Merit-bound Alley

Today at work, the conversation of bored geeks turned to a time-honored classic: What superpower would you want to have?

I will not bore you with the choices we made, but I want to mention a beautifully philosophical consideration that one of my coworkers raised.

“Hm… do I want to be a pervert, or do I want to travel?”

Think about it.

Provincial Russians gave me my first chuckle of the day when I read that residents of Bogolyubovo refuse to use new passports because the barcodes may contain satanic symbols. Bogolyubovoians have also stopped collecting pensions because the checks may also contain the mark of the beast.

It’s comforting that the superstitious villagers won’t be able to spread their insanity since they will apparently be too poor to travel, and won’t have valid passports anyways.

Elizabeth Crossan passed away on Wednesday, March 21st after a long battle with cancer. She is survived by her husband, David Adair Crossan, and her children, David Jr. and Sammy. My thoughts and sympathy go with with the Crossan family in this terrible and difficult time.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QckSTgvONc]

The musician is Trace Bundy. I can’t even quantify how much I enjoy a musician who is able to make an instrument his own, rather than merely playing it.

“We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they’re never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. …In the face of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. Here’s another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time, the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, the present century. The present moves from the past to the future like a tiny spotlight inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere on the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.”

We are lucky to be alive and therefore we should value life. Life is precious. We’re never going to get another one. This is it. Don’t waste it. Open your eyes. Open your ears. Treasure the experiences that you have and don’t waste your time fussing about a non-existent future life after you’re dead. Try to do as much good as you can now to others. Try to live life as richly as possible during the time that you have left available to you.”

-Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

I just hope I will have lived up to it.

There is no doubt that Walter Cronkite provided some of the best coverage of the failed war in Vietnam, but now read his thoughts on another failed war. Using his incisive style of investigative journalism (so different from the obnoxious investigations we see on the local Fox news), Mr. Cronkite brings a few stories of people that the War on Drugs has unfairly affected. Let’s take a look:

Nicole Richardson was 18-years-old when her boyfriend, Jeff, sold nine grams of LSD to undercover federal agents. She had nothing to do with the sale. There was no reason to believe she was involved in drug dealing in any way.

But then an agent posing as another dealer called and asked to speak with Jeff. Nicole replied that he wasn’t home, but gave the man a number where she thought Jeff could be reached.

Nicole was sent to 10 years without possibility of parole in Federal prison for conspiracy to deal drugs. It is reprehensible that while her boyfriend was able to negotiate a shorter incarceration in trade for information, Nicole was not able to, as she actually knew nothing about the drug trade.

Mr. Cronkite pretty much sums up how I’ve felt about the War on Drugs ever since I’ve actually considered it, but is able to voice it better than I could ever hope to. Give a read, it’s good stuff.