Little Mosques

Some thoughts on Bill Gates

1. I heard Noam Chomsky say the Government did most of the work behind the development of computers, and that people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were just lucky to be in the right place and time to be its benefactors.  (wait, am i using the word benefactor correctly? ah, no.  a person who confers a benefit is a benefactor.  benefactees! ...should be a word)
      2. I read somewhere else that computer technology came from space-aliens!  Our space-alien benefactors.  Maybe reverse engineering of their tech, I dunno.  I read a yahoo article not too long ago about a guy who died recently who claimed to have seen one, working for the U.S. government. 

I visited gatesnotes.com, Bill's blog, and saw a chart of the most dangerous animals.  Which got me started on looking up statistics on the web.  Mosquitoes (spanish for 'little fly') are by far the worst (725,000 human deaths/year).  Next was we humans ourselves, with 475,000/year.  This doesn't include suicides, I discovered (around a million per year, or 3 thousand per day)  The world homicide rate (which I assume includes war fatalities, not just crime) is 6.2 per 100,000 people per year.  The world population meters I found/used, worldometer and others, listed (today's!) global population as 7.234B, or 7.305 B, or 7.705 Billion people.  I then used the google calculator, which put me in Bill's ballpark.   But I looked up war, just to be thorough, asked google how many wars are in the world right now, and got this-

This site claims the U.S. is in 0, 1, 5, or 134 wars (depending on how you figure), currently:
http://www.mintpressnews.com/us-now-involved-134-wars/196846/

which I thought was interesting.
The number of wars on earth right now is...ridiculous.
65 countries and 627 militias/separatist groups fighting. See:
http://www.warsintheworld.com/
Are there any wars the U.S. is NOT involved in?!
You might expect me, as God, to say it's all one big war, good vs. evil or something, but no, I imagine it's mostly about money, poverty, and the arms economy.  I think the U.S. is the biggest arms dealer.  I imagine U.S. business loves all this war, while the PR machine (such as the president) is all about putting a diplomatic and peace-loving spin on things.  I, for example, think everyone should know Aikido, and there shouldn't be any borders, police, militaries, nukes, or even guns.  But I live with my head in the clouds in the great republic of Berkeley!

I noticed today that I like to eat red foods.  I drank a coke (now a dollar, up from .85, with the sugar tax), ate a strawberry paleta (popsicle), cinnamon bears, and red twists (twizzles, I guess).  Not the healthiest diet, I know.  I also like swedish fish.  I realize coke is brown, but i don't think brown packaging would work, do you?  I guess it's a blood thing.  I do like red meat -I had delicious lamb at my parents' house last weekend, that my brother cooked.  That was red and brown, too.  But I don't buy meat anymore, if I can help it -but I'll have some if served (I admit I love the stuff).

I met a guy named Red, and I had a college roommate from Redding...
My Reading, of late:
I like the occasional war book.  I'm reading Generation Kill, by Evan Wright, which my friend Sam lent me.  And I just finished (red) Redeployment, by Phil Klay.

I'm just teasing, about little mosques.
It is weird, though, that Islam is I slam, Allah is all a H, and a little mosque sounds like it might be mosquito. Makes me think of SWAT teams, actually.  (Special Weapons And Tactics)
I hope Bill isn't paranoid about Hollywood's Enemy at the Gates, and Kill Bill.