What's Been and What's Ben

10. Michael Jackson (2009) – by shear news volume over trivial things. An unscientific survey found he was the dominantly covered celebrity of the first decade of the third millennium. From child-touching to baby-dangling to radical cosmetic surgery to his final death from an extreme overdose of operating-room anesthesia, Jackson dominated the decade and in many ways represents America’s boundless excess.

9. Boxing Day Tsunami (2004) – a quarter of a million people dead from a black swan incident that we as a species were unfamiliar with. Seven billion dollars in aide was provided by countries all over the world with over 100 billion being given by each of the following countries in order: US, Australia, Germany, UK, Canada, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Ireland, Taiwan, and Denmark.

8. China (2008) – after hosting the Olympics the rise of China to rule to world was moved one step closer. It is important to note that for hundreds of years Westerners have predicted the rise of China to become the dominant power in the world. Their rapid industrialization and embracing of capitalism have given them a noteworthy 8-10% increase in GDP every year.

7. Katrina (2005) – the Tsunami in the Pacific may have killed 100 times more people, but Katrina caused more economic damaged and showed the weakness in response by a developed country. Kanye West said it best, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

6. Invasion of Iraq (2003) – in what could be considered the biggest magic trick in history, the Bush White House put some yellow cake in Colin Powell’s hands and started a war with the other. The war defined the Bush Doctrine of preemptive invasions to prevent a future attack. This action divided America internally and from the world around it – squandering the goodwill the world community had given us. I was for the war before I was against it.

5. Near total economic collapse (2008) – that could have sucked more than it did. Thankfully we ensured that bankers remained super-wealthy and did not change weak antiquated regulations. This was the result of too many smart people going into business and trying to create as much imaginary money as possible at the cost of the mutual funds they tricked millions into buying into.

4. Obama’s election (2007-08) – imagine you are in a bar in 2006 and some says “…and then we elected a black president.” You would think it was a joke. The nation elected the anti-Bush and made everybody feel good about it. In what was likely the election of my lifetime, with both parties nominee in contention until the last few primaries/caucuses. Obama was elected not as just a black president, but as a presidential candidate who happened to be black (technically he is half and half). His name only hints as the many dramatic themes of the election of Iraq Hussein Osama.

3. Bush’s stolen election (2000) – Bush stole the election from both Al Gore in the general and John McCain in the primaries. Karl Rove may be the big player behind this, but either way, it sets the stage for the next decade. McCain had nasty robo-calls in South Carolina launched against him that asked if the answerer knew about McCain’s illegitimate black baby – who was really his adopted daughter. This played on racists elements of the republican party enough to throw the republican nomination to the loser coke-head drunk repeat-business-failure son of a former president. A few months later Bush had the conservative supreme court stop the recount in Florida hours before they would have declared Al Gore the winner. The results in Florida were delivered by State Auditor and chair of Bush’s presidential campaign in Florida. Oh! and his brother was governor.

2. Internet 2.0 (2003-09) – the Internet has brought the world closer together than anything before. Instant sharing of information across the world through words, images, sounds, and videos has changed the lives of billions of people in a dramatically short time. With Internet 2.0 (content creation, not just consumption) individual people are free to write blogs, post on message boards, vote on digg.com, post themselves singing on youtube, and network through a number of social-networking sites. Used for everything from entertainment to science to create a world that could only be dreamed of two decades ago. Almost any question can be answered by simply googling it.

1. 9/11/ (2001) – no other series of event are referred to only by the date on which they fell with numbers already present in the psych of Americans as the telephone number of emergency services. On 9/12 every single U.S. flags was sold out and everybody was a New Yorker after 3000 died in cold blood. This was the largest in a string of attacks on Americans by radical-Islamic terrorists such as the USS Cole, shoe bomber, Fort Hood gunman, and underwear bomber. After going to war against terrorism in Afghanistan a few months afterward, we have yet to capture Osama bin Laden – the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. These events defined the Bush presidency (originally he wanted to be the education president) and the next decade as U.S. foreign policy was shaped by the reaction and over-reaction to these events. The fear created by these events caused a reduction in civil liberties and an expansion of the previously contracting post cold war U.S. military.

What was that all about, 2009. You started out with such hope and fear and you ended with such hope and fear. Obama held the promise that he would make vegetables delicious and taxes fun. He is ending the year with W. level approval as people feel the disappointment that the second coming of Jesus will not in the aughts (2000-2009). When can we just start calling years like years without the obvious “two-thousand” prefix?

We had those seals shoot the Somali pirates in the head at sea to save the sea captain. Al Franken became a U.S. senator after a few months of recount. Iraq looks like we might leave soon. World economic collapse was averted. KAUST opened. I don’t think anything legitimately worthy of a Mission Accomplished banner.

On the other hand unemployment went to double digits as Washington became stalemated by a republican party that refused to accept that they were in the minority. Michael Jackson died and people forgot he like children a bit too much. I liked Thriller, but didn’t feel he warranted more than a brief mention on the news.

I feel that the Obama hate has been masked racism. I hope somebody is doing some psychological study on the tea-baggers. After the doctrines of Bush failed people were so used to attacking things that we ran out of will to build anything up. The tea-baggers have no mantra of their own. They enjoy shouting at Obama. Glenn Beck and the like have risen to power by feeding on fear. Perhaps this has been the decade of fear.

So another terrorist tried to kill Americans with an airplane. This time a Nigerian with Yemen ties named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He made a bomb, but was an idiot who should have spent more time studying and less time hating on America because we are more awesome than everybody. I agree with a recent New York Times opinion piece by David Brooks, which I got free on Air India business class, hypothesizes that Americas prosperity comes from our ability to adopt new ideas. 9/11 wasn’t over before we figured out how to stop planes from being crashed into buildings. Flight 93 learned in-air about what was going on and put a stop to a potential attack on the White House, Capitol, or Washington Monument. This time a boarder-line retarded pitiful excuse of an engineer fails in making a good bomb and gets tackled by a Dutch dude who had been taking a nap or something and then restrained by others on the plane. Now he is covered in burns, his face must be so red, and will spend the rest of his life behind bars. I don’t think terrorists realize how Westerns act on planes now. I see something going down, it instantly becomes a survival game. Silly terrorists. The dude was just a spoiled rich kid who wanted to play radical in a lame attempt to keep it real. He was a mechanical engineer, take from that information what you will.

On a strange side-note, I feel some strong sympathy for the Nigerian dude who was on the same flight two days later and got sick around landing time. I am sure he was detained hardcore – the victim of bad timing and potentially for carrying an enchilada bomb.

I spent Christmas out at my Grandma’s farm on Whaletail Lake, west of Minneapolis by an hour. We made a snowman, as pictured with my sister.

And with my youngest cousin, Eero. I threw my back out lifting up the second layer. The snow was ultra wet from some freezing rain and would make a snowball if you just dipped your hand into it.

I love snow so many times more than sand!

I started off by missing the bus from campus to the airport. I split a cab with a fellow student who had the same flight as me. My Lufthansa flight out of Saudi Arabia to Frankfurt, Germany was delayed. I arrived a bit late and ran to the gate for my Chicago flight. I watched while going through the security checkpoint as they shut the door on my flight at the gate twenty feet away. It turns out Lufthansa had two days before cancelled all flights, Heathrow and Amsterdam had closed for a day or two because of blizzards. I waited in line for six hours to get my new tickets. In accordance with the wonderful German socialized-traveling the airline provided me meals, cab vouchers, and a hotel room for the night as I awaited my flight home in the morning. The line for tickets extended forever. It was two days before Christmas Eve and everybody and their brother way trying to get out of Europe. As soon as had tickets in my hand I went and had a few beers at the airport bar. Onto the hotel, the Frankfurt Intercontinental. It was strange that they chose this hotel chain as it was the one I stayed at for a month in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia before campus was built.

I slept for a few hours. Woke up at 9. Had free dinner. Went to hotel bar. I would have ventured outside, but I only had an undershirt and a short-sleeved collared shirt. I did not want to freeze in Frankfurt – which looks just like Wisconsin. I spent a few hours casually drinking with some cool British dudes who were trying to get to New York. Their flight was cancelled and they had to return to the airport to stand in line again. We talked about universal healthcare, the entitlement culture, and television.

I woke up at 5 and went to the airport. For breakfast I had what I thought was a German breakfast of a Turkey sandwich with this strange pretzel break and coffee with Jagermesiter. I only got a ticket this early because of a comment I made to the Lufthansa ticketing agent the day before:

I will do anything to get home
Anything? (starts typing vigorously for a minute) Do you like…Adventure?
Yes?

So I ended up on an Air India flight. When I mentioned this to the British guys at the bar they both started to laugh. Turns out it is an airline so dirty that Air India needs its own ground crews because the local crews refuse to clean the planes. I sat in dread of that until I heard a German voice pronounce my last name very clearly (all Germans know how to pronounce FREE-vert) to tell me I had been bumped up to business class. The worst flight of my life turned into the best as I was given a seat that went flat, free booze, better food and cleanliness. Sitting across the aisle from me was a guy who missed his own wedding and was a member of some prominent band I forgot the name of. Between the hotel stay and the business-class seat it was a rather nice flight. When I landed in Chicago I was not questioned at all by the customs agent. In the Chicago airport there were Christmas decorations all around.

The flight from Chicago to Minneapolis had 77 people on standby, but I luckily had a ticket. After landing my parents and I drove to Culver’s for a Triple Bacon ButterBurger Deluxe with extra bacon – 1000 calories. I landed at the start of a blizzard that lasted until yesterday. It took about 56 hours to get home.

It is all done. Four project proding, three finals filleting, two presentations percolating, and one ticket back to Minneapolis. I have been working since the 9th, every day, non-stop. Arguable the most stressful time in my life. At least up there with IB extended essay, IB testing, and fall quarters junior and senior year at Rose-Hulman. The academic workload wasn’t bad during the semester as whole. The problem is that it was all compressed to the end because professors delayed assigning things as they hoped for the labs to open. Enough school talk.
Chistmas presents: ordered and bad-ass. My applications for the next school are coming along as my recommendations lined up, GRE test scheduled, transcripts almost ordered, and I will write my personal statement on the plane to give them some metaphorical perspective from my physical perspective 30,000 feet above the Earth as I travel from the Middle-East to the Mid-West. I have a crude drawing on the mountains above my TV/computer monitor in my living room/office.

Yes, even a five-year-old would make fun of it, but it has given me something to hope for during these past weeks of where I will be going – at least for winter vacation. My apartment has been kept below 60 degrees to get me accustom to cold so that I don’t go into shock when I am finally exposed to it in three days where it is currently -7. It has been almost two months since I have been off this compound. It must have looked crazy when started laughing randomly in the campus square when I noticed that workers were planting flowers in winter.

This video is why I am proud to have voted for Senator Al Franken.

John McCain, 2008 republican presidential nominee and contender for Senate Kids Should Stay Off My Lawn Committee, showed how senile he is when he couldn’t remember back to earlier that day when somebody was cut off by Franken for going over time. It is doubtful that Franken didn’t get some joy out of cutting off Lieberman, 2000 democratic vice-presidential nominee,  who has been intentionally stalling a vote on the Healthcare reform bill. Senator Lieberman is from Connecticut which is home to a large portion of the health insurance industry. Senator Franken is from my home state of Minnesota which is also home to UnitedHealth Group, the largest insurance company in the world. Sen. Franken has the advantage that he can raise campaign money from somebody other than large corporate interests.

I still have the Kerry/Edwards presidential election sign that was signed by Al Franken in 2004 at a fiery speech at the Minnesota State Fair that hung on my wall all four years of college. I also got to shake his hand at the Minnesota State Fair in 2008 when he was running for his senate seat he won by 0.011% of the vote. I will always remember accidentally reverse-stalking him where it seemed he would show up everywhere I went from the University of Minnesota building, to his radio interview, and finally when I was standing in the middle of the street eating corn and he walked by.

Gasoline in the America should have a two dollar a gallon tax. Pollution should be taxed. Alcohol and cigarettes are taxed at a high rate as a sin tax. Why not just tax things that moral purists think is evil, but also things that cause cancer. People think something like that is ridiculous because it is already so expensive. These people don’t understand that we pay tax either way. There is no such thing as a free lunch. You pay either way, why not do it in a way to naturally encourage environmental stewardship.

Liberals always let me down because they never see a moral argument in what they say. Although I love the idea that then to use facts (I’m in an italics moods) over arbitrarily religious ideology selectively chosen to suit personal interest, I still feel that moral arguments must compliment these facts, figures, and logic.

Cap and Trade is stupid because it protects the establishment which preventing the natural evolution of businesses. If a business shrinks they can regain their former status because they will have extra carbon credits. If a new company wants to start up, what credits do they get? What if they want to compete with a preexisting company that pollutes with the same process? Conspiracy theorists can take it from there.

What if all tax was based on environmental impact? No other taxes. You probably need some regular taxes so we don’t start living in the woods. I also think teachers should be like churches – no taxes. I agree with Joe Biden that you express you true morals with your wallet. I also agree with John McCain who argued once for believing in global climate change because the things we do to fix it are things we know we should be doing anyway.

I recently found out that I did not have a flight back from Christmas. Denial (this can’t be). Anger (this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass (the Big Lebowski reference)). Bargaining (what is the cheapest flight). Depression (this is my fault). Acceptance (never got here). It would have cost me $2700 to fly back at this late time during the busiest travel time of the year. I filed my paperwork back in October to use my once a year free round-trip flight from KAUST to go home for Christmas. My dance card is full back home between Chirstmas, New Years Eve, a GRE test, a trip to Boulder, and did I mention Christmas. This was all that gave me hope to get through this tough few weeks near the end of the semester where professors delayed lessons plans suddenly overwhelmed us with work. Writing this was a luxury.

KAUST never told me I didn’t have a flight. The reservation with the travel agent was canceled on November 13th. Paperwork was likely overhwelming for the sole staff member. Everything is back on track and my original flight has been confirmed. Thank God. I wanted to wait to blog about this until after the situation was resolved to give KAUST the benefit of the doubt because I feel that I am often hard on them. This was particularly upsetting because this wasn’t a large-scale problem that would take years to fix, but an administrative accident. The prospect of having Christmas taken away was all that I needed during this hectic time where I have four projects due within a 24-hour period. I had decided that if I had to buy my own ticket, it would have been a one-way. Luckily KAUST came through for me and I will get to finish out my masters degree. On a related front of KAUST doing what it should, they are compensating us for stuff damaged during the flood. Now onto the flood of work that will not stop until just before I board a plane next week. I may pull my first all-nighter since high school when I finished by IB extended essay (3947 words) on the viability of Huey Long in the 1936 US presidential election – had he not been assassinated – five years ago next Wednesday.

Ipods can not take down an airplane. I remember a funny bit on The Simpsons where Bart has his gameboy on during takeoff and the flight attendant asks him to turn it off, he does, the plane starts to crash, she pleads him to turn it back on, he does, and the plane resumes normal flight. I understand cell phones because they transmit radio signals, but iPods are thoroughly tested by the FCC to ensure that they can’t create interference. Planes are also designed to not be affected by the millions of radio signals they fly through. There is an argument that people need to pay attention to the safety announcements, which brings me to my next idea to improve air travel.

I propose a form you sign that is kept on file with the FAA and the airlines that states that you are fully aware and accept full responsibility for knowing those same stupid safety announcements so I can listen to my iPod for the entire trip, gate to gate. How many people have been saved by knowing that their cushion floats? Even when the plane landed on the Hudson in a strange occurrence of a water landing that wasn’t instantly fatal, nobody needed the damn cushion. The advantage of the form is that is everybody on the plane signs it, then no announcements at all need to be made except perhaps a short “so everybody here knows how to sit in a chair for a few hours, great, lets get flying!”

There has never been any evidence that a personal electronic device (PED) has caused any interference with an airplane. The proof that the policy is complete BS is that they don’t ask everybody to turn off their watches – which are almost all electrical devices that have radio-frequency range crystal oscillators inside.