QuasiMondo

Faced with increasing criticism from her former supporters, disillusionment with the Democratic party's failure to change the course of the war, a fractured anti-war movement, and other personal reasons, anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan has given up her war protesting activities.

In the essay "Good Riddance, Attention Whore", Sheehan writes bitterly of a hypocritical Democrat party, an anti-war movement beset by egoism, the accusations of being an attention whore, the loss of her marriage, health problems that have put her in debt and comes to the sad conclusion that her son, Casey 'did indeed die for nothing' and that the America she lives in is not the America she once loved.

Just reinforces my belief that you really can't change the world.

__________________
Cameron originally envisioned the Terminator as a small, unremarkable man, giving it the ability to blend in more easily. As a result, his first choice for the part was Lance Henriksen. O. J. Simpson was on the shortlist but Cameron did not think that such a nice guy could be a ruthless killer.

-From the Collector's Edition DVD of The Terminator

JumpinJesus

You can change the world, as long as you do it with the express written consent of the Democratic Party, Republican Party, Clear Channel Communications, Viacom, and the RIAA.

While I find it sad that Ms. Sheehan was treated this way, I'm glad that we are able to see what really goes on inside the anti-war movement. Like she said, it's not about saving lives, it's about ego.

__________________
"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

Willravel

The only way to change the world is to have a small group of committed people. She was one. If you have a few other people to help support one another, you stand a better chance of succeeding. I'll miss her activism and her heart.

smicer

Further evidence that the democratic party and the republican party are one and the same. No difference at all.

host

Here is some "counter" evidence that the current congressional committee chairmen do not even breath the same air that the folks who they replaced, breathed, and that we stand a chance, for the first time in years, of wresting accountability from the most secretive and arrogant federal executive administration in modern times:

The_Dunedan

Host,

The problem with your thesis is that this is a case of Democrats finding and exposing corruption among Republicans, their nominal opponents. Back during the Clinton Regime, the Republicans were finding and exposing tonnes of similar corruption by Democrats (campeign fundraising, tech sales to China either directly or via Israel, etc). When the Dems start rooting out the corruption and abuse of power in their own ranks, I'll believe there's some difference between the parties.

Meantime, both parties continue to wage aggressive wars abroad and tighten restrictions on Civil Liberties in the US. Both parties advance the agenda of Victim Disarmament. Both parties borrow titanic sums of money which they leave it to future generations to repay. Both parties have stood by silent (or even cheering encouragement) as a debt-driven real-estate market has bubbled...and burst.

When one of the major parties disavows and works to change the above, I will believe there is a difference between the two. Until then, no sale.

Baraka_Guru

umm...

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

squirrelyburt

Although I don't agree with Sheehan, I respect her courage. I felt long ago that she was a politcal pawn. Her sons death can never be thought of as "for nothing", as the death of no American soldier can be.

__________________
If you've ever felt there was a reason to be afraid of the dark, you were right.

host

The_Dunedan, 99 percent of the efforts to oppose recent war policy have come from democrats, and your spending characterizations do not match the data:
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/r...ebt_histo4.htm
09/30/1977 * 698,840,000,000.00
09/30/1980 * 907,701,000,000.00
09/30/1981 * 997,855,000,000.00 Democrat Carter's budgeting ends
Total Debt increase during 4 year Carter Term= 299.015 billion dollars

09/30/1988 2,602,337,712,041.16
09/29/1989 2,857,430,960,187.32 Republican Reagan's budgeting ends
Total Debt increase during 8 year Reagan Term= 1859 billion dollars

09/30/1992 4,064,620,655,521.66
09/30/1993 4,411,488,883,139.38 Republican Bush's budgeting ends
Total Debt increase during 4 year Bush Term= 1554 billion dollars

09/30/1999 5,656,270,901,615.43
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/r...ebt_histo5.htm
09/30/2000 5,674,178,209,886.86
09/30/2001 5,807,463,412,200.06 Democrat Clinton's budgeting ends
Total Debt increase during 8 year Clinton Term= 1396 billion dollars

09/30/2006 8,506,973,899,215.23
Total Debt increase during first 5 years of Bush Term= 2699 billion dollars

Between 9/30/1999 and 9/30/2000, <b>annual increase in treasury debt, which had averaged</b> ($3413 billion divided by 12 years of republican presidencys) <b>$284 billion during the 12 years of Reagan/Bush, had been reduced to just 18 billion.</b> Annual debt increased between 9/30/2000 and 9/30/2001 to $123 billion, because president GW Bush, after Jan. 20, 2001 Inauguration, instituted an income tax rebate that refunded an unbudgeted amount of at least $70 billion, negatively impacting budget year ending 9/30/2001

What I am saying, Dunedan, is that you are reacting to problems that are not "there".
It is 2007. The record of the past 17 years of treasury debt increases under republican
presidents speaks for itself. Comparing it to the past 12 years of democratic presidencys,
speaks for itself.

The data supports my POV that it is inaccurate to claim that "both parties" spend uncontrollably. During the Clinton presidency, runaway annual debt increases were brought to a halt, due largely to reasonably higher taxes on top income brackets that did not significantly alter their incentives to earn, or their lifestyles, and fiscal budgetary discipline. The total non-military federal employment levels actually were decreased to achieve near deficit elimination!

So, your complaint about "both parties", where it has to do with spending, IMO, is muted.

We live in a time where the DOJ has been corrupted into an empty, partisan, corrupt "shell" of it's former self. If there was congressional democratic "corruption" of any significance, in the recent past, why have we witnessed only indictments and prosecutions by this highly partisan DOJ, of republican members of congress?

If you were correct, and there is recent democratic corruption in congress to be rooted out by Rep. Waxman's committee and by others, equal to (or....any) what is being investigated about republicans, why are we not even seeing thinly veiled DOJ harassment prosecutions, based on slim evidence...of democrats?

If the crimes of Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA), and of Rep. Whats-his-name (D-WV), are proveable infractions of the law, where are the indictments from the DOJ?

Dunedan, I think that your "both parties" spend and "break the law" to a level where both can be justifiably dismissed, in favor of what you envision as political "reform", does not match either the records of fiscal management or of levels of corruption, actually experienced.
If "one party" has done a far better job of fiscal management and ethical, open, accountable government, than the other, why tar them both equally and advocate the dismissal of both?

By your advocacy don't you remove the incentive for republicans to attempt to reform their fiscal mismanagement and closed, unaccountable methods of governance, and for democrats to keep on doing what they've been doing....sound fiscal management and governmental accountability?

The_Dunedan

The problem here, Host, is that I do not care about differences of degree, only of kind.

Sure, the Democrats were perhaps less bad in certain areas. But they made up for it in other areas, in spades. The Republicans have done likewise. The fact is that both parties have spent more than they have earned and passed the debt down to someone else's children. They have both been doing this for sixty years at least, to my knowledge, and the size of the debt matters not a whit as far as I'm concerned.

The Republicans gave us union-busting and foreign war, the Democrats gave us victim disarmament, Ruby Ridge, and ever-expanding entangling alliances. Then the Republicans came back and gave us the PATRIOT Act and all it's excrementitious offspring, which the Democrats will not hesitate to turn on the people -they- find distasteful when they inevitably regain power.

Halx

Gandhi was "knocking on an open door" when he went through his resistance. He also did it in a time and place with almost no media or corporate proliferation.

In order to turn the USA around in today's environment, we need to mobilize a lot more than a small group of people. We need to get a lot of people pissed off.

__________________
You have found this post informative.
-The Administrator
[Don't Feed The Animals]

Baraka_Guru

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.


This very well might be one of those "sad but true" realities. Although I would like to counter that thought with the idea that if America wants real and lasting change, they need to open their hearts beyond their borders, I don't think this is likely in the current environment. There will be a lot of anger in the coming years; there will be many tears. What is certain is that there needs to be change. America cannot continue on its current path. Such a path is not long for this world. Ghandi's world was a different time and a different place, yes, but to use a metaphor of an open door is an oversimplification. What he accomplished was big and still resonates today.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

BBtB

Cindy Sheehan shamed her son. She wasn't silenced by the media. She wasn't silenced by either party. She was simply speaking a message that the majority of Americans did not want to hear. One person CAN change the world, the majority of Americans do not want the America this lady does, and thank God for that. Also this thread is about Cindy Sheehan and her retiring from her fanatical ranting and raving... Why are we talking about the deficit?

__________________
Meridae'n once played "death" at a game of chess that lasted for over two years. He finally beat death in a best 34 out of 67 match. At that time he could ask for any one thing and he could wish for the hope of all mankind... he looked death right in the eye and said ...

"I would like about three fiddy"

smooth

what do you mean by "shamed her son?"
are you saying that her behavior makes you ashamed of her son?
or are you saying that you are ashamed of her on her son's behalf?

because both of those sound....pretentious...yeah?

or is there some other way I should be reading your comment?

__________________
"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman

Willravel

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Rice, and a plethora of others should be ashamed from taking the meaning from her son's death. She tried desperately to bring her son's death meaning, and you say she shamed her son? That's a very disappointing attitude.

Sticky

We can't change the world?
How sad if this is what some of us are thinking.

I would suggest that what you may not be able to change (at least in the short-term) is these deep rooted institutions.

Maybe we are focusing on changing the wrong things. Maybe we are starting too big.

Ultimately it is up to us to elect our governments - local, regional, national.
It is up to us to give to charities that REALLY help change the world, often on an indivudual basis.
It is up to us to volunteer for organizations that are working to make changes in the world.
It is up to us to choose to work for corporations that fit our beliefs for the world.
It is up to us, where we can, to buy products from corporations that fit our beliefs.
It is up to us to reduce our consumption, re-use what we can, and re-cycle as much as possible.

It is up to us to try to make these things contagious so that our neighbors, friends, acquaintances and other we may come in contact with want to do these things as well.

Want to change the world? You can hope for instant results but don't expect them.
Improvement is a hard and continuous process.

Start with what you can change. Help others change.
Don't wait for the goverments of the world to change things.

__________________
Sticky The Stickman

Telluride

I don't think Americans need to "open their hearts beyond their borders", whatever that means. I think we need to get back to the ideas of minding our own business and keeping our hands to ourselves on both the national and international level. America abandoned it's founding principles of limited government and individual liberties long ago. Perhaps allowing this country to collapse under the weight of its own bureaucracy and corruption is the best course of action? I think America is too far gone to be saved, but there's plenty of potential for rebuilding.

__________________
"I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice." - Friedrich Hayek

seretogis

AMEN!

__________________
seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames

host

I think that the rest of the world would celebrate your "plan". Imagine the withdrawal from the "world stage" of a parasitic, militaristic U.S.....a country with less than 6 percent of the world's population that "sucks up" 25 percent of world petroleum output, and borrows, each year...the equivalent of ALL of the annual savings of the entire world:

....and here are the headlines, right now:
I don't think that you could fathom what your proposal, if literally implemented, would do to "our American way of life". An honest isolationist policy would remove $1 trillion of annual borrowing that finances trade imbalances and federal borrowing, and would leave the U.S. to consume the 6 million bbls of petroleum it produces per day, just 40 percent of it's current consumption.

The rest of the world would greatly benefit from your proposal, but in the U.S. itself, fuel rationing and economic depression would be the near and longer term consequence.

It isn't a practical alternative, it isn't going to happen. It's akin to a heroin addict staying home....no more "B & E's" to steal items to pawn to support the habit, no more trips into "the hood" to cop the next fix.

Consider shifting your political agenda to the real world where 50 percent of Americans own just 2-1/2 percent of the wealth, one percent own 33 percent, and nine percent own 36 percent, and examine why that is....how it happened, how government can be changed to sanely reverse the consolidation of political power, influence, and representation that facilitated the flow of wealth to so few people.

We have the votes to make the government work in the interests of the majority of us. IMO, your unrealistic political agenda stands in the way of most of our best interests, and what you support actually narrows the distribution of wealth and politcal power...into the hands of the folks who already enjoy control of most of it!

hunnychile

Yeah, I'm surprised she wasn't gunned down in an anonymous drive-by or an assault on a grassy knoll in Texas.

Worst yet:
Too bad that a single person can't make a difference in the World!

At least she tried.

__________________
"I need compassion, understanding and chocolate." - NJB

Telluride

What are the majority's best interests, in your opinion?

Anyway...

I said nothing about isolationism. What I'm proposing is less government at home and a general policy of non-interventionism abroad. I'm not interested in cutting off contact and/or commerce with other nations. I believe that our government should generally butt out of the lives of American citizens and shouldn't be meddling in the affairs of other nations, either.

However, I believe this plan would be unpopular with "the powers that be" and they would oppose it.

__________________
"I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice." - Friedrich Hayek

Baraka_Guru

This is a challenge for America, considering its commerce often meddles in the affairs of other nations. I think the potential for rebuilding you mentioned in a previous post would include rethinking how business is done on a global scale.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

host

I believe in using the political power of the sheer numbers of the wealthless and powerless to offset the wealth and influence of those who have skewed the distribution of both in their favor, and redirecting government to discouraging private interests from interfering with what it could be doing to end the selfish interference of private insurers and their allied lobbyists in healthcare coverage. These interests have defrauded Medicare and conspired to fix prices that medicare pays "the healthcare industry".

They are also the reason that so many are uninsured, despite the US spending more per capita on healthcare, than any other developed country, including countries that offer government guaranteed health coverage for all....



I support this:
....<b>because I believe this:</b>

The post below, oon this thread:
http://economistsview.typepad.com/ec...stice_for.html

...I also believe that a consumption tax, just as an abortion ban, has a greatly lesser effect on those with the means to travel beyond the jurisdiction of the tax or the ban. Thus, the only practical way to tax is during the "receipt" phase, on earnings, or upon inheritance.

I also do not believe that the governnment is "broken" or "incompetent". It has intentionally been made to appear that way....via appointments of "Cronys" (no Regent Univ. "grads" among Bush's nine new white house lawyers....not-a-one)....and via tax cuts and a ramp up in spending....from '81 to '93, and from '01 until now. Treasury Debt increase from oct. 1, 1999 to 9/30/00 was $18 billion, and now it's $500 bilion annually.

If government is by nature, incompetent, why do conservatives and libertarians still support entrusting it with oversight and management of the world's most powerful military? Seems like a contradiction......

host

Cindy Sheehan fell victim to this truth:

<h3>.....<a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/10/lieberman/index.html">In the American political framework, one can never lose credibility by urging on new wars. That is an inherently respectable position. Only opposing new wars, or the continuation of old ones, can result in a loss of credibility....</a></h3>

roachboy

first off, this idea that somehow seems to be operational in the thread that one person can "change the world" seems naive--the example of ghandi is not good in this, as he was the spokesman/leader of a social movement. rather, it seems that folk--including historians and other such--like to collapse social movements onto individual representatives. maybe because it is difficult to write about collectives using a language that tends toward the particular. maybe it's an ideological thing in that, like margaret thatcher, alot of folk look around and do not see society, only individuals. either way, it is debilitating as a tendency in the staging/interpretation of the past, one which has effects when people consider questions of politics and how to address them.

there is no way around collective action, and there is no way to collective action that is not geared around organization.

there is no anti-war movement in the united states. there are ALOT of people who oppose the various fiascos visited upon us by the bush people--but this appears to be the kind of opposition that causes one to complain over drinks to people you know already agree with you about the miserable state of affairs in the world--or that prompts people to vacation with more intensity than is customary. there is no antiwar movement because there is no organization. there is no organization because it seemed convenient earlier to allow moveon to do the organizing for us. when moveon decided for its own organizational reason to crawl into bed with the democrats, it seems that it was willing to cut loose the tactic of large-scale demonstrations in order to focus on potentially television-worthy agitprop actions starring cindy sheehan. i do not pretend that i know the story behind this unfortunate decision. but it clearly was a response to obvious facts that emerged during the earlier phase of opposition, when actual people would show up on actual streets to protest---and would get almost no press. reports would routinely take police "estimates" of turnout to be accurate--when any idiot knows that they are not---the apparently all-important television cameras would somehow manage to not show large-scale protests--and the "new objectivity" would require that the 6 people who would gather on one street corner to shout pro-bushpeople slogans would get a nealy equivalent amount of coverage as the demo of 500,000 (in washington on lovely late spring day a few years ago, i dont remember which)...so it seems that the folk at moveon decided that there was a problem with demonstrations and that problem was television coverage and so they switched tactics.

at a certain level, i understand why: i was at demo after demo after demo...you could see what was happening if you bothered to look. you could see the television crews, where they were, what they filmed, what they did not. there were more police and fbi taking photographs than there were journalists. it was all very strangely prague in august 1968.

i dont understand exactly how it came to pass that the networks no longer considered street protests to be news really. television too does not enjoy collective action: too hard to film. television likes individuals. individuals can show up on o-reilly. collective action threatens the entire logic that makes an o-reilly possible.

i dont know anyone for whom cindy sheehan's actions were adequate. i dont know anyone who thought that she encapsulated the range of objections to the bushwar. she was clearly used by moveon and the democrats because of her son, and the thinking was obviously that her outrage over her son's pointless death in an idiotic and unnecessary neo-colonial debacle was enough to pose problems for the conservative base in that she ast least in potentia disrupted the linkage between "patriotism" (a form of that collective mental disorder we call "nationalism") and the bush people.

so there is no anti-war movement because there are no collective actions. there is no movement.
cindy sheehan *was not* a movement. she was a signifier. and she was used like a signifier. in her anger and disappointment, she wrote her piece denouncing such organization as there is behind this largely imaginary movement. the tactical choices that moveon made are now "egoism"---and in a way, she's right.


but i do not remember anyone actually deciding that moveon WAS the anti-war movement. i remember that they simply appeared during the first gulf war and were doing organizational work on a large scale when no-one else was, and that this carried over into the first phase of the present debacle. i remember that everyone knew full well who moveon was and knew thereby that they were a particular organization with a particular composition and a particular set of ties and that sooner or later they would act in their own organizational interests and they did. trots are like that. always have been. but what i did not expect was that moveon's organizational work would be the only real organizational work that was happening.

demos are strange. they give you the impression that you actually have power. you kinda feel it. you look around across a sea of people and you feel it. then it ends and nothing changes. you find out (or knew) that the people you imagined were being addressed were out of the country that day, perhaps because of the parade permits that were required for a demo.

so we sit in chairs in complain.
i am sitting in a chair. this is complaining. that's all that happens. from this viewpoint, complaining here is as good an option as complaining anywhere else. the antiwar movement is the one i make from sitting in front of this monitor into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee and back again to complain more. in the present degenerate state of affairs, it almost seems a radical action that the stuff gets written down: it seems that mostly opposition lasts the duration of sentences shouted at the television or muttered over a beer.

back in the day, jurgen habermas used to think about revolution. he worked out a little model geared around a notion of legitimation crisis--what mattered for him was a collective withdrawal of consent from the existing order. his schema relied on this as a coherent meaningful collective action, and in his optimism this withdrawal was seen as in itself a revolution. habermas didn't like violence and so thought about revolution in terms that avoided it for the most part: the collective withdrawal of consent as a result of the political implosion of a dominant order would cause the linkage between state and people to simply dissolve, and with that dissolution the existing order would, presumably, simply evaporate--this because existing orders are only as they are because we, collectively, fill them with air: they are balloons with guns. i think we are in a legitimation crisis, but it is not going at all as habermas thought it would back in the day. there is a withdrawal of consent from the existing order. it happens all around you: it is continuous. you are maybe part of it. i am maybe too. but there is not context around this withdrawal of consent: it has no coherent message...there is no organization...so a legitimation crisis can look a whole lot like a withdrawal from politics tout court, a reversion to consumerist form. because it has no collective extension, it does not exist. the marketing of politics--which is, in the end, just another commodity, like a car or a goerge foreman grill--continues as if nothing was seriously wrong. the wheels of power transfer continue to turn, as if there was some legitimacy remaining in the election rituals that every 4 years rotate factions within the oligarchy. so the framework acts as though nothing is happening.
and that which is happening--the withdrawal of consent from the existing order--has not organizational expression, no context.
so it does not exist.
it happens all around, but it does not exist.
so tell me again how it is that one person can change any fucking thing.
we are right now living through a situation in which countless individuals act as isolated individuals and as isolated individuals oppose not only this debacle in iraq but every fucking thing about not only this administration but the system that allows it. and as individuals, our actions have no status out there: they do not exist.

your sentiments against the war in iraq do not exist.
my sentiments against the war in iraq do not exist.
we might have them, but they are vapor.
they are less than that.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

BBtB

I am very ashamed of her on her sons behalf. I don't know very much about this woman or her son. Neither does anyone else here. All we do know is media clips and sound bytes but the fact of the matter is, now and has been for sometime, an all volunteer army. Casesy Sheehan was an adult. I have no reason to believe that he was not intelligent adult fully capable of making adult decisions. He knew what he was doing. He knew the risks. No one tricked him. No one decieved him. If anyone got away with sugarcoating it for him he is just a fool. He bravely chose to fight and he is one of the unfortunate few to perish. That was his choice and new his mother spouting how much of an idiot he was for making that adult decision as an adult.

"I was raised in a country by a public school system that taught us that America was good, that America was just. America has been killing people, like my sister over here says, since we first stepped on this continent, we have been responsible for death and destruction. I passed on that bullshit to my son and my son enlisted. I’m going all over the country telling moms: ‘This country is not worth dying for.’

But your son thought it was... My point is that parents and children do not always agree on things. I contend that maybe Casey does not want to be remembered for this. No one asked him. His mom sure as hell didn't. No one dies in war after all.



"My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel."


Bigot. If this war had to do with Isreal why did we not attack Iran or Syria? But whats a little jew bashing between friends...


"The biggest terrorist is George W. Bush."

If the leader is a terrorist then those that do his bidding are also terrorist, so the entire armed forces are terrorist, so Casey was a terrorsit. Thanks mom!



"I have been silent on the Gold Star Moms who still support this man and his war by saying that they deserve the right to their opinions because they are in as much pain as I am. I would challenge them, though, at this point to start thinking for themselves… I am starting to lose a little compassion for them. I know they have been as brainwashed as the rest of America, but they know the pain and heartache and they should not wish it on another. However, I still feel their pain so acutely and pray for these "continue the murder and mayhem" moms to see the light."


And this one says it all, this speaks not only for her but oh about 90% of hard liners (left and right)... If you disagree you must be brainwashed.

My point is this, George W is far from our best president (he is not our worst either, those who say that need a healthy dose of history... ) but people like Cindy Sheehan are equally destructive to our nation. These internet junkies need to take a step back from their computer. I know it doesn't seem like it but not everyone agrees with you. There is a very large chunk of America that doesn't get into these internet politics. There are many people that stand silent. Many of them are upset about the war but they are equally upset when they hear a woman saying "This country is not worth dying for" because many of them think it is. THAT'S the difference. I wouldn't die for George W but I would die for America. If Mrs. Sheehan disagrees that this country is worth dieing for then why stay? Go to a more noble country. Of course, very few countries would allow you to openly attack your leader day after day. In quite a few countries in fact you would dispear quickly.

__________________
Meridae'n once played "death" at a game of chess that lasted for over two years. He finally beat death in a best 34 out of 67 match. At that time he could ask for any one thing and he could wish for the hope of all mankind... he looked death right in the eye and said ...

"I would like about three fiddy"