Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2004 > Early November 2004 Edition
Halloween, which was celebrated locally on Saturday, was a big draw this year because the weather was very pleasant.
Some nun drove a score of kiddies to Fairmount to join the locals in trick-or-treating. Madre had to cut back on how much candy to give out to ensure each kid got some.
My brother was here, having visited his step-daughter Staci for Parents Day at Ball State, and in the spirit of the holiday scared the little ones with some well-timed bellowing.
My sister Vickie forsook the goth look (which scared off the parents) in favor of a Sally Mae costume from the ancient comic strip Li'l Abner. I visited her to give her a copy of her files, which I backed up onto my hard drive before she switched to her new computer.
Mink's Lame Home Page, akibare.org, is blogified on livejournal.com. I discovered last night that Mink decided to drink the Blog-Aid last month. This is the first major upgrade in a couple of years.
Most of the new blog deals with her UIUC job, where evidently the higher-ups are showing remarkable social and fiscal incompetence in dealing with the university's supposedly ignorant mass.
Seeing this new blog has convinced me to set up a blog of my own -- something that my boss hinted at when I rejoined the Bracken this summer, and my sister for the past year or so.
Kerry might as well win.
We really can't take another four years of that lying ignorant cowardly apeling and his greedy minions.
Social and cultural issues are irrelevant. Nowadays these are handled by regnant elites over whom a President has no power to effect. It's time the American people learn to fix these at home, to not expect the State to fix them, and to ignore those elites. It will be hard because it mostly involves hard things:
We must be very vigilant if Kerry wins. Kerry is a brown-nose lackey of the entertainment industry, which in turn makes him an enemy to computer technology and the Internet.
I wrote some time ago that we were digging out Osama bin-Laden like a potato in Afghanistan. I didn't know then what a slippery fellow he was. Now we find that he is alive and well and dwelling on the obvious: Bush is in Iraq for the oil and the rest of us are getting hosed.
Bin Laden also said that his real target was the American economy. I can't imagine where he got the idea that Americans are nothing but bellies in front of a boob tube. Maybe he watches too many episodes of The Simpsons.
But trying to destroy the American economy is counterproductive. It may have been okay for Muslims to mire down the Soviet Union in Afghanistan until its economy collapsed because the USSR contributed little to the Muslim world's pocketbook.
But if America's economy collapses, a major consumer of Muslim oil is gone; the European Union, Japan and China can't pick up the slack: America is a major importer of their goods, and a collapse will trash their economies.
Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the Great Depression will know that a poor America is hostile and xenophobic. No Muslim will be able to travel beyond the largest cities or university campuses for fear of mob reprisals. Faced with such a confinement, many will probably emigrate back to the Muslim world.
As I said, a bankrupt America is one that will no longer buy Muslim oil. Since that is the Muslim world's only viable export, that means large areas of the house of Islam will become miserably poor. Muslim governments will become more brutal when the evitable food riots break out, for there will be no American foreign aid either in money or in grain.
It gets worse. Al-Qaeda is a Sunni movement. Sunni governments in the grip of al-Qaeda will find themselves in the shadow of an Iran armed with atomic weapons and without an America as a counterweight.
Finally, for the past couple of decades America has been a "weak reed" to Israel, as ancient Egypt was to Babylonian-era Judea. An American collapse will make this clear to Israel. This, in turn, will compel Israel to compensate by kicking its conventional and nuclear arms programs up a few notches. In the end it will be likely that a future Arab-Israeli conflict will go nuclear. If that happens, Palestine will become a radioactive wasteland; Al-Quds/Jerusalem will be uninhabitable for centuries; and the Palestinian Arabs will be dispossessed forever.
The America people has chosen another four years of incompetence and folly as George Bush the Younger barely won Ohio to win re-election to the presidency. Kerry won New England, the mid-Atlantic states, the northern Great Lakes states and Chicago (I assume the rest of Illinois voted for Bush), the West Coast and Hawaii. "Flyover Country" has shown both the West Coast and urban East just who is the boss in this country, and thereby shows just how irreparably divided we are.
I came in late (10:30am) to work after visiting the doctor's in Alexandria. I'm told I'm doing okay. I will have to remember to mail in my cholesterol test from a couple of weeks ago and fill my new prescription before the old one runs out next week.