United Nations – Swords into Plowshares

PLEASE DON FIREPROOF GOGGLES NOW 😉

… I’d end all the wars, recall all the military forces, and honorably discharge 50% of them. We don’t need citizen soldiers, we need citizens. The funds recovered from the waste of war would immediately fund the new National Health Service.

… Guantanamo Bay would close and everyone would get a trial by jury in the United States. The Department of Justice would have to step up, and if someone was incarcerated without proof they would be given $250,000 and an airplane ticket to their destination of choice.

… The Department of Homeland Security would be disbanded and the funds wasted on them re-routed to NHS.

… I would champion an amendment to the United States Constitution declaring that all human beings are equal in every way under the law. Therefore gay marriage would be a non-issue and any “Illegal Immigrants” would instantly become citizens. They would be rounded up, provided with proper US Identification, all of them would receive Social Security Numbers and they would become a on-the-books part of our workforce.

… Any company found guilty of damaging the climate, the environment, or any ecosystem would be dismantled and the parts sold to fund recovery programs. No cap-and-trade, no reparation payments, either you submit or you cease business in the United States.

… Massive funding of the Department of Education. Class sizes throughout the United States would be capped at 20 children per class and those schools that retain the best teachers and produce the best students get yearly bonuses to their general ledgers.
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This is going to go over like a fart in church. 🙂

S is for Superman

The world desperately needs Superman. Hell, we’d be happy if Iron Man could pinch hit while Supes was en route to Earth. Alas, none of them are real. The world is so full of problems, it would be so convenient to have a superhero to help sort them out.

But then again, is it a hero we’re looking for or is it a question of what we need versus what we think we want? I think we need some alien threat. Humanity really only gets together and resolves differences when there is a superordinate threat placed upon us. Anything could play this role, alien invasion, killer asteroid, or even Dr. Manhattan. I find the movie rendition of The Watchmen to be just as good a story as the book one was. That our race will only resolve our differences when we’ve got something bigger and grander than ourselves with which to fight. We can’t fight alongside each other because there is no villain to the piece. What we have are fogs. The fog of war, the fog of terrorism, the fog of bigotry. It’s next to impossible to fight a fog. The only way to dispatch these fogs is if we face some dire superordinate threat.

That would be all the superhero we’d need. We’d be our own.

They’ve Chained Nature, but They Will Never Make It Sing

I would have changed the ending to “I Am Number Four”. I would have, during the last struggle scene had the villain explain to the hero “It’s always like your kind, finding others to do your dirty work. You should have asked your parents about who and what we… ” leaving the audience wondering if the villains of the piece were simply slaves looking to avenge their servitude on the children of their owners. The movie could have been an examination of master/slave revolt sci-fi, but instead, it’s just your average breadbasket monsters vs. pretty hero.

Rotunda of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va. (LOC)

I remember the worst teacher I ever had. It was at SUNY Buffalo. He was teaching Childhood Psychology. This professor was a conflagration of worsts. His ego was so puffed up by everyone telling him what a smart academic he was that he couldn’t see beyond the bridge of his glasses. His biggest transgression that set me off was that he refused to supply the class with a syllabus until the day after the Add/Remove Deadline had passed. He considered our presence in his class on the opening day to be a personal insult, that we were “shopping for courses” and that we weren’t serious about our majors. When it became very clear to me that he was not going to follow the rules about a timely release of the class syllabus I marched down to my department and issued a formal complaint and in that same meeting removed myself from this man’s class. I didn’t need his obnoxiousness to graduate. I was told that there was nothing that could be done about him, that he had tenure and that short of him committing a felony could get him dug out of his position.

I appreciated his position and understood the spirit of what he was trying to do, even while I railed against it. This particular point has come up before and I’ve blogged about it at length. That ever since the late 90’s, kids in college have been attending with a different structure of assumptions and a different approach to attending a college. This very old professors primary complaint was a quaint throwback to a culture that has come and gone. Higher education is less about the privilege of going to college and just another self-glorified service provider, with a contract and negotiated terms and conditions.

It was many years ago that I attended this professors class. He was already very old (one foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel) so I can only assume that he is firmly and soundly dead. C’est la vie.

TIME FLIES…………………*

I would rather be super-intelligent than extremely good looking. For me it comes down to a matter of depth. I respect depth and cultivating deep understanding, being regarded as intelligent is far more important a pursuit than simple vanity. In my experience the “Good Looking” people lead very vapid and dull lives. Vanity is fleeting, you’re young only for a short time and then you get old and it’s all ruined.

Perhaps it’s the acceptance of the flow of time. Time can only lead to deeper understandings, only lead to more intelligence while Time follows Vanity down a dark alley and then tears off it’s arms and beats it to death, leaving Vanity dead and stuffed in a rusting dumpster.

Since nobody can escape time, it seems the best bet to select that which will work to your best advantage.