Ok, so for months and months, I’ve been arguing that the Bush camp rhetoric concerning Iraq has been just that - rhetoric. There are no real war plans. Bush has learned from his father’s work as President and VP under Reagan that a bluff is as effective as action. Here’s what I argued he was doing - Saddam can’t be allowed to have dangerous weapons, because he’s proven that he’s willing to use them (attacking Kuwait and missiles into Israel in 1991). He’s also a terrible leader for his own people; however, the world has many of them, and countries need to serve most internal problems internally, else we’d be invading a country a week.The critical issue is to ensure that Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam will be allowed, reluctantly, to stay in power if he has no weapons. End story. The only way to get inspectors back is these bluffs. Now, the liberals would say that Saddam already is allowing inspectors back. But he’s only allowing them back with conditions. That’s unacceptable. If we can’t inspect Place X, then he’ll hide the weapons there. Doesn’t take Stephen Hawking to figure that out.

That’s what I used to think, at least. The wording of Bush’s request to Congress to allow him unconditional power in dealing with threats in Iraq is very similar to the text of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that got us in the 10-year disaster called the Vietnam War. Speaking as an American, not even as a citizen of the world, and as a non-liberal, I would rather have 10 World Trade Center bombings than another Vietnam War.

Luckily, those aren’t our only choices.

In order to regain peace, three conditions must be met.

First, the Arab World must be secularized and must severly change their culture. They will be driven into poverty once the oil runs out unless their society seriously changes. If there is a model, it is Turkey. Many countries rely on the subjugation of women, a lack of respect for work, a lack of acceptance of errors and a lack of understanding of processes such as the courts and democratic elections. These are dooming Arab nations into failure. It is not the religion - parts of Pakistan, Morocco, Turkey and others are surviving with Islam. However, Islam needs to be disengaged from public life. This will be difficult.

Second, the US needs to remove hypocrisy in foreign affairs. We must admit the mistakes we’ve made in the past and not save face. We must apologize for nations where our assistance, even if given with a good heart, has caused grave harm. We must set a single, distinct standard for foreign intervention. We must be firm with this policy. We must push the world, subtly, toward democracy or at the very least benign dictatorship. We must not deal in arms, period. The blowback is too great. We must ensure that globalisation is more even-handed in its distribution of wealth by limiting the amount that one foreign government can take in loans, by allowing nations to protect infant industries and by removing all tariffs on American products. American corporations must do more to be seen as a force of good overseas (this, in fact, will be my own job in 4 years). Selling Coke in Pakistan is great - securing mineral deals from corrupt government officials and leaving the local population in poverty in not.

Third, the Israeli-Palestinian situation needs to become the world’s top priority. It is not simply a powderkeg. It is a nuclear storehouse. Every day that the crisis goes on adds to the collective Israeli and Arab memory. The full world must financially disengage from Palestine and its supporters and from Israel and its supporters until a settlement is reached. Both sides have many faults, and I’m not going to debate who is in the right. I will simply say that both sides are currently, at this moment, in the wrong. The actions on both sides are an insult to humanity.

To accomplish these conditions, there are many answers other than war. War has its uses, I agree. But it is always, ALWAYS, a last resort. Iraq’s leaders are terrible and there are certainly terrorists of some kind there. But is the price of capturing them, possibly, and securing peace, doubtfully, worthe the price of killing the 2 Baghdad children below?

The problem is that I’m not positive anymore that we’re bluffing. I just hope that Bush is a damn good poker player, cuz he’d have got me by now.

There’s so much free stuff here in Boston. It’s amazing. Since I’ve got here, Ash, The Doves, Dashboard Confessional and Lamya have all played free shows. Spiderman, The Boxer, Three Kings, Traffic, Das Boot and Das Experiment have all been screened for free. MTV has been here. ESPN has been here. It’s nuts. How I still spend so much, I don’t know. I want like a 3/4 length leather jacket, but the cheapest nice one I’ve found is almost 200 bucks at Structure. Ricockulous. Oh, Avalon, the bombest club ever, is also free tonight. And Junior Sanchez, Felix da Housecat and Armand Van Helden are spinning. Sweet!

Coinbird! Angree for Coins! Comic genius, though only if you have a decently fast internet connection.

I’ve learned you can’t really argue with college professors. They’re very intimidating. However, it’s wicked fun to debate cuz there’s a lot of smart kids. Check this out, I think me and my group (especially Aakshee and Rishub, our token South Asian minorities) are freaking gods. We had a debate, “Does it pay to pay for college?” We were the Con side. And we won. Our number manipulation would have made Arthur Anderson proud.

Who you can’t argue against are the damn Chinese kids in my Chinese I class. I now know that half my class speaks fluent chinese and are just taking the class to raise their GPA, cuz half of them laughed at a joke that this guy made in Chinese which no one could’ve understood without knowing Chinese. And most of the rest know the characters from Japanese. I’ve gotten 4 B’s in a row in that class even though I study my ass off. It’s sooooooo hard.

And speaking about being so hard, they (who do I mean? I mean those smart guys that discuss this sorta thing on “Crossfire”) discovered that the Mayans destroyed their culture in a giant empire war. With the Hobis dying from overcultivation and the Woolly Mammoth being hunted to extinction in the Northeast, someone might wanna tell that “Noble Savage” guy (Rousseau, I think) to rewrite his theories.

Da Music of 908

“The Life” by Styles P & Pharoahe Monch.
This is off the Soundbombing 3 comp. Pharoahe is a master of gangsta rap flow. “What I Go To School For” is a Pete Yorn meets Westlife-sounding song about getting freaky with your teacher. Sick, huh? But funny. I think this’ll be big (though J-Live, Distant Soundz, Artful Dodger, Ash and the other bands I thought would be big aren’t, heh).“Thin Line” by Jurassic 5 ft/ Nelly Furtado
This is off the J5 CD that’s in stores on October 9th, but dropped on some IRC channels a few weeks ago. It’s pretty good, though not as good as their last CD. J5’s “Acetate Prophets” is unlike anything they’ve done since the very first CD. It’s a downtempo track filled with samples and no rap. It sounds like a journey around the world. No other way to describe it. Glamma Kid & Shola Ama’s “Sweetest Taboo” is a pop-raggae track ft/ the girl from “Imagine”. It’s tight. “Cattleprod” by Lo Fidelity All Stars is a U2 track sped up and produced by Oakenfold. “Slide to the Vibe” by Voodoo & Serano is a trance song with a sonorous high-pitched wail thing going on. “Just the Way You Are” by Milky is vocal hard house with a “doo doo doo doo” hook. “And it goes…”

Everybody! I’m in college!So my computer was broken when I got here. I shipped it in my suitcase, but I had it packed well. But it wouldn’t show anything on the monitor and I was like, shit. But there’s a computer guy next door who listened to the beeps the computer made when it didn’t work (they’re called Beep Codes, I guess) and told me that it was a loose video card (one long beep and two short beeps). So I dug around inside, found where it wasn’t connected right, and now we’re working A-Ok and I can do my website and email all you guys. I got a cell phone (617-230-7042) so call me (especially during free weekends, 9PM Friday - 9PM Sunday west coast time)! Dude, the internet here is amazing. I downloaded Good Will Hunting at 742 KB / second. Jesus!

So the day before I left, I told a few people to come over and say bye, so I thought a couple people might swing by. But a whole grip of people showed up, like 20! I was so happy, hehe. Yay to my friends! In the morning, I went to Portland and took off for Boston via St. Louis. I had my carryon filled with wires (from videogames and computer parts), so of course that set off alarm bells and I got searched not once, not twice, but three times on the way! As they say here in Boston, it was a wicked pissah (which can also mean really good, heh. Wierd, huh?). They make you take off your shoes and my well-packed videogame cords got all mangled! Ah well, at least they work.

The world’s largest porn collection is donated to the new Museum of Sex. I like the quote from his mom: “It got to the point where he had too much,” she said. “He just couldn’t keep it clean.” Well, keeping a porn collection clean would be hard, huh? (bad-da-bah - thank you thank you)

I changed my classes a little, they’ll all be good. I have Philosophical Argument & Reason (and I got into a 5-person discussion section, how nuts is that), Honors Microeconomics, Chinese 111 and Democracy in American Capitalism Writing Seminar. It should be wicked fun. My books were over 300 bucks for the semester, ouch. We start on Tuesday, but on Monday there’s a thing called “Splash!” on campus that I heard MTV2 was broadcasting live from, so maybe you can see my campus then.

Ok, so where am I living? I’m in a 19 story high-rise with a view of downtown Boston and Fenway Park (only 3 blocks away! Awesome!). I know you can see a gorgeous sunrise off the water in the morning, but I hafta admit I haven’t been up anywhere near that early, heh. I slept from 2 to 6 PM the other day, right thru an orientation session. Good times. The dorms are rated #1 in the country, but mine is one of the worse ones. It’s still not bad, maybe 1.5 to 2x the size of UO dorms, basic layout, bathroom in the hall, co-ed floor. Next year, I’ll have amazing housing, though.

The food is good here. Not the best, but still I can always find tons and tons that I want to eat. They bring in chefs from top restaurants in the city sometimes too to design a meal for us, which is cool. Oh, one more thing about the dorms: Both Babe Ruth and Ted Williams used to live in apartments that are now student dorms. I reallllllllly want to live in Babe Ruth’s old apartment, how cool would that be?

Now the important thing: The women’s studies. This school I thought was like 60%, but I guess it’s more like 65% female. It’s amazing. The girls aren’t as bomb as a place like USC, but there’s so many that it makes up for it. This one girl across the hall is gorgeous (and really nice too). I saw her room and there were what looked like cutouts from a magazine of some CK guy model. So I made a joke about her half-naked guy pictures and it turns out the guy is her boyfriend. If you girls that I know saw this, you would pee your pants. He has gigantic arms, a totally ripped chest, a model face and he works as an underwear model in New York. Yeah. So I should just give up hope of ever having a chance with bomb girl, hehe. Maybe she has hot friends =).

Compassion fatigue? Is there too much talk about 9-11? It was a very sad day, but really, all this non-stop empathy is a sign of weakness and a cheapening of the sadness. Can we just remember that it happened without 24-hour newscasts and FDNY hats on guys from North Dakota?

So I walked down Newbury Street to Chinatown the other day. Newbury Street is a wicked swanky district. It’s funny, cuz you can see the up and down progression. It like, one block is Virgin Megastore, then Gap, then Banana Republic, Louis Voutton, Armani Emporio, a bunch of really expensive places with impossible to pronounce names, then it goes back down in price till you reach the end of Newbury. In Chinatown, I was the only white guy there except for all the non-Chinese at the “rice out your car” store. Made me laugh. The cars here are really nice, too, cuz no one drives in the city except for the ppl with Mercedes’. On the way home, I saw 2 different guys just sitting on the steps smoking the reefer. It was like Eugene, heh. One of the guys was this bum in Copley Square and he was smoking while yelling “I’m high as a kite!” and no one seemed to notice.

I met this Irish Drunkard who was born in Dorchester, my birthplace and lives 10 minutes away from there. It was good times. He’s a freshmen too, wicked funny, we had some laughs. We’re gonna go beat up some Italians someday, hehe. I’m not sure who I’m gonna hang out with a lot, but this guy John next door, Steve from Minnesota and Dez, the Indian guy from New Jersey seem pretty chill. This Mexican exchange student Jose Enrique is cool, maybe I can take him out and have him pick up some ladies for me cuz he is like a magnet.

Oh, finally, movie review. 13 Conversations About One Thing is not too shabby, 3 stars. Funny at parts, sorta dull at others. It’s a treatise on happiness where the subplots weave together, though in the end the only point seems to be that there’s no point and the jokes are a bit dry. Other than that, good film. Not groundbreaking, but solid.

“Grindin’ (Selector Remix)” by The Clipse’ ft/ Sean Paul & Kardinal Offishall.
Not too many good new songs cuz I don’t have my speakers yet, but this remix of the car-bumping tune of the year is raggae’d up featuring Canadian rapper Offishall and up-and-comer Sean Paul (his new single Gimmee The Light I’m gonna review for next update).Also “Nicoles Groove” by Phaze One ft/ Ms Breeze
A solid female-vocaled garage track. If you want more garage, check “Weakest Link” (So Solid Mix) by Echobass. It’s basically a d’n'b track with samples from that lady on the show “The Weakest Link”. Original at least.