This keeps getting better and better. In the latest development of the Bush administration's Reich Ministryof Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, I mean, um, U.S. Department of Education, I mean wait no the White House Press Corps, yet another individual has been found guilty of recieving special treatment, to say the least, from the Bush Administration.

That's right, Mr. Jeff Gannon 's true identity has been revealed: James D. Guckert, investor in internet gay porn and writer for Talon News, a Grand Ol' Party news machine.

The coolest thing about this whole "Bush administration does propaganda machine act" see, is that nobody really cares. Sure the press does, but the general public doesn't really care.

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so"profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet,which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic(absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law(gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at whichsouls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increaseuntil all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshmanyear that, " it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you", andtake into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has alreadyfrozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, itfollows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore,extinct...leaving only Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God."
THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A"

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

In a new development on the ongoing monitoring of Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities, Alireza Jafarzadeh, an Iranian defector, reports that Iran is using "existing differences between the U.S. and Europe to their advantage and tries to drag out talks with the EU to buy time."

Reuters also reports that "the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been investigating Iran's nuclear program ever since Jafarzadeh announced in August 2002 on behalf of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an exiled opposition group, that Iran was hiding several massive nuclear sites from the IAEA."

An intelligence analyst interviewed for the article stated ""it is a matter of several months, up to a year, most probably less than a year (for nuclear capability). By that time we think they will have enough feed material for the centrifuges so they won't be dependent on foreign input."

This new development poses several difficulties for the U.S:

1. Will the U.S. be able to work out it's difficulties with the E.U. over who exactly is responsible for containing Iran's nuclear weapons programs?

2. Have we learned from our past mistakes? George A. Lopez has an informative piece in Foreign Affairs explaining that sanctions against Iraq were working, and had destabilize and almost completely destroyed Saddam Hussein's WMD program. The catch, however, is that we did not know this for sure until we invaded Iraq. In Iran's case, however, we have a wealth of knowledge that we did not have about Iraq.

3. What approach should we use? Although sanctions were working in Iraq, they did not come with out a cost. Lesley Stahl on Sixty Minutes in 1996 asked Madeline Albright, then Secretary of State when, about sanctions against Iraq: "we have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Then secretary of state Madeleine Albright replied "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it. " To her credit, Albright did apologize for the comment latter. But the children still died. Perhaps there is an alternative to economic sanctions.

Rightly so, Ray Takeyh explains today in WAPO that there is: "the United States, by relaxing its economic sanctions and granting Iran a voice in the postwar Persian Gulf deliberations, could disarm clerical hard-liners who require American belligerence for perpetuation of the nuclear program. In exchange, Iran would have to accept verifiable restraints on its nuclear activities. Indeed, an Iran whose strategic environment is stabilized and enjoys expanding economic ties with the United States is likely to be a more constructive interlocutor on issues ranging from terrorism to human rights."

Thus it seems a middle ground needs to be found. While the sanctions against Iraq were working,

The U.S. is stuck between a rock and a hard spot with the crisis in Sudan. Something obviously needs to be done about the escalating humanitarian crisis. Well, why haven’t the U.S. and global community done more to stop the deaths of innocent men, women and children?It's a complicated situation. First, the United States must cope with a sticky history of intervention in foreign countries and affairs over the last few decades. World War II, so often though of as a morally righteous
endeavor on the part of the United States, nevertheless took a toll on American lives, families, and psyche. When the Korean War, and later Vietnam came along -along with the shadow of the Cold War- America increasingly found itselfinvolved in foreign wars that were not simply the "good guys vs. the bad guys." The idealistic days of cops and robbers in foreign policy had ended. Moreover, the U.S. was increasingly becoming involved in conflicts in countries
radically different from the U.S. Previously, in the case of Germany during World War II, America fought and rebuilt a country that is altogether not that different from the United
States. America and Western Europe at least share a greater commonality in the history of thought, philosophy, politics, and culture, than America shares with Vietnam and Iraq, for example. The last decade of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the years afterwards ushered in a new, even more complicated, era in U.S. foreign policy. The world today is not the same one our grandparents grew up in. The line of good and evil is not clearly delineated. Beginning with the U.S. support for Osama bin Laden while fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The U.S. also supported Saddam Hussein against Iran in the 1980s. Then came the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina. With the clash of Serbs, Croats, and Muslim Albanians, the United States in the early 1990s found itself in a politically complicated situation, with warring ethnic factions, and an uneasy relationship with the Europeans over exactly who was responsible for mediating the violence.Next came the Gulf War. Although considered a relative success, the U.S. didn't go all the way and capture Saddam. After the U.S. troops pulled out, Hussein suppressed a massive Shiite uprising, which lead to the deaths of many innocent people. The next difficulty was Rwanda, years of economic sanctions against Iraq, and an ever increasing number of 'hot spots' around the world. The U.S. faces today an extremely difficult question, and many unanswerable questions underline the dilemma. Is the United States the world’s moral police? If so, more desperately needs to be done to save lives in Sudan. That is the challenge of World War II and the Holocaust. On the other hand, however, many Americans don't particularly enjoy seeing the bodies of American soldiers dragged through the streets, as happened in Somalia in 1993 when the U.S. intervened for humanitarian reasons. For many people, it's difficult to give support to military intervention in foreign countries when it's not clear why we are there, what we are doing, and what our exit strategy is.Finally, I simply wish to point out that the crisis in Sudan is an outrage. But given the recent history of U.S. involvement in foreign countries, it's not hard to see why the U.S. is not doing more to stop the violence. But, we should. The question then becomes, what should we be doing differently so that we can be a more positive force for stopping genocide? Given the complete failure in the case of Rwanda and Somalia, as well as in Bosnia, what institutional changes need to occur either in American society or government that would allow the U.S. to assume a more responsible position in its relationship with the rest of the world?

JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS?: Martha Stewart, in a recent court decision ,was sentenced to five months in prison followed by five months of house arrest for lying about a sketchy stock deal. The queen of home economics remarked that "today is a shameful day." Following her conviction however, Martha Stewart Living stock prices jumped, suggesting that Martha's time in prison may not ruin her life after all. 
 
Former CEO of Enron Corporation Ken Lay, christened "Kenny Boy" by George W. Bush, is just now facing 11 counts of federal fraud for his leadership of Enron when the company collapsed in financial ruin, robbing thousands of common employees of trillions of dollars in retirement funds.   Stewart chose to speak out, and in doing so lied to the government. Lay, however, has kept his mouth shut to the government but appeared on Larry King Live to polish his public image and show that well, he's not such a bad guy after all, right?

America truly has an interesting concept of justice. The women who taught us all to love making cookies, picking flowers, and decorating our homes goes to prison. The man who robbed thousands of hard working Americans of their entire life savings has still not had to pay the concequences of his actions.

Even if the culprit is Osama bin Laden, and we track him down, and we kill him and destroy his network, he's won.

That's because he is ready to die, and the people who support him are ready to die. Americans aren't ready to die. Under those circumstances, you begin to see some of the cracks in a determinedly bourgeois civilization, which is basically about securing safety rather than securing goods. This situation holds a deep moral challenge for us.

The events of September 11 have brought home to America that war is about dying. I'm not quite sure how that will be received. I suspect it will produce a more repressive politics than we already experience. Americans have no sense of how it is that we can be this hated. It never occurs to them that our country's actions have terrible results for other people around the world, and that they blame us. I have a friend who pointed out that September 11 is the anniversary of the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and the beginning of a regime of torture there, and of course that was U.S.-sponsored. Why shouldn't people be mad at us?

We are willing to worship a God only if God makes us safe. Thus you get the silly question, How does a good God let bad things happen to good people? Of course, it was a rabbi who raised that question, but Christians took it up as their own. Have you read the Psalms lately? We're seeing a much more complex God than that question gives credit for.


By Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University professor of theological ethics.

SOMETHING LEFT OUT: Greg Behrman, in an article from the International Herald Tribune, kindly posted on Oxblog, outlines AIDS as a threat to global security.

So often in the discussion of AIDS as a global epidemic, one key point is left out; Behrman's article begs the question throughout: why does AIDS spread so fast in developing countries?

The most common answer is obvious: because it's a developing country! Right? They lack birth control, adequate medication, modern medical technology, and properly trained doctors and nurses. This is all true.

But the primary reason AIDS spreads so fast in the developing world: people still do not know that AIDS exists.

The Asia Times writes:

"In poor rural areas in Henan, locals were encouraged to sell their plasma to the numerous operations throughout the province. Unfortunately, employees at the blood banks either didn't know or didn't care about spreading HIV, as evidenced by the repeated use of individual needles on donor after donor. The inevitable result of such actions was an HIV explosion among people who could not afford health care even if they were lucky enough to have access to it."

Developing countries lack the modern information and communication we enjoy as citizens of the first world. Simple things like fifth grade sex ed or using clean needles at hospitals are a far cry from the reality of the second and third world. Religious beliefs and ethnic traditions also play an influential role in limiting the discussion.

Behrman could have hinted at the AIDS epidemic as tragic result of not only a lack of information, but also sadly that of misinformation. Misinformation might be the next greatest threat to global security.