Let's Talk About...

Rice: US Will Join Iraq Talks Involving Iran And Syria... US-North Korea Talks Set for March... Iran hopes to resume nuclear talks ...

Talk, talk, talk. Everybody seems to think that talking is the way to prevent international crises involving nuclear weapons in the hands of bad guys. Or, at least, everybody hopes it will. Because if it doesn't, somebody's gonna have to start fighting, and the U.N. won't start it and the Americans are getting tired of fighting, period.

This is nothing new. In April 2006, my last post before my unexplained hiatus was about this same issue... I re-read it and everything I said was still true: Everybody wants Iran to stop; Iran doesn't want to stop; Nobody's willing to make Iran stop. It doesn't take a master of Aristotleian logic to figure out what's bound to happen in a few years.

The Economist thinks that "economic sanctions" (whatever that really means) will begin to take its toll on Iran's, er, economy. It also notes rising dissent and criticism for their leader's positions and statements, something unheard of a couple decades ago. There still seems to be optimism that we can convince Iran to stop researching nukes without military action.

Maybe so. Or maybe by the time they get nukes they'll be smart enough not to use them on anybody. But the only thing that's changed amidst the haze of diplomacy and rhetoric these last ten months is that Iran is 10 months closer to a nuke than it was before. And as long as Iran holds the trump card of the price of oil, that's the only thing that will continue to change.

Maybe I'm being pessimistic. Or maybe I'm just not in denial about diplomacy as a panacea. Sooner or a later things are bound to get messy...

Edmond the Hun

Pirates hijack food aid ship off Somalia

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-02-25-shiphijacked_x.htm

I just thought that was a cool headline. And they even waited until after the aid was dropped off.

Everybody wants to be president... (616 days to go)

Well, we only have 616 days left until it's time to vote for another president, so I better update you on the latest. Tom Vilsack (Tom who?) has dropped out of the race, bringing the Democrats down to seven wanna-bes. The Republican number is steady at five.

Since this is my first post about the Presidential race, I'll lay out all of my notes thus far:

1) Hillary and Obama haven't been getting along in their recent campaigning. This might damper hopes of a Clinton-Obama ticket.

2) I don't think Hillary will get the Democratic nomination. She leads in some polls but a lot of people hate her. Enough Democrats are aware of this that they will be reluctant to give her the nomination because it might cause potential voters to swing Republican simply to avoid making Hillary the First Man.

3) A lot of people hate her. I already said this, but it deserves its own point for this reason: Some radical conservatives hate her so much that they would rather see her dead than become president. I suppose this scenario is more like a Tom Clancy novel than real life, but I cannot say that I would be surprised if someone attempted to assassinate her while she was campaigning, especially if she actually gets the Democratic nomination. I'm just being real about the level of hatred and disgust some people have for this woman.

4) So far Republican candidate Sam Brownback is my favorite based on his beliefs and positions. However, I would like to learn more about his experience, knowledge, and abilities before I would commit to supporting him. Because there lies the moral dilemma: do you vote for the one who believes all the right things about abortion and gay marriage (things which the President alone has little control over), or the one who would be the best at leading the country and interacting with other countries and all of that political stuff?

Well, that's all I got for now. We got plenty of time to decide...

Edmond the Hun

Run For Your Lives...

So apparently on April 13, 2036, an asteroid will a few thousand miles by Earth. There is a 1 in 45,000 chance that Earth's gravity will suck it in and spell doom for lots and lots of people. Cool, huh?

The scientists that figured this out think the U.N. should do something about it. Blowing it up might cause lots of little asteroid fragments to hit us, so that option's out. A boring but safer idea (anyone ever read Asimov's Nemesis?) is to get a spaceship or something with some mass and use Newton's gravity formula to nudge it off course just a bit.

Three things here. One, I'm not too worried about dying from an asteroid hit with those odds (which are much worse than my odds of fatally slipping in the bathtub or dying in a car accident, and much better than my odds of dating a supermodel, according to http://www.funny2.com/odds.htm). Besides, a big explosion might be pretty cool.

Two, regarding the state of the Earth in thirty years, I'd be more concerned about all this global warming stuff than a 1/45,000 asteroid. Whether or not you believe humans are the cause of it or not, there are some pretty interesting graphs and figures out there. And how much less oil will we have by then?

Third, they're expecting the U.N. to get something done?

painting your trash gold while you sleep

Fall Out Boy's first single from their new album, "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race," has been the most (legally) downloaded song for the past four weeks. I still haven't heard it, but I did look up the lyrics just to see if it contained sexual innuendo like their previous hits.

Well, I didn't find any, but what I did find made me laugh at its blunt irony. Let's take a look at some of these lyrics:

I am an arms dealer
Fitting you with weapons in the form of words
And I don't really care, which side wins
As long as the room keeps singing
That's just the business I'm in
This ain't a scene, it’s a god damn arms race

This is what I get out of that: The guy's saying, We're feeding words to our fans, and we don't really care about the meaning of the actual words as long as everyone keeps listening to our music.

I'm a leading man
And the lies I weave are oh so intricate, oh so intricate

I love this line! Fall Out Boy is one of the most popular bands right now, and the guy here is freely admitting that they are feeding their listeners lies about life, love, and relationships. But the lies are so intricate and subtle that most people don't even notice.

...At night we're painting your trash gold while you sleep

That's my favorite line of the whole song, because in one line it describes what most of pop culture does to its listeners... it takes our trash ~ our selfishness, our pride, our lust ~ and paints it to look like gold, to make us think that we want it, that it's cool to pursue and fulfill our desires and pleasures regardless of the consequences, all while we're sleeping and don't even notice.

How many hundreds of thousands of people have this song and don't even realize what it's admitting ~ and therefore confirming the very things it's admitting: We're corrupting you, but you don't care, and we don't care, just keep giving us your money.

I'm tired of them painting our trash gold while we sleep. But I'm awake now. Are you?

The Return of the Hun

It's been a long time, but I'm back. I will be focusing, as before, on news and politics and what it has to do with our daily lives, but also on pop culture and its influence on youth.

I'm sick of watching Christians argue about the proper things to do instead of going out and telling the lost about Jesus.

I'm sick of watching pop culture corrupt youth with its twisted ideas about love, relationships, and God.

I'm sick of reading things like 18,000 children dying every day of hunger, knowing that even if somehow I could give one of them my lunch, they might still die the next day, and knowing that even if I could somehow feed one of them for a lifetime, they would still die and maybe miss heaven, and there would still be millions of others who suffered hungry deaths, wondering, with all the corruption in the church, and the corruption in the world's political systems, and the corruptions in modern culture, if it's even possible to make a difference anymore, but knowing that these passions burn inside me and that I cannot give up or despair.

So I will work. I will learn about the world and what's going on inside it. I will observe modern culture and how it affects us. I will figure out how to use the incredible new technologies of networking and information flow, such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and others, to spread the love and hope found in Jesus Christ. I will find others who share these passions and work together to be part of a revolution. And most of all, I will cry out to God to save my generation.

Maybe I'm a little fanatical. Maybe these ambitions won't last. Maybe I can't do anything to make a difference in the world and all I'll ever do is work a job accomplishing some tasks along with everyone else.

But there's a dying world out there, and I'm sick of my own inability even to reach the ones I see every day. Besides, what have I got to lose?