Athlete • Speaker • Guide 
Athlete • Speaker • Guide Date: 29th November 2006
It’s no secret to regular readers of this blog (and thanks to those who have sent in comments on elbows, ropes and falling!) that I really don’t like George Bush and his crew of Neocon nutters. I’ve always felt they were taking the US down some sort of rabbit hole into an alternate reality where it was OK to treat people like, well, not people. Where it was OK to invade a country (Iraq) not because that country had done something to the US but because, well, because. Where deficits didn’t matter, corporate abuses didn’t matter, workers didn’t matter and the constitution was just a suggestion. I have frequently noted the Bush administration’s invocation of “national security” to justify blatantly un-American actions such as Guantanamo Bay, the suspension of Habeas Corpus, torture and all the things we generally associate with third-world dictatorships but are now somehow OK for the US to sanction. In short, I’ve felt that Bush is the closest thing to a World War II fascist (Hitler, Mussolini) the United States has ever seen. I don’t make that comparison lightly, or for shock effect. As soon as a country starts stripping individual freedom to preserve it something has gone seriously wrong.
This article in Slate does a much better job of explaining the Bush/fascism historical parallels than I can. End of political rant, gotta get one off every month or so…
Training: It’s been cold enough to discourage much outdoor training here of late, but I’ve been hiking, running the dog (getting a dog has done more for my aerobic capacity over the last five years than anything else in life) and doing some yogacizing. Thanks for all the elbow suggestions from various people, I’m doing pretty much all of ‘em, let’s hope some healing results soon!
Posted in: Blog
Yeah, my dog is the best running partner. He motivates me through his misbehavior when he hasn’t had enough exercise. Fortunately he likes backcountry skiing too; this year we’re gonna strap a beacon on him, just in case.
Michelle, you might want to think twice before putting a beacon on your dog. If you’re both caught in the same avalanche, do you want rescuers to find your dog first–or you and/or your human friends!?
It seems that the human costs mean nothing to many who support the war. Unfortunately human lives doesn’t change US foreign policy.
Ed Harriman has a good article in the London Review of Books about the war, among other facts he notes that military spending in Iraq costs the US around 8 BILLION $ per month.
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