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gaardian
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Country: United States
State: California
Birthday: 9/7/1979
Gender: Male
Interests: Philsophy, Western Religion, History, Politics, Movies
Expertise: Theology, Philosophy
Occupation: Student
Industry: Education/Research
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
12/7/2004
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| So I defended my thesis last week and I passed, which was good. But I screwed up the defense royally. They asked me to step outside so I couldn't hear anything, I heard EVERYTHING. You know all of those snarky little comments you make about something when that person isn't in the room. Yeah, I heard all of that stuff. I tried not to, I went about twenty five feet away from the room which is as far as one can get without leaving the building but I could hear it all. The acoustics in that place are amazing. Then I was asked to step into the room to defend. By that point I was really flustered and a little demoralized which made everyting a lot worse. Needless to say it was two of the longest hours of my life. When I left the room I got to hear even more joyous comments from my commitee while they graded my defense. By the time I was done I felt like I got kicked in the gut. Very much fun. They really didn't have me change anything though. Only one senetence and quite a few mistypes in ninety pages of thesis. So I wonder, was it really that bad? I don't know. With what free time I have I've been playing the Godfather. Not a bad game but the map is so huge driving around town is a little bit of a pain. Other than that well worth the twenty it now costs for the PS2. | | |
| Crazy Move Part II: Why oh Why did I let her keep any crap at the house? It became more and more evident that the lady running the sale was completely idiotic. She would post stuff on craigslist once every two weeks or so and complain that we wre putting so much pressure on because it was so busy. We would get calls from her on Friday nights telling us that she would have to come over right away to sell a poker table or a toaster oven or some other thing. Finally I'd had enough and I scheduled with our trash people to have it all hauled away. It was over a month since the actual sale and we just wanted it to end. So two weeks in advance I told her to get whatever she wanted out. I gave her another warning a week into it. Always an excuse. I'm taking my car in, I'm having a mammogram, I'm in Palo Alto. Finally the day before I told her it would end up in the trash. She gave me about three stories as to why she couldn't come over to the house and begged me to stick it on the side of the house. I did and it got stolen or she took it. I still don't know which. But after that I thought that everything was done. Oh no!! She calls again about a week later and says that she thinks one of my friends took her speaker. After the sale I was giving away everything that was large that my family didn't want so that I could move into my downstairs. I told one of my friends about the speaker box we had and he wanted it. She was ther and watched him take only my grandma's speakers. This was over a month ago. So my natural response was why did it take so long to figure out especially because she said all of her prep had been for "inventory". I tell her I'll call my friend. I don't. What conversation am I going to have with him? "Hey man, hows it going? Did you steal crazy beatch's speaker about a month ago." I tell her he doesn't have it and to leave us alone and then go to work. The Lady BREAKS IN TO MY HOUSE!!!!!! She apparently doesn't believe that we don't have the speaker and still have her freakin toaster oven. Everything in our basement is moved around and she took our dryer sheets. Holy Crazy Beatch Batman!!!! Needless to say I'm creeped out and have to stay around the house, for a day to get the locks changed and guard the house in general. I have to actually miss work for this crap. Probably should of charged her, but she had a key from before and it would have been difficult to prove that everyting was "moved around" in our basement and our dryer sheets were stolen. So that was our move into our new place. | | |
| Crazy move Pt. 1: So around Christmas time we tell my aunt and grandma that we are willing to move into Grandma's house b/c she's moving in with my aunt and they need someone to take care of it. They agree and we hook everything up with our landlord at the time that we'll be out by the end of January or early February. Since my grandma is moving to a significantly smaller space they decide to have an estate sale on the property so she can get something for all ofthis stuff she owns and no one wants. This is when things get insane. We move in and the estate sale is being put on downstairs while we live upstairs. Not incredibly conveinient, but for a week we can put up with it. The lady running the sale is a freakin' lunatic. The first night she accuses us of stealing her stuff. When we ask her what is missing she can't really think of anything. Great way to start a business relationship. She stays up until two or three playing loud music and singing while "working". Working is in quotes because after she left we would come down at night and wonder what the heck she was doing for ten hours a day. She accuses us of stealing repeatedly during this time and complains that our Glade plug in is really some kind of chemical attack against her. Awesome. During the sale she keeps putting off the time which she wants to get her crap out of our house. Because it turns out she's selling her stuff at my grandma's estate sale. There's honestly about six boxes worth of stuff and she thinks that it should take her four or five days to get it out. We feel this is ridiculous and ought to take no more than four of five hours. We call my aunt who hired her and tells her to get out in twenty four hours at the latest. She filps out and then spends the rest of the sale complaining about us and my aunt in full earshot of us (we're still upstairs) to anyone who will listen. Increasingly awesome. Sale ends at five and when she leaves at eleven there is crap everywhere downstairs she says she will finish up tomorrow. When she shows up the next day I sit down there and watch her "work" to expedite things. It takes this woman thirty minutes to fold a towel and put it in the box because she is folding and refolding it. When I offer to help she refuses because "I will do it wrong." She is at my house until eleven and packs all of the boxes but "doesn't have time to load it all." and leaves boxes in our living room. For some reason unknown to me I allow this and some of my grandmothers other things to reside in our garage where she will try to sell it on craigslist. This is when things begin to get really interesting. | | |
| Thesis is done, excellent. Now I can look forward to the little things. Blogging. Reading the news. Not running to the copy center every day to get another draft to edit for four hours. Oh the joy. So I've had a pretty busy and eventful winter about which I will be commenting in more detail shortly. Here are the highlights: Moving Being "Burglarized" of Dryer Sheets Estate Sale from Hades. . .(see also last entry) Thesis Panic AWOL Brother Dance Dance Revolution Extreme II and many more!!!! | | |
| I have been thinking long and hard about the U.S. situation in Iraq. For over a year I have been hoping that the President would send enough troops to stabilize what was at the time a growing Sunni insurgency. I felt that any Shi'ite retaliation against the Sunnis was necessary to control the insurgents who were the chief threats to US troops on the ground in Iraq. I feel that this is no longer the case, Shi'ite response to Sunni attacks has grown from something which can be defended as defensive to offensive in nature. The situation on the ground has come to the tipping point where I believe that the Shi'ite majority and Sunni minority are on the inevitable path to a full blown civil war. This will be very nasty because of twenty years of conscious attempts by Saddam to import Sunnis into majority Shi'ite and Kurdish towns. The fighting is reaching a neighbor against neighbor type of situation which will be Rwandan in proportions in that it will be widespread, local, and outside of the reach of any governmental control.
While I pray this is not the case, I think that no power, political, religious, or military is able to stop it when neighbors hate one other enough to kill each other. It is like trying to kill a swarm of bees with a baseball bat, a few will fall but you will get stung and stung badly, and over and over again.
Under these conditions the US can do absolutely no good. What we should do is withdraw our troops to Kuwait, Kurdistan, and Bahrain. With this positioning we can be in a position to control major flare ups of violence and large wandering armies controlled by local warlords. We can also ensure the security of the relatively stable and friendly Iraqi Kurdistan while simultaneously limiting their involvement in any civil war between Sunni's and Shiites. This will prevent any more destabilization than what has already occurred.
The Saudis and the Iranians are already going to and already illicitly are funding each side while reaping the benefits of what nominal control the US military has established in the region. Once the US leaves, two things will happen. Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia will likely be flooded with refugees, and those who remain to duke it out in Iraq will be funded by the Saudis and the Iranians. This will have two effects which are positive for US policy. The increase in Sunni refugees to Syria will likely drive a wedge in the Syrian/Iranian alliance as Syria is forced to pay for refugees created largely by Iranian funded death squads. Lastly the Iranians and Saudis will likely duke it out for control of the region using large amounts of resources undermining eachother rather than funding radical Sunni and Shiite Islam throughout the Muslim world. US location in Kuwait and Bahrain or Quatar will hopefully prevent the escalation of this regional conflict over Iraq from spreading to a direct all-out war between the Saudi's or Iranians while protecting vital shipping lanes to the rest of the world.
Sadly this solution is morally reprehensible. It leaves Iraqi supporters of US involvement in untenable positions on the ground without support. Hopefully those can find some sort of home or at least detente in Kurdistan. Make no mistake however, civil war is going to happen between Shia and Sunni in Iraq whether we like it or not. The best the US can do is minimize the violence while simutaneously rebuilding its miltary, badly depleted in rested men and equipment. There is also the question of Iranian nuclear capacity and whether or not the Iranians will simply nuke Riyadh in a couple of years if they get a nuclear weapon. I was against going into Iraq from the very start because I feared that this would happen. Once we went I felt that we were compelled to stay if we could do anything to reconcile the Iraqis and bring them together as a unified nation state. This is no longer something that the United States is capable of doing in my opinion. It is also morally reprehensible to ask our troops to continue dying for a policy that we know does not work, and I don't think that the Iraqis want us there any more than we want to be there. It is simply arrogant to impose ourselves where we are no longer wanted. We must look to our own strength and not spend everything we have on this war.
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