October Greetings

Greetings again, all!
The march of time has not changed though there have been some days recently when I’ve thought I’ve entered a time warp. It feels as though the calendar has flown until this point where I can get another chance to catch my breath. In the interim, I have received several requests for my opinion on topics; some of those topics have now been superseded (I think the phrase is that “the issue has been overcome by events” – but I don’t know). I will attempt to address all, additionally adding some of my own design.

October
First and foremost, though, is to welcome all to the month of October. October: hay rides and apple cider, crisp mornings and Indian summers, golden forests and bonfires. And did I mention: Pumpkin pies, apple cobbler, Supreme Court, and the World Series? OK. I don’t know how the Supreme Court gets to take their summer break from June until October (they started in session today – hence they made the list) but the baseball games are called, after all, the October Classic. The Dodgers get to play again in October (the post-season timeframe) for the first time since 2004 (interesting that it’s the OTHER year in which I was deployed overseas). Hopefully they won’t get out first round, but we’ll see. At this point I could try to brag and say how 60% of California’s teams made the playoffs, but then someone would just point out how New York got 100% of theirs. Anyway, we could very easily end up with just California and New York teams in the end.

Tribunals
I don’t know about the legal aspects – I’m not a lawyer – but what I do know is that we can’t indefinitely hold detainees and still maintain the moral high ground. If we expect to win the war on terror, we have to win the “hearts and minds” of the people who would otherwise support the terrorists. So however we are able to have fair judicial treatment for those we are holding, imprisoning/punishing those who deserve it, freeing those who do not. Congress and the President seem to have reached an agreement. I wait, just as everyone else, to see how this will be received.

The Pope is Jewish
This one I really don’t understand. Iran’s leader has said that the comments that the Pope made that incited lots of {unwarranted ??} violence (reference the Cartoons for more on absurd Muslim violence) were caused by the US-Israeli conspiracy. While I might buy off on the US and the Vatican conspiring… no I don’t even accept that. It makes no sense. The US, let alone Israel, does not control the Papacy.

My Space Rage
Lest anyone think I’m picking a fight with Muslims for over-reacting, let me give another incident of raising ire that raises eyebrows: a 22-year old woman hired an (unbeknownst to her) undercover police officer to kill another woman because she appeared on her boyfriend’s myspace. Pray tell, do I need to remove any photos from my page to save a life?? Come on people!!! It’s nothing real. It’s just a bunch of ones and zeros. It won’t give you life, it won’t give you health, you can’t touch it. There are real things to worry about – not who appears on whose page.

War of Civilizations
I don’t know if there is a peaceful solution to the impending crisis, unlike what Kissinger thinks. Sure, he has much more experience in policy and statecraft, but historically when two civilizations opposed to the values, actions, and beliefs of the other, war is the only inevitability. I’m not saying that we are on the brink of world war, but unless a cultural war can be won, a fighting war will be fought.