Australia Barack’s for Obama

So aside from my very bad pun (my dad found it quite clever!), Barack Obama presents the world with a last bastion of hope for the US’ last 8 years of ‘failure’. Now some of my friends will be reading this, and will be wondering – hey, isn’t Nam a right wing, rascist, white conservative wannabe? – and the answer is: No, he is not. Now I’m just simply an idealist pragmatist – if that makes sense. But aside from that, once the hysteria of having a black president dies down, reality will set.

This election was different in the last few months. We’ve seen several things on both campaign’s agenda, including the War in Iraq. It is amazing to note the effects of these campaigns: Pensylvania is a swinging state, primarily Roman Catholic, and abortion was a big issue in 2004. This year, none of those civil liberties issues were a dominant factor in this year’s election; the economy was the final push in determining the President elect.

So what effect does that have for Australia? Now some radical republicans, including my African American friend ADL (yes, he really is black – no offense) believes that Obama’s heading in a isolationist direction. Now the last time they had that, there were two world wars. That may be an extreme way of looking at things, but it certainly has its effects on Australia’s economy. I have no doubts that Australia can pull itself through this recession, Australia always does, but Obama will have to worry about the current housing problems and high unemployment in some parts of the US – part of his election promises. That leaves Australia out, and to be honest, we’re not a big player, a good friend nonetheless.

Now I find it somewhat bewildering at how Australians have not come to realise this reality, that we will not enjoy the boost we had to our economy in the last 8 years during the Bush administration, and I doubt that the AUD will reach 97 USD any time soon. But we must remember, that although he is a black US president, he is a president nonetheless, and it does have an effect on our economy. Now as an idealist, I love the idea of having a black president, and being Vietnamese, that’s not too far from having an Asian president (fingers crossed). But just remember, to analyse the dramatic effect that the US has on Australia – and anyone who says that we can rely on China is a fool, the US provides the world direction.

DISCLAIMER: If you have not already realised, this is a serious post.

 

Obama ‘08

I don’t know much about US politics, or well, politics in general, but it seems to me that Obama is a man who has the ability to inspire hope and change within a nation, and even the world. Regardless of your what you think of him, his policies or the nation he appears to be headed to lead, you have got to respect that. I know I do.

 

The Political Compass

Good evening once again, comrades.

A while ago I found a neat little site called “The Political Compass”, and today I thought I’d share it with you.

The main point of interest about this site is the relatively short political test that you can take, which asks about your opinions on various political, social and economic questions. From your answers, it calculates for you a “political compass”, which shows you where you lie on the economic scale (left-wing or right-wing) and the social scale (libertarian or authoritarian). For example, here’s mine:

Note that your position on the political compass can also be stated in numbers, with your economic position first followed by your social position. For example, mine, shown above, is (-6.2, +0.3).

As you can see, there’s more to it that simply Communism on the far Left and Fascism on the far Right (in fact, it is a myth that Communism and Fascism are opposites – Fascism is actually the opposite of Anarchism, while Communism is the opposite of neo-liberalism). There’s more to politics than the way the economy is managed – there are also social factors, which are taken into account in this graph.

Of course, this test is far from 100% accurate. In fact, it probably only gives you a very rough idea of where you lie politically as you aren’t questioned very extensively. So please don’t take this too seriously – I posted this more as a fun thing with a bit of politics mixed in.

There is also some analysis of how the political compass works, and there are some graphs that show the position of some famous politicians on the other pages of the site. I encourage you to check these out too.

If you’re interested/bored, visit the site at http://politicalcompass.org/. Click on “Take the test” on the left to take the test.

- Ruob.

 

CoD4 Death Quotes

Below is a list of quotes that appear when you die in the single-player campaign of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

"In war, truth is the first casualty" -
Aeschylus
"Incoming fire has the right of way." - Unknown
"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind."
- John F. Kennedy
"War does not determine who is right - only who is left" - Burtrand
Russell
"A ship without Marines is like a garment without buttons." - Admiral
David D. Porter, USN
"The press is our chief ideological weapon." - Nikita Khrushchev
"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury
you!" - Nikita Khrushchev
"If the enemy is in range, so are you."    - Infantry Journal
"So long as there are men, there will be wars."      - Albert Einstein
"Aim towards the Enemy." - Instruction printed on US Rocket Launcher
"I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must
we do to do good?" - Robert McNamara
"Any military commander who is honest will admit he makes mistakes in the
application of military power."   -
Robert McNamara
"You can make a throne of bayonets, but you cant sit on it for long."
- Boris Yeltsin
"The deadliest weapon in the world is a Marine and his rifle!" -
General John J. Pershing
"Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty." - Ronald
Reagan
"Whoever stands by a just cause cannot possibly be called a
terrorist." - Yassar Arafat
"Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result."
- Winston Churchill
"War is delightful to those who have not yet experienced it." -
Erasmus
"Friendly fire - isn't." - Unknown
"Diplomats are just as essential in starting a war as soldiers are for
finishing it." - Will Rogers
"I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's
only when we use them for good or evil that they become good or evil." -
William Gibson
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do
nothing." - Edmund Burke
"Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die."
- Herbert Hoover
"The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong,
unless proved otherwise." - Colin Powell
"Freedom is not free, but the U.S. Marine Corps will pay most of your
share." - Ned Dolan
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War
IV will be fought with sticks and stones."     -
Albert Einstein
"The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do.
The hard part is doing it." - Norman Schwarzkopf
“If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a
hundred battles.” - Sun Tzu
"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
character, give him power." - Abraham Lincoln
"If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merits of our
cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning." - Robert McNamara
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of
patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson
"If the wings are traveling faster than the fuselage, it's probably a
helicopter -- and therefore, unsafe." - Unknown
"Five second fuses only last three seconds." - Infantry Journal
"If your attack is going too well, you're walking into an ambush." -
Infantry Journal
"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." - Colin Powell
"When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend." - U.S. Army
Training Notice
"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on." -
John F. Kennedy
"A leader leads by example, not by force." - Sun Tzu
"If you can't remember, the claymore is pointed toward you." -
Unknown
"There are only two kinds of people that understand Marines: Marines and
the enemy. Everyone else has a second-hand opinion." - General William
Thornson
"The more marines I have around, the better I like it." - General
Clark, U.S. Army
"Never forget that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder." -
Unknown
"Keep looking below surface appearances. Don't shrink from doing so just
because you might not like what you find." - Colin Powell
"Try to look unimportant; they may be low on ammo." - Infantry
Journal
"The world will not accept dictatorship or domination." - Mikhail
Gorbachev
"Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws
before destroying them." - Voltaire
"Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They're just brave five
minutes longer." - Ronald Reagan
"In the end, it was luck. We were *this* close to nuclear war, and luck
prevented it." - Robert McNamara
"Some people live an entire lifetime and wonder if they have ever made a
difference in the world, but the Marines don't have that problem." -
Ronald Reagan
"It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you just
bombed." - U.S. Air Force Marshal
"We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to
visit violence on those who would harm us." - George Orwell
"If at first you don't succeed, call an air strike." - Unknown
"Tracers work both ways." - U.S. Army Ordinance
"Teamwork is essential, it gives them other people to shoot at." -
Unknown
"The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war."
- Ralph Waldo Emmerson
"We're in a world in which the possiblity of terrorism, married up with technology,
could make us very, very sorry we didn't act." - Condoleeza Rice
"All warfare is based on deception." - Sun Tzu
"The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will
lead to the destruction of nations." - Robert McNamara
"In war, you win or lose, live or die - and the difference is just an
eyelash." - General Douglas MacArthur
"You cant say civilization dont advance - for in every war, they kill you
in a new way." - Will Rogers
"They'll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and
you're going to destroy nations." - Robert McNamara
"It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be
one of those men who goes into battle." - General Norman Schwarzkopf
"Any soldier worth his salt should be anti-war. And still, there are
things worth fighting for." - General Norman Schwarzkopf
"It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it." - General
Douglas MacArthur
"Let your plans be as dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move,
fall like a thunderbolt." - Sun Tzu
"Anyone, who truly wants to go to war, has truly never been there
before!" - Larry Reeves
"Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never
encountered automatic weapons." - General Douglas MacArthur
"Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it
back has no brain." - Vladimir Putin
"My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the
earth." - George Washington
"Cluster bombing from B-52s are very, very, accurate. The bombs are
guaranteed to always hit the ground." - USAF Ammo Troop
"If a man has done his best, what else is there?" - General George S.
Patton
"The bursting radius of a hand-grenade is always one foot greater than
your jumping range." - Unknown
"The tyrant always talks as if he's preserving the best interests of his
people when he actually acts to undermine them." - Ramman Kenoun
"Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom - for himself." -
Elbert Hubbard

 

More Anger

Dear Readers,

Here are my thoughts,
I recently decided to read an article about the execution of Saddam Hussein.  In reading this article, I discovered that this event had been blamed for 7 copycat deaths, apparently all suicides, from children 15 years old or younger.  One 9-year old in America apparently did it as an experiment.
Does anyone else think that this is a good thing?
Think me heartless if you will, but is the world not full of idiots?  How many people buy from infomercials, think that in cutting themselves, they help emotional pain, or say, emulate the execution of an Iraqi dictator as AN EXPERIMENT!!  I mean, honestly, this kid saw the damn broadcast, and he saw that he died, how many more outcomes did this kid think there could possibly be?  It is people like this that create street gangs and trailer parks (no offence meant).  Call me snobbish and uptight, but overpopulation is a serious problem, and all the governments like to bitch about the lack of resources, yet they allow people who, 500 years ago would have been driven out of town, to have 11 kids, AND PAY THEM FOR IT!! We do not need a baby bonus, that simply breeds bogans.  What we need is a better education system.  As a product of the public education in our fine state, i feel privileged to have met some of the diverse people that populate it, and it is through meeting many of these people that I get inspiration to write articles like this one.

I’ve been doing some writing recently on BigThink (excellent site for the intellectually and philosophically inclined).  I have recently come to the conclusion that the world is quite severely overpopulated.  The world (on average) doubles it’s population every 42 years. This trend has continued for the last few hundred years.  Think about this, Man’s tendency to commit acts of violence against others.  From the very dawn of human civilisation, we have kept killing each other.  In response, we began to breed more and more to make up for this death.  We then reached a point after World War I where we decided to create rules of killing and control, to ensure that this death never occurred again.  Think about it, did any part of the world complain about overpopulation until the 70’s?  No! Because, we were quite successfully killing each other off until the point where we decided that war was a bad thing.  Now that we have restrictions on war, also due to the great advances in technology and medicine, the human lifespan has increased from four decades to nearly eight.  this doubling of the human lifespan, as well as the increase in birth rates due to the imagined prosperity, have now caused overpopulation.  Did you know that there is actually a worldwide food shortage? To the point where biofuels are now no longer viable because of the drain that they would put on the world food market.  The president of Greenpeace has now placed his faith in nuclear power, is this not a sign of severe trouble approaching?

Enough.

Harvey