Don't know why but I decided to look up jwz today, and noticed he has a blog now. I found this amusing entry:
A Warmonger explains the War to a Peacenik
(alternately, a TMW cartoon version)
Enjoy. [02:38]
Ok, well I guess proselytization and advocacy are mostly pointless endeavors for my blog, so I won't attempt any more of that. That's ok.
On Sunday, Rachel Corrie, an American from Olympia, Washington, was murdered as she protested the bulldozing of a Palestinian home in Rafah by the Israeli army, the IDF. I wish I could say the barely contemplatable taking of your life will open some eyes of your fellow Americans (or let them hear your words) Rachel. No matter how IDF PR or mainstream news may dishonour your memory by watering down or tainting details of your death, your courage is respected and admired here, there, and elsewhere.
---//---
In other news, former UK foreign secretary and leader of the House of Commons Robin Cook resigned yesterday with a fantastic speech at the House. He captures exactly why even our _only_ international supporter (our lapdog Britain) is having serious commitment issues with joining us in the present impending War.
Meanwhile, back at home a GOP Chairman in Missouri resigns under conscience as well, with a poignant letter. And finally to top it all off, a Minneapolis FBI agent (a location that gave dismissed warnings to FBI HQ prior to 9-11) Coleen Rowley wrote a letter to the FBI Director which brings up serious points about the FBI's ability, stance, and attention in fighting terrorism, and how this has been and will be impacted by this War. Here's a nice little excerpt:
"[The internal security posture of our country] has been weakened by the diversion of attention from al-Qaeda to our government's plan to invade Iraq, a step that will, in all likelihood, bring an exponential increase in the terrorist threat to the U.S., both at home and abroad."In your recent testimony to the Senate, you noted that "the al-Qaeda network will remain for the foreseeable future the most immediate and serious threat facing this country," adding that "the prevention of another terrorist attack remains the FBI's top priority." You then noted that a "U.S.-Iraq war could prompt Baghdad to more directly engage al-Qaeda and perhaps provide it with weapons of mass destruction." But you did not connect these very important dots.
"...We should be deluding neither ourselves nor the American people that there is any way the FBI, despite the various improvements you are implementing, will be able to stem the flood of terrorism that will likely head our way in the wake of an attack on Iraq. What troubles me most is that I have no assurance that you have made that clear to the president."
Thank you for listening Mr. Bush. [10:28]
Scott IMed me earlier today and let me know that a global candlelight vigil was going on tonight. I caught the message just before my local area one was starting, thought about it, and decided to head over. I usually don't participate in "activist" branded activities (for a number of reasons) but I decided I wanted to see the people who came, see how many would be there, and perhaps be a visual indicator that there is one more person who believed that Invading Iraq Now was Wrong.
I'm glad I went. When I arrived there I guessed there was about 200 people there (parking was a bitch!), but afterwards I walked around and I'm guessing it was closer to 500 jammed into that park. As I suspected, it wasn't your stereotypical liberal yahoos, radicals, and unionists "protesting" as the media (or our President) would have you believe. These were all regular people, of all ages and walks of life, my fellow Americans, united in one way -- belief that the war we find our government putting us on the verge of is not the Right Thing to do.
There is much more that I can say on why I believe this, but I will just say the following for the moment. As much as high brow intellectuals may think otherwise, people are not stupid. Sure we let ourselves get manipulated or bamboozled all the time, but when we feel that we're being hoodwinked we're virtually always right. When you have tens of millions of people in the Western world and several hundreds of thousands of people in our country all publicly congregating in numbers like never before in recent history, can anyone think they are all part of some collective political agenda or gaggles of people with unreasonable views? No, these are people who feel like they are being duped. They don't want to be taken advantage of and they want to let it be known. We must listen.
We must take the power of choice on this issue out of the hands of our President, and back into the hands of our Congress... now before it is too late. Your individual Congressmen have taken all the accountability out of their hands and we must put it back. War is supposed to be debated and declared by Congress for a reason -- so that anyone voting for it truly feels held accountable to the people they represent. When we let Congress hand over that decision to someone, they have washed their hands and feel no pressure to answer to their constituents because they will never make the final decision. There are bills on the House (Res. 20) and Senate (Res. 32) floors to repeal this blanket authorization, and United for Peace & Justice has called for massive nationwide congressional pressure to pass these bills. With War action coming to a head tomorrow (Monday), please act -- if only to call your Congressmen. These are not bills stopping war, they are bills to put the responsibility of declaring war back into the hands of people who can be held directly accountable to us, the People.
Hardly a word was said tonight despite all the people and all the differing backgrounds people brought with them. The one prevailing feeling was entirely clear -- hope, hope that madness would not be allowed to prevail. [06:04]
Well, I decided to break out the NyQuil tonight. I figured if the rumors were true and I zonked out, that this could be a good thing as far as my sleep schedule is concerned. I chose to ignore Denis Leary however and avoided the green death fucking flavor, recalling oinkY_u emphatically denouncing it after having run out of the cherry flavor. I took it maybe 3 hours ago, and though I did kind of enter an OBE earlier, I think it is not kicking my ass... maybe I'll take a second dose and see where that takes me.
I am quite tired physically though, which is probably mostly explainable through this cold. Surprisingly, it's been treating me reasonably well so far. I dropped by the godparents' place for dinner and Hyun-wa was in town. Next to my good friend Matt, and recently maybe Jet, he's someone with whom I really enjoy talking about the world and politics. Yesterday was no exception, and afterwards we even went out bowling with his son Tom -- despite the fact that I've been going over there weekly now for the past several years, I think this is the first time we'd actually gone out and hung out.
I bowled very carefully though, as I have a volleyball league game tomorrow and I need to make sure I didn't farg up my shoulder or wrist. So I used 13 and 12 pound balls for the first two games, and the last I bowled mostly spin-style (vs. straight bowling) with an 11. I guess I'll know tomorrow whether my care paid off. Wackily enough, I usually suck trying to play spin-style since I really can't impart that much spin for some reason; but that game I nailed 4 strikes with that style, and got my best score of the night!
Last thing, when did they start adding the extra (perfectly-sized) depression in the rims of medicine containers? That's a great idea, so you can pour it and stop without getting a big ass drop trailing down the outside! I noticed it on both the Robitussin and NyQuil bottles. Of course this has probably come into existence 4 years ago and I'm just demonstrating my cluelessness.
Oh yes, Tarun: your blog's internal links are broken -- I tried posting a comment, but it didn't work and it got lost in the ether. Welcome to our blogging world!
Ok, I'm beat and it's time to quaff the Q... [04:38]
Addendum: [03.16] Fixed link to Tarun after he explained why his blog was broken.
Well, the weekend has come and gone, and along with it my friends and apparently my health. |Whippy| and Jen stayed over for 3 nights and 1 night respectively, and the nights only |Whippy| was here I accidentally fell asleep in the living room with the window open. I haven't really been sick in years, so I guess it was payback time. Blech. At least the symptoms haven't been too bad so far.
Hmm, oddly enough when my mom visited a few months ago she bought me some NyQuil, Robitussin, and Tylenol (all my cold meds had expired in 1997-2000, mostly remnants of free cold packs from college). She must have known something I didn't. Heehee.
The last two days I've actually been dealing with silly admin work, pay for hire stuff. FreeBSD is kind of wacky (the last BSD OS I used/managed was BSD/OS 2.1 (aka BSDI) -- a very different system), but I may actually like it more than Linux. *shrug* Not that I care enough to play around with it for a while at least.
In other news, the email update mechanism is now fully in-place and has been verified to work seamlessly. Of course, Jet then turned around and pointed out the date wasn't dynamically updated on the page. Gah, typical user ;).
Next up (after the 30 second date tweak) is standardizing to an XML format, then hooking in a real DB backend (instead of the persistent DB hack I put in first). Both of these should be straightforward -- doing the groundwork (e.g. installing MySQL, etc) will actually end up being the bulk of time/tedium I suspect. No huge rush here though.
Had lunch with (my old advisor/research boss) Davis today. As always, he was excited to show me what he's been working on lately. The past few years it has become increasingly focused on high level stuff. His research is already probably on the fringe (bucking traditional models/approaches, which does not please many in the field), but this is really out there. Basically, he's generalizing complex, dynamic systems and showing that our very (traditional) notions of viewing these systems has been very narrow. We've focused on parts of the bigger picture (in terms of planning, simulation, and control) that are really secondary, making huge volumes of literature and research in these areas, but haven't even formulated other aspects of systems let alone developed or mastered our understanding of them. In effect, he's trying to spawn a whole new field -- or at least make people prove that they're right to keep the collective horse blinders on. Despite the fact that he really has a hard time with politics -- and thus his research program suffers from inconsistent, sporadic funding -- sometime I really have to admire the man. It takes heart to take your peers to task when you think you've all been doing things wrong (and continue to plan to do so), support your ideas in an intelligent, rational manner, and finally to not stand down when all you're met with is belligerence, hostility, neglect -- and no real arguments. It's the fight for truth.