Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, etc. etc. etc. I had a great holidays even though I came down with some sort of sickness on Christmas. After sleeping it off, I pretty much feel better. I'm heading to New York for skiing for the next two days in what should be a very fun couple of days with lots of good friends. After that, I'm heading to Chicago for New Years with Anna honey, my beautiful girlfriend.
I haven't been playing all that much poker. I had some success in NL hold em cash games and that will be the focus going into the New Year in order to fund the tournament buy ins and deal with some of the variance of tournaments. I will not be playing a single hand of Pot Limit Omaha cash games probably for the rest of my life unless involved in some sort of mixed game or something. I have decided that this game is more variable than probably anything I've ever played. I believe myself to be a pretty good player here, but I just think I either kill the session or get killed in the session and never anywhere in between. Seriously, in my last 10 PLO sessions I've never won or lost more than or less than 3 buy ins. That means that if I'm playing a PL 1000 session, I'm either leaving up 3k or down 3k. It's not a healthy way to play this game as NL hold em provides me a better chance to slowly build my earnings.
My disturbing moment of the last few days regards a documentary I watched on HBO called "Sand and Sorrow." It is about the genocide in Darfur. The Sudan government is essentially sponsoring this and from what I can understand, no one in the world is showing enough backbone to stand against this. I further believe in my position of supporting Barack Obama as he is the only one that has said he commits to sending troops to Darfur to stop the genocide. I've been a full opponent of the War in Iraq since the beginning and am usually against war in general, but when one people displaces over 2 million native people and kills an estimated million of these people either forcefully or indirectly along with raping woman all along the way, something needs to be done. The strange part about this entire thing is that President Bush announced the actions in Darfur as genocide, then proceeded to do nothing except a few half-hearted diplomatic solutions. Now, there was a point in the documentary where we find out that China is the leading importer of oil from Sudan, so they rejected action at a UN meeting as well as the fact that the US intelligence officials had great relations with Sudan over intelligence regarding Osama Bin Laden (which has apparently helped a whole lot because we've caught him 3 or 4 times already.....oh wait....). Anyway, China is in the way here because their country has no moral backbone and would commit genocide in a second if it furthered their own cause. I just find it deplorable that we send 120,000 + troops into harms way in Iraq, a country that has nothing to do with a lot of the reasons most of the troops were told they were going there, yet we cannot send 10,000 troops to stabilize one of the largest genocide's in history. I'm not positive about the facts, but it is just behind the Holocaust and it may very well exceed the death toll along the way. When people talk of history and the horror of Hitler, it's like people believe it will never happen again, but it is happening right now as you read this. Another non-Arab African family is torn apart by the guns and rape of Muslim Arab factions in Darfur. One of the most shocking parts of the entire documentary was when children were given crayons and paper in Darfur by reporters. The children were not told anything but they began drawing scenes of rape, murder, bombs, their houses being burned and some unbelievable pictures of what has happened to them. Nobody cares though. Maybe not nobody, but at least not enough people to make anything significant happen. If you are a troop, do you care more about protecting America's economic interests in Iraq (oil and thus a stable economy), or protecting millions of people that have already received a death sentence in Darfur. What scares me most is what most people would say.
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