Merit-bound Alley

There has been some bitching on FSP about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s invitation to speak at Columbia University. Considering that the president of the University, Lee Bollinger,  verbally bitch-slapped President Ahmadinejad into the previous century (5th century, but Iranian standards), I wonder how much the FSPers will be crying now.

University President Lee Bollinger said:

 ”Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” Bollinger said to applause from many of the 600 people in the room for a speech from the Iranian leader.

He cited the Iranian government’s “brutal crackdown” on dissidents, public executions, executions of minors and other actions.

And Bollinger assailed Ahmadinejad’s “denying” of the Holocaust as “ridiculous” and “dangerous propaganda.” He called the Iranian leader either brazenly provocative “or astonishingly uneducated.”

“The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history,” he said.

He said he doubted Ahmadinejad would show the intellectual courage to answer the questions before him.

The better part of me thinks it’s good that the students at Columbia will get to hear this man speak. The meaner side thinks it’s uproariously funny that the university President had the nuts to swing first! I hereby invite President Ahmadinejad to Delaware where I will remove from his spine the +5 Dagger of Hilarious Backstabbing.

Kudos to Columbia University for the funniest turn in recent history!

PS I have more commentary on this as soon as I stop laughing…

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Well, it looks like I broke 10,000 hits this weekend! Thanks for reading, folks, I literally couldn’t have done this without you!

The American Friends Service Committee has analyzed and released a cost breakdown of how much the war in Iraq is costing the american taxpayer. This information, taken from the work of Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist and Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary of commerce under Clinton, shows that the war is costing us $720 million a day, or $8333 per second.

According to their subject blog, How Would You Spend It?, “For that price, the United States could have provided: 34,904 Four-Year Scholarships for University Students; 1,153,846 Children with Free School Lunches; 6,482 Families with Homes and 163,525 People with Healthcare. HOW WOULD YOU SPEND IT?”

Personally, I would buy all the Transformers ever made, new in their perfect, unopened boxes, then put a video up on Youtube of me openeing and playing with every single one of them. I would then post links to this video on all the collector websites and listen to the sweet cacophanous melody of nerdy screams and embolisms. But I’m kind of an asshole that way.

That being said, I would like to point out a quote in TFA:

“Either you think the war in Iraq supports America’s national security, or not,” said Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “If you think national security won’t be harmed by withdrawing from Iraq, of course you would want to see that money spent elsewhere. I myself think that belief, on a certain level, is absurd, so the question of focusing on how much money we are spending there is irrelevant.”

Well, that’s just blind, isn’t it? Anyone who has played a game of Civilization knows that resource management can make or break a country. Hoping that our country remains secure will not create the money needed to run an increasingly unpopular war. Please also ignore the fact that there is no indisputable evidence that we are safer for continuing it. Add that to this new breakdown which tells us that we could hous 6500 families a day, feed 1,150,000 children a day or put 35,000 people through 4 years of college a day.

Listen folks, I’m all for preventing another 9/11, but you have to be aware of the cost not only in dollars, but in lives. Imagine the good that could have been done with this money. It’s a shame that Bush’s God didn’t tell him to feed the hungry, rather than go to war; I wonder how much this administration would be spending if he had.

Now, I don’t normally announce these, since most of my adds are part of our incestuous little group of Delaware miscreants. However, the Friendly Atheist written by Hemant Mehta is one of the best atheist blogs out there.

You may have heard of Hemant as the guy who sold his soul on Ebay, and subsequently wrote a book about the experience. I Sold My Soul on Ebay details Hemants trips to several churches, from small to mega, and gives a constructive critique to Christians on how to better relate to their secular brothers and sisters. Read this book. Hemant is probably the most open-minded atheist I’ve ever come across and his willingness to show kindness to religious folk while still challenging their beliefs give the rest of us heathens a solid example of tolerance and compassion to learn from.

Check out the Friendly Atheist if you like well-written, humorous, and intelligent blogs. If you don’t, stick around here. Chances are I’ll have something innocuous or vitriolic posted about pirates or makeup-wearing politicians before too long.

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Me heart is with any buccanneer the holds this day in ‘is or ‘er heart! Be generous with yer AAAARRS! and AVASTs or it’s straight to Davey Jone’s Locker wit’ ye!

YAR!

I’ve come to the realization that the anti-hero is completely a fabrication. There is no person that will save us even though s/he seemed evil at first. Think about it: do you see Bush as turning face and proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was vying for the people of the USA all along? Do you see the unfathomable weakness of the Dems in office as having played cards that will finally make this a country that we can be proud of again?

Face it, Americans. Bush is just a dumbass that may have once thought that he was a saviour. The Dems are exactly the limp dishrags they have proven themselves to be. We are not going to find surprise salvation from the person who claimed to be the hero all along. That’s movie shit. You’ll see that in a video game.

The simple fact is, you can judge people by their actions. Bush seems like a complete dumbass, and chances are that he is. Cheney seems like that evil overlord of the administration, and chances are that he is. Condi, Rodriguez, Snow: if they seem like the administration mouthpieces (and nothing more) then chances are, that’s exactly what they are.

The writing is on the wall, folks. None of these are the ill-favored ranger who turns out to be the noble King. In fantasy world, Bush would have had a clever plan all along, Condi Rice would have been facilitating it, and Tony Snow would have been the narrator of the biggest fantasy in history: that we had a government that we could trust, rely on, and have faith in.

Unfortunately, we are not living a wonderful fantasy novel where everything will come together by book three. Bush is as stupid as he seems, the Democratic majority is just as impotent as it seems, and the candidates for2008 are just as shifty and untrustworthy as they seem. America no longer has a hero, and I doubt that we even have the capacity to create one. Every year, we will choose the lesser of a group of evils, and the people that are caught up in the fiction of the anti-hero will be the ones that think they have made a difference.

And the real heroes, the ones who struggle to gain a position where they can enact some change, will continue to be ignored by the Americans who buy into the fantasy of the anti-hero.

UPDATE: This wasn’t supposed to be as despairing as it sounded. The message that I wanted to get through is that we still have the choice of our representation. If someone seems like a power-hungry bitch, DON’T vote for her (no subtlety there).

Be jaded. Be a cynic. Be skeptical. Be an American. Goodness knows, that’s what we need in this day and age.

The yearly event at the Saengerbund is always a great time. I plan on being there tomorrow probably in the afternoon, and would love to meet up with anyone else who is going. Post here or send me an email at jmadjeski_at_gmail_dot_com.

PS: This is even more special to me as it is the day before my birthday

Bush announces that 5700 troops will be coming home before Christmas!

Better news: Not in wood boxes.

So, the baby is playing with my wife’s necklace, and I snap the nice picture below. However, I am a sick fuck, and decided to put my meager photoshop skills to use.

Original:

Click through to see my sickness.

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I was at work when the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 happened and reading the internet news site,  Fark. When the headline came up that a plane had crashed into one of the world trade centers came up, I figured it was a small aircraft had clipped the building. I clicked ont he link to find that cnn.com was inaccessible, as were several other news sites.

I plainly remember the sinking feeling I had in my stomach as I went to see the television on one of the trading floors which was always tuned to CNN, and stared slackjawed at the huge smoking hole in the first tower. I stood like that, shaking a little as the second plane hit. In a cloud of fear and confusion, I headed back to my office to read the commentary on Fark, where people were already frantically discussing what was going on. People in NY were posting what they were seeing right out their windows, and those that were able to get it posted up-to-date news from sites they were able to access.

I remember the specualtion of a car bomb in DC, I remember people worried about friends and family in New York, and I remember reading when the first tower collapsed and my run to the television to see the second tower fall five minutes or four hours later; time was a haze by that point. Back on Fark, someone who didn’t make it into work at the WTC posted his grief that his friends and co-workers in his office at the top of Tower 2 were probably dead.

I remember reading when the third plane hit the Pentagon and the fourth crashed in PA. To this day, I still can’t remember the timeline of when everything happened; all I remember is the fear and confusion. Five separate commentary threads had to be created that day so that the users were able to communicate without bringing the site down, hundreds of posts on each from the simple “Oh my god, I’m going to be sick” to the enraged screams against Bin Laden (already a suspect that morning).

Even though I remember that day, I read through these threads today to try to remember how it felt. I’m sorry to say that it worked.