Who is Brad Stone (a.k.a Stoner)?



Well, I'm a 40 year old kid who never quite grew up. I'm single, but still looking for that special gal. I was born and raised in Dallas, TX and I now work in Dallas as a Visual Basic programmer for a small software company. I attended SMU here in Dallas during the late 80's and received a math degree in 1989. I adore animals, especially my cats. My friend, Nancy, and I have rescued numerous cats and dogs off the streets of Dallas and found them good, loving homes. I spend much of my time outside of work either camping in the deep woods of East Texas (i.e. at Brushyland) or bass fishing at Lake Fork. Click here for a photo gallery of some bass I've caught. There's not many things I'd rather do than hop in my Ranger bass boat and zip across Lake Fork to my favorite honey hole! So far the biggest largemouth bass I've caught is the 11.1 pounder above. I caught her at night back in May of 1995. I released her and had a nice fiberglass replica made of her. Night fishing for bass is great...there are very few boats near you and the fishing is awesome. I also enjoy riding my Honda XR400 dirt bike as often as possible especially in the Rocky Mountains. I guess I also have a fairly irreverent sense of humor - see my Xmas cards on my home page.

If you are curious about my politics and religion then keep reading. If not (and I can't blame you, LOL) then click your Back button.

Politically, I am a proud "progressive liberal" - especially when it comes to social issues. When blacks wanted to sit at the front of the bus, when women wanted the right to vote - it wasn't conservatives who stuck their necks out for others. No, it was progressive liberals. It's a heritage of sacrifice for others that I'm proud of. I normally vote Democrat because while I do not always approve of how some Democrats spend my money, I am willing to risk a small portion of my private wealth but not the liberties and freedoms of others (i.e. blacks, women, gays, etc.). And, of course, I don't like the way many Republicans spend my money either.

I'm also a "disbelieving agnostic" - but I'm so skeptical of the existence of "god" that you can call me an atheist if you want. I guess I'm pretty skeptical of religion, the supernatural, "spiritual forces", etc. Like flying saucers, ESP, Intelligent Design, Big Foot, and reincarnation, there hasn't been enough evidence to convince me of such things. That doesn't mean I feel that I "know" that these things don't exist - but it does mean that I put the odds of their existence very, very low due to the lack of evidence. To me, many believers are often unintentionally biased by how they want the universe to be. Science, when done correctly, isn't quite so biased. Einstein didn't want large masses to bend space-time, that's just the way nature is. Particle physicists didn't want a proton to consist of three quarks instead of say, four. Again, that's just the way nature is. But I think that many believers often believe in heaven or a savior or "spiritual connectedness" or a personified, sentient Mother Earth who has feelings and who prefers a certain chemical composition in the atmosphere - because that's how they want things to be. I may want some of those things to be true too, but that doesn't make them so. Where many people see the one-in-a-million miracle by the hand of the supernatural, I see the law of large numbers at work; for every person rescued from a burning building, many more die horrific deaths. For every child that goes into remission, many more die lingering, painful deaths. I often wonder why humanity so often praises a supreme being for having saved the one in a million when it had the power to save the million; and why a supreme being would want or need our praise. I sure don't know for a fact that I have The Answers to spiritual/philosophical questions. But I do think it's good for us to wrestle with such questions from time to time - and especially to periodically look at things from the opposing viewpoint and have some doubt about our beliefs. Doubt is good. Doubt is humility. It's harder to harm others who simply believe or worship or love differently than you do, if you hold some doubt about your own beliefs. (Harming others doesn't only mean causing them physical harm - it also means passing laws that treats them differently). Humanity (especially the religious) was way too harsh on people who dared to believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun (if you call being burned alive, "harsh"). To most people back then, it was just "common sense" that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Perhaps there are things in our lives today that we feel are true simply because we feel they are "common sense" or because it's the way we want the universe to be. To me, neither provides enough justification to believe in something.
I'm also a secularist. That is, I do not like the mixing or religion with politics and, like JFK, I strongly prefer that our politicians keep their religion private. For these reasons, I can not support Barack Obama for President in 2008. Here's more information on my complaints regarding Obama.

Peace. I'm becoming more and more of a proponent for peace. Probably because I'm witnessing the U.S. enter more and more unnecessary wars - and callously scoff at civilian casualties, I mean "collateral damage". We were told that if we lost the Vietnam War that it would trigger a Communist Domino effect. Well, we did lose in Vietnam and the Communist Domino effect did not happen. So 58,000 brave Americans and over one million Vietnamese (mostly civilians) died needlessly. And today, Vietnam is well down the road of free, fair and open markets and less humanitarian problems - as President Bush recently remarked while visiting there. So, through incentives and diplomatic & economic pressure from the rest of the world, Vietnam is turning away from its previous brutal ways. This is more proof that war is rarely the answer. Vietnam was clearly a war that we need not have entered; the same holds for Iraq. Iraq was not a terrorist problem (as numerous reports have now proven) before our unprovoked invasion but it is becoming one now because of our invasion. Surely we should have thought this through more. Saudi Arabia (home to nearly all of the 9/11 hijackers) is more of a terror threat than Iraq ever was. But even in "justified" wars, like WWII in my opinion, we did some unjustified things. The indiscriminate fire-bombings of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japan and Germany was neither justified nor moral. By doing this, the U.S. pushed the world down a bloody slippery slope and thanks to George W. Bush's policies the U.S. now lacks the respect to pull us and the world back up that slope. And the technique flat doesn't work anyway - Germany and Japan had their resolve strengthened by our actions. As powerful as the U.S. military is, it is not well suited for gorilla wars like in Vietnam and Iraq where our opponents do not fight in organized units. Thus, we need to think very deeply before engaging in such wars. In the case of Iraq, nearly every analysis (including reports from the Republican-led Congress and Pentagon) has stated that the war has destabilized the Mid East and has hurt our efforts on the Global War On Terror. Reports from the same organizations have shown that our leaders misled us about the pre-war justifications for the invasion; they also prove that Saddam and bin Laden hated each other - as many Mid East experts were saying all along. The Iraqi casualties have been horrendous. Over half a million Iraqi civilians have been killed. That would be like the U.S. having six million Americans killed. Over two million Iraqis have fled their country - the equivalent of 24 million Americans leaving this nation! The humanitarian problems that we created in Iraq have been grotesque. Most of the educated Iraqis have either fled or have been executed by religious extremists - so there is a "brain-drain" effect occurring over there. Even if the current levels of sectarian violence eases up, the dead will be gone forever and the country will still most likely become a theocracy partially ruled by the barbaric Sharia Law. Given the fact that Iraq was not a threat to us, that many Iraqi scholars have been murdered, that hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed and that the country is now full of terrorists & headed toward theocracy - surely we should not have invaded. The cost in American lives and money have also been too high. From Pinochet to Saddam to bin Laden - the U.S. has supported some of the worst thugs in history. And when our leaders decide to turn on them, they will mislead you & I into supporting their war. If you don't go along with the war, you are deemed unpatriotic. Enough. Human lives are at stake. The soul of this nation is at stake. Become educated about what the U.S. does geopolitically. A first step is to rent the movie Fog Of War, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's eye-opening near mea culpa on Vietnam; it includes several painfully insightful thoughts about past and present warfare.

My favorite quote:
"There is no need for temples. No need for complicated philosophies. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness." -The Dali Lama

Well, that's all the religion and politics you'll find on this entire site. If you want to know more about my personal thoughts on these things, you'll have to ask me. Brushyland.com isn't about politics - it's about friendship, laughter, camaraderie and enjoying the beauties & mysteries of nature together.

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