PHILOSOPHY: Politics

I prefer learning by forming an overall structural model, then filling in the structure over time, which saves a lot of time and confusion. Thus, if possible, we want to view the situation from the top. I heartily recommend the remarkably detailed researches and reports of Sherman H. Skolnick who's life-long avocation involves connecting-the-dots in politics. In his report, The Bilderberg Syndrome, he provides a brief overview of the realities concerning the rich and powerful people who wield the greatest power on this planet. (His home page provides a list of very diverting articles he has produced over the years and can be as good a place to bruise your political naivete as any.) Another excellent eye-opener is from the point of view of foreign policy (really, it's domestic policy, too) in an interview with former attorney general Ramsey Clark on American Militarism. That being said, I will wander (albeit shallowly) the maze of the philosophy of politics, then lead to details and links which may further your knowledge. In brief, I will say that people form their own social contracts under the dictums of nature, but there are a certain percentage of the wealthy who are simply driven to aggregate wealth and power beyond all reason. Accept the reality of this without necessarily ascribing to it, and you will better understand what is happening in global politics.

To analyze the basic concept of political issues in simple terms, we want. Some are greedier than others, and more clever, so they get more. In a simple world, the strongest, cleverest member of the pack became leader and got to eat first, was a good choice for a mate, etc. Of course, humans, being rather clever, accomplish this in convoluted ways. There would always be strong, clever, greedy individuals who did not care about the greater good, not at all. Traditionally, this has resulted in warring clans, city-states, and nations. Noam Chomsky sums up the machinations of power throughout history rather clearly in "Hegemony or Survival". Political theory generally fails to account for this greed, that it would dampen automatically when individuals had enough to get by on, that citizens would be informed as well as not lied to, but it is not reflected well in history. Personally, I don't want abstract political theory, I want peace and security for me and mine (unless someone miraculously makes me Emperor of the Known Universe with the power to crush all who oppose my will. MUWAHAHAHAHA!!)

The basic process of the political interaction between people is called for which I've set up a separate page to discuss the application of, which we call business. Commerce is the interpersonal trading of goods and services, recognized as having value because some people can accomplish more than others and have it take a smaller bite out of their lives. Trading shares the profits on both sides in a fairly-balanced transaction. In practice, of course, commerce is rarely fairly balanced. Thus, it is used to aggregate wealth and power. Prior to the industrial revolution, an emperor could conquer just so much. Most people were farmers or fishermen living hand-to-mouth, so one major disaster and everyone would starve to death. After the plague in Europe and ensuing couple years of excellent growing seasons, people traded more and were better off. With the european renaissance came the roots of the industrial revolution and technology, which generated more wealth than ever, and there were people to take advantage of it.

Looking at life on Earth as a whole, we must genuinely meet the requirements of nature, or we will "fail to thrive". Our biggest built-in problem to scaling-up civilization is abuse of power in a society of abundant wealth. The disparity follows a naturally logarithm curve if one cares to graph it, as Clay Shirky points out. So, it is not that we could hope to flatten the power curve between the Have's and Have-Not's, but whether we can successfully deal with the aberrent abuser at the top of the curve. If we do not, we will eventually be doomed as the creation of wealth will eventually allow a single aberrent individual to destroy the world. A mega-corporation going under does enough collateral damage now, thank you, as a few key executives escape with hundred-million-dollar severance packages as a million people suffer hardship. One link in a world of information is The New Diamond Age from Wired Magazine. It is light, but informative piece detailing a new technology and touches ever so lightly on the reactions of those whose businesses are threatened by it. Make no mistake: if you were to discover a really valuable product, say a source of unlimited free power tomorrow, you would never reap the profits you dream. You would: (a) be killed outright, (b) have your patent denied (or broken, if you got one), (c) be slapped with a gag order from the courts and told to hand over the technology, (d) be hassled eternally by the legal system and the not-so-legal system, (e) discover the military had labelled your patent top secret, (f) certainly have the technology stolen from you, (g) have pressure put on you via friends and loved ones until you capitulated. It is naive to ignore the existence of people with far more greed, money, and power than is healthy. As well to smear yourself in blood and thrash around amongst a school of sharks. The "big boys" got where they are by struggling under nature's rules, not man's social contracts created for the common good. Indeed, the power mongers could not achieve what they have without aggregating the wealth created by masses of the common people. It is not sustainable for everyone, nor particularly wise, but simply is.

The corporation is not necessarily a bad thing, the profit motive working often to bring products to those willing to pay is at the root of all commerce from family life to world politics, the consumer then gaining something they had not the time or skills or motivation to produce themselves. But corporation has a certain legal meaning now, not the least of which it is considered to have many of the rights, but none of the responsibilities of a person. This and many others powers gleaned through legal wrangling in over a century of effort have, unfortunately been badly abused by a number of them, particularly when a corporation gets ridiculously large. This is perfectly understandable when one remembers its sole attainment is to make money, under which conditions an amoral atmosphere takes hold and absolutely anything goes--a truly non-human mentality. Here was a fine example of this:

"A comment by the RIAA attorney Gary Greenstein at a recent meeting with the Webcaster Alliance - representing a range of netcasters, including the smaller 'casters and nonprofits - puts AOL's strategy into perspective. The meeting took place at the RIAA's office on January 29. According to two people present at the meeting, Greenstein explained that the RIAA didn't care if 25,000 webcasters in the US went out of business because AOL streams 200 channels of music, and the streaming media listener would then have to get their music from AOL. And AOL pays its bill to the RIAA." --The Register:

This natural tendency for abuse of power by a few, when countered with rational laws governing the free-wheeling of capitalism, has achieved something more or less workable, if far from perfect. Unfortunately, we are seeing it get truly out of hand to the detriment society when a corporation feels it must coerce the consumer. The end result of this mentality results in something exactly opposite the original intent. The heavy-handed application of the DMCA stifles robustness amongst its main customers, while on the other hand corporate greed bleeds-away your technological power to the highest bidder as long as it looks good on the quarterly report:

"During the antitrust hearnings, Jim Allchin (VP of Platforms at Microsoft) said that opening up their interfaces would create a national security issue," Davidson said. "So they won't open to the competition and yet they want to give their code to China and Russia. Help me out here. How is opening up your APIs to competitors a national security threat, but it's not if you are giving your code to non-US nations." --Oracle's Chief Security Officer Mary Ann Davidson drew attention to Microsoft's double standard with its policy of source code disclosure.

Basically, the only way to check coercion of one party by another is for a third party to stop them. Thus, we have a number of international accords on human rights, etc., where we make some forms of coercion nominally dishonorable. The watchdogs are first, official groups designated for the task, and when they fail due to corruption we have the brave whistleblowers, and that noble bastion of information, the journalists, to help us save us from ourselves. Yet, what has happened during the administration of George W. Bush? There is a systematic dumbing-down of our awareness of current events on many fronts because of vested interests. We are coddled and protected from learning about our international neighbors in any detail, administrative actions are given PR spins, the American media has come under even more centralized control, and we are given trivial amusements to distract us from the harsh realities in the world. We all know the party line for increasing our safety is to allow increased government power in the hopes of making us more secure from danger. It has been a while since we had to remember a certain historical lesson, one that pervades the Constitution of the United States: that government, as any person or group, is prone to abusing its power and needs that power to be strictly limited. In other words, the founding fathers knew that freedom in their fledgling country was utterly dependent on a balance of power between the people and their government, so that the society could consequently take advantage of the wealth and power generated by the group while not being downtrodden. It actually works pretty well, and some other countries even tried to emulate our Constitution to a greater or lesser extent. We've just gotten rather sloppy about following it. Take a look in the national archives, they've got lovely copies of the supreme law of the land free for download. It's probably high time you took another look at it, anyway.

We can see that coercion's biggest enemy is information getting out to other people that will condemn the action. With the advent of printing and electronic media, that positive force was compounded. How is it that it seems so ineffectual today? One of the infamous "robber-barons" of the last century, William Randolph Hearst, proved that one doesn't need to control every newspaper in the country, mere a couple of dozen of the major ones to have an influence far in excess of one's holdings. Nowadays, the mainstream media is controlled by a light, but strict hand--news stories which conflicts with the party line can easily be killed before reaching publication by a simple phone call from on high, and many of the rest can be shamed or manipulated to conform. The effect is quite remarkable, and has to be seen in action to be quite believed. Big business is trying to push out small ISPs, what you can say on the Internet is under attack on many fronts, and Federal monitoring of communications continues to increase. The FCC has allowed allowed more centralized corporate control over the media, as well.

The latest front to appear in the war against the people is the current elevation of the intellectual property (IP) game. Those with money are raking in the new frontier opportunities of the lax patent system. Many patents are intentionally floated in the hopes of staking a claim to a significant portion of the world's technology. The current climate is one of the threat of mutual litigation unless each side comes to terms with one another. With a few quiet strokes of the Congressional pen, we become a population of felons. What we have is a new kind of war, and any war needs troops. In an audacious move, the US Department of Justice is setting up an Intellectual Property Task Force, the IPTF. Like the concept of creating markets through war, it is utterly brilliant. Horrifyingly unethical and immoral, yes, but brilliant.

Journalism can be a chancey business, when even inadvertant comments can trigger an already volatile situation, as Isioma Daniel discovered. Being coercion enemy number one puts journalists on an invisible war front which groups like Reporters Without Borders try to shed light on. The lesson here is not only is it your patriotic, Constitutionally-implied duty to shed light on coercion in America through the free flow of information, but the process itself is fundamental to maintaining basic human rights. Go out onto the Internet and find the news, and do not overlook other viewpoints and foreign sources to increase your chances of finding out what is going on. You might also occassionally read some in-depth reporting to help your mind shake off the numbing effect of our sound-bite society. When printing came into being, it disseminated information past recall or successful repression. Unfortunately, between the control of major media, and the shakey freedoms on the Internet, this has reverted to a more information-controlled society. A phone call from someone in a high place can kill a story of international importance in thousands of news outlets. On the issue of discovering the White House had a shill ('Jeff Gannon'--aka James Dale Guckert) in the press corp there with an ironically questionable background, Sidney Blumenthal (former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars) wrote in The Guardian on 2/17/05:

'"Spin" seems quaint. "In this day and age," said press secretary McClellan, waxing philosophical about the Gannon affair, "when you have a changing media, it's not an easy issue to decide or try to pick and choose who is a journalist." It is not that the White House press secretary cannot distinguish who is or is not a journalist; it is that there are no journalists, just the gaming of the system for the concentration of power.'

In cyberspace, whole spaces disappear overnight. Perhaps we cannot immediately face AOL-TimeWarner, but we can and must face the new daily struggle against those who do not feel your Constitution extends into any part of the Internet.

Ultimately, we seem to find the only checks and balances we have are people's reactions to the debilitating effects of greed. By ignoring reality and acting in a parasitic manner on society for the good of a few, society as a whole suffers. As there is no limit to greed, only the reactions of the needy will provide the much-needed check on greed. One could be drawn to the conclusion that successful parasites are rare, given the current political climate in the United States of America, given that reality will leak out at the seams. However, one must remember that financial power is just as useful as political power, so to find those who benefit one must also look in the direction of corporate empire. It is certainly possible that a given political tempest will merely provide a convenient distraction from illicit corporate gains, which we have seen in the "rebuilding of Iraq".

War is begun with the belief by its prime movers that personal gain is feasible, for them or the group they place their lot with. The various political philosophies are beginning to blur into a bottom-line struggle between democracy vs. autocracy, freedom vs. coercion, a dynamic which stands out over all. Any political philosophy strengthens itself as an institution by using the wealth generated by an aggregate of individuals. They all are proving weak compared to a highly stylized political form which is designed specifically, and for no other purpose, than to aggregate wealth: the modern corporation. A community of interdependent businesses which trade the fruits of their labor at some modest profit can be quite sustainable, but proved only a stepping-stone from subsistence farming to globalized markets. The modern corporation must grow at some 25% per year or die. In this mega-corporate age, I dare say, if there weren't solid economic benefits to someone, powerful corporate interests would insure there would be no major wars. Excepting, of course, a war between the downtrodden population and the corporations themselves--certainly a feature of all modern military conflicts, being a side-effect of major strategic moves like taking over countries or of tactical maneuvers like the Colombian drug wars.

"We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. . . . It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless." --U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F. Elkins) Ref: "The Lincoln Encyclopedia", Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)

If there are any doubts in your mind as to the reality of these issues, read some more. It's not as if the movers and shakers, when they try to slip something by you without your notice, are going to bring it to your attention. It's simple human nature. You might try mediachannel.org, iwantmedia.com, or The Center for Digital Democracy for starters. While you're at it, keep a wary eye on electronic voting, too. The Matrix has you, and most of you are unaware of the fact.

As you become more involved and soak in ever increasing amounts of information on the Internet in this new information age, some mental anguish and disillusionment is bound to occur. This is normal growth. Be strengthened by it. Let us touch on some current events, then. Heather Wokusch, with her experience, is a useful read. I dare quote a January 2003 article, "Reign of Terror Redux: From Bush to Bonaparte", which I feel sums-up the current U.S. administration from a historical perspective:

"Here's the situation: The nation's leadership is taken over by a secretive group of elitists who profess democracy while dragging the country into a totalitarian nightmare. Confusion and fear take hold, civil rights are eroded in the name of fighting a terror war, and impersonal governmental bodies with names like "Committee of General Security" start labeling dissenters as enemies of the state. Secretive courts with limited accountability punish civilians who object. Tightening its grip on power, the government creates public crises it can later be seen as solving, and military service is made mandatory for young men. The ongoing terror war drains the country's resources, foreign relations hit rock bottom, and the economy slides even further. But since fear is the government's most effective weapon against its own population, the terror war is expanded.

"Sound familiar?

"The Reign of Terror, in late 18th century France, lasted only one year but left the country in chaos and ripe for Napolean's despotic rule soon after. Unless we learn from history, we could suffer the same fate."

There are serious and chilling questions floating unanswered in cyberspace. So many are involved in the power-brokers "little" intrigues and so many play fast and loose that it is a standard ploy to allow time and timing to sweep issues dangerous to their perpetrators out of harm's way. No few will be quick to point out the domino-fall of events--the 2000 election issues, the World Trade Center, the War on Terrorism, Patriot Act I, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, Patriot Act II, which will continue into the future, ad nauseum--and point to the many serious, unanswered questions left behind as each new event distracts an already distracted public. The pattern of events alone is quite sufficiently damning. It is a game being played for the highest of stakes, that of world domination.

Yet even the possibility these events were planned from within pales in the light of the ugliest pattern yet to emerge. It is not the sacrifice of millions of lives to achieve a specific strategic power goal, but that of the creation of markets through war, a war-based economy the Germans termed wehrvirtschaft around the second World War. Creating wars and artificial shortages, privatizing natural resources and utilities, again garnering public monies to rebuild the very countries they destroyed. It sets a whole new standard for political obscenity. Not content with creation of wealth and honest competition through gradually increasing technology, there appears those willing to knock civilization to its knees repeatedly, like junkies desperate for drug-money, unmindful of the long-term cost. The needs of the corporation have now become the needs of America. We have truly become a corporatist state. Unfortunately, the wheels of this machine have to be greased with human blood.

On the plus side of all this is that life will try to survive, by its very nature. As negative forces pervade the globe, disparate people will spontaneously start grumbling about whatever situation looks bad to them until a point is reached in which the people will (generally) counter the power abuse. I see this common pattern in human affairs, based on our basic greed and laziness, involving the creation of institutions which are not self-sustaining, and, once having glutted themselves upon their opponents, begin to feed on themselves and collapse from within. The tribal unit grew into government and nation. Now we have the corporation, a virus of sorts designed only to aggregate wealth, which is only now truly seeing its real power. Still, the forces of nature cannot, utimately, be denied. For it is only people which comprise civilization, and people who form its institutions. As the people suffer, so shall its institutions weaken, and vice-versa. This cycle can only be broken if the majority of the people can see the pattern and rise above it.

A devastating war, internally or internationally, tears down much of the infrastructure of technology, to say nothing of the generations of social damage which results. That many prosper as a result of feeding off the destruction is insufficient reason to pursue it, from the human perspective or the technological one, though our ignorance generally leads us down that path. The corporations which survive on the making of wars know they can keep they're own infrastructures substantially safe from harm. As we see daily in industry, many care nothing even for that as long as they, at least, can garner enough wealth and power for a proverbial Golden Parachute which helps ensure their personal well-being. It is of little comfort to us, who are forced to take notice when tens of millions of people begin to feel the ravages of such autocratic depradations. We in the USA are particularly at risk to this kind of damage because significant portions of our workforce survive because of industries which are outgrowths of the filter-down of technological wealth-creation. We are no longer the seven-eighths agrarian society we were over a century ago. To upset this apple-cart is to risk having entire cultures being sent to the end of the line. That the control of much of that wealth changes hands among a powerful few at the top, we can grudgingly accept because, after all, we reason, we have garnered at lease some small wealth improvement. Most of us in the USA no longer are working 14 hour days under dangerous working conditions, indentured for generations, and it took us only a couple centuries to achieve it! In fairness, I should mention that there are always a whole slew of friendly-sounding bills in Congress that are hoping to change some things for the worse. That we could do orders of magnitude better is scarcely conceived of. Fortunately, we are still quite some ways from a total loss despite various rotten apples, not only because of the basic government structure which is still in place, but due in large part to the long-held belief in our freedom despite our growing ignorance about its maintenance.

"It's hard to convince people that you're killing them for their own good." - Molly Ivans

• Current outlook: Increasing cloudiness as Congress gives up Constitutionally mandated powers to the President and his designees. A police state is in force but has not yet reached its full power, as it needs Patriot II to help strengthen it. If only a few thousand people are involved, they can be "disappeared". A search of your premises and communications can be conducted without a warrant, your knowledge, or your consent. The underlying forces are the increasing power of corporations which are finally succeeding in achieving a corporatist state over our Constitutional mandate.
• Medium-term outlook: Watch for delayed and slowly increasing public reaction as the DHS abuses its foundling power, along with other departments. Information is more tightly controlled. Update: Groundswell of reaction is picking up, as in Gore's speech of 11/9/2003. Abuse more open in The Day the Constitution Died, June 8, 2004. Abuse continues in the airlines, the poster child for homeland security.
• Long-term outlook: Grim. The corporations continues to gain power and will do so in the forseeable future. Expect public reaction when people begin dying by the millions, but only against the government, not the corporations and ruling families which are the prime movers in the background.
• World reaction: Expect the entire world to grumble at us, but do not expect the completely-controlled mainstream media to tell us why.

You have Constitutional rights only if the government says you do.

• Shredding the Magna Carta
• No political speech online
• Patriot Act & Dept. of Homeland Security at work
• Current Internal Revenue list of "axis of boycott" countries.
• FISC: America's secret court.
• Alien Terrorist Removal Court is created as the narcotic of power increases.
• Untraceable wiretapping heightened by the Patriot Act.
• No-fly list
• The Thought Police are monitoring YOU, citizen: Robertson Oklahoma case
• Not all channels of power are widely recognized for what they are: Showdown at the FCC, more criminalization of "obscenity" to "protect kids"
• The media corporations will be more powerful than our government: Bestriding the World, P2P Jail Bill
• You must not embarrass officials with their failings: Bad Raps for Non-Hacks, Whistleblower Jailed

Any software, data, or entertainment media must be used in a manner in which companies imagine maximizes their profits.

• Digital Millenium Copyright Act counter-analysis, MPAA has the right to shut down a network on "good faith"
• You do not have the right to inspect the rules which filter Internet content to libraries and schools which use filtering software: N2H2 filtering list
• A publicly-accepted "standard" can be privately controlled: "Software Patents in Action",
• You must not circumvent any encryption device: MPAA letter, Security research, RIAA lawsuits, rants, Ziemann essays, Declaration.
• Keep purchasing that proprietary software: Oregon Open Source bill.
• If you comparison shop and tell people, you could be infringing on proprietary information (the sales prices): Sales price clash

The lust for power holds no allegiences. Any organization provides channels for leveraging influence for the benefits of a powerful few.

• One person in a nominally democratic society, via corporations treated as "persons", can in principle control the world Corporations Claim the "Right to Lie"
• Corporate power can be used to weaken Constitutional protections DoJ supports RIAA in P2P privacy scuffle, Watching DVDs is legal in Norway
• Cultural lockdown is just one side-effect: RIAA attacking our culture, the American Mind, music police, 12yr old music felons, IP War

Life on Earth's biosphere is collateral damage in our coercive struggles.

• The national organics standards, developed over a decade of democratic struggle, is now safely in the hands of bureaucrats: Rule changes.
• Genetic technologies will continue to be driven by the bottom line: Seed Battle

I can't say I have any argument with that estimation. The following indented text sums up some key points from a letter from Clark. The website where you can take action is http://www.impeachbush.org:

President George W. Bush chose to wage a war of aggression against Iraq, which had not attacked the United States and presented no imminent threat to our people, or legitimate interests. A small cabal, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby and Rove wrested decision making processes, defying international institutions, the opinions of humankind and the rule of law. War of aggression is the first offense listed in the Nuremberg Charter as a Crime against Peace. The Nuremberg Tribunal after hearing evidence of Nazi crimes in World War II convicted the leaders of waging wars of aggression, which it called "the supreme international crime." At Nuremberg, the Chief U.S. Prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, promised posterity that in the future all nations, including our own, would be held accountable for such crimes. Additionally, President Bush and key administration officials engaged in a lengthy campaign of deceit, concealment and false propaganda to create support for, and acceptance of, its war of aggression by claiming Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, harbored terrorists, had close ties with and supported Al Qaeda and intended to attack the U.S., U.S. citizens and U.S. interests.

The U.S. has made civilians and civilian facilities its direct object of attack. It has pursued assassination and summary executions as official policy. President Bush boasted of summary executions in his State of the Union message in 2003. Excessive and indiscriminate force and illegal weapons have been used. U.S. military casualties exceed 10,000 including more than 1,100 deaths with many additional thousands returned to the United States for physical and mental illnesses. The U.S. war of aggression against Iraq and military occupation has cost more than 100,000 Iraqi lives, mostly civilian. The U.S. has employed torture, including torture to death, rape and sexual assault and humiliation, as approved and ordered policy from Afghanistan and Guantanamo to Iraq, inflicted on thousands of prisoners, many, if not most, without any evidence of wrongful conduct. An admitted 37 human beings have been murdered while being held in captivity by the United States under these conditions. We know not how many more. All the mounting evidence makes clear that this program of torture and death is not aberrational conduct of rogue or undisciplined soldiers but is rather the policy adopted at the highest levels of the Bush/Rumsfeld chain of command. All this in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the International Convention Against Torture, the laws of all nations and common human decency. Haiti, where President Bush forced the elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide from office, is in chaos with many thousands killed by widespread daily violence committed by U.S. supported paramilitaries against Aristide supporters.

Beyond politics, there is the issue of religion. In this presidency, there is a confluence of what is termed right-winged politics (effectively, the desire to see corporations and the rich gain even more) and the religious right (which claims to be the heart of Christianity, but is advocating everyone and everything die, including themselves, so that God will set them at His Right Hand while punishing others eternally based on the Chosens' petty desires--often mis-termed "The Rapture.") It's about as scarey as you can get. At least Adolph Hitler wanted some earthly empire to happen. It's really quite amazing from an intellectual viewpoint: True Evil. Wow. The absolute denial of all Life. On Earth. In reality. The very Life which forms the basis for my (and many others) entire philosophy. But wait, there's more! Base these important decisions on a philosophy which denies reality and you have Madness, complete and absolute. But wait! How much would you pay?! I'm also getting to witness this by being immersed in this Mad and Evil society. This is about as close to a general definition of Hell as one can get. It's a good thing reality is more complex than fantasy. I can still take dandelion breaks, for a while, anyway...

Unfortunately, it is just as likely as not that the only way this will get resolved is the way nature always resolves things: Whatever Works. An awful lot of people will probably kill each other before the balance of Life (that is, those complex forms whose pattern does not anhilate itself) is restored. Evolution in action.

POLITICAL HUMOR & SATIRE

• The Boondocks
• Doonesbury
• Get Your War On
• Elena Steier's The Revenge of the Vampire Bed and Breakfast and others
• Scott Bateman
• Too Stupid to be President
• World War 2.5