(Click for full-size.)

For their courage and conviction, they are being beaten, intimidated, corralled, and even killed.

This is important, and I believe the we, all of us, should stand up and take notice.  Tyranny is real.  It exists in the world, and if we don’t do everything to combat it here and now, then all it does is let tyrants know that they can have their way.  Appeasement will not work.  Inaction will not work.

Spread the word.  Don’t let these brutal attacks go unnoticed.  We’re a long way away, and there’s not much we can do, but we must do everything in our power.

Ahmadinejad and Khomeini are tyrants.  They are murderers.  Never forget that.

At the moment, Twitter is one of the few major outlets that a lot of Iranians have to communicate.  For more news including some eyewitness reports and pictures from Tehran and the rest of Iran, check out #IranElections on Twitter.

At the risk of sending this post over into full-on melodrama territory, I paraphrase Pastor Niemöller: “First tyranny occured in Iran, but I said nothing, because I was not Iranian.”  Let’s not go down that path.

Updated: Just wanted to also give props to Twitter and their hosting provider NTT America for delaying maintenance work to keep Twitter available for Iranian protesters.  At this point it’s the only communication with the outside world that a lot of them have.

*Sigh* I’ll be cleaning things up here for awhile. Hopefully a more interesting post in the works for tonight/tomorrow.

But anyway, on to the video:

The first major difference between the Canadian and you and I is that the Canadian has two stomachs and a gizzard. If you suspect someone of Canadianness, you should get your pocket knife out and attempt to ascertain how many stomachs they have. Your basic Canadian, afraid of discovery, will flinch back from the knife at their tummy. A patriotic American wouldn’t be a’skeered to let you count their innards, since they have nothing to hide.

1.) When shooting unopened pop cans with a Mosin, they actually do make a more impressive burst if you shake them up first. I would have thought that the added pressure would be negligible compared to the pressure created by a .30 caliber rifle round ripping through it, but there’s a noticeable difference.

2.) Shooting clays is a hell of a lot of fun. Difficult, but fun. We were using a little plastic hand-thrower and so they were pretty slow moving. I’d say I probably hit half of them.

3.) Some bored math and Googling lead me to figure out a surprising and somewhat morbid fact. If you were to take all the blood of all the human beings on the planet, and pool it in one place, it wouldn’t even fill a modestly sized lake. (By volume it works out to about 40,800,000,000 liters, or 33,077.1 acre feet.  There are many lakes in the Spokane area  that contain more volume than that.  Deer Lake, a little ways north of here, is only moderately sized, and yet even it is about 57,000 acre feet in volume.  Coeur d’Alene Lake, just across the border in Idaho, is a sizeable 3,000,000 acre feet.  That means that you’d have to disanguinate the population of the planet 90 times over in order to fill it.

Interesting, eh?  When I thought of the question of how much human blood was on the planet, I rather expected there to be a lot more of it.

4.) Speaking of, I never before knew that large bodies of water in the US are measured in acre feet.

“You’re not alone. The entire human race suffers from the same affliction whether they know it or not. . . . You could be at risk to exposure to flying polyps.”

The blog’s not dead.  It’s been laid aside for awhile (far too long), but it’s being revived.  I had a conversation recently with my good friend Raquel and she convinced me that I need to write more.  She’s perfectly right, of course.  I’ve let my writing slide rather severely this last year or so and I desperately need to get back to it.  This blog is a convenient way to do that.

So the blog has been sick, but is being ressurected, Lazarus-like from the dead.

The Economy

Okay, a note to everyone out there.  The economy sucks, yes.  But this isn’t the end and, what’s more, you can’t even see it from here.  And despite the current government’s best efforts, things will recover.  The markets are still extremely volatile and projected government spending deficit is so staggering as to make numbers meaningless.  Still, in the short term inflation predictions suggest we’ll be at about 3% for this next year, which I’m lead to believe is average.

Of course, what the current currency printing and central planning campaigns that our government is engaging will do to the economy is hard to say.  I have my own predictions (severe long term inflation, weakening international competitiveness and a prolonged recession) but economies are complex things and messing with them often has myriad unintended consequences.

So sick, but not dead.

Politics

I attended the recent Spokane tea party and, while I was somewhat disappointed in the tone of the event here locally (lots of neo-conservative posturing from the speakers), I was heartened to see so many people there.  Many of them were folks who had never turned out for such an event in their lives, coming out to make their voices heard.  These people were inspired to come because they felt their country was going astray.  They were there because they cared and wanted to help make their nation better.

To then see these protesters vilified and insulted in the media and by many in the leftward parts of the political spectrum was profoundly disheartening.  This derision came from many of the same people who cheered anti-government protests during the Bush years.  Who were heartened and lauded by the spirit of dissent against what they saw as a government gone astray.  For them to so harshly condemn and mock that in their fellow Americans disappoints me.

Still, political discourse is alive and well in this country.  Admittedly it still seems frustratedly mired in the false dichotomy of a Democratic Left and a Republican Right, but I think even that’s changing.  Plenty of signs at the tea party advocated ousting both parties at the next election.  Even more expressed general pro-liberty sentiments.

So while I’ve not been impressed with either this administration (thus far) or the last, it seems that the necessary energy and belief in discourse and governance of, by, and for the people is still alive and well all across the political spectrum.  So while I think government is bloated, irritable, and ill now, I hold out hopes that it can be healed.

Us

I’m not really much of a fan of Kierkegaard, but one the things which I’ve taken away from him which really rings true for me is that there is only one true Sickness Unto Death: despair.  I firmly believe that so long as we all hold ourselves up from despair we’ll weather whatever national crises we may encounter.  The economic, political, and social climates in this country are variable and unpredictable things.  Sometimes they favor us and sometimes they don’t.  But we live in a country with enshrined freedoms and a history of exercising them for the better.  And I firmly believe that, as long as we don’t let ourselves give up in despair, than no sickness this nation may endure will be unto death.

A few things I just wanted to drop in and post about…

1.) Heather West (who is comprised entirely of pure awesome) figured out that Senators had about one minute for every billion dollars to read and consider the most recent stimulus bill before they passed it.

2.) Interesting article on the BBC website attributing Britain’s victory over the Spanish to the use of standardized munitions.

3.) I want an FNP-45 so bad it hurts.

4.) I’ve been watching Bones recently and I’m stupid addicted to it.  It’s basically CSI, but with good writing and compelling characters.

5.) Thesis continues apace.  55-ish pages after cuts and what I have, I am quite happy with.  Unfortunately my advisor mentioned an off-hand idea to me the other day which totally fascinated me and has me nose-down in research, rather than writing.  Still, it’ll make for a stronger finished product.

And now, I’m off to No Excuses Thursday.