First a few words about Boo. I've been reading his stuff over at the "orange place" for about gosh, four years now?  A long time.  And I always admired his writing and when he set up his own website I was quite honored to get an email informing me of the fact.  

And he's certainly been a tireless campaigner for all the stuff I know I could NEVER do, all the political analysis of seats, the really in-depth articles about important issues and the activist stuff.  And he's done a great job of keeping his website viable and pretty much completely "civilized", which is just about impossible in this day and age.

So long story short, in no way am I criticizing the PERSON nor the work he's done.  I respect him greatly and what follows is just my response to it.  Got it?

I've been watching the Ron Paul candidacy from afar here, across the ocean.  And it's been very appealing to me.  It's been very appealing to a lot of people I respect as well and I've been watching a lot of his videos of debates and town hall meetings to try and figure out why.

I won't cover Pakistan because it's getting a ton of coverage now, nor Iraq.  You already know what's going on in Iraq.

Everything below refers to just the last week.

Pop Quiz Time!

To understand where we are, sometimes it is worth taking a look at where we've been.  And to do that, I'm going to tell two stories, both set in the tiny Central American nation of Guatemala.  But it is actually a story about the United States of America.

The looming war or strike or conflict with Iran is clearly something that affects the entire globe.  Yet journalists consistently forget to mention something absolutely critical about Iran's potential to acquire/develop/build nuclear weapons.

Tomorrow I will go to his funeral in a small village near here so we can lay him to rest.  But here today I'd like to celebrate his life.

Orwell's government minions in 1984 used the "memory hole" to rewrite history but I often wonder if what is actually currently happening is far worse: not a disappearance of news archives but more of a "Great Forgetting".  That is, when enough people are hit with a high enough level of shocking information the result is becoming desensitized to it.

Let's probe these awful wounds in the name of spiritual health.

I've got something of a lighter workload today so I thought I'd take you on a journey through where some of it comes from.  It's neither an exhaustive look nor a complete one, but it's a taste.

I thought that looking at a Civics textbook currently in use would be a good start.  Just through pure random Google results (i.e. it was on the first page), I'll start with this one by Holt, Rinehart and Winston entitled "CIVICS" with the subtitle of "Social Studies".

This is what I would say.