Syria

If you’ve been alive and you didn’t just crawl out of a hole in the middle of nowhere, you’ve probably heard something about Syria recently. I’ve talked to quite a few people about Syria and nobody really seems to know what’s going on, other than the fact that people are dying and something about chemical weapons. Well, I’m here to give you a short synopsis, and a reason why Obama should knock off the rhetoric and leave Syria alone.

What is Syria? Syria is a country located in what most people would refer to as the “middle-east”. Syria shares a border with Iraq, to its South West, Jordan to its South East, Lebanon to its West, and Turkey to its North. Syria is about the size of Washington State, with a population of 20.8 million people, who are predominantly Arab and who are religiously Sunni Muslim.

Who’s fighting in Syria? Well, protests against Bashar Al-Asaad’s regime began in 2011. Asaad has been the president of Syria since 2000. Once the protests started, the government began to quietly make rebels “disappear”, and it quickly escalated to openly shooting on protesters. Then the protesters started shooting back. There really aren’t two sides. Sure, there are organized rebel groups, but there isn’t some sort of top rebel leader who the government could meet with to sign a treaty, even if either side wanted to.

So, you’ve got a bunch of little rebel groups all fighting against the government for one reason or another. Asaad is basically a dictator. So, if the protests began in 2011, why do we want to intervene now? Well, Obama says it’s because Asaad used chemical weapons against rebels in Syria. First of all, we don’t know if chemical weapons were used. There’s an indication, but no absolutely proof. Second, if chemical weapons were used, we don’t know by whom. Asaad is a likely suspect, but we don’t know for sure if it was him or not. All we know is what our own government is telling us, and it’s not like they’ve ever lied to us? Right?

*Benghazi* * NSA Wire Taps* Oh, and that’s only within the last year.

Also, Asaad has killed quite a few people before this alleged chemical weapons attack. How many? Statistics differ, but according to The Human Rights Data Analysis Group, there were 92,901 documented deaths between March 2011 and April 2013. Documented. So that’s the minimum number, and most likely, quite a few more people have died. How many people died in this alleged chemical weapons attack? Less than 1,500.

So, why do we suddenly care about Syria? I’ve got 2 theories. First, it’s because there are “rules” to war in this modern age, and killing people with bullets is a lot different than killing them with chemical or nuclear or biological weapons. Sure, bullets probably hurt more than falling asleep and never waking up, which is what happened in Syria, but hey! Chemical weapons are bad! This is most likely very similar to the arguments you’ll hear from liberals, progressives and Democrats. I don’t buy it. If we didn’t care back in 2011, or 2012, or March 2013, why do we care now? Chemical weapons? I don’t think so.

Here’s the theory that I buy. What’s been happening in the US lately? Well, that NSA wiretap thing is kind of a big deal. You know, the government spying on us, violating our Constitutional rights. Those rights are kind of important. VERY IMPORTANT. I think that this whole Syria thing is just to get us to look in the other direction. You know, forget about the NSA, they were bad, they feel bad, they’re sorry (that they got caught), so here’s what we’ll --- HEY GUYS LOOK! SYRIA!!! By the way, does anyone even remember Benghazi? 9/11/12? No? Yeah, that means the government won. Same thing is happening here. They want us to all forget about the NSA and IRS scandals, and launch some cruise missiles into Syria.

Guess what? The media is going right along with the Obama administration on this too. You guys hear much about the NSA in the news anymore? I haven’t. Not in the mainstream media anyway. What do you hear about? Syria. Oh, and Miley Cyrus. Miley Cyrus was also DEFINITELY a government distraction. There’s just no other explanation for that.

Oh, and also, Russia and China have also told us to back off. Syria is one of Russia’s last allies, and Russia has its only remaining naval base outside of the former Soviet Union in Syria. Also, Russia sells guns to Syria, and Russia likes making money. Russia also doesn’t like it when other countries (America) put themselves in the middle of other countries’ problems. America buys guns and ammunition from Russia. There were ships with said guns and ammo heading to the US from Russia. Russia turned those ships around, mid-Atlantic, and sent them to the middle-east as a symbolic “BACK OFF” to the US.

I’ll end with this: Obama is an idiot. 91% of Americans don’t want to get involved in Syria. What does Obama want to do? Get involved in Syria. He hasn’t made a case; he hasn’t given us a good reason other than “OH LOOK THEY USED CHEMICAL WEAPONS (maybe)”. We elected him, he isn’t a dictator. As an elected official, he’s supposed to do what his constituents want. The vast majority of his constituents want him to leave Syria alone. No other country in the world wants us there, and Obama has his finger hovering over the “Launch cruise missiles into Syria” button, just itching to press it. By the way, the NSA is still wiretapping your stuff.

Trayvon vs Lane

I’m going to preface this post with a disclaimer. I am not a racist, I have no animosity towards any particular race. Statistics are not racism. If something is true, it is not racism. Racism is thinking that you’re superior, or that someone else is inferior, based SOLEY on the color of their skin. I can dislike someone who is black because of another trait that they possess. I would dislike someone who is white because of the same trait. It has nothing to do with their skin, or where they’re from, or where their ancestors are from. I don’t like morons who take pictures of themselves making gang signs, flipping off the camera, and wielding guns, I don’t care if they’re black or white, either way, I don’t like them.

So I live in Oklahoma, not too far from where the Australian guy was murdered by a group of thugs who “were bored”. When I first heard the story, it crossed my mind that the guy could be a student at my college. The news story said that he attended a small college about 85 miles away, so it was entirely possible that they were talking about my school. Turns out, they weren’t, but it still hits pretty close to home for me.

For those of you who haven’t heard about this yet, or who don’t know much about the story, 3 black teen grabbed a gun, hopped in a truck, and targeted Chris Lane, a 22yr old Australian who was out jogging, and happened to pass the boys. They simply drove by, and shot him. They then bragged about it on Facebook.

Why did they do this? Because they “were bored” is what was said, by one of the boys, in court. They wanted to know what it was like to kill someone. Sounds like Folsom Prison Blues to me. But what really irks me is the fact that the media won’t give this nearly as much attention as the Zimmerman trial.

Now, for those of you who aren’t too familiar with that case, George Zimmerman is a Hispanic from Florida who was walking around his neighborhood at night on a neighborhood watch, because they’d been having problems with crime. He saw Trayvon Martin, a black teen, in a dark hoodie, and ended up shooting, and killing him. He was charged with murder and was found to be innocent.

President Obama decided to stick his nose where it doesn’t belong, and comment on the case, several times, in favor of Zimmerman being found guilty. Florida has a Stand Your Ground law, which essentially allows for self-defense. Zimmerman said that he killed Martin in self-defense, and a jury of his peers found that to be true. One of the jurors even said, after the trial, that they WANTED to charge him with something, but couldn’t, because they couldn’t find that he did anything wrong.

So Zimmerman gets off, and then the US Justice Department is talking about pursuing a federal case against him and charging him with a hate crime. Now I have two issues with this hate crime nonsense. First, all of the FBI reports say that Zimmerman isn’t a racist. His grandfather is black, he took a black girl to prom in high school, this guy isn’t a racist. However, because Zimmerman looks white, and killed a black kid, the mainstream media jumped on the story, painted Zimmerman as a racist, and called for his head. Then he gets acquitted. There was even a black woman on his jury. All 6 jurors found him not guilty.

I feel sorry for the guy, he didn’t do anything wrong and he’s probably looking over his shoulder every day hoping some thug won’t shoot him. I mean come on, legally he’s free and clear, leave the guy alone. Let him write a book and make a million dollars.

Anyway, the point is that this new case, which happened only about a month after Zimmerman got acquitted, isn’t really all that similar. However it has everything that the Zimmerman case lacked. One of the teens tweeted “Ayeee I knocced out 5 woods since Zimmerman court!:) lol shit ima keep sleepin shit! #ayeeee”. Apparently “woods” is a derogatory term for white people. So this thug is bragging about punching out white people. That sure sounds like racism to me. Another of these kids tweeted “90% of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM”. Gee, that’s blatantly racist.Where’s the outcry? Where are the people saying that these racist kids deserve to rot for what they did? I haven’t heard much of that like we did with Zimmerman.

Now, I'm not saying that they should rot. The media loves to misconstrue things ans take quotes out of context. It happens ALL THE TIME. Like in the Zimmerman case. The call went like this:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he's up to no good. Or he's on drugs or something. It's raining and he's just walking around, looking about.

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy -- is he black, white, or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

NBC's Version:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black.

That’s pretty different. That’s blatant defamation. Zimmerman is currently suing NBC for defamation, and I hope that he wins. This can’t be the first time that NBC has done something like this. I haven’t looked into it, but this had to have happened before. Whose lives have they ruined because they want to make someone look bad so they take something out of context to further their own agenda? The news isn’t there to put a spin on things or tell you how to think or what to think, it’s there to tell you what happened. Plain and simple. That NEVER happens anymore, and I’m sick of it.

Back to the Chris Lane murder. All I’ve heard is Jesse Jackson saying that “This senseless violence is frowned upon”. “Frowned upon”…If this was 3 white teens who got bored and shot an upstanding black kid out for a jog, visiting his girlfriend while he was in the US on a baseball scholarship, Jesse Jackson would be on every media outlet telling us how racist we are. But because it’s the other way around, instead, we just frown upon the thugs who shot this guy.

You frown upon the guy smoking by the front door when it’s illegal. You frown upon people sticking their gum to the bottom of the desk or chair. You don’t trivialize the fact that 3 guys grabbed a gun, chased down an innocent man with no provocation whatsoever, and shot him 3 times in the back, then joked about it on Facebook. You don’t frown upon that, you give them all lethal injections or send them to prison for the rest of their lives.

I did a bit of research to confirm what I already know. The majority of crime is not interracial. Whites kill whites, blacks kill blacks. In fact, blacks kill blacks more often than whites kill whites. Blacks kill whites more often than whites kill blacks. I’m not just going to throw statistics at you without a source, so here you go. A black person is 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white person than vice-versa. This isn’t racism; these are cold, hard facts, backed up with evidence, from our own government.

http://www.examiner.com/article/federal-statistics-of-black-on-white-violence-with-links-and-mathematical-extrapolation-formulas

http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/22/viewpoint-dont-ignore-race-in-christopher-lanes-murder/

I’ll say it again: I am not a racist. I have black friends, I have Hispanic friends, I have white friends and I have Asian friends. I do not judge someone based off of the color of their skin at all. It’s unfortunate that race is still an issue. However, I’m tired of being called a racist simply because I disagree with or dislike someone who isn’t white.

Now, what all of this boils down to is actually really simple; the issue is that a lot of people aren’t willing to believe that there’s some big plan out there to get the world to think a certain way. Well people, there is. For decades, the Left has been pushing its agenda forward, and the media goes right along with them. So here’s the point, here’s what we finally getting to after I’ve thrown all of this information at you: The media isn’t really going to give this story a lot of coverage because it doesn’t fit the Left’s agenda.

The Left, the so called Liberals and Progressives (there’s a difference between the two), essentially want to turn this country into a socialist country, abolishing the free-trade and market-capitalism that allowed this country to thrive for a couple hundred years. What does that have to do with Zimmerman and Lane? Well, a lot actually. Typically, middle class, white Americans vote Republican (or Right) and nearly everyone else votes Democrat (or Left). So by demonizing middle class, white Americans, everyone else gets riled up, and goes out and votes for more Democrats, who promise to do something about the George Zimmermans of the country.

But why do they need to get riled up? Why not just vote anyway? Well, typically, we have about a 50% voter turnout nationwide. People who are so engrossed in their own lives don’t vote. People who are content with their jobs or welfare or riches don’t vote. But when you get people excited or angry about something, they’ll be lining up to cast their ballots. If some up and coming politician in Florida says that he’ll get rid of the Stand Your Ground law, which is what protected Zimmerman, he’ll have people who are outraged about the Zimmerman verdict flocking to the polls to elect him.

So again, this case here in Oklahoma won’t get much attention. It’ll get some, for sure, and people like Glenn Beck and O’Reilly will probably give it some attention, but because CNN and NBC and Bill Maher won’t be talking about it much, the vast majority of the country will have forgotten about it by this time next year, if they’ve even heard about it in the first place.

I hate to trivialize the murder of a man about my age, who had everything in life going for him, but that’s what’s happened to this country. We’re so overwhelmed with violence in the media and on TV, in movies and video games, that it doesn’t mean anything anymore until it hits us close to home, within our own family. The value of life isn’t what it used to be, but if something happens that furthers a politician’s agenda, you can bet you’ll be hearing about it.

I’ll leave you with this: Violence perpetuates violence. Racism perpetuates racism. Slavery was a terrible, awful thing that happened in this country, but most of our history books have it wrong. My next post will be over how they have it wrong, but for now, I’ll keep it short. Slavery has been dead for over 100 years. Nobody alive today has been legally enslaved in the United States of America. Whites have been enslaved, Jews have been enslaved, and blacks have been enslaved. Enslavement has happened within and between races. It’s a terrible, ugly thing, but it’s happened. However, we managed to end it, and we know that it is wrong.

We had a long, bloody war. The Civil War wasn’t exactly about slavery, but slavery was an issue, and the vast majority of casualties were white. My ancestors fought and died on both sides, and Abraham Lincoln, a white man, is largely responsible for freeing the slaves. I hate that everything is about race. Obama is the “first black president”. Who cares? What does that have to do with anything? If his race affects his decisions or policies, that is the very definition of racism. I try not to judge people at first glance, but if you’re behaving like a thug, and talking like thug, you’re a thug. Whether you’re White, Black, Hispanic, Asian or Other, you’re a thug, and you’re what’s wrong with this country.

"Gay Rights"

While I doubt that anyone will ever read this, I do, however, enjoy writing, so I thought I'd put this out there and see what happens. If you know me, you know that I'm very opinionated. You also know that I'm into politics and all of that fun, messy stuff. Typically, that's what I'll be writing about, simply to jot my thoughts down for myself rather than for anyone else. You guys out there just get to read my stuff. Yay for you.

What prompted me to begin this blog, and what will hopefully prompt me to continue it, was a story on "Gay Rights". That's a big deal these days. We hear about it all the time, and the mainstream media loves to tell everyone how great being gay is or some nonsense like that. I'm not going to hate on gays, but I'll before I go any further on my thoughts about this particular issue, I'll put my stance right there out in the open, and I'll probably elaborate on it a little later.

I think homosexuality is wrong. I'm a Christian, I take the Bible at face value, I've read Romans 1, I think that the Bible still applies to us today, there's no reason it shouldn't; Homosexuality is a sin. But here's the thing that I don't think a lot of Christians get: Sex outside of marriage is wrong, lying is wrong, cheating is wrong, stealing is wrong, lustful thoughts are wrong, and I could fill up pages and pages of more things that are wrong. Of course, we Christians like to use the word "sin". Same difference.

Either way, if you're a Christian and you've read the Good Book like I have, you know that at one time or another, no matter how holy or righteous you think you may be, you did something wrong. Yes, I'm equating homosexuality with taking $5 out of your dad's wallet when you were 10. That's in the Bible.

So anyway, this story was talking about "Gay Rights". I'll say it again for emphasis "Gay Rights". Has anyone ever heard of Heterosexual Rights? I haven't. Here's the problem I have with that particular moniker: It implies that homosexuals are being denied rights that non-homosexuals have. Yes, in most states gay marriage is illegal, and you can get into the visitation rights issue and the 1138 federal laws pertaining to marriage (most of which have to do with taxes) that don't apply to homosexual couples, but that's not my point. My point is that the argument is inherently flawed in the first place. It's become a battle between gays and anti-gays.

Now, there’s a difference between anti-gays, and people who think that homosexuality is wrong. Anti-gays are people like the Westboro Baptist Church. They’re just as wrong as homosexuals. In fact, I dislike the Westboro Baptist Church more than I dislike homosexuality. The Westboro Baptists not only makes Christians look terrible, but also dishonors the lives of honorable soldiers who fought for this country. That really irks me, but I’m getting off topic.

The battle between gays and anti-gays is based on a false premise. That false premise is this: Gay marriage is the answer (for the gays) or the problem (for the anti-gays). Now, let me tell you why they’re both wrong. The gays want to be told that their relationships are equal to the relationship between a man and a woman: marriage. The anti-gays have a problem with this because they disagree. The Bible, and several laws, define marriage as a relationship exclusively between one man and one woman. There are plenty of people out there who aren't necessarily anti-gay, but who just think it's wrong. There's a difference. Anti-gays are the ones out there making lots of noise about the issue. Those other people are just entitled to their own beliefs and will exercise their voting powers to say no to gay marriage if given the chance.

Now, this entire argument is false for several reasons. I’ll get into two, and again mention that the Bible says that homosexuality is a sin. So, first reason: Marriage, in this day and age, isn’t some shining ideal. We’ve got a divorce rate over 50%, nobody “waits” until marriage anymore, and then you’ve got people who cheat on their spouse. So it’s not like marriage is treated, by the majority of people, like some holy status. It should be, but it isn’t.

The second reason, and the one that I’ll get into a bit more, is the fact that marriage is being dictated by the government. Marriage is a legal status more than anything else. Marriage grants you certain rights, like hospital visitation rights and inheritance and all that fun stuff. Which is all well and good, however I think we need a major remodeling on how marriage is treated. I like what Ron Paul has to say about it. During one of the 2012 presidential primary debates, Ron Paul basically said that the government has no business in marriage. Let’s give it back to the churches, let’s let the churches decide who can get married.

I agree with these sentiments wholeheartedly. Marriage is, after all, a religious institution, not a legal one. And yes, people will still have a problem with gays. However, there are churches out there who completely ignore Romans 1 and who are more than willing to marry a guy to another guy. So if we do give marriage back to the churches, it would be less of a legal status and more of an honorary title recognized by your particular religious organization. Whether or not we legalize gay marriage, or criminalize it, it'll still happen.

Again, I think it’s wrong. But we live in a fallen world, and homosexuality is no different than that one time you did something you knew you weren’t supposed to do and then lied about it. It may be a more prominent issue, but in God’s eyes, there’s no difference.

So anyway, that’s my stance on the so-called Gay Rights deal. I still take issue with the term Gay Rights because I don’t think they’re really being denied anything, and their entire premise is wrong, but hey, that’s my opinion, WHICH I AM ENTITLED TO. (I’ll get into that issue another time). So folks, thanks for reading, and if you disagree with anything I said, good for you for using your own brain! I’d love to hear about your thoughts. Just be civil about it.