"justice"

Note: for the purposes of the internet, I'll probably still be dropped off the face of the planet for a few days.

Spending time in a courtroom is downright depressing. You see people slipping through the cracks as you watch. Black man after black man after black man...sure, the numbers might indicate that poverty is more widespread among minorities, and crime is more widespread among the impovershed...but that sort of disproportionality really makes me wonder. Public defenders who probably get too many cases to remember a single client's face mumbling with indifference, the judge looking at a stack of papers for a few minutes before making a decision and moving on...and what's this all for? Justice, apparently. It seems to only hurt. It also angers me that rapes occur every day, and where are the cops? Looking to see if they can find drug users and dealers.

Too much was running through my head, and I still haven't sorted it all out.

On a completely unrelated note...do males ever learn tact? Is it just something that seems absent in the early years, or is it (as I am suspecting more and more) something that is never learned? A couple of friends of mine recently broke up because one moved accross the country for college. He managed to move on, I guess, because within a week he found a new girl. Sure, it seems odd too me, and the girl is still upset and nowhere near moving on...but I can't really fault him for it, and anyway it wasn't like he was actively looking for anything. What can I fault him for, though? He broke the news by saying "I found someone to replace you."

Teenage boys...at least we can laugh at them.

not written under the influence

I was reading To Kill a Mockingbird today, and at some point thought of the book survey, and realized that perhaps I'm not reading enough contemporary novels. I did just recently read Everything is Illuminated, but still...not very much. Yet I still feel that I need to firm my base in the classics...this is the first time I'm reading To Kill a Mockingbird (I'm in college), and I still haven't read Catcher in the Rye...I'd like to read more Dostoyevsky...and anyway, Naked Lunch put me off contemporary writing. I mean, just because you're on acid and a half million other drugs doesn't mean that you have the right to publish nonsensical garbage. I swear, 99% of people who bought that book bought it to look intelligent. Now that I think about it, some of the shittiest stuff I've read has been written under the influence...sure, many greats in writing (the beatniks), music (duh) and the rest of the arts have been on drugs, but for a good majority of people, they just make them stupid. And then they think their works are so great...man did I get sick reading poems and listening to songs by my stoner friends with egos too large for what they were producing.

The lesson here is...I have a lot of reading to do! And unfortunately, somewhere in there I have to waste my time reading Lord of the Rings because I promised a kid I would...though, she doesn't seem to be keeping to her word about reading an actual work of literature. I think I'll put it off.

bizarre

I don't know how to feel...

Pluto loses planetary status

meme

Sigh...I was tagged. I blame Mark for this source of procrastination.

1. One book that changed your life?
The Stranger, by Albert Camus

2. One book you have read more than once?
This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
the complete works (particularly short stories) of Mark Twain. He's got it all...funny, poignant, beautiful.

4. One book that made you laugh?
Anything by Kurt Vonnegut, or Oscar Wilde

5. One book that made you cry?
East of Eden by John Steinbeck

6. One book you wish had been written?
something great about why people shouldn't take themselves so seriously

7. One book you wish had never been written?
whatever the first book is on organic chemistry...grrr ochem

8. One book you are currently reading?
The Island by Aldous Huxley

9. One book you've been meaning to read?
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

from the lebanese point of view

Lebanese civilians talk about life in southern Lebanon during and after the war

There are points in this where I feel sympathy, and there are points that are utterly ridiculous. You really can see the power that Hezbollah has over the people of Lebanon.
For example:

Q: Is there widespread bitterness towards Hezbollah for using civilians as human shields resulting in many needless deaths?
Lina: Hezbollah never, never used civilians as human shields. It was a matter of pride for us; they were fighting for us. Everything they did was for us, so we could live in dignity and freedom.
--
It is Hezbollah who stopped Israel invading our country any more than a few hundred metres. And it liberated the south from Israel in 2000.
--
Fairuz: The reason we are happy about our martyrs is because we know there is a price for everything and we are willing to pay that price. If you want water you have to pay the price for it. Our blood is the only thing we have to pay with for what we want.
--
Q: Could Rim and Fairuz explain why they are reluctant to show their faces in the photographs?
Rim: At the slightest occasion Israel will be ready to display our photos and call us terrorists. They would probably put us on a list of terrorists, because Israel lacks democracy and freedom, unlike us.

a bit old...

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/story?id=2288095&page=1

It's pretty strange stuff. I was talking about it with my boyfriend last week, and he asked me if my personality was already affected, what did I think of that. While it is a tad creepy, I suppose we are, on top of our genetic makeup, the sum of our life experiences...and what's worse about a parasite affecting how I think than the environment I was raised in?

Still, even with the rationalization, it's pretty creepy. PARASITES IN MY MIND!

Lafferty suspects it may account for cultural differences. Boring men in the middle east might not be a bad idea at this point...

Green wisdom

Yesterday I spent quite a bit of time with one of my favorite Greens. Late fifties hippie, miraculously mentally intact considering the ridiculous amount of drug use (had a really bad addiction to cocaine, now just a pothead with the occassional use of psychedelics), was a CO during Viet Nam...everyone knows the story. He now lives on a nice bit of land in the forrest, working his way off the grid. He's been active in the Green Party since for a good amount of it's history in America.

And he's a Zionist.

Still fairly critical of the Israeli government, mind you (though not so critical of the recent Lebanon conflict), but just will never shake off the nice Jewish upbringing. And very much in the closet about it. Anyway, in talking to him about the left's anti-Israel stance and bias against us pro-Israel folks, and he said something that I found very poignant. I'll end with it:

In order for peace to be reached in any situation, we need pro-peace people on both sides.

except for that whole slavery and racism thing...

When forced to put a name to my politics, I often say "Jeffersonian."

"law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual."
--Thomas Jefferson

I've been gone awhile. Some Zionist stuff was done. Some tormenting Nessie was done. Actually, after Thelma...I mean Tia...and I left some literature at his workplace, he called us "self confessed member[s] of a murderous death cult." Gotta love paranoia.

In my "what's pissing me off today" segment:

CA prop 85
73 failed. Can we be done with this? OK, to be fair, it was by a narrow margin and perhaps some of those voting no were fiscal conservatives who were voting no on everything because they were angry that their tax dollars were being wasted for an unnecessary special election.

But...I'm angry at the measure itself. We seem to have medical confidentiality at the age of 14 for just about everything else. This is just an effort to make abortion stand out and seem "wrong." And, it could easily tear families apart. Not that anti-abortion advocates care about the living or anything like that.

So...San Francisco. Saturday August 12, 9:30 AM. Civic Center. Be there or else!