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Saturday, June 15, 2002
Beth and I just saw The Bourne Identity. Very good spy thriller. Much better than Spy Games, which I won't bother to link.
.: posted by andy 6/15/2002
Arther Anderson is found guilty of obstruction of justice. Further proving that it's not the crime, but the cover up.
.: posted by Jeremy 6/15/2002
Thursday, June 13, 2002
For those of you with a future in international espionage, some travel tips that I got in a company email today:
1. If your forged passport is from a foreign country, never actually travel there. The airport security people may recognize that your dialect does not match the region of the address.
2. Never carry more than one set of fake ID at the same time.
3. Don't forget whose fake ID you are carrying at the moment.
.: posted by Jeremy 6/13/2002
This is funny. I got it from Devin's "list of wars" link.
Minor Armed Conflicts:
Parties involved: USA vs poor people
Battlegrounds: mostly African American shooting each others and others
issues: inner cities poverty, alienation, arms proliferation
number killed: 9,360 people killed by hand guns in 1998
um, ok.
4 year olds aren't capable of making choices of their own and aren't responsible for theirselves. Parents/guardians are responsible for their 4 year olds. Governments aren't responsible for their enemy's 4 year olds, or their own, for that matter. It's a parent's responsibility to take their children's safety into account when making the choice of what government they support.
In my world nuetrality is a myth. You either benefit from a war, or you don't. Individuals make the choice of whether to support a war, or to fight against it, and then they choose what level of involvement they want. It makes you an enemy, or a supporter. So if a man is my enemy, he better be ready to kill me, or make a concerted effort to stay out of my way, because I won't make a concerted effort to not kill him.
The whole problem could be avoided if nobody chose to be my enemy. But if somebody wants to kill me or enslave me, he is my enemy, and it would be irresponsible of me not to kill him first.
.: posted by Jeremy 6/13/2002
This morning I got to watch live spy-plane footage from yugoslavia on CNN.
.: posted by Jeremy 6/13/2002
Jeremy said Israel (and by extension every man woman and child in Israel) want more military action against Palestine and all Palestinians want to kill Israelis, so we as a nation should just them do it. Just because Sharon ordered more tanks into Palestinian territories doesn't mean that every single four year old in Israel wants to kill or subjugate the Palestinians.
Perhaps in your world, anti-war demonstrators should attack and disable the war machine; soldiers, bases, factories where munitions and supplies are manufactured? Would that be the only way they could clear their social conscience?
Many or most wars are very personal. They are the product of years or decades or centuries of animosity, they are the invasion of a people's home, sons and brothers and fathers being killed. Only in America is a war something to watch on CNN, to do over here for a while, then stop and do it over there.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 6/13/2002
the arab thing was a poor choice, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make anyway. I agree that we don't owe arab states a damn thing. We pay them every penny of the artificially inflated prices that they demand for the oil that is pumped using infrastructure that was seeded by us and then stolen, er, nationalized.
.: posted by Jeremy 6/13/2002
So your argument is that governments and militaries rarely act by the will of their population? Or that if one person in that population disagrees with the rest, then all responsibility for their government's acts are removed from them?
When the history channel, or whatever, says things like "the Holocaust was the act of a madman," it just reinforces that lie. Countries don't go to war simply because a few wack-jobs at the top say "lets go grab poland, and put some more kittens in the freezer," they do it because their people want it, or are at least willing to go along with it. If people thought of war in a more personal way, I think there would be much less of it. This is why I think that our concept of avoiding civilian casualties, and being outraged at our own, really only makes it easier to convince people that war is a viable solution, and that there can be such a thing as a "humane" war. If wars were knock-down drag-out fights-to-the-death of anybody-and-everybody-that-gets-in-the-way-or-even-thinks-about-it, then people would demand that they never happen in the first place. But we teach our kids that there have to be rules in war. So when I vote for Pat Buchannan, I don't have to worry that any of the military actions he orders will cause any retribution in my own backyard. I send my taxes to the government so that they can hire soldiers to take the responsibility off of me.
The rules of war are set up so that I can order a war, and then pay for somebody else to fight it for me, but don't you dare come and bomb my house.
.: posted by Jeremy 6/13/2002
Wednesday, June 12, 2002
I received my first piece of mail in a week today. The local grocery store flier, and an ad for a furniture store. I had been getting worried, and was going to send a note to the post office asking if there was something wrong with my mailbox or something. Turns out it was just a false alarm.
As for Jeremy's argument about civilians being responsible for the acts of their government and vice versa, I'd like to think that an individual could have an opinion different from that of it's government, or of the majority. Also, if all Israelis wanted to destroy or subjugate Palestine and all Palestinians wanted to destroy Israel, I think the situation would be a little different there than it is now.
I also take umbrage at your statement that our government exploits the arab world. That statement could be said to be true as much as I could be said to be exploited by my employer. It was and is a mutually consentual agreement between a large number of groups and organizations. Much of the arab world wants us there, or at least our money. They may not like what comes with it, but they can walk away from the table at any time. The irony of bin Laden is that his money came from a unique economic boom caused by the West and it's want of oil. It's kind of like the rich kid that protests against the WTO which represents daddy's multinational.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 6/12/2002
Tuesday, June 11, 2002
Andy is worried that Sharon is headed for a no confidence vote, and expects Netanyahu will be the one that gets lifted back into the position of PM. I think he's right on both counts. I think he is discounting the cause, though. The people of Israel want tougher action against the Palestinians, just like the Palestinian people support the suicide(homicide if you watch Fox news) bombings. So since we in the west are all pro "people's will", why should we give a damn if they murder each other endlessly? Sharon is just an extension of Israeli will, as Arafat is of the palestinians'. Neither could do anything if their public would not support them. Which makes me wonder why we concern ourselves so much with "civilian casualties". It seems artificial to me to force our designated militaries alone to bear the brunt of our civilizations' ignorances and mistakes. Why should israelis be outraged that israeli civilians are murdered when it is those civilians that voted into power a government that is willing to oppress another nation? And why should we americans be outraged that our civilians are murdered when the government that we support exploits the arab world. Explicitly or not, all governments exist by the will or capitulation of their populations. What I don't understand is the idea that the existence of a government removes responsibility(and therefore the application of justice/vengence/etc) from that population.
To be fair to my own country(and I'm all about being fair), I use the same argument to shrug off the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden as well as our use of the bomb(twice) on Stephanie's fair southern-Japan. If people don't believe their support for a government is consequential, their ambivilence can lead to genocide.
I say the strangest things when I'm drinking, don't I?
.: posted by Jeremy 6/11/2002
The Church of Spongebob Squarepants
.: posted by andy 6/11/2002
Monday, June 10, 2002
April's Israeli invasion of Palestinian-controlled areas had unsurprisingly little effect on the Palestinian ability to blow up Israelis. Not taking the hint, Sharon's soldiers are rounding up more Palestinians, "rooting out terrorist infrastructure". Get a clue, Sharon. You can't bully these people into submission. The more Sharon pushes them, the more Palestinians will decide violence is the only answer.
I think Sharon is headed for a no confidence vote. My worry is that Netanyahu will ride that no-confidence vote into power. Bebe is more hard-core than Sharon.
.: posted by andy 6/10/2002
GIAT Industries, makers of very cool stuff. Including the PAPOP, French counterpart to the American OICW. Neat thing about the PAPOP is that its 35mm HE round has a programmable fragmentation pattern. I always wonder, though, if all these customizable explosive rounds will ultimately cost too much time to be effective.
.: posted by andy 6/10/2002
I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 6/10/2002
The Jewish Defense Group is going to start armed patrols in Brooklyn. Some will carry shotguns in bags and others with the proper licenses will carry "other" types of firearms. Like what? MP-5 submachine guns? Still, the most interesting part to me was that there will be some patrollers carrying bats and pipes. Reminds me of westside story somehow... except with jews and arabs, instead of whities and puerto ricans.
.: posted by Jeremy 6/10/2002
If I were going to be a soccer hooligan, I don't think I'd paint my receding hairline bright-white. Maybe his doesn't bother him the way mine bothers me, though. I also doubt that the best way to calm these people is by banning public viewings. Sounds like a good way to start a revolution in some countries.
.: posted by Jeremy 6/10/2002
Sunday, June 09, 2002
For those of you who live under a rock, there is some girl in Utah that was kidnapped from her house. It really irritates me that this would be the lead story on CNN for a week. While a bit more dramatic than most, people, even children, disappear all of the time. This case is treated like it's some spectacular, unheard of act. As scary as it is, children and young adults vanish. I remember one summer in Austin when every few weeks a new young woman would come up missing in strange circumstances. One told her roommate she was going to go get groceries, and her car was found in the parking lot of an HEB a few days later.
When Andy posted a link on the Green River Killer on sadmind a while back I started doing some reading, and the person they finally arrested was charged with three murders. There were something like fifty bodies found over the term of the case. In their investigation, they went to other cities along the west coast, and found again and again ten and twenty skeletons and corpses of people, usually young women, buried or dumped around these cities.
But, Elizabeth Smart's parents are rich, and we hear about it for weeks. Ditto with Chandra Levy. If they want to do some actual good in this world, instead of bombarding us with sound bites, they should use the spotlight they control so easily to educate people about the situation of abductions, means of self-defense and of avoiding such situations. That way they just might save some innocent person's life.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 6/9/2002
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