Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

Eisenhower said that. A great general. A great statesman. And it seems to me, a great human being.

A special report up on CNN’s website is showing names, photographs, and brief descriptions of the circumstances surrounding each of the 509 military deaths in Iraq so far. A trend is starting to develop as I scroll through the list. Many are being killed by ‘non-hostile gunshot wounds’, which I guess is a military euphemism for ‘friendly fire’. It seems to me that a bullet entering the body is pretty much always hostile.

Another subset of this group have been killed in automobile accidents, falling off buildings, helicopter crashes, and even one listed as ‘death by natural causes’. Are they trying to tell us that someone died of old age while in a combat zone?

I have mixed emotions about this war. First, there are three dozen other dictatorships in the world just as brutal. Most of those our government supports in one way or another. All are considered ‘friendly’ to the United States, though they are decidedly unfriendly to their own. While overthrowing this dictator is undoubtedly a good thing, it was done for entirely the wrong reasons and as Jesus said, “Grapes can not grow from thorns.”

No, I believe we went in there for a few bad reasons. President Bush needed a villain to point at, otherwise the world would be pointing at HIM as the bad guy. Corporate interests wanted the resources, and they are very close to this administration and particularly close to Cheney. They’ve even passed a ruling stating that our corporations shall be free from the rule of law while doing business in Iraq. Is that even legal in a global sense? What if China said that their businesses would be absolved of ANY crime in the United States? I guess the rules are different when you’ve destroyed the standing military of a sovereign nation and sent its ruler into hiding.

To the families of those who have died, my bitterness does not lessen your grief or the sacrifice of those who have fallen. Like all soldiers, they were called, they went, and they died for purposes that were beyond them. It is for us, as a nation, to ask if the end justifies the means. In the end, what defines us as a nation will not be our economic status, the number of jobs available, our religious views, or our perceived freedoms. It will be our willingness to support injustice or deny tyrants their power over us. And I’m not talking about Saddam.

As a brief side note, Halliburton stock is up from 20.38 to 23.35 since the invasion began. Wall Street knows what this is about, even if the rest of America doesn’t.

Nature reaches out from across the millennia and astounds us with a rock formation carved by wind and rain out of sandstone into a fantastic shape to remind us of fairies, demons, or the very face of God. Some are touched by this and brought to tears as they contemplate the ages. Some feel the presence of something holy or sentient. Some feel compelled to carve their initials into the soft stone.

These small desecrations are the legacy of a culture that does not respect nature. Always have the trees stood at the edge of our settlements. Once we said, “let each man take from nature according to his need” and set forth with our stone axes to gather firewood to last through the cold night. At some point in our distant past one of our ancestors, with a small and greedy mind, looked upon a vast primeval forest and said to himself, “I could sell some of this.”

The park so fresh in my mind is owned by the nature conservancy. It is land set aside by conservationists to preserve rare flora and fauna. Tucked away in a small town where Confederate flags fly proudly in people’s yards and “League of the South” signs welcome you as if they are the local Chamber of Commerce instead of a political front for the Klu Klux Klan, you would not expect to find something so liberal as land set aside for protection. Yet the need to preserve something of nature for our children and children’s children is common to all strains of man, regardless of his religion, level of tolerance for others, or social and economic status.

To carve your name on one of the gifts of nature, or to leave so much as a soda top behind as litter, is a theft from future generations. Perhaps it is not as big of a theft as those who do mountain-top removal to get at the coal within, or those who drill for oil and rape the land for the sake of its mineral wealth, but it is the tolerance of such small desecrations that allow the greater ones to happen.

When the student is ready the teacher will appear. Or so the Chinese saying goes. I feel the same way about books. There are books that I have come into casual contact with in stores, the library, in reviews and articles but yet never picked up to read. Yet one day I pick them up to find they have something vastly relevant to say about the way events are unfolding in my life. Michael Crichton’s Prey is such a book. Recently I’ve been thinking about technology and man and the sheer lunacy of progress. Should we assume that just because we’re in charge of technology now that it will always be so? Can we really assume that we are in charge of technology now? Who can still bake their own bread? Who can entertain themselves now without digital television or the false communities of online games and forums? We are as much slaves to our technologies as an elderly woman stranded by the side of the road when her car breaks down.

I’m not sure if there has ever been such a staggering combination of hubris and raw ignorance as man. We destroy the life-giving plants that provide the very air we breath in order to churn out junk. We taint with toxic chemicals the very waters from which we spring and that make up such a high percent of our bodies. We ingest deadly poisons that have been sprayed on vegetables and consume vast amounts of synthetic hormones, human and otherwise, in our meat and dairy. We are a phage on the face of the earth and we will consume until the cycle of self-destruction can no longer sustain itself and falls apart like a snake eating its own tail. A million years from now a new culture will rise which will be poor in material wealth but rich in art, music, and philosophy. And they shall not be human.

Democracy’s only saving grace is the illusions it offers. Take General Wesley Clark (retired) for example. He comes out of the gate strong and brings such military statesmen as Washington and Eisenhower to mind. In a time when Americans feel the most insecure then enter the warrior, stage left, in statesman costume. Let’s pull off the mask and see who’s really behind this mystery, shall we?

This is a man who commanded the soldiers who threw Posse Commitatus out the window at Waco in 1993. A man who quietly did what he was told to do by the Justice Department and burned alive men, women, and their children. Well, at least we’re speculating that he did. You see, the Honest General won’t come clean about the secret meetings that were held or what was discussed. We can’t even find out who the “senior military officials” from Fort Hood were. And believe me, if the New York Times can’t dig that up then you can bet that a Steal-This-Nation blogger can’t do it.

This is a man who bombed the hell out of an industrialized nation in violation of the Nuremberg laws on war crimes. A man who targeted Milosevic’s private residence to directly threaten his family and assassinate the head of a nation we weren’t even at war with.

This is a man whose political platform has been to intellectual debate what bologna has been to gourmet cooking. Even his website has been an Easter egg hunt in terms of finding some sort of defining statement. Mostly you get rebuttals to other more ballsy politician’s comments and a concentrated attack on Bush which really drives home the General’s main governing strategy of attacking the leadership of an enemy. What’s worse is he picks attacking statements that everyone can agree with. Bush is making it too easy for the General by simply being such a scoundrel and a liar.

So before we let in the next Caesar who’ll dismantle the Republic, let’s take a good long look at this man’s history and listen to his words to try and discern our future.

The current controversy about Miss Vida Samadzai, the Afghan contestant in the Miss Earth contest, has got me wondering. Is that all we’ve got to show for rousting out the Taliban and plunging a country into at least partial anarchy? Granted, she looks great in that red bikini (although she could use a sandwich), but there should be a little more to all this than just the photogenic flesh of one of the most misunderstood genomes in the world today.

According to the various press reports I’ve read, they’re having a hard time finding ANYONE in Afghanistan who approves of this. The Supreme Court of Afghanistan (I’m picturing three old guys in a cave) have thrown some legal and religious statutes at her. Local women on the street won’t talk to reporters about it (stone a few of them for talking to male strangers and the shyness lingers on for a long time) and even the few women they did find who’d chat about it were angry. Can you blame them? In that country women are fighting both figuratively and in some cases physically to prove to men that they should be allowed to be educated and relaxed about some of the harsher tenets of Shariah law. “Just because we adopt some of the elements of Western Society doesn’t mean we’re all going to become the next whores of Babylon,” they cry. And then to help out her sisters back in the homeland, what does college student Miss Samadzai do? She dons a red bikini and struts her stuff down the catwalk at the Miss Earth pageant. Nice.