gottahavacuppamocha

Today’s my birthday. I turn (breaks out the calculator)… 39 years old! At work they used to get a cake or something, but I think I’ve been able to break them of that since I don’t let them know, and the person who kept track of that doesn’t work there anymore. I figure it’s worth a note here, but I don’t make too much of it. Borders sent me an email for a free pastry, so I’ll probably take them up on that today.

I quit smoking (again) for the New Year, but it’s screwed up my sleeping schedule a bit. Although since my sleeping schedule has been pretty odd for the past year, it’s hard to tell. At any rate, I’m up late and surfing the web.

Over at the English language section of Asahi Shimbun, I saw an article on football. The headline was sort of confusing, but mentioned the Rice Bowl in a sports context, so I thought I would take a look. Imagine my surprise when I read the article and found out that not only do they have football in Japan, the Rice Bowl has been played annually since 1947, and since 1984 it has pitted the top college team against the top “X.League company team”, which I’m assuming is a pro-football team.

Imagine doing that here in the U.S. Granted, I’m not a big sports fan, so I probably wouldn’t care one way or another. But imagine the winner of the Super Bowl taking on the ranked college team (BCS is a joke anyway, since it’s not a true playoff IIRC). I would think the college team would lose, but there are some good football teams out there, so who knows.

It finally happened and Saddam Hussein has been executed. Stangely, I find myself having some conflicting feelings about this.

Saddam was not a nice man. Not by a long shot. He was a tin-pot dictator who ruled his country with a ruthlessness of Stalin. It wouldn’t take much to convince me he was guilty of the acts on which he stood accused.

In general, I support the death penalty in extreme cases, such as serial killers and mass-murderers, and Saddam was almost certainly guilty of the latter.

Where the conflicted feelings come from is that the trial lacked legitimacy. As soon as we were told he was captured, the outcome was inevitable. His execution was inevitable. It wasn’t inevitable because he was guilty, though he was probably that. It was inevitable because the trial could have no other outcome. The court and the trial existed for the sole purpose of finding Saddam (and co-conspirators) guilty. It was a kangaroo court. A show trial. It was meant to show that “justice” was served. It was meant to show that Saddam got his say before he was killed, and the people could feel good about killing him, because he had his chance in court and if he was found guilty, well too bad for him. That’s the breaks. However, in the end all it was was a show. It was a ceremony. I wouldn’t call it a trial. The trial started before Iraq even had a stable government. Hell, it barely has a stable government now.

The trial was run by the Iraqis and supported by the Coalition governments. However, since his trial started before they had a stable government, I wondered how they can charge him. They didn’t have laws. Without a government, there is no constitution and no laws. Without any laws to be broken, what’s the point of charging him.

Previously, Saddam was The Law. If he wanted someone arrested, they were. If wanted someone dead, they were. They might have been given a show trial, but with an outcome as inevitable as Saddam’s. All the Iraqis did was use Saddam’s own tricks against him. They dragged the trial out for years to give it an air of legitimacy, though the veridct was a forgone conclusion.

I think the trial was pointless for two reasons. Since the conclusion was inevtable, they could have saved the cost of the trial and executed him right away. Why bother with a trial at all? If they wanted Saddam to have a legitimate trial, they should have shipped him to The Hague before the International Criminal Court. I suspect the reason for that is because the US wouldn’t allow it, because the ICC doesn’t have the death penalty.

Anyway, he’s dead. I won’t mourn his passing. May God have mercy on his soul. May God have mercy on George Bush. May God have mercy on us all.

Richard Stallman, better known as RMS, is scheduled to speak at 3:30pm November 1st (tomorrow) in the Wynne Courtroom at the IU School of Law at IUPUI. I just recieved this email from the USSG listserv. I’m tempted to go, but I’m not sure. His presentation is titled “Copyright v. Community in the Age of Network”

As we head into the last week and a half before the mid-term elections, I thought a few quotes might be in order. Some of them seem oddly prophetic.
Thomas Jefferson

• Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.
• Whensoever hostile aggressions…require a resort to war, we must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.
• I am for freedom of religion, & against all maneuvres to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.
• I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
• I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance, or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.
• Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
• A little revolution now and then is a good thing; the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
• The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
• On matters of style, swim with the current. On matters of principle, stand like a rock.

Thomas Paine

• These are the times that try men’s souls.
• Tyranny, like hell, is not easliy conquered.
• Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
• The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.
• The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected.
• It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.

George Washington

• The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.
• Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all.
• Few men have virtue enough to withstand the highest bidder.
• In a free and republican government, you cannot restrain the voice of the multitude.
• Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.
• My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.
• Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it.

John Adams

• The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
• Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
• Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.
• The fundamental article of my political creed is that depotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an ogliarchical junto, and a single emperor.
• In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.
• Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.
• The essence of a free government consists in an effectual control of rivalries.
• This nation of ours was not founded on Christian principles.

Benjamin Franklin

• Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
• There never was a good war or a bad peace.
• I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.

Abraham Lincoln

• The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.
• We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read.
• Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
• Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
• This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
• The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
• With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
• America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

On the lighter side, we have:

Will Rogers

• Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with.
• I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
• The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that’s out always looks the best.
• The American people are a very generous people and will forgive almost any weakness, with the possible exception of stupidity.
• An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.
• Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.
• Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate; now what’s going to happen to us with both a Senate and a House?
• I don’t care how little your country is, you got a right to run it like you want to. When the big nations quit meddling then the world will have peace.

Mark Twain

• Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
• My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its officeholders.
• Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.
• It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.
• It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
• Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out…and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel…and in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for “the universal brotherhood of man” — with his mouth.
• Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
• The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry out is not a patriot but a traitor.
• Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.
• Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

In case I don’t blog again before November 7th, be sure to get out and vote. Show Congress who’s the boss.

Just saw this article over at Topix. The author articulates to a certain extent, what I’ve felt for years – that the Democrats and Republicans mainly care about getting more of their people into office, and less about the business of running government well. It’s a game and the party with the most seats wins.

For me, there are two big reasons to vote independent. First off, traditional two party politics leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Choosing the lesser of two evils means either way, the voter has a poor selection to choose from.

Second, with independent candidates, even if I disagree with what they say and what they stand for, I can at least be certain they aren’t telling me something just to get my vote. They’re telling me their position because they believe.

Actually, I think they say “And the Oscar goes to…”

The 78th Annual Academy Awards (a/k/a The Osars) was held last night, and from what I understand, it got mixed reviews from others. Overall I thought it was pretty good, though it did seem to lack a lot of drama. of course, since I didn’t see any of the movies up for the big awards, that might have something to do with it.

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