My cousin Lt. Ehren Watada is facing a rough road ahead as he sacrifices himself in an effort to wake up the United States government and the silent majority of this nation.

Ehren is a brave man to choose this path when so many before him could have but didn’t. Most people our age are thinking about starting a family, buying a house, settling down. Ehren is trying to change the course of history.

But he can’t do it alone. After all, a democracy isn’t about Ehren and what he says as an individual. It’s about a nation participating as a whole to systematically determine its future course. It’s about electing moral and strong leaders who accept responsibility for their mistakes and look forward.

Ehren is doing this because our nation should have done better, could have done better when deciding to wage an all out war on another country under false pretenses. He’s doing what our leaders haven’t. He’s doing what we haven’t done.

He is saying this war is wrong and it needs to end. It’d be nice if the rest of us could do the same.

Send Ehren your support, he needs every last bit.

<rant>

Bizarre. That’s about the only way I can explain things. Baseball players are required to testify under oath in front of senate judiciary committees, but oil executives and district attorneys aren’t.

Sure enough, Mr. Specter, maybe you should have rethought how much you can trust people nowdays — especially people involved with the white house — and especially the ones who deny they were.

Although, I don’t think you thought very much at all about it. You probably just did what you were told. Either way — shame on you for not holding people accountable for telling the truth.

This crap has been building up for a while — so let me get some stuff off my chest. Let’s see — things our congress has focused on:

• Steriods in baseball (who gives a shit)
• Building a WALL — A FRICKING WALL — between the US and Mexico (didn’t work for Germany or China; way to regress 200 years guys; done for political gain in November)
• Discussion about gay marriage (robbing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness from US citizens based on an uncontrollable part of their nature; again, way to regress 200 years; didn’t work for slave owners or restricting women’s voting rights; didn’t work for Hitler either)
• Janet Jackon’s nipple (not something to ban from TV — embrace it!)

Things that were pretty much ignored:

• Domestic wire-tapping (national security, shh, it’s so secret nobody is accountable for it)
• Constitutional checks and balances (wtf?! there are limits to presidential power?)
• Safety regulation in mining operations (oh, people can die from underregulation that benefits rich business owners?; no lobbyists for saving lives?)
• Health care reform
• Social security reform
• Budget deficit
• Lobbying reform
• Election reform
• Shit, well, pretty much everything they should have been instead of building walls and working on conservative (and pointless) legislation

So my response to this stuff — including Barry Bonds hitting seven-hundred-something home-runs? Get a grip, people. The country is going down the tubes and you’re worried about baseball records and steroids? Wake up.

Congress does a lot of great things, but lately I just don’t know what those things are.

</rant>

Okay, I’ll admit it. I initially didn’t like the guy. He sat in the front row at Mavericks games, all riled up, fists pumping and emotions swaying with every call. He just seemed pretty obnoxious, which makes me hastily throw you in my “oh no, not him again” category.

Be careful about who you dismiss.

I spent a few hours last night replacing much-needed sleep with a complete tour of Mark Cuban’s life, courtesy of Google, Wikipedia and blogmaverick.com.

Sure enough — I was wrong. Somewhere behind the fist pumping, shouting at refs and NBA fines there lies a fricking brilliant man who I find terribly interesting and inspiring.

Inspired by Fountainhead, driven by something that is a lot like the open source “itch” we all know in the programming world, Cuban has gone from successful enterprise to successful enterprise by fixing things that piss him off.

It takes a tremendous amount of courage to reject the norm, and even more to recreate it. Don’t like what you’re doing today? Change it. Dante and Randall would have agreed. If you want to blame somebody for your situation, blame yourself.

Mark Cuban never let his situation control him. He wasn’t the guy at the kwik-e-mart saying, “…but I’m not even supposed to be here today!!”

WWMCD? He would have started up his own kwik-e-mart that put the other one out of business. Or, he would have moved on to something completely tangential that sparked his interest. He would have succeeded there, too.

Why? He’s a rare combination of grit, determination, preparation, research and luck. Obviously nowdays he is a bit blessed with a large bankroll, but before it took some cajones to step up to the plate and pitch the ideas he had. It took a lot of faith and determination in himself to make them succeed. That is what separates him from the rest of the rich slugs. He has great ideas, sure, but he also follows through on them.

And he eats his own words gracefully, too. Ask the people at Dairy Queen.

In a time when we don’t have leaders or good examples of Americans, I think Mark Cuban serves as a good icon. He’s worlds better than crooked senators or anybody in the White House simply because he’s a multi-billionaire and he still takes the time to keep up with blogs, speak his mind freely and uses his money for good causes. He is also not stopping his pursuit of what’s right, or at least what’s cool.

You don’t see Mark Cuban crying for the people he might hurt or upset because what he is saying may not necessarily be something they agree with. He isn’t constantly weighing media reaction to the truth before he speaks it. That makes him genuine. It makes him the most human billionaire I’ve seen or read about. It makes him someone I can believe and relate to regardless of how much money he has or what he’s done. He’s a guy with ideas and feelings, not some larger-than-life self-absorbed asshole. Well, a normal guy with a $40M jet he bought online.

He’s a guy who:

• Created a fallen soldier’s fund (Fallen Patriot Fund) to help injured or fallen soldiers’ families cope with their loss
• Supported P2P networking in the Groklaw v. MGM case
• Created an internet radio broadcast site because he thought not being able to listen to college basketball games over the internet was annoying
• Created an HDTV network because HD programming from regular cable companies was crappy
• Brought the Mavs back from extinction because his friends dared him to
• Founded a company that helps people sift through the blogosphere because he recognized how important blogs are long before the rest of us
• Started up 2929 entertainment because he thinks waiting for movies to come out on DVD is bullshit

So, thanks Mark, for bringing back the Mavs (though I’m a Suns fan, I appreciate the Mavs too), and showing that being yourself and believing in what’s right (for everyone, not just yourself) can take you as far as you’re willing to go. Keep it up, dude.

Mark Cuban kicks ass. Chuck Norris ain’t got shit on this guy.

Edin thought it was funny that people who don’t have real problems sing angry songs.

So I thought about it on the drive home from Portland late Saturday night after we sent off Rick to Seattle. Some thoughts crossed my mind:

• Was the grunge movement just whiny drifters mad about their station in life?
• Pseudo-existentialism aside, what substance did it all have?
• How does alternative rock in the 90’s compare to the music of the 30’s, when there was a national depression?
• How does American music differ from music in underdeveloped countries? Is it angrier?
• Aside from hard rap, why is African American music generally happier?
• When we have everything, are we the least fulfilled?
• Where is my shirt? Did I even remember to wear it today?

When I added it up, I started to realize that a large majority of the “happy” music I know was sang during some of the worst periods by people living through some major drama.

Where I tend to differ a bit, though, is that I find a lot of beauty in hard beats and rhythms created by people who probably didn’t have a legitimate gripe. Though I liked them especially if they carried a significant message — something closer to the heart than, “my dad didn’t by me an Escalade now I’m going to bust a cap.”

And while I tend to like bands like Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana, Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam — I really did have to wonder what the hell all these guys were so pissed off about. Maybe it was their long hair, which was tangly and unmanageable.

Stevie and Ray were always smiling, even though they couldn’t see a damn thing, and the Duke didn’t grow up in the best of times.