Monday, July 14, 2003

Bright, but Different. Time to pile on the meme bandwagon for "bright".  The Times op-ed piece says something along the lines of not believing in elves, easter bunnies, and god.  While I personally do subscribe to a naturalist viewpoint, I don't think it's a conflict to believe in god.  There are two separate questions, for me: Is there a god, and are there supernatural events?  I think you can very readily believe in a god, and at the same time believe that for all practical purposes there are no supernatural events. The basic reason that I believe in god is this: Just look at the Universe!  We have one tiny primal atom erupting in a big bang, and this is what results from it? The incredible complexity and diversity that we see all around us?  I don't think there's much more proof necessary than that!  It's Occam's razor at its finest.  God really is the simplest solution to the problem of why the universe exists. But then let's move on.  Are there supernatural events?  No.  God set things up this way for a reason.  The magic's done.  The clockwork is running.  We are within the system.  As we work within the system, we are continually running into things that seem like magic, but then turn out not to be, as we gain further understanding.  The real question is, just how deep does this thing go?  How much more is there for us to learn?  And the big one: Is there a limit to what we can know?  Seems right now like God built this thing (the universe) to be deep and interesting.  I have a problem with people who ascribe human characteristics to god, and then want to run my life or other people's lives on that basis.  That's Easter Bunny stuff.  God isn't about a cracker and wine, facing Mecca fives times a day, or televised preachery.  God is about scale, universes, and wonder. 11:51:24 AM    comment []

It's not really working out, is it? What a shoebox of puppy crap.  My semi-literate response: How exactly does the absolute squandering of American credibility for the purposes of reaping the emaciated, dusty, low-hanging fruit of Iraq in any way help overall American strategic interests?  "Remake the Middle East"?  Will we be doing that by stick or carrot?  It doesn't seem that the carrot is a particularly viable strategy, given that Bush seems to be utterly unable to understand why much of the world considers him the greatest current threat to peace.  If we're doing it by stick, you can count on this administration to play bull-in-china-shop, then move on to the next target.  I find it amusing that so many GOP standards-bearers are resorting to the parsing of wordplay to justify statements made prior to the war.  11:36:41 AM    comment []

Bullet Points. Let's just summarize why we ended up in Iraq: Saddam Hussein was directly connected to and supporting Al Qaeda Hussein/Iraq was an imminent threat to the US and the region The Iraqis would love us Weapons of mass destruction We can do this for $60 Billion Did I miss anything?  I think those are the primary ones.  Seems like El Busho is zero for four on the publicly stated reasons for going in.  Back then, I and many others felt that the publicly available evidence absolutely did not support going into Iraq, in a pre-emptive manner, at that time.  We therefore assumed, in good faith, that the Bush Administration had evidence that they could not reveal, primarily concerning WMD.  When Bush asked for the trust of the American people, he was given it.  After disrupting and disbanding the Iraqi regime, we assumed that WMD would be found. They haven't.  If they are found at this point, they will be in very small quantities.  Now we're spending $4 Billion a month to keep 150,000 troops in Iraq, indefinitely.  Plenty of conservatives are blaming Clinton for downsizing the military, which makes this operational tempo difficult to sustain.  There are statistics that would show how much the military downsizing contributed to this, and I don't know where to find them.  I'll try. The thing is, it's always easier to defend than it is to attack.  You can do it with less manpower.  If your military is oriented around defending the homeland, the op tempo is easy to maintain.  If you want to get into nation-building, your expenditures are going to be much higher. Wasn't Bush against nation-building?  Did 9/11 really change everything?  I really, truly think that it did not.  The actions of the Bush adminstration were effectively predetermined before he took office.  What they're doing, they planned to do all along. 9/11 was an excuse to accelerate the war effort against Iraq, which was always in the plan.  Afghanistan wasn't -- that was an aberration.  Of course, the US government has utterly failed to follow through there, and has left the country in a state of decay and destruction. Bush reminds me of a kid who is trying to repair a clock.  He's pretty much got the thing pulled apart, but didn't keep track of where the parts came from.  And it just won't go back together.  11:24:03 AM    comment []