Fear. Or as IRC weenies like to call it, ph33r. Without a doubt, fear is a powerful motivating factor. The discussion I was listening to after the first presidential debate mentioned how the Bush campaign uses fear to promote its agenda. Bush of course uses fear of another terrorist attack as his primary rallying cry for why to vote for him rather than John Kerry.

I don't like to live in fear. One of my pet peeves is irrational fears. I'm not that sympathetic to someone who is afraid of a terrorist attack, unless of course you live in the Gaza Strip in which case I'd ask, why the hell do you want to live there? If you tell me you're afraid of dying from cancer I can be more sympathetic because thousands of people are diagnosed with cancer every day. The probability of dying from a terrorist attack just isn't that large.

Spending $200 billion to win the war in Iraq to because you're afraid of a terrorist attack is an irrational response to an irrational fear. You'd save a lot more lives by banning smoking or by installing devices that won't let drunk drivers start their cars.

One reason that I have always voted for Democrats is that Republicans seem to prey on the fears of the American public. During my childhood the threat of a Soviet first strike capability was the primary motivator for the massive military build up during the Reagan administration. And we were lead to believe that the expectation of Mutual Assured Destruction held the Soviets in check. Today it's the fear of terrorism which empower the Republicans to run amok. In addition to the war on Iraq, two of the worst examples of the are the abuse of prisoners at Abu Graihb and the imprisonment of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay.

I really like the new Firefox. It's fast, and doesn't require that much memory. My new favorite thing is the BugMeNot plugin. BugMeNot is a service which you use everytime some (usually a newspaper's web site for me) web site asks you for a username and password. If you aren't registered, then you can use the bugmenot database of anonymous users and passwords for that site. For a news junkie like myself, this means I never have to register at a web site just so I can read one damn article that someone sent me a link to.