We can end war.

Please, before you read on, let those four words float in silence for half a minute, until you actually hear them - until they come alive with meaning as insistent as a hatching egg. War is not inevitable, no matter how cluelessly enthusiastic the media may be to promote it, no matter how thoroughly it runs the global economy and dominates almost every government.

We can shut down this system of self-perpetuating violence and geopolitical chicken. We can dismantle the glory machine and redefine patriotism. We can curtail the most toxic enterprise on the planet. We can end war.

Oh, the audacity to say such a thing! Yet it amounts to no more than saying: We can evolve, individually and collectively. We can bring wisdom to conflict. We can reclaim the institutions that run our lives. We can look into the eyes of children, those we know and those we don’t know, and vow to protect them. We can start caring again about future generations and bring their well-being into our thoughts and plans.

Iranians will head to the polls tomorrow to elect a new President. Iran has been a major player in the Middle East for decades and, considering the country’s loose remarks about nuclear energy and existential warfare throughout the past few years, all eyes will be directed on Iran come Election Day. This will also be the first vote for Iranians since the 2009 re-election of current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A dismal occasion for Iranian voters, the 2009 election was almost certainly rigged in Ahmadinejad’s favor. However depressing, that election in 2009 did manage to inspire what became known as the Green Movement, comprised of Iranian moderates and liberals, which still seeks to reform Iranian public policy. Unfortunately for those Iranian moderates, liberals, and independents, the slate of candidates that will appear for selection on Election Day are far from reform candidates. If a candidate fails to win more than 50% of the vote on Friday, then a runoff election will occur on June 21.

On a cold night in January 1990 in Berlin, a mob of angry citizens and western intelligence agents struck a blow for freedom. They stormed the headquarters of Stasi, the secret police service of the GDR. Guards were beaten, furniture was thrown, files were stolen, files were destroyed. The most effective and pervasive apparatus of surveillance the world has known until today was exposed and dismantled.

After the dust settled and the CIA agents had spirited away the files that concerned them most, the public of a reuniting Germany was confronted by a harsh reality: their world was riddled with secret policemen and snitches. According to some estimates, as many as one in 166 East Germans spied on their fellow citizens as a full time employee of the Stasi and as many as one in seven were parttime snitches. Spouses spied on each other. The system was effective and rewarded the citizen who participated materially and psychologically.

In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the great good wizard Saruman becomes slowly corrupted by a malign influence named Sauron. Hoping to look into the future, the distance and the past he gazes into a magical crystal ball called a palantir. He finds Sauron's great unblinking eye looking back at him, bending his will, subverting him, causing him to both compete with Sauron and become just like him. He slowly breeds foul creatures and converts his citadel of Isengard into a replica of the great furnace factory of death that is Sauron's own seat of power at Mount Doom.

The Obama administration's modern day flaming eye stares at us in part through its own crystal ball called PRISM, which appears to be a data integration product made by Palantir Technologies, a secret cybersecurity firm that got its start up funding from the CIA.

As the brutality in Syria begins to spread throughout the region, the United States can no longer afford to choose the time at which it confronts this crisis. The time is now. Bashar-al-Assad’s regime is committing intolerable war crimes against the Syrian people, who are demanding a long overdue change in power. Spilling into its bordering countries of Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan, the violence in Syria exhausted at the expense of many innocent people deserves an informed discussion at the very least.

The Syrian struggle, by and large, boils down to a religious dispute. The divide exists within the ranks of Islam, and culminates in a separation between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Mohammed founded Islam in the 7th Century and installed the first Islamic state, known as a Caliphate, in 622. A theocracy by definition, that first Islamic state came to be in Medina, which is located in present-day western Saudi Arabia. According to Sunnis, the first four Caliphs (Mohammed’s successors) were legitimate religious leaders. Further, Sunnis considered these Caliphs’ heirs to be lawful.