Vance Dubberly

Information is always power, always. If Turks don’t want to hear that some unit of the Greek military hates them then they do themselves a disservice. It is the people of Turkey talking to the people of Greece which will ultimately ease any tension between the two. Like an ostrich shoving it’s head in a hole so that it does not see the tiger about to attack it, Turkey can not hide from the hatred of Greeks Christians.

There has been alot of talk around cultural sensitivity with this issue. America can not impose its values of “openness” and “freedom” on other cultures. Anybody who knows me knows I am rarely at the defense of my own country. However there is something that all people in the world just need to get over. If your cultural values are such that they do damage to you and or others, your cultural values do not deserve respect, they deserve respite. Culture is a beautiful thing, unless it is self defeating. Keeping your people in the dark is self defeating and deserves contempt not only in Turkey, China, and North Korea, but also in the United States.

YouTube aka Google is the largest information broker on the planet and they are showing a disturbing willingness to bow down to some of the most brutal governments in the world simply to make a buck. Their explianation for this is page right out of Neo Conservative handbooks. “Open markets will produce open societies.? It’s nothing more than a sad attempt at justifying making a deal with the devil. Perhaps YouTube should say to Turkey, we will not let you access our site unless you repeal the law which calls for the jailing of any person who speaks ill of Turkey. If Turkey wants to censor information then it may do so, but it may not eat the fruits of the tree of knowledge.

Two weeks ago I went to the course. My girlfriend and I took a trip south to Lake San Antonio and spent a very chilly weekend at the Campground. On Saturday I biked the bike course and on Sunday I ran the run course. It was hard. Very hard. The 40K bike is nothing to scoff at. There are several hills a few of them pretty steep. The run course wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. I actually run better up hill than I do on flat ground. Doing the two in tandem will be much harder, especially after the 1.5K swim which is my worst sport.

I’ve been training a little. After Martin Luther King weekend I had to take a week off due to the damage I did to my knees that weekend. Don’t just go out and do that kind of distance after 2 months of zero training. You might finish but the end result isn’t pretty. I’ve only been running and only 3 miles 2 times a week at that. The idea is the get the body used to the impact again and to focus on mechanics, which is difficult to do if you are tired or soar. Tomorrow I’ll start back to swimming and likely add that in at least 2 days a week. The biking will wait a bit, it’s my strongest sport by far so I want to spend some time strengthening the other two before I really start the 6 day a week routine.

This weekend I’ll be heading down to Lake San Antonio again. Maybe if the temperature breaks 50 degrees I’ll do a swim too. I’ll get some pictures of the course and maybe write something a bit more personal while I’m there. I’m hoping to make this a regular series here. The Wildflower Triathlons are 3 months out and I’ve alot to do before arriving there. I’ve always wondered what others have done to get to a Triathon, what kind of lives they lead, and how they prepare. Since I’ve not had any luck finding that kind of information on the web I guess I’ll make my own.

Also I’ve started writing a program to track my training and display the training routes. I’ll get it up soon. It’s written to suport multiple users so if and when I think it’s stable enough I’ll open it up to anybody silly enough to trust me with their data.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) however was rather dismayed over the commercial. So dismayed they initiallized a campaign to have the Ad and the associated web site pulled from distribution.

WTF? The commercial was a cliche farce making fun of overly macho men who are insecure with their sexuality. How is this a slight against gay people? I’m sorry, but GLAAD and it’s supporters really need to get a grip. The commercial wasn’t making fun of Gays! It was making fun of homophobes.

The same was done by The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention who have openly critcized an ad by GM where a robot losses it’s job and then commits suicide. GM however hasn’t pulled the ad. For the first time in my life I think get to say, “Good for you GM!”

What disturbs me more than the obvious over sensitivity and motherlisness of these groups is what, in effect, they are really doing. While they might under some dellusion which requires medication believe they are looking out for the underdog or disenfranchised in society they are in fact doing damage to the cause of human rights and dignity.

By attacking ( with a straight face mind you ) these ads. GLADD and TAFSP are claims made by real victims seem laughable. I can hear my white trash freinds now, “Fucking faggots wanna make everybody gay!” ( this mentality is precisely why I don’t have those type of friends anymore ). Choosing to make a high profile battle out of a paranoid dellusion hurts the cause of Gay rights and creates animosity toward homosexual culture. Getting all worked up about a robot jumping off a bridge, well that’s funnier that the commercial.

Frivilous attacks like this do damage to the causes they are supposed to support and worse, they lend credibility to institutions which in many cases are engaged in extremely unethical practices.

Bush is right. Well kinda. OK Bush is dead wrong about pretty much everything except one thing and he can’t even articulate that right. Failure to stabilize Iraq will result in instability within our own country and cause an explosion in the number of acts of terrorism around the world. We simply cannot let Iraq crumble into Civil War. Pulling out of Iraq is not like pulling out of Vietnam where we were at war with an enemy that played by the rules of traditional warfare.

We never should have gone into Iraq. Our president lied at every turn and the American People blood thirsty for revenge after 9/11 bought those lies without question. Every justification made to support invading Iraq was a lie and it was glaringly obvious. I shouldn’t need to tell you what they are, if you don’t know by now — well that’s pretty sad. We have however broken the beehive and there are a lot of pissed off bees swarming looking for somebody to blame.

The current state of affairs in Iraq should have easily been foreseen. Much of the Islamic world has been kept in poverty by brutal dictators since World War 2, many of them, including Saddam Hussein funded and kept in power by us. People, like rats, kept under a constant state of stress turn on each other. They create factions and those factions compete for what little resources they can scrounge. It’s the same behavior we seen in gangs in our inner cities. Saddam Hussein as horrible as he was, was the cork that kept the Iraq from exploding. Remove the cork and well…

We removed the cork. Not only did we remove the cork, we broke the bottle. When we invaded Iraq we destroyed most of it’s infrastructure. We opened the door to Iran and Syria and invited them to wreak havoc in a country which they’ve long despised and in which they have strong ties to religious sects.

For our Politicians to speak of withdrawal. For both them and the media who echo them, to speak of Iraq as though somehow the Iraqis are responsible for the chaos which has ensued in that country since we invaded it, is disgusting. You don’t take the cork of a shaken bottle of champaign and expect that nobody will be getting wet. Yes it would be best for both Iraq and for the United States if they would stop bombing each other. It would have been best if we had never gone in in the first place.

So what to do now that we are there? The truth is I don’t know. What I do know is that if I came into your house with a sledge hammer and took to smashing anything I could see, it would be my responsibility to repair your house. Also I think you might not want me in your house to repair it. Perhaps as such, given that 60-70 percent of Iraqis think we should leave, it might not be a bad idea for use to hire a repairman. Perhaps we could talk the U.N. into committing peace keeping troops to Iraqi if we funded them a 100 billion or so and a committed a lot of troops ( under their authority ).

Short of that we’ll need to be there alone for at least another 6-10 years. Which is what we should have planned on to begin with. Damn foolish that we didn’t. I don’t hate to say… I told you so.

This is going to be kinda random, mostly it’s just a bit of news and some thoughts which are the surfacing of the many tracks of thought which are my life.

A) The life I am living is not the life I want to live. I want to do technology, but I want to use it to build community, to connect people both to their living peers and to their past peers. I think this is the beauty of the internet.The internet is the apex of what information technology will be during our lifetimes and it saddens me to see it used as little more than an opportunity to make more money. Not that making money is bad… but information has value beyond the $$. I need to get on my plans. Which I won’t tell you about here.

B) Barrack Obamma. I am listening to this mans latest book. “The Audacity of Hope” I have to say this is the first politician I listened to in many years that has even a lick of sense. At the very least the book serves as an explaination how our government actually works, but Obamma adds somethiing else here, he adds wisdom. His ideas forman symphony which I have failed to see in public discourse in…well ever. I hope he runs for President soon as this country is entirely to awash in “spin” and “one liner” word play for it’s own good. A voice that can bring coherence to complex world we live in is badly needed.

C) I went camping this weekend. The point of the trip was to gain some perspective on an event I signed myself up for in May of this year. The Wildflower Triathlon. Wendy and I staid in the campgrounds that host he event. Sunday we did the bike ride, and today I did the run. My body is a wreak. While I’m pretty sure I can finish the even which will be upon me in 3 months. I’m not so sure I willl be able to move fore a few days afterward. More later.

D) I am a revolutionary. It’s that simple. I am driven by the desire to break new ground, to open new pathways, to flush out the stail with something freash. It does not matter in what facet of life, I’m always looking for something better and I do so with little regard to what has previously been standing. This has not been my life as of late. I attribute this to the type of revolution I have lately been marching with. There seems to be 3 kinds. 1) nhilist, the revolution which simply seeks to destroy the status quo, 2) suplantist, one which seeks to tear down the status quo and replace it with a new structure, and 3) irrelevantist, one which fails to even acknoledge the status quo and see only it’s own structure exteding into the all manner of life. I believe I have move progressivly in my personal life from 3 to 1. This is un acceptable.

Man I am soar. More in a later post.