So long, Dick. Sorry -- Rich.

Paul Gleason, a.k.a. Principal Richard Vernon from The Breakfast Club, has died of mesothelioma.

That sucks.

He'll never make good on his promise to knock Bender's dick in the dirt.

Windy

Yeah.
This is the backyard of my parents' house. We've lost trees to lightning, hail, flooding, tent worms, ice, construction-related root damage and now wind. But we've planted new trees in their wake. Doing our part to respect the circle of life -- or tempting that hella bitch Mother Nature yet again?

A War to End All Wars to End All Wars to End All Wars...

So I'm watching Real Time with Bill Maher as I tend to do on Sunday afternoons, and there is a satellite interview with Victor Davis Hanson, a personal adviser to Vice President Cheney. Hanson has, in his written works, supported the position that war is the natural state of mankind, and that it is inevitable in any case. I go through the usual paces of rolling my eyes, clenching my teeth and muttering bad words under my breath.

But for the rest of the day, I can't get it out of my head: what if this guy is right? I mean, look at history. When you can stomach it. The whole of human recorded history is sectioned by wars. I can't, offhand, think of one instance of great sociopolitical change that did not come about at least in part by violence or unrest of some kind. We, as a species, have yet to come up with a workable alternative to war as a method of sociopolitical evolution.

And then my brain had to go and connect these horrific thoughts to others I had previously -- specifically, the idea that mankind has stopped evolving. With the advent of civilization, there is no more need for survival of the fittest. This is not to say that lazy people being mauled by a sabretooth tiger is a better scenario than lazy people sitting around watching TV all day, but loss of any kind of evolution can only serve to make a species weaker and more vulnerable to the whims of the surrounding environment.

And so my damned brain combined these two horrors into a new thought that kept me up last night: What if the human race needs war? I mean, wars have been justified throughout time by numerous red herrings: a king's ambition, a personal grudge, extreme nationalism, political expansionism and/or colonialism, and most often, religion. All of those reasons are pure B.S. There is only one real reason wars are fought: Too many people, not enough resources. At its most basic, it is the notion that we need war to thin the herd or else we'll literally waste away.

And so I am forced to consider: could this all be for real? We, as a species, need war to evolve? Somebody please convince me that I'm wrong.