score 1 for Mother Nature

Wanna bet no one is going to be buying a car this President's Day anywhere on the east coast? Yay for blizzards!

happy "Stop King George from making his B movie into a reality" Day

The problem with protests is that there's a lot of effort put into them, but often there's no real progress. Standing around with a bunch of other people who agree with you is nice, but doesn't really accomplish that much. Imagine if all those people who are presently decending upon NYC (and 500 other cities around the world...) spent just a few hours actively advocating for peaceful solutions to world problems. What if, instead of standing around in the cold, these people met with their local legislators, mayors, news reporters, neighbors, school committees, etc. and simply talked about solutions more productive than violence? Better yet, what if these people mustered the courage to run for office on a platform of civility, with rational appoaches to politics and and a serious aim to put people before profits? Or how about if these folks quit working in corporate habitrails, broke their addiction to personal automobiles, vowed not to contribute to overpolulation, and spent their lives working to enrich society. Take that gut feeling of wanting the world to be a beautiful, happy, safe place and use it to effect change as a teacher, a holistic doctor, a writer, an artist, a political leader, a police officer, a lawyer, a city planner, a craftsperson, a baker, or a farmer. Think of the thousands of people who you could share your idea with in one of these jobs!

I used to think that I was accomplishing something by being an outspoken person in the corporate world. But, for all the good I was doing, I was also comtributing to business as usual. In my desire to have a comfortable job, I lost sight of the fact that the point in life is not to be comfortable, but to be alive. Sitting at a computer day after day working on making a product that no one needed is not what I want to do with my time here on the Earth.

Manufactured Joy

We hear more and more these days that depression, road rage, stress, and fear are becoming the norm, rather than an aberation. Some may claim that it's a result of the gaping rift between the rich and the poor, while others may blame terrorists or the media. And all of these problems are definitely causing society to feel pretty damn crappy. But I think that a cause even closer to the root is the fact that we humans have become so seperated from our human-ness that we feel completely unwhole. Everything from our friends and our enemies, to our joys and our sorrows, even to our genetically modified food and our excercise machines, is manufactured and approved and then served to us on a shiny platter by the people we've chosen (or had chosen for us) to be our leaders. We've become so addicted to the easy high of a far off war fought by someone else, or a mindless romantic comedy at the local megaplex, that we don't even want to want to know what is really going on in the world or even in our own communities. Sure, escapism is a necessary part of the human healing process, but we've become a nation stuck in the fantasy world that we work so hard to pay for. We sit in our hermetically sealed cars for two, three, or four hours a day, placated by "music" created by profit-enhancing algorithms, while the rest of the world is relegated to obstacles that threaten our very purpose in life (working and consuming). And when we finally manage to extract ourselves from protective bubble of the personal vehicle, we immediately scramble to return to the environmentally and emotionally controlled environments that are the buildings we work, shop, and live in.

But this isn't living. This is a coma. (Or perhaps an ill placed comma?) Deep down we all know that this is all fake (and may be why so many "normal" people enjoyed the movie the Matrix), but we're incapable of giving up the falsities that the Bush administration, the "news" media, and Hollywood in general are feeding to us (on pewter spoons that will eventually kill us). Why should we give up the manufactured joy of a successful killing spree on a video game for the unknown reality that might hurt us for real? Well, because this manufactured life is making us ill on a human level. It's destroying our hearts and our minds and even our bodies (US citizens are the unhealthiest on the planet, despite our vast medical resources). Plus, this fantasyland is just no comparison to the real joys of life. You can choose to be alive and human, and to be in charge of creating your own joys and sorrows, or you can choose to be plugged into the feeding tube of the masses.

Technology, fantasy, even drugs are rarely bad in and of themselves, as they are merely tools. The danger lies in the user. Even duct tape can be used to kill.

baited breath

I can see yours in the cold...

Ok, so it all seems to have boiled over, onto the stove, and settled, finally, on the floor in a cool mushy puddle. Things got worse, then kind of stayed in limbo for several excrutiating days, and now you'd barely know that WWIII had happened in my house. We are a bunch of drama queens, aren't we? (I'm definitely much less dramatic than I used to be, though.) I don't think all the roommies are particularly happy, but things seem to be pretty damn civil these past few days, thank goodness.

I've been spending a lot of time with my homeboys and homegirls (ewww, that just sounds gross) at SCUL. These people really are great, and kept me sane while my world seemed to be rapidly falling apart these past couple of weeks. My favorite neighbor also just lost his dad, and the gang has been really supportive of him, too. People who bike, I think, are just a little more cool than the rest.

Speaking of biking, I got a call at the MassBike office today from a writer at Bicycling magazine. He was looking for some quotes and info about commuting, of all things. Usually Bicycling is incredibly boring (and that's coming from someone who LIVES biking), but they are going to do a big section on commuting for Bike Month this year. I gave him some really dull, but honest, quotes and thanked him for writing the article. I neglected to mention that I just cancelled my subscription, beceause I thought the mag sucked...

Finally, I want to leave you with a little story about what I did while half the country was watching big men in little pants running around with a funny shaped ball. It turns out that one of the SCUL ladies is a scientist at a sprem lab. No kidding. She invited a bunch of us over to her place for dinner and realized that she needed to go to work to do a couple of things. Instead of just leaving, we all decided to tag along. One of our gallant young men offered to donate a bit of his manhood's progeny for our experimentation. So we got to watch his sperm flit about under the microscope looking forlorn without their egg. I sort of knew that there were different types of sperm cells, but you could really tell that they had different shapes and mannerisms. It's funny to think that all of these individual creatures live inside of a guy, and are, for all intents and purposes, part of the man. (cue Eric Idle...) While we were at the lab, we actually were even more excited to get a chance to play with the liquid nitrogen that they freeze the tiny 1/2 humans. We froze one of my bananas and shattered it on the sidewalk, and then ate some of it (it tasted shockingly similar to a non-tortured banana). We splattered the liquid nitrogen on the floor and watched it slither all over the place (it behaves a lot like mercury and doesn't seem to have any friction at all). And then one of the guys decided to try to burn his wart off with the stuff (which he knew was fairly safe because his doctor had done it to him before). All in all, we agreed that it was one of the best field trips we'd ever been on. Nothing like getting a bunch of geeks in a science lab...

who would you eat?

We're not so different. This little excercise is interesting in a number of different ways. I like to confront anti-abortion folks with these pictures of embryos from different species and ask them which ones are sacred, and which would you happily kill and eat? But the similarity could also be useful in illustrating the idea that humans, pigs, and chickens are pretty damn similar when you really get down to it. We're all just blobs of cells that have decided to organize themselves into shapes that have a head, some legs, eyes, heart, brain, and some other random stuff that has managed to keep us reproducing for millions of years.

Happy half moon day, everyone.

hope

"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered...

America, the richest, most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war."

Dr. Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967

but keep trying!

I did my best to make my life a bit more tolerable last night (and thanks to some really great people, and too much beer) I was actually happy for 8 hours or so. Alas, several of my roommates had different plans, and managed to make my life pretty damn miserable. The thing is they made themselves miserable in the process. They actually asked me to move out because they think I'm causing all their problems. And I'm certainly no roommate saint, but I'm convinced that there's a lot more to it than just me (they complain that I'm too messy, but they also complain when I clean!). So I'm hoping to stay put (and I'm certainly willing to compromise even more). A similar situation happened to me about 12 years ago, and I did reluctantly move out, only to discover that within a couple of months so did everyone else, because after their scapegoat left they realized that they all hated eachother. Why does life have to be so difficult? As the writers for Buffy drilled into us all last season, "The hardest thing about the world is living in it."

Society seems to successfully break down one hurdle to survival, only to replace it with another hurdle. What happened to the life of leisure that the industrial revolution promised us :-)

not dead yet!

I'd pretty much given up on this journal thing, as I've just been too busy, and I'm kind of tired of staring at a computer screen these days (maybe it's a symptom of cabin fever). But I've been feeling shittier and shittier lately, and it occured to me that venting might be a good idea. So here's my vent list!

1. People suck. Last night, one of my roommates asked me one of those ridiculous hypothetical questions that I hate where a human and a cow are about to die, and who would I choose to save? Obviously, there's no one answer to this sort of unrealistic query, it really depends on all sorts of variables (had either one pissed me off lately, does one have a better chance of saving him- or herself, do I have a personal interest in saving either, would either of them be likely to die soon anyway, or would I really even be capable of saving anyone at all as I'm such a klutz?). But, if you boil the question down to what I think he was really curious about - Do I think that a human is more worthy of life than a cow? - then I have a bit of an easier time giving an answer. Short answer? No. For any number of reasons, the world is not better because the average person exists, and neither is the world significantly improved by the life of a cow. And if you want the long answer, then I would probably go futher and say that a human is more likely to do harm than the cow is, so it probably would be better for me to save the cow.

2. I live my life with a few simple beliefs. Things like caring about others, trying to give back more than I receive from the earth, and looking to make things better than they already are. It's sort of like a religion, without the silly omnipotent or semi-omnipotent creatures lurking about in some other dimension. My philosophy isn't set in stone, and I know that my modern, technophile lifestyle doesn't quite mesh with my ideals, but it does help me when I get confused or have trouble making a decision. Unfortunately, it also makes me extremely depressed when I do my best to live a good life and some of the people around me totally screw me over because of it.

3. I know I'm not perfect, but I get the distinct impression that most people are just incredibly superficial, selfish, uncaring, and utterly clueless. Example: I reluctantly invite a woman who also has cats to move in to our home, and her cats not only take over the house, leaving my poor kitty cowering under the bed 90% of the time, but she also leaves me a four page note telling me to keep my cat out of the living room! The note also declared that she thought that I was rude to ask her a (very benign) question while her boyfriend was in the room. In other circumstances I might have chalked up her cluelessness to being in a bad mood, but she'd literally just found out that she'd gotten a job she'd been wanting for months, and she was really happy. Added to all this stress with that roommate, I've also got to live with the moodiest man I've ever met, who has randomly decided (after fawning over me when he first moved in) that I am completely intolerable, and am apparently incapable of doing anything right.

4. Forget Iraq, there's a warzone right here, all around us in America. It's called the roads. Every time I step, or roll, off the curb and into the street - to go to work, perhaps - I fear for my life. I've been hit by idiots in cars at least four times in the past year. And no one seems to care. "People just don't look where they're going." was how the last police officer consoled me when I reported the SUV that ran through a stop sign and right into me in the middle of a crosswalk. It's become acceptable, even encouraged, to operate a motor vehicle dangerously. (The aforementioned roommates spend months on end playing Grand Theft Auto, a video game where the goal is to kill as many people as possible while driving around in stolen automobiles). The last time I had enough courage to get on my bike, I had to scream bloody murder at some asshole who just couldn't wait 5 seconds and decided to squeeze his 7 foot wide, 2000 pound, armored vehicle into the 4 foot wide space between myself and oncoming traffic.

I'm once again getting to a point where it's all becoming a bit too much for me to take. Time to cuddle up with my favorite feel-good movie, Contact, and see if I can't drag my terrified kitty out and give her a hug.

a new day

Happy Solstice everyone! May your homes be full of warmth, joy, and hope on the beginning of this new season of light. Take a moment out of your busy day to remember your mothers - the big blue-green one, and the nice one who makes you cookies! I hope that you all receive gifts from the heart this year, and not just stuff from a department store that you'll end up dropping off at Goodwill in a week. And I hppe that you have chosen equally special gifts for those you love. Maybe a handknit scarf, a mixed tape/cd, a promise for an evening walk on the beach, a donation to their favorite organization, or some yummy homemade sweets. (If you're still in need of some good present ideas, check out this organization which has guide to simplifying the holidays with plenty of wonderful consumer-free gift ideas.)

Enjoy!

two week wrap-up

Well, yeah, I'm posting. I'm considering taking an official hiatus from the blog, but I haven't decided yet. Maybe I'll try to commit to a once a week post or something. I've just got too many things to do these days, plus the fact that the gift giving season is upon us.

Anyway, here is a completely random list of things that have happened to me lately. Nothing terribly exciting.

I made my way through the four dvd set of the Fellowship of the Ring. Really makes you appreciate the film when you know the mind-boggling effort and time that was put into the making of it. I was less than thrilled by the film when I saw it in the theater (I'm more of a dialogue fan, and there ain't much). But I absolutely love to see all the background stuff, like the props, models, wardrobe, foley effects, and, of course, the CG effects. They went to so much extreme detail that they actually manipulated the color/contrast effects of almost every scene to give a desired effect. That's why the film looks so different depending on what sort of emotion is being conveyed, and on what realm the characters are in. (Hobbiton is overly saturated and has a golden glow, while Mordor is almost deplete of color, for example.) It's sounds simple, but watching the colorist (using a technique called grading) work, you get the impression that it's an amazing amount of work.

Thanksgiving was ok. Now that the Cronburg clan seems to have abandoned the idea of a family event, it's just not the same. My stepmother, with all good intentions, has started her own tradition of inviting random visiting scholars and such who she meets at work. These folks are from all around the word, and generally are only in the US for a couple of months. This year, we had two Brazilians, a Columbian, and a guy from Spain. These people are always very nive, but it's just not what I imagine of when I think of Thanksgiving. (Last year, I actually skipped Thanksgiving for the first time ever, because I just couldn't face a room full of people I didn't know.)

Work is busy. I'm stuck doing a lot of background work on the national Police Ed. project. It's probably the first thing I've done at MassBike that I just don't have an interest in. Probably because it's less in my control. I work better when I can just run with an idea (doesn't everyone?). But I'm slogging through it all, and hopefully it will generate some interest and I'll have a bunch of other people doing a lot of the work instead of me! Other stuff at work is more interesting, and I've just come up with a new idea that I think will really be kickass. I'm going to create a MassBike Kids Club that will allow kids to join for free and provide them with a bunch of cool stuff on a fairly regular basis, to keep them interested, and provide access to the minds of budding bicyclists. (Whuaaahahahah!) Generally, MassBike is seen as pretty unhip, and I want to change that. We're gonna be so hip (to kids at least) that we won't be able to see our feet!

Ooooh, snow!

My roommates came up with a new game called ladle ball, played in the kitchen with soup ladles and a handball. There are no rules, but it's fun trying not to toss the ball into the cat's water bowl...

I spent Buy Nothing Day hanging around my house and not going outside. Not what I had planned (which was to ride in Critical Mass and then end up at a big Buy Nothing Day performance thing on Newbury Street), but at least I held true to the spirit of the day and avioded the disease of consumerism for a bit. And I know that it's more about avioding the overspending that usually comes with the Solstice time of year. So I'm trying to organize something to hand out to my family and friends that will encourage them to avoid spending money on gifts as much as possible (something like this brochure at the Center for a New American Dream. Though I'm still waffling on whether or not to send my extended family gift excemption vouchers.

I've also discovered that having a lot of things on my to do list allows me to procrastinate, yet still be productive, as I avoid doing one thing by doing another. (For example, right now I should be working on a logo for the Kids Club or writing my article for the MassBike newsletter, or making Solstice cards, but I'm posting here instead, which was also on my to do list...)

bicycling is living

Yeah, so I don't post all that often anymore. As a friend of mine said once, people who have enough time to blog regularly usually don't have enough of a life to make it interesting! (Not to say that mine is all that thrilling...)

Last night was Bike Night, and it went well. Next year will be amazing. What's cool, is that this year's Green Party gubernatorial candidate, Jill Stein, actually showed up to speak. She didn't have anything earth shattering to say, but it was nice, and she made a great point about not allowing diminished expectations — the less we ask for, the less we get. It's a fine line that activists have to walk, between looking like an extremist and being impotent.

I also apparently got some big props during my boss Tim's speech, but I was outside staffing the valet bike parking, and didn't get to hear anything except the last sentence or so. Ah, well, I did get enjoy the applause, which made me blush. And I had some nice company (and brownies!) while I was stuck outside, too, so I was happy enough.

We had an auction of bike related items and I had submitted some jewelry that I'd created with recycled bike parts that I'd had laying around the house. Surprisingly, there was a little competition for it, and the final bid was over $20. Cool, huh? If you want to see what it looked like (and learn how you can make your very own bike jewely) check out this page on my minimalist website. (It actually has three pages on it now!)

squeeeeal!

If you are like me, this will make you squeal in delight.

I watched the Episode II dvd this weekend. All of it. I'll have some philosophical discussion about it sometime soon...

broke

I have about $20 to my name. Hopefully, the unemployment stuff is all worked out (they apparently don't like it when you work temp jobs) and I'll get a buttload of money form them soon. As a bonus, though, I've been doing a lot of cooking and baking, and I'm probably eating a lot less junk food!

Been busy with MassBike stuff. Bike Night is the big event of the year, and I've been doing PR work to make it seem like people would be fools to miss it! See MassBike's event page for more info.) Yay!

I hadn't gotten a chance to mention that I saw Bowling for Columbine a while back. It wasn't any masterpiece of filmmaking, but it definitely was effective in generating discussion. The premise of the movie is asking the question of why is the US such a violent country. Many of the standard answers are pretty much debunked (video games, movies, too many guns, etc.). And the movie leave you with the question essentially unanswered. My best guess is that we have cultivated such an atmosphere of inferiority in our populace — through advertising gimmicks, test crazy school systems, and workplace/social hierarchies — that we are have turned into a country of paranoid bullies. Anyway, I highly recommend this movie. As a bonus, it's got South Park stuff in it to help alleviate the depressing tone of the topic.

my hero

Leave it to an nonagenerian to say what my last posting said in a much more elequent and inspiring way. See what Granny D has to say about the political devide that haunts this country, in this speech she recently gave in Boston.

United States of Idiots

We have spawned an entire society of imbeciles who have no idea of how the world works. I have to I keep reminding myself (and others) that people do what they do, and think they way they think because they just haven't been taught anything else. It's not really their fault that they vote for the wrong people (and referenda). Its all very simple to them - Candidate X says that he's gonna lower taxes and make more jobs, so hell yeah I'm gonna give him my vote. What's funny is that these people aren't just greedy, but in their blind greed they end up screwing themselves (and the rest of us) over.

Heck, one of my supposedly intelligent roommates voted to eliminate income taxes entirely (as did about half of Massachusetts voters!). When I pointed out what that would mean (cutting a majority of social programs such as housing and health insurance for the elderly and handicapped), she said, "well, they proposed it, they must have a plan". The State House can't even plan when they have hoards of money, I can't even imagine what would happen with no money... I also reminded her that our rent would probably double. She apparently thought that the landlord couldn't legally raise our rent that much, but the fact is that he can if he needs to cover property taxes.

Anyone can make a bad decision. But the problem is that more and more people are making more and more bad decisions. And we're all suffering for it. All I can think is thank goodness I don't have any kids. I'm utterly convinced that something big is going to happen sometime soon. It's really just an intuition, but I'm absolutely sure that some sort of world-sized metaphysical scale is getting so unfathomably unbalanced that it's starting to look more like a catapault than a scale. And day now a giant flaming ball of metaphorical pestilence is going to come hurtling at us, and we're going to be completely fucked.

Not to be pessimistic or anything.

It's easy being green

Elections tomorrow. I'm actually really curious to see how it all turns out. The country seems a lot more interested in democracy and it's inherent citizen participation these days. Leave it to King George to aggravate the moderate centrist voters enough to actually care about voting. Both Massachusetts' and Maine's Green party gubernatorial candidates are polling at at least 5%, and these polls are notorious for getting only the opinions of the stay at home wives and the elderly (though both of my grandmothers voted for Nader). Even the current governor of Maine says (off the record) that he is voting for the Green candidate. Locally, the old boy democrat state rep from the next district over, Tim Toomey, is getting a run for his money by a determined Green. The centrist (and even some of the wussier leftwing) media is so scared of the Green in the Governor's race that they have gone out of their way to either ignore her, or, now that the public is actually aware of her, to bitch and moan about the greens "spoiling" their party. The outcome that many have hope for is starting to come about—the centrist dems are moving left a smidge in order to try and court the favor of the left. The aforementioned Toomey has gone well out of his way to be really really nice to bicycle advocates lately. So much so that he even showed up at a very small meeting for the Friends of the Community Path just to let us know that he had been working hard on getting the path funded, and of course, to pass out flyers about his campaign.

There's even a write in campaign in Senator Kerry's (essentially) unopposed race to let him know how upset many of us are about his locally unsupported decision to vote to give Georgie the keys to the toy, I mean, war chest. The woman's name is Randall Forsberg and she's a democrat, not a green, but she's an anti-war activist from way back. To vote for her (all across Mass) for Senator, you have to write her name and address in in a specific way, for it to officially count. For instructions go to www.rforsberg.com.

I didn't go to the protest yesterday. Fortunately about 15,000 other people did, including Tim Robbins. Someday I'll make it to a protest, really I will.

party people

The rest of the household went out to a Halloween party at ManRay. On a Wednesday. At 10:30. If I didn't have to work tomorrow, I might have gone, but I'm pretty much ready for bed now, so no big fun for me. Eric was dressed up minimally, but had on these Clark Kent glasses and has just bleached his hair and he looked shockingly like this guy I used to have a huge crush on (and did, eventually, do the nasty with). So it was creepy looking at him all night. I had to ask him if he had any percings, just to be sure that the resemblence was only above the neck...

Busy week again. I've got a big meeting on Friday in which I think I'm going to have to tell them something that they don't want to hear. But I've got to say it and I've got the backing of a state representative, so I'm not terribly worried. As long as it doesn't snow or freezing rain on my way there (it's about a 15 mile bike ride there), I think I'll be fine.

SCUL was great on Saturday. Not so much the ride, which was quite short and derby-filled, but the award ceremony before the ride. I actually got an award. I got the Stone Cog award for "embodying the spirit of SCUL". Pretty damn cool, if you ask me. Especially since I'm such a wallflower at these things. The trophy is the best - a tower of bike gears and axles welded together in a particularly pleasing sculptural shape with a plaque and everything. I now have two, count 'em, two bicycle trophies. I'm so cool!

life as we know it

Wow, it's been a while. It's been so long that my browser had forgotten the address of blogger...

So, yeah, I've been insanely busy. I'll be working full time for a couple of weeks while Tim is off campaigning for his Senator pal. It's a lot of work to be a bike advocate! The police education program is going full steam ahead, and we got a contract to make a national version for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Damn! I think I'm going to try to learn Flash to make it look spiffy.

The Critical Mass Halloween ride was a wash last night. I don't know what's wrong with some people. We're going to need a few people to do some organizing, as much as we prefer to avoid it. I wish I had the time...

I'm trying to make myself go to SCUL tonight, as it's the last official ride of the year. But it's pouring and I'm so damn busy, that I might just go for the closing ceremony and then head home instead of riding. I miss the gang, but I'm just so burnt out on biking stuff lately. I got a nice little distraction last week when my roommates and I went out for dinner and saw a free showing of Jackass the Movie. I vehemently opposed going, but I had a hard cider on an empty stomach and was completely unable to coordinate myself enough to figure out another movie to sneak into. So I went and I actually really enjoyed Jackass. There were definitely some really stupid bits, but there were a lot of really funny, and not so violent, stunts. Plus, there were bicycles :)

You know, one of the reasons that I don't post as much as I should here, is that Blogger has a lot of glitches. I still haven't figured out what is wrong with the archive list on the left side of the page. Some people can see it but I can't. And then there is the problem that every time I want to post Blogger/my browser gets stuck and I have to log out and back in to post. Grrrrr.

plenty of pixels

Sorry about the complete lack of posting goodness in the past week. Just been pretty quiet, and that last post about the war pretty much said it all. I did forget to mention that our long lost roommate finally returned from his overseas mission playing computer games. Yay! Because of this I've now been sucked into playing some of the video games that our new roommie brough with her. The snowboarding game is pretty cool, even in my opinion. And I also just found a pretty nifty 3D generating program called Groboto. It is primarily a building block type program, but it has some pretty bizarre tools and forms. You can create images that look like they're straight out of Age of Empires, or you can do some amazing organic fractal looking stuff. The problem I've got is that I can't seem to be able to export it so that I can use it in a more powerful rendering program like Bryce. If I can get it working, I'll probably use the images for graphics on my temporarily abandoned Random Turtle Productions site.

Tomorrow, I get to testify (well anyone can, really. Want to come?) at a state legislative hearing about pedestrian and bicycle safety. I have no real idea what I'm gonna say, beyond the fact that people are woefully uneducated about the rights and responsibilities of bicyclists. I'll probably play up school-age education, with a hint of police education for good measure.

4 out of 5 FBI agents agree

The war on terrorism is a failure. Apparently, in both FBI and CIA internal studies, last year's war on Afganastan is officially a bust. According to an article in the New York Times:

"Classified investigations of the al-Qaeda threat now under way at the FBI and CIA have concluded that the war in Afghanistan failed to diminish the threat to the United States ... Instead, the war might have complicated counterterrorism efforts by dispersing potential attackers across a wider geographic area."

Another article on Alternet.org goes into detail about how badly we did at accomplishing the goals that were espoused by the US warmongers. And guess what, we're about to do it all over again. More and more, this country seems like it's stuck in some made-for-tv movie.

Speaking of movies, anyone notice how the highly acclaimed "Wag the Dog" has suddenly disappeared from the TV guide listings?