This week's turning around. I think I'll be fully recovered from my sickness tomorrow. In the future, I think it would probably be wise to not follow up five days of riding my bike too hard/dehydrating myself in the process with riding my bike too hard again, in the cold, after it rained. I guess I take exercise too seriously. Or not seriously enough to consider my welfare. But damned if you'll see me lurching around with atherosclerosis and a beer belly in thirty years!

We're watching a movie based on a British play (The Importance of Being Earnest) in English. It's probably pretty good, but my level of energy makes it more boring than funny.

Has anybody ever read On the Nature of Things by the philosopher Lucretius? I've got this great philosophy book that I found at a garage sale which has an excerpt from book V of it. The guy was so ahead of his time! He was born in 99 B.C. and died in 55 B.C., but he rejected the mythical "everything has a consciousness or will of its own, or is ordained by god" system of thought as pure folly, and based on pure reasoning, made some really fascinating conjectures about astronomy, chiefly the way the sun and the moon move in relation to the earth, and that the moon isn't a stupid god, but just reflects the light of the sun. He also makes some interesting points in saying that it's foolish to believe we'll be around for eternity (not only us, but heaven and earth), but that the only reason everything works as well as it does in the universe is because of constant replenishment, or more familiarly, conservation of energy/matter. He goes so far as to imply that life and death are fundamentally equal, and that the "soul" or mind cannot exist without the flesh. The guy was a real pessimist and a skeptic, in other words, which means he was sort of like me. It pisses me off that I can digest his prose but can't get higher than a 76 on an algebra 2 quiz on conics.

Hey kids! When Clinton lied, NOBODY DIED! Can you believe George Bush is asking for another 25 billion dollars from Congress to use on his little war against the "axis of evil"? The pompous asshole is so confident about his re-election that he's setting aside funds for his next administration now, just so he can keep his war going on, well, indefinitely. I read a CNN article today that said his administration expected to keep troops in Iraq indefinitely. Really. I'm beyond political discussion on this one, but correct me if I'm wrong here: when angry people are shooting at you with AK-47s and rocket launchers, maybe the best course of action is to GET THE FUCK OUTTA THERE! That's right! Just go! Then we wouldn't have any horror stories about our--excuse me, I meant the government's--troops being mangled by a raging mob in the streets of Baghdad. Oh, and we wouldn't be Goddamn torturing people. You know what's sick? The president spoke to the Iraqi people and said he was appalled at this whole let's-let-our-prisoners-of-war-rot incident, but didn't apologize. The president is the fucking spokesman for the country. He's as much an ambassador as anyone, and it should be him--not some general in full uniform that refers to the armed forces as "my army"--that apologizes.

And you know, I was thinking. Fine, go to war; attempt to liberate a persecuted people. That's cool. But don't go it alone and lose all your allies. I've always said that no matter who the president is, I can't do a better job than him. Recently I've realized however, that my foreign policy would consist of either being isolationist, or cooperating completely with allies. You're either staying the hell out of it, or you're all for it with your buddies. And really, anyone who's ever played Age of Empires knows that if you're at a LAN party and try to take on everyone yourself without the help of your allies, you get screwed in the end. And we're getting screwed right now by people who lie to us about taxing the rich. Sure you'll tax people whose income is over 200,000 dollars a year, but those aren't CONSTANT FUCKING DOLLARS! You forgot to account for inflation (or decided not to, because most Americans aren't politically informed enough to realize little loopholes like that), dumbasses, and that puts no strain on the rich, and more on the middle-class.

That felt good. It felt good, too, when the story on the torture chambers was followed up by a report on a man who dropped a nailgun and shot six iron spikes into the back of his head, but miraculously lived. Don't you just love American news?