dominance will be lost, although we will not recognize it for likely forty years from now, and it all could have been prevented, but for the short-sightedness of those who choose ideology over reality.

Technorati Tags: commentary

I’m not sure how to write this post.

You see, I have many sources of frustration, ranging from computer issues (I absolutely HATE Windows, but Mac OS X as it behaves on my 2 year old PowerBook isn’t making me a fan of it, either… to make a too long a story short, every computer system I have is misbehaving in some fashion, whether by being far slower than it should be given the memory and processing power available, or requiring a reinstall for causes I deem far from sufficient for a modern OS) to issues too personal to write about here, not mentioning my irritation with those who seem to think they are far more qualified to interpret scientific data than those who actually have both graduate degrees and experience in the areas that they themselves lack.

Just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean it has equal weight with those who actually know something about the subject, or even more weight than those who know how to extract real trends from chaotic data because it is what they are paid for (in other words, not to be too arrogant about it, people such as me, who are highly paid to extract the reality from the muddle of conflicting results, compensated because the success of the company depends upon the correct interpretation of hazy fogs of probability).

Yet, there are those who proclaim “global warming is nothing but a liberal dream” or “racism doesn’t exist in the United States” or “raising the minimum wage will not reduce the number of unskilled jobs available” in pure defiance of the available data because their ideology over-rules any rational interpretation of the data.

With ideology rather than reason determining the predominant view, how can we ever hope to chart the most beneficial path for our nation?

At one time, for an all too brief period between the US Civil War and the 1980s, there was a genuine effort to examine data on a scientific, non-ideological basis, but since the Reagan era, everything, and I mean everything, has become politicized, from the potential benefits of a vaccine that prevents cerivical cancer that according to anti-sex extremists would supposedly promote promiscuity, to the obvious (to anyone who truly examines the data with a non-ideological view) effects of global warming, to the intelligence that warns us of the actions of potentially hostile governments. The effects of viewing intelligence data through a lens designed to see only what the ideology wants to see has gotten us into the situation in Iraq, where through both misguided philosophy coupled with incompetence we have prosecuted a successful military campaign that is without precedent that has mutated into an equally unprecedented, incredibly incompetent and subsequently unsuccessful occupation, a situation that was warned against beforehand with rare prescience, which makes the indictment of incompetence all the more relevant and damning.

In consequence my frustration builds, arising from my own personal issues to those of a more global nature; where entropy is not the root cause any more so than the incompetence that apparently rules over all, seemingly going beyond the demon god Murphy with his law of “whatever can go wrong, will go wrong” to a state of “anything that is wrong will be decided as the course of action.”

So, where do I go from here, without my head exploding from the pressure?

Damned if I know…

Technorati Tags: commentary, opinion, personal