May 11, 2011

Momentous Events

Osama bin Laden is gone now, clearly a terrorist trying to avoid justice, but the United Nations refuses to accept this conclusion, and instead would like to see proof that the raid was legal. The United Nations has not yet asked whether 9/11 was legal - I suppose that answer is simply too obvious, and doesn't provide any means of annoying the United States. I think that we should have laughed off this absurd question, but apparently we are wasting time to provide an answer.

There are other people in the world who are demanding proof that bin Laden is dead in the form of photographs. There would be no benefit to us from the release of these photographs, I think. It would be more likely that they'd be used in terrorist propaganda. Also, thanks to the vogue of denying historical events, there remain many persons who would not be convinced even by photographs - and granted, nowadays such photographs could easily be poorly forged. Other persons who do not believe us are generally those who hate us, and naturally trust us as little as we do them. So the persons who least believe us, deniers and in addition to them, our enemies, are those who would be least convinced by the photographs.

On another topic, possibly of less global import but definitely of national import, there is talk of a pending executive order requiring companies that bid on federal contracts to divulge all political contributions. This could easily be misused by both political parties. I appeal to all of those people who regularly complain about big money on politics to consider how easily this order could be used to begin what might otherwise be called bribery. We should not allow such footholds to be sown, or we may reap corruption and shoddy work later.