May 22nd "Israel" posting:

So according to my reader stats, the "Israel" topic, was off the charts, 43 views since i posted, and that is up from 12 views this morning all together on that post. quite impressive.

what is not impressive is the personal messages i have gotten. I got two messages calling me anti-semitic and other rude terms.

Let me make this clear, I think all of your religion's are complete bull. and yes that includes the jews, sorry folks. your all a problem. I respect your beliefs, I understand where you all come from (christians, muslims, jews, etc.) and I have no place to tell you what to believe, and vice versa. But i do have a place and a right to say what I will of those religions, and vice versa. As do you have a right to have an opinion on my words about your religion. But when you get worked up and freak out about what I posted, on MY FUCKING BLOG, you just prove my point every single time, and once again prove whats wrong with this world. To that I hope you are all having a great day.

BOB DYLAN TURNS 70

The Voice of a Generation has turned 70 today! For those of you who don't know, Bob Dylan is my all-time favorite artist, musician, and song writer. When I first started my love affair for Dylan, I knew I had found the voice that I would always look to in my time of trouble, happiness, and confusion. Dylan is an icon above all icons. Every musician today will tell you he single handedly changed music. The brits may have the beatles, and all the other great, but we got Dylan, and without him music would have never come as far as it has. So today i am posting some writings by a few artists. Rolling Stone Magazine has a cover story about Dylan this month and on their website you can read all about it at www.rollingstone.com/dylan.

So without a further ado here we go:

"The Times They Are A-Changin'" (The Times They Are A-Changin', 1964)
By Bob Weir

Back in high school, there were two things that I marked my days by. Every few months I’d get a new Beatles record, and every few months I’d get a new Dylan record. "The Times They are A-Changin'" has always been one of my favorites. I wasn’t a politico back then, but he managed to articulate in undeniable poetic terms everything I was thinking and feeling at the time.

The song has an open-ended kind of spirituality to it, equally about faith and reason. He was telling the government to lose their self interests. He was telling journalists to use a lighter hand. And when he sang, "Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, and don’t criticize what you can’t understand," he was locked into an eternal truth there. His main message seemed to be, “Use your head, and follow your heart, and above all, be open.”

His records helped Jerry and I bond when we first started playing together. We were kids when we met; I was 16, Jerry was 21. We went and saw Dylan in 1965 at the Berkeley Community Center when he was pounding out with the guys in the Band. He did his first set solo and then the second set with the Band, to the considerable annoyance of some “purists” who booed. That seemed to me totally contrary to what he was saying in his early songs, about being open.

Jerry and Dylan later became great buddies. They understood what it was like to be idolized beyond any reasonable standard. They became tight right after John Lennon was shot, so they were pretty much the only two guys who knew what it was like to be held to that standard. We toured with Dylan in 1987, and being in an improvisational situation, we developed a musical bond that a lot of folks don’t get to have. Sometimes we missed the wave, but when we caught it, it was a beautiful thing that made life worth living. If we could do it all over again, I wish we had played "The Times They are A-Changin'."

This was from Bob Weir, of Grateful Dead fame. This article is from Rolling Stone, and are not my words.

And if you want to read something a little more in depth this is an article from slate.com written by  John Dickerson:

Bob Dylan is turning 70, and here we all come: the writers, the critics, the biographers, the song-quoters—and not one of us with a cake or a candle. Each of us thinks we know how best to celebrate the changeling who has changed our lives. Dylan has been called the voice of a generation. It's true. He's given voice to generations of writers who say he inspired them. If every person has a book in them, it seems every writer has a Dylan book—or at least an essay—in them.

Dylan isn't thrilled with the birthday presents. He's always taken a dim view of critics, even adulatory ones: "40-year-olds trying to explain my music to 10-year-olds," he once called them. In a recent letter to fans he rolled his eyes at the "gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future," dubious about the prospects of a great one. He has made a professional sport of embarrassing interviewers he thinks are trying to put him in a box, most famously Time'sHorace Freeland Judson in the documentary Don't Look Back. A key theme of Dylan's music is: You're missing the point. "Ballad of a Thin Man" from 1965 says it most famously and explicitly: "Something is happening here but you don't know what it is." You can even find the message in "Boots of Spanish Leather."

It's your own fault, Bob. If you made everything so simple and so plain, you wouldn't have so many followers plumbing your lyrics, tweezing your life, and succumbing in the process to the many sins Dylan somehow makes it very hard for writers to resist. I committed one of them at the end of the last paragraph. Call it song dropping. I've tossed off a song title and moved on to the next paragraph. Unless you're a fan, you probably aren't familiar with the song. Even if you are, my point may not be as self-evident as I think. (For the record, my point was that the song "Boots of Spanish Leather" is a conversation between two lovers, each missing the point—maybe on purpose—the other is making.)

Other sins include endless citations of obscure blues and folk musicians and rhapsodic descriptions of Dylan concerts you've seen—merely to establish that I'm very well read, it's well known. This is another sin, gratuitous quotation of Dylan lyrics. Done sparingly it's part of the clubhouse conversation of Dylan fans—a breadcrumb sin—but it gets tedious fast (almost there) if the writer quotes a lyric with no attempts to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means. (See what I'm saying?)

When I started listening rapturously to Dylan as a teenager, in the mid-1980s, I wanted to know what his every word meant, including a, andthe, and um. It's the least you can do when you're writing lyrics on your jeans. Emotionally, I was in his thrall, but I also wanted some glimpse of how those words might all add up. He's asking questions that call for answers or at least conversation: Who are you? What's it going to take? What's true? If you had to get out fast, would you use the window?

And as my bookshelves filled up with biographies and cultural histories, I had a recurring question about a lot of the answers I found in those books: Why, in all the time that I've been listening to Dylan, has he so often been judged to be on a comeback from the period before I was born? Caught up in the world of Dylan's fans, which included most of the people who wrote about him, I couldn't help feeling out of step. They were either too hard to please—they said he was no good after he went electric or after the motorcycle mishap or after he became a Christian—or they were so pleased by everything he did, it suggested his genius might be a big hoax.

Though the great Dylan book may not be at hand, even he might approve of the mission that inspires the most recent crop of writing about him: to "celebrate the impossibility of pinning down Bob Dylan," as David Yaffe writes in his collection of four Dylan essays, Like a Complete Unknown. Above all, that means exploring the desire for change that drove Dylan from the start and still consumes him in his latest period, as Daniel Mark Epstein understands in his biography, The Ballad of Bob Dylan. In Bob Dylan in America, Sean Wilentz traces the cultural currents and cross-currents he's constantly navigating. It's the lived Dylan experience—messy, conversational, and expanding—that has engaged Greil Marcus all along, as his incisive Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010 attests.

"For an artist who began his career protesting," Yaffe writes, "his most fervent protests have been against his earlier selves and the audience who wanted to embalm him in them." Yet Dylan's fans, these books suggest, may have served all along as a kind of brutal muse—fruitful and destructive, like the romances that have inspired so many Dylan songs. And as is his way with those relationships, Dylan spends a lot of time pretending not to care—or bridling with impatience—even as he privately obsesses. The tension throughout Dylan's career between his drive to keep moving and his fans' deep investment in his current incarnation, or some prior incarnation, turns out to be a crucial catalyst of his restless creative process.

Follow the bouncing Bob since he came to New York on Jan. 24, 1961: Guthrie emulator, protest singer, beat poet, hipster rocker, recluse, stadium-show band-leader, carnival musician, evangelical, gospel singer, faded rocker, American song curator, radio host, filmmaker, and painter. When Dylan is in a comfortable spot in his career, he kicks himself out of it, reaching for some new sound, trying for a new and precise way to capture an idea that's always elusive. He rolls the rock up and then he's the one who pushes it back down again. "This home that I'd left a while back and couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there," was how Dylan put it in the aptly named documentaryNo Direction Home, summing up his career. "I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be, and so, I'm on my way home."

The constant recreations are what pull us in as fans. Dylan is discovering something new and we're going along with him. He's giving us a map to understand our own lives. It's not just the evolving music and words that draw us onward, but also the promise of a gateway into feeling like a member of a special new group, one that is always ahead of the curve. "We thought we were advanced and special," Wilentz writes of seeing Dylan in1964 at the Philharmonic Hall in New York. "For us the concert was partly an act of collective self-ratification."

That is where the struggle started. A sense of identity rooted in Dylan-allegiance made for a very demanding audience, avid for precisely what its hero withheld: certainty, a promise either of more of the same or of absolutes. Now instead of just chasing after something, Dylan felt pursued.

Nothing, it seemed, could go more against the grain of his creative style, as an inside look at Dylan in the studio reveals. In a great chapter on the making of Blonde on Blonde, Wilentz captures the determined musician at work—abandoning recording in New York for a new venue in Nashville—and in Epstein's portrait of Dylan at work on Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft 40 years later, little has changed. The recording sessions are experimental and off-balance, yet Dylan runs them in a way that gives him maximum control. Sometimes he'll start a song in a new key. Musicians just have to catch up. He resents his producers who he says have watered down all of his albums. (He's produced his last three by himself.) If that's how he feels about professionals chiming in on his work, imagine the whole world telling him what his music was supposed to say and sound like.

How fast did Dylan start moving to elude entrapment? His third album, Times They Are A-Changing, filled with the protest songs that would help cement him as a protest singer, came out in the same year—1964—as Another Side of Bob Dylan, which marked his move entirely away from political protest songs. Of all the periods of change in Dylan's career, 1964 to 1966 is the most intense. His iconic decision in July of 1965 to go electric at the Newport Folk Festival and the negative reaction (Pete Seeger wanted to take an axe to the cables!) isn't the half of it. What followed was far more radical: a total commitment to creative risk in the face not just of uncertainty but hostility.

Dylan spent much of that year after Newport getting booed. It's one thing to try something out. It's another to live with that roll of the dice, following your idea for month after month. Dylan felt the new amplified sound matched his in-your-face attitude and his Kerouac and beat influenced lyrics. "I had to get where I was going all alone," he said at the time. "And I know it's real. … They can boo till the end of time. I know that the music is real, more real than the boos." His drummer Levon Helm was so undone by the audience abuse that he left the tour to join an oil rig. Dylan just kept following his way.

And it nearly killed him. Shortly after this period Dylan had a collapse and didn't tour again for eight years. But he was musically still on the move. He retreated into seclusion to write some of his most beautiful songs of repair on John Wesley Harding (1967) while also finding joy in dickering around with his friends in The Band in their home recording studio. The Basement Tapes (1975) that emerged from those sessions are "less a style than a spirit," writes Marcus, "a spirit that had to do with delight in friendship and invention … a spirit that shoots a good smile straight across this album."

It was his fans, in no small part, who pushed Dylan into that fertile period, which lasted a decade and produced some of his best music. Even Dylan himself seemed to acknowledge his embattled reliance on his audience to propel him forward. He couldn't forge ahead alone. There was a reason everyone was talking nostalgically about Dylan's greatest years by the time I started listening to him in the mid-'80s, after his followers panned his Christian phase. Dylan himself felt adrift, "a missing person inside of myself," he said. He'd lost a connection outside of himself. I traveled to shows he played with Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead, where he looked out into the audience and told us we all looked like "cutouts from a shooting gallery."

If the audience he needed didn't exist, he would create it. In his autobiographyChronicles, Dylan writes that he was about to hang it up and stop the "marathon stunt ride"—until he had a revelation at a show in Locarno, Switzerland, in 1987. Instead of running from his fans, he would "put myself in the service of the public" He'd leave behind his old followers and find a completely new set. "The kind of crowd that would have to find me would have to be the kind of crowd who didn't know what yesterday was." Dylan seemed to be recognizing afresh something Marcus wrote in 1960 after the release of the lackluster album Self Portrait. "If the music Dylan makes doesn't have the power to enter into the lives of his audience, his audience will take over his past."

Dylan has been working hard to hold off that takeover. He's put out enough good albums since the turnaround he writes about that Dylan fans have a new debate: Which is the better comeback album? He plays more than 100 shows a year, mixing old standards with new work. This year he made his first trip to China, prompting criticism from fans who thought the author of "The Times They Are A-Changin' " shouldn't play in an authoritarian country—since presumably he wouldn't be allowed to perform his signature protest songs.

Responding on his Web page, Dylan sounded like—what else—a musician who refused to be pinned down: He wasn't censored by anyone other than himself. He wanted to play new stuff. He bristled at being presented as a '60s icon. "They responded enthusiastically to the songs on my last four or five records," Dylan said of his audience. It wasn't a crowd of expats, either, he pointed out. Actual Chinese had flocked to hear him play. Fifty years after his career began, Dylan is still wrestling with his fans, leaving some behind and attracting new ones a long way from America. It's all part of trying to keep moving and find his way home.

NOTE: Neither of these article are my words, thanks to Bob Weir, Rolling Stone magazine, and John Dickerson of Slate.com, for their words on this great day.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOB!

A series of things that deserve looking into

So traffic laws are getting out of hand. Tickets are rising, we now make our officers meet quotas each month for tickets given out, and here is a series of traffic laws im sick of:

1. Wear your seat belt or get a ticket (Click it or ticket)- We have all heard this one a million times. Put on your seat belt, it saves lives. And ya know what, I DO wear a seat belt, I am a rather large fan of the seat belt. Seeing as the seat belt has prevented myself and quite a good many others from launching out of the front window of our cars and having our head cave in on the pavement. But there is a commercial here in South Carolina with a lady saying "I just don't have time to put it on," and my favorite, "It's my car, I shouldn't have to wear a seat belt if I don't want to." And you know what I love what that second lady said. She has a point, it's not like the state of South Carolina is making my car payment, or my insurance payment, or paying my property tax on my car, or paying for my tax and tag on the car, their not putting gas in the tank, they aren't paying for my car to be maintained, I think you get the idea now. And that girl is right, it is your car, if you don't want to wear a seat belt you shouldn't have to, and you sure as hell shouldn't get a ticket for it. But you know what pretty lady, when you don't have that seat belt on and you drive down HWY 123 from Greenville to Walhalla, and your car suddenly swerves and drives your ass into a tree or a ditch or some shit like that, and you propel out of that car like a potato cannon, i bet your gonna wish you wore that seat belt then. So go ahead take that law off the book, because if your so stupid as to not wear one, then you will eventually face the consequences, survival of the fittest folks, and that bitch sure ain't fit.

2. Getting a ticket for no tread on your tires. Guy I work with got pulled over for this shit, adn got a ticket of about 100 bucks. let me tell you something folks, if you have never bought tires for your car, then you don't know this, but those fuckers are expensive as hell. Now the average price for my tires on a 2011 Scion tC sits around 175-215 bucks EACH. That shit adds up quick when you throw in the following: Parts and labor (whose gonna put those fuckers on there?), the tires themselves, balance the tires, rotate the tires, and all that other shit. now your talking about a bill for TIRES being somewhere around 700-900 bucks!! And now you have been pulled over for not having enough tread on your tire (the tread should not be below the top of Abe Lincoln's head on the penny, past that your fucked). So throw in that 100 bucks your paying for the ticket, unless you find the time to go to court and waste an hour of your life, so now your paying even more. Do cops not realize we just came out of a recession, and unemployment is still hovering around 9% and over 10% in South Carolina alone? how the hell do they expect somebody making minimum wage and working off of tips to just up and one day go out and buy brand new tires, hell no you save money for that shit. once again it's a personal responsibility. you want your emissions to go up, your gas mileage to go down, and your car go out of control while making a turn? then go ahead run those tires bald, i don't give a shit, your problem not mine.

3. No Right on Red- This is really stupid folks. You have seen the sign a million times if you drive, pull up at a stop light turning right, your in a hurry to get to wing zone before the close and bam there it is, NO RIGHT TURN ON RED sign hanging above the street, like it's taunting you "HAHAHAHA IM UP HERE AND YOU CAN'T TURN BECAUSE I SAID SO JACKASS!!" This shit is for people that can't drive, feel like they need all 4 lanes to be empty to be able to turn, and they hold up everybody else too. We live in a fast paced, always going, on the move society, I don;t have time to NOT turn right on red, I depend on that and when I see no right on red signs i am immediately pissed off. shit's gotta go now, otherwise we are going to start seeing "No Left Turn, No Questions Asked" signs, then you will always have to turn right, unless of course there is no "Right on Red."

4. Random Sobriety Checkpoints- This has got to take the cake on stupid bullshit. Really? Are we really setting up checkpoints to arrest drunk drivers? Have our drunk drivers become such great drunk drivers that we can't tell if they are actually drunk so we have to set up a check point to make sure? Now in my time of driving (like the bob dylan reference?), I have seen, and driven past, behind, in front of, and beside people I assume are drunk. Each time they are swerving, all over the road and scaring the shit out of me, literally. if I, a 20 year old dude from south carolina can notice a drunk driver, wouldn't you feel safer if a cop could do the same? Well if the sobriety checkpoint is any indication, it's clear they are not qualified to detect drunk drivers. But ya know what the worst part about sobriety checkpoints are? It's a waste of our tax dollars. think about it, if you have a friend that always drinks and drive, doesn't care about the risk they are taking and sees nothing wrong with it, then thats their problem. thats a prime example of ignorance is bliss. and if we just let all the drunk people drive, eventually natural selection will rear its ugly head back, and show you exactly how ignorant that person was to drive drunk. i mean if all the repeat, continuous drunk drivers drove drunk eventually it will catch up to them, and like that they crash, they die, and now one less drunk driver we gotta worry about smashing into your house on sunday while watching the biggest loser or jersey shore. so sobriety checkpoints, waste of time, waste of money, waste of resources, and most of all a foolish way to solve the DUI problem. But the biggest kicker of all is being subjected to this bullshit like we live in Berlin in the 40's or Moscow at the peak of the Soviet regime. to have to produce photo id, and all that bull shit is so un-American and so anti-constitution (violates 4th and 5th amendments) that there in lies the real problem

just food for thought for you on this sunday.

have a good one and happy reveling

Israel:

So I have spent alot of time in the past bashing christians, muslims, and most  other organized religions. But I re-read alot of my post the other day, and noticed a trend, I never say anything about the Jews. And today, the Jews have me all kinds of pissed off and heres why:

This is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with our President, Barack Obama:

Well the other day our president spouted off about the possibility of Israel and Palestine achieving an ever lasting peace in the "Holy Land." Obama made a proposal, the same proposal made by Bush, Clinton, Bush41, Reagan, Carter, and so many other foreign nationals. Obama proposed that Israel and Palestine return to the borders that were in place in 1967 and those look like this:

Now maybe you notice a trend here, slowly but surely the Palestinians have lost their land. Now after WW2 the British (who controlled this land), aligned themselves with the United Nations, and settled on the plan second from the left, in 1947. The idea was to give the Jewish people a claim to their "Holy Land," while keeping a balance with long time nemesis the Palestinians. The ultimate prize for both has been the Gaza Strip, and of course Jerusalem. And now after thousands of years of fighting for this land over stupid bullshit religion, and lots and lots and lots of money and support from America (the land of we love jews, not as much as christians, but more than muslims), the Israelis have squandered Palestine and taken a vast majority of the land away from the Palestinians.  

Now look, I myself do not think the 67' borders are sufficient enough, I think the 1947 border is good, but in terms for negotiation and foreign affairs, the 67' borders are a good starting point. Now for my whole life, and the life of just about every other person on earth, you turn on the news at night and yet another assault, murder, bombing, etc has happened between the Israelis and the Palestinians.  Anti-Semitic, and Anti-Palestinian propaganda has been spewed by both sides for years and now I, yes I will cut the bullshit and give you my humble opinion on this.

We all know of the long hardship of the Jewish community. From being enslaved by the Egyptians, to ransacked by Christians and Muslims during the crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust,and numerous other atrocities have been committed against the Jews. Even though the Jewish faith is substantially older than its Christian and Muslim counterparts. Hell both of those base their religious texts off the Old Testament. And that Jesus guy, yeah he was Jewish too. But all that aside, we all know the hardships the Jews have faced, we have been learning about it since grade school, and I can not state the importance of NEVER allowing these actions and history to repeat themselves. But there is a darker side to all of this.

You see Israel got wise when they buddied up to the United States. They foresaw something that could be very beneficial to them. And they were right. The United States eventually would send millions upon millions of dollars in aid, weapons, and other commodities to the Israelis. The United States essentially (my take, not fact) helped create the Israeli army, we aided Israel and support(ed) Israel in every way possible. We defended them against "radical" Muslim nations in the middle east, we aided them in defense of their land, we gave them millions of our own money, and never asked or wanted for anything from them. To many it seems just, and right to support and help the most shit on people the world has ever known. But through all of that, the Palestinians lost land, and were pushed further and further back as their land shrank more and more over the years.

Now the Palestinians did not just up and say "Hey yeah sure the Jews can have all of the land we will just take these tiny little slivers on the edge and be hapyp with that." No it didn't go down that way. The Palestinians knew that MR. Imperial (United States) would help Israel achieve whatever goals they pleased. And if the Israelis goal was to have all of Israel to themselves, then that was ok. So all that military equipment we sent over there, the Jews took, and decided to use it, not in defense, but for offense to kick the Palestinians out....for good. Let it be known that those guns in Israeli soldiers hands are American guns, with American ammunition. The bomb, are American bombs, the planes that drop those bombs are American planes. And if they are not American military equipment, then you better believe that the money used to pay for them most certainly was good old fashioned American green with Ben Franklin and that smart ass smirk of his. Yes how the tables did turn, and have turned for that matter. 

And just the other day, President Obama proposed returning to 1967 borders. But when he said that, Fox News and the right wing immediately attacked him and pretty much (my words not theirs) began to paint him as Anti-Israel. The main reason being to take that long time strangle hold the Democrats have had on Jewish voters, and turn it in their favor. And the day after that speech, who but Benjamin Netanyahu shows up at the White House, calling the proposal a non-starter for peace negotiations, and claiming it to be completely irrational. 

Well let me lay this out for you Prime Minister Netanyahu, I get what your doing. Your playing the "Im Jewish, and you should feel sympathetic to me" card. Yep I said it folks, go ahead brand me, hang me, stone me, call me Anti-Semitic. Im not, I am simply a realist who understands that this is nothing more than Israel playing the sympathy card......again. I get it Israel, you have been shit on for centuries, your people are considered the worst people to ever live by radical, dangerous, and evil people. You have had a tough run of things, and I for one find it empowering that each time you come back swinging, and come out on top. But playing this card while murdering in cold blood thousands of Palestinians is outrageous and un called for.

So Prime Minister, let me ask you something. If the United States came out tomorrow and said if you don't return to the 1967 borders, we will revoke our support of your state and consider you to be an ally with which we do nothing but trade with, no foreign aid, no military expenditures, no money, and most of all no backing you when those wild and crazy muslims come knocking on Jerusalem's door. Then what would you do? I am about positive you would shit your pants and come crying to the United States for help. You are like the United States of the middle east (just not as big and your all Jews), your flagrant, you don't give a shit what anybody thinks, you place yourself on a pedestal above all those other middle eastern nations, and most of all you commit the same kind of atrocities on the Palestinians that you once received yourselves. 

Face the facts, you share a home land with the other two major religions in the world. You live in a place considered by BILLIONS of people to be the most holy place in the world. You have a responsibility to make that place not only "holy" but safe for those who come to worship and be apart of that city. Even more so you have the responsibility of being the "Moderate" middle eastern nation. You are suppose to be the ones promoting Democracy, freedom of expression and religion in the middle east. Not the one promoting violence, hatred, and stubbornness, which is exactly what you do every time you discard the idea of re-drawing borders and achieving ever lasting peace with Palestine. 

The Palestinians deserve plenty of blame as well for their radicalized leadership of the past, their violent methods of negotiation, and their flagrant disrespect for non-violent pace talks. But the Palestinians are not the ones receiving money and military aid from the worlds richest and most militarily advanced nation in the world. 

Until Israel steps to the plate and agrees to give the Palestinians some of their land back, and agrees for a peaceful resolution to the non-stop violence that afflicts that region, we will always be burdened with this moronic, religious based struggle. So Israel the ball is in your hands, will you lead the path to prosperity and peace, or will you lead the path of death, destruction, and hatred?

Then again all of this arguing from both sides could be fixed in one easy step:

STOP BUYING INTO ALL THAT RELIGIOUS BULLSHIT 

Just think about it

So I have watched teh news very little the past few days, but have noticed one thing that is getting on my nerves. The flooding of Cajun country in Louisiana. Now this flooding is a man made disaster, why? Because teh flood gates have literally been opened on sparsely populated cajun country to avoid a catastrophe like the one we had in New Orleans from Katrina. But this flooding of the mighty Mississippi raises not only ethical and moral questions, but governmental and political abound, and it goes hand and hand with philosophy. So today lets talk about a few of the issues involved in the flooding.

For one I am going to ask you all a question and I want responses, theyy can be short, long, detailed, or whatever I just want one. So when i took this ethics class in college we were asked a series of questions and this was one of them:

"You are standing next to a train track, and next to that track is a track diversion mechanism,  where the track will split into two tracks. You are standing there and notice one guy working on the track to the left, then you see five guys on the other track to the right working on the track. All of the sudden you hear a train, and you see the train coming down the line, but the men working do not. You see that the train is headed straight for the five men, but you have the power to divert the track to the one man, either way you are going to sacrifice somebody, that is if you are involved at all. So what do you do? Do you save the five lives? Or do you save the one life?"
^ Most people will say ont he basis that five lives is greater than one, thus they would move the track to the left and sacrifice the one man, and save the five guys. But couldn't you have left it alone? Maybe the one guy was a father, and the other five were hardcore criminals who were ordered to help fix the track. Or we could go in any other direction on the subject, but in the end it comes back to this:

This is the Mississippi and yes it's flooding. And the Army Corps of Engineers has decided its best to flood sparsley populated cajun country to save New Orleans and Baton Rouge again. Now at face value, yes it makes sense, it makes about as much sense as diverting the track to the one guy and saving the other five. But why do we have to this? Well once again you read my blog and im a smart guy so im going to tell you why.

We all remember the summer of 2005, levees broke in New Orleans, FEMA was a disaster, and we found out exactly how weak and fragile our infrastructure is. And nearly six years later, we are facing the same problem. Why are we even facing this problem? Why are the levees not able to hold this water? Why is it that we must sacrifice the others to save the others? If we would actually spend the money to fix these things, we wouldn't have to do things like this. Ruin lives, ruin homes, and even in some cases death. This is just like Katrina, it's a man made disaster, with some help from mother nature. It is a complete disgrace and no doubt a slap in the face of the people of cajun country. if we would invest in our infrastructure and strengthen our levees around these big cities, this conversation would not be happening. But it is happening, and now we must figure out what we will do about it.

happy reveling

more post to come soon 

WELCOME BACK

So i haven't posted anything in a while, and i apologize to my dearest readers for that. I have been awfully busy, what with friends coming to my house as refugees from the tornado in alabama, got a brand new car, and so many other thing that i just didn't have time to post. for that i am sorry. but the posts will be up and going again full steam ahead tomorrow. so turn on, tune in, and drop out.

BREAKING NEWS: BIN LADEN DEAD

So if you haven't heard this ass hat is dead. that's right osama bin laden is dead. good riddance. there is a major political side to this, but i have to work and im tired as hell. more on this later. 

will be starting the "Issues" series here in the coming days.