Lord of the Flies Isn't Too Far from the Reality

So I recently attended the Boys State program in Virginia, and it has really been a journey.

First, of all, i want to say how fun it was with the kids who had to suffer the program with me. It was obvious that 90 percent of the students there were only there for having "Boys State" on their college applications. The people who were chosen to come were great people, I couldn't have had a better time for the week if it wasn't for them.

Now, for the actual program.

The week was full of disgusting politics and social maneuverings for issues and topics that too far from reality to even think about. Yet the people who were so into it were nothing short of violent in getting their bills passed and especially getting their candidate elected. There were the good, the bad, and the ugly throughout the conservative brainwash camp, and they were divided distinctively between the dorm and the actual activities. While the fun and the "good" were confined in the dorms right before lights out and the talent show, the bad and the ugly were rampant in the conventions, mid-day activities, and the speeches.

I've never had so much republican conservative slander thrown at me before they brought out the public speakers, expecially, Dave Willis, Jerry Faldwell, the leutenant governor, and the attorney general. Of course, they were talking about issues such as gay marriage, sex offenders, etc. which really held no appeal to me. In fact, i found myself disturbed by what they were trying to get across to us, which was, total compliance to the rule and patriotism to leave no room for individuality and freedoms.

The most disturbing and disgusting topic of the week was that of the flag. It seemed as though the main focus was respecting the American flag. Dave Willis made it clear that he wanted the burning of the American flag to be illegal and another authority wanted total respect to the flag during the flag raising and lowering ceremonies or whoever messed around would be victim to his personal confrontation. Now, I do respect their patriotic adherance to their country, however, I cannot shake off the feeling that their missing the point.

America is a country. A country is an idea. Really, what is the United States of America. The USA consists of different states which consist of people who consider themselves to share an identity. This identity is a citizenship that embodies everyone who wishes to be part of this nation. America is whatever the people make it. Our country cannot be represented simply by a flag or papers. America is simply what we make and what we want it to be. WE are the people. The people make up the country. We can burn the flag if we want to and we can express any of our opinions if we want to as long as we don't oppress the rights and freedoms of others. However, out of feverish patriotism and blind pride, the conservative and militant right want to suppress the freedoms that we have in the name of hate and revenge. What good is protection if we don't have anything to protect. What does a government protect? Our lives? What good are our lives if they don't mean anything. America is collection of individuals. Why are we the best (we're not)? Because we have that freedom. Now, fear, terrorism, and propaganda are restricting those freedoms and our opinions to evnetually bring us down.

Another thing I noticed is that Boys State seemed to be a lot like the government set up by the kids in the Lord of the Flies. The most unimportant were set as top priorities during ceremonies (the flag) and proper dressing was always enforced. Religion was so important in the program and everything revolved around time consuming propriety that had no effect on how we lived our lives whatsoever. So you know waht i have to say to that? Fuck yoU!

anyways... that's my story for Boys State...

Ramble Ramble Ramble

I want to talk about how certain people are...

how certain ARE these people?

about anything. About life, dating, school, God, politics, government, science, abortion, dating, building, business, hormones, etc. When they get experts up there to talk to us about some issue, who are they to say so, and who are we to listen? i'm sure research has taken us a long way, but is there a definite truth out there? i'm sure someone can argue that 1 + 1 does not equal 2. Even in the basics, people will stumble and argue.

Take an atom for an example. In chemistry, we learn that the number of protons, neutrons, and electrons make up the structure of all elements and one can basically know what element something is by looking at its atom. However, if you look into an atom, you see that there are smaller particles called quarks. If you look into quarks you find even smaller particles shifting in and out of reality and matter or whatnot. How definite is reality. How real or definite is our physical world compared to any other world. Essentially, is our world only a figment of our imagination? Kind of like a movie. There are missing pieces, but our brains (doesn't necessarily have to be our brains... perhaps just our physical bodies or senses) put them together to make a whole uninterrupted scene.

What if there are other dimensions that we cannot see?
but then again... so what?

That leads me to ask another question: how sure are people about morality? how certain are people that proclaim Jesus as a savior or God as... God or maybe even that God is dead (Nietzche) or Bush is God or whatever the hell these kids are saying nowadays? To tell you the truth, i think nobody really knows what they're talking about. Could morality be an artificial and unnatural idea or substance that is necessary for human societies or human civilizations to survive? Are societies natural? Do other animals or other beings have a sense of morality? Do dogs feel guilty? Do all dogs go to heaven? kidding.

I know of some people who would die if they realized that there was no purpose to their lives... but what difference does it really make? i would think that just dying and ending your life without anything to look forward to is more comforting than dying and ending up in hell OR in heaven. Why would you want to continue your existence for another thousand years (if taken literally from the bible) in heaven? What is heaven? Don't we all have a different perception of heaven? Doesn't that mean at least someone's going to be disappointed when they realize that heaven was not what they expected it to be? i would think that whoever made this idea of heaven definitely did not have a satisfying life. OR. He couldve have a very successful life, perhaps even a rich... Jew. Why wouldn't he want to continue his life?

it's late... i need to go to sleep. goodnight all.

New York Times - 500 Conspiracy Buffs Meet to Seek the Truth of 9/11

June 5, 2006
500 Conspiracy Buffs Meet to Seek the Truth of 9/11
By ALAN FEUER
CHICAGO, June 4 — In the ballroom foyer of the Embassy Suites Hotel, the two-day International Education and Strategy Conference for 9/11 Truth was off to a rollicking start.
In Salon Four, there was a presentation under way on the attack in Oklahoma City, while in the room next door, the splintered factions of the movement were asked — for sake of unity — to seek a common goal.
In the foyer, there were stick-pins for sale ("More gin, less Rummy"), and in the lecture halls discussions of the melting point of steel. "It's all documented," people said. Or: "The mass media is mass deception." Or, as strangers from the Internet shook hands: "Great to meet you. Love the work."
Such was the coming-out for the movement known as "9/11 Truth," a society of skeptics and scientists who believe the government was complicit in the terrorist attacks. In colleges and chat rooms on the Internet, this band of disbelievers has been trying for years to prove that 9/11 was an inside job.
Whatever one thinks of the claim that the state would plan, then execute, a scheme to murder thousands of its own, there was something to the fact that more than 500 people — from Italy to Northern California — gathered for the weekend at a major chain hotel near the runways of O'Hare International. It was, in tone, half trade show, half political convention. There were talks on the Reichstag fire and the sinking of the Battleship Maine as precedents for 9/11. There were speeches by the lawyer for James Earl Ray, who claimed that a military conspiracy killed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, and by a former operative for the British secret service, MI5.
"We feel at this point we've done a lot of solid research, but the American public still is not informed," said Michael Berger, press director for 911Truth.org, which sponsored the event. "We had to come up with a disciplined approach to get it out."
Mr. Berger, 40, is typical of 9/11 Truthers — a group that, in its rank and file, includes professors, chain-saw operators, mothers, engineers, activists, used-book sellers, pizza deliverymen, college students, a former fringe candidate for United States Senate and a long-haired fellow named hummux (pronounced who-mook) who, on and off, lived in a cave for 15 years.
The former owner of a recycling plant outside St. Louis, Mr. Berger joined the movement when he grew skeptical of why the 9/11 Commission had failed, to his sense of sufficiency, to answer how the building at 7 World Trade Center collapsed like a ton of bricks. It was his "9/11 trigger," the incident that drew him in, he said. For others, it might be the fact that the air-defense network did not prevent the attacks that day, or the appearance of thousands of "puts" — or short-sell bids — on the nation's airline stocks. (The 9/11 Commission found the sales innocuous.)
Such "red flags," as they are sometimes called, were the meat and potatoes of the keynote speech on Friday night by Alex Jones, who is the William Jennings Bryan of the 9/11 band. Mr. Jones, a syndicated radio host, is known for his larynx-tearing screeds against corruption — fiery, almost preacherly, addresses in which he sweats, balls his fists and often swerves from quoting Roman history to using foul language in a single breath.
At the lectern Friday night, beside a digital projection reading "History of Government Sponsored Terrorism," Mr. Jones set forth the central tenets of 9/11 Truth: that the military command that monitors aircraft "stood down" on the day of the attacks; that President Bush addressed children in a Florida classroom instead of being whisked off to the White House; that the hijackers, despite what the authorities say, were trained at American military bases; and that the towers did not collapse because of burning fuel and weakened steel but because of a "controlled demolition" caused by pre-set bombs.
According to the group's Web site, the motive for faking a terrorist attack was to allow the administration "to instantly implement policies its members have long supported, but which were otherwise infeasible."
The controlled-demolition theory is the sine qua non of the 9/11 movement — its basic claim and, in some sense, the one upon which all others rest. It is, of course, directly contradicted by the 10,000-page investigation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which held that jet-fuel fires distressed the towers' structure, which eventually collapsed.
The movement's answer to that report was written by Steven E. Jones, a professor of physics at Brigham Young University and the movement's expert in the matter of collapse. Dr. Jones, unlike Alex Jones, is a soft-spoken man who lets his writing do the talking. He composed an account of the destruction of the towers (www.physics.byu.edu/research/energy/htm7.html) that holds that "pre-positioned cutter-charges" brought the buildings down.
Like a prior generation of skeptics — those who doubted, say, the Warren Commission or the government's account of the Gulf of Tonkin attack — the 9/11 Truthers are dogged, at home and in the office, by friends and family who suspect that they may, in fact, be completely nuts.
"Elvis and Area 51 — we're sort of lumped together," said Harlan Dietrich, a recent college graduate from Austin, Tex. "It's attack the messenger, not the message every time."
To get the message out, the movement has gone beyond bumper stickers and "Kumbaya" into political action.
There is a plan, Mr. Berger said, to create a fund to support candidates on a 9/11 platform. There is a plan to create a network of college campus groups. There is a plan by the British delegation (such as it is, so far) to get members of Parliament to watch "Loose Change," the seminal movement DVD.
It would even seem the Truthers are not alone in believing the whole truth has not come out. A poll released last month by Zogby International found that 42 percent of all Americans believe the 9/11 Commission "concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence" in the attacks. This is in addition to the Zogby poll two years ago that found that 49 percent of New York City residents agreed with the idea that some leaders "knew in advance" that the attacks were planned and failed to act.
Beneath the weekend's screenings and symposiums on geopolitics and mass-hypnotic trance lies a tradition of questioning concentrated power, both in public and in private hands, said Mark Fenster, a law professor at the University of Florida and author of "Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture."
As for the 9/11 Truthers, they were confident enough that their theories made sense that on Friday, as a kickoff to the conference, they met in Daley Plaza for a rally (though some called it Dealey Plaza). They marched up Kinzle Street to the local affiliate of NBC where, at the plate glass windows, they chanted, "Talking heads tell lies," as the news was being read.
"I hope you don't end up dead somewhere," a companion said to a participant, hours earlier as he dropped him at the Loop. "Don't worry," the participant said. "There's too many of us for that."