2008-07-11

"Lob Bombs": US's New Biggest Worry In Baghdad


About Iraq

> constantly stunned at how many Americans on this blog actively cheer on or rationalize the killing of their own soldiers.

back atcha, pal.
when you say

"killing of their own soldiers"

you mean: we're rationalizing the US troops getting killed?
vs. "the killing our own soldiers are doing".

no one here is glad for the over
4,100 US dead।
or Brits,
or Canadians,
or any of the others who Bush killed
based on transparent lies about
-- non-existent WMDs and
-- nonexistent links between an Iraqi dictator and Al Queda।

but the arithmetic is:
each of those single dead American troops balances on the bloody scale of a larger Justice.

on the other end:
-- for every single one of our dead and dearly missed boys and girls --
is a stinking heap of

293
dead Iraqis:
men, women & children।

...so far.

that's:
1 American:
*

and 293 Iraqis:
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when do we stop
a) killing our kids, in order
b) to "help" the Iraqis so much?

because they asked us to STOP helping them
-- and leave, now!

there will be bloodshed after we leave.
noone can stop it; least of all *us*.

always is, after hated occupiers are expelled.
but it's their choice; their reckoning; their history; their right

we need to get out;
prepare to pay major war reparations;
and prosecute the war criminals who got us into this immoral disaster and killed ओउर

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

"Lob Bombs": US's New Biggest Worry In Baghdad


About Iraq

an actual counter-argument there, chief?
not much.

tell you what:
let's dig up some dead Iraqis,
and ask if they find the comparison a
"soph[o]moric stretch"।

a few:
five (bloodied bodies)?
fifty (shredded corpses)?
five hundred (stinking septics)?
five thousand (fly-strewn shambles)?
fifty thousand (horribly heaped)?
five hundred thousand (filling fifty football stadiums of stark, sheer slaughter)?

silly!
the dead can't talk.

hmm.
how 'bout their relatives?

let's ask
Fifty [survivors] From Falluja.
or maybe:
a Round Thousand from Ramallah.

will they say:
"oh, no, no no!
my husband/son/uncle/daughter/wife/niece/nephew
isn't really
just as
fsking DEAD!

it's not as if we were -- oh, how soph[o]moric! perish the thought! --
in *Poland*
and you people drove Tigers, flew Messerchmidts,
and shot us with Schmeissers, Lugers and Fallschirmjägergewehr 42s;
'course not!

driving good old Deetroyt HMMVs, Apaches and MRAPS;
killing us with M-16s, M249s, SMAWs
-- heck, anything with an M in it --
that's all **A-OK** with us, G.I.!"


"no comparison between Abu Ghraib / Guantanamo, and
Montucon / the Bethelot -- none!
anyone who says so is just a troublemaker।"

"no no no!
littering villages with thousands of cluster bombs;
lacing our air and soil with deeply toxic DU dust;
using white phosphorous "illumination" barrages to incinerate our resistance --

all **completely** honorable!
we totally forgive your so very honorable troops for this.
you're Americans!
-- you cannot *by definition* do anything bad or monstrous।

-- why, the very thought: it's... soph[o]moric!"

or...
not.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

"Lob Bombs": US's New Biggest Worry In Baghdad


About Iraq

...but the bill they will bring back home with them, engraved on their waking and dreaming moments, is drawn on and payable on their soul and peace of mind and sense of well-being and personal safety.

and that bill gets inevitably bigger for every single hour they hold back; every new sortie they go out on; every new patrol they mount; every new sweep they conduct; every DU round they fire; every artillery fire mission they summon; every house they bulldoze.

not to mention: every borrowed Chinese dollar they use on the chow line, drink down in bottled water; etc. etc.; which their children and grandchildren will be sentenced to repay -- with compound interest and a devalued dollar.

helluva bill -- and we're all gonna be paying it.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

"Lob Bombs": US's New Biggest Worry In Baghdad


About Iraq

in my sincere and considered opinion, the **only** honorable course available to any members of the US armed forces -- uniformed or not; regular or irregular; mercenary or volunteer -- is to claim Conscientious Objector status; now, today; and declare they can no longer in good conscience keep following illegal orders; and willingly accept the jail time that will necessarily follow.

continued voluntary participation in the conduct of a massive war-crime makes you a war criminal, period.

"I vos chust followink orders, mein Herr!"

is NOT SUFFICIENT JUSTIFICATION.
and hasn't ever been;

especially not since sodding Nuremburg, mate.

I do have respect for the training of the professional soldiers, particularly the junior officers.
they presumably are required to do the reading.
they need to look closely at the **real** requirements of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

all bar a couple of the above calibration realities are truths that have been brutally clear -- to the world -- for many months.

anyone who has been "in-country" for more than the few days or weeks necessary to see first-hand what the hell US troops are doing to cause "collateral" damage and casualties, and who has had the briefest opportunity to dig into How Did We Get Here, has only got their conscience to answer to; for the time being.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

"Lob Bombs": US's New Biggest Worry In Baghdad


About Iraq

why? in order to satisfy the waste-spewing corruption-soaked bank accounts of the senior executive suites at Halliburton, KBR, Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing and all the rest of the corporate parasites guzzling down our national resources.

those Cheney Chums **love** them some war, oh boy howdy, yes indeedy; and they really really love people like you.

people whose sense of "honor" is

Totally।

Fscking।

Blind.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

"Lob Bombs": US's New Biggest Worry In Baghdad


About Iraq

...all bar a couple of the above calibration realities are truths that have been brutally clear -- to the world -- for many months.

anyone who has been "in-country" for more than the few days or weeks necessary to see first-hand what the hell US troops are doing to cause "collateral" damage and casualties, and who has had the briefest opportunity to dig into How Did We Get Here, has only got their **conscience** to answer to; for the time being.

but the bill they will bring back home with them, engraved on their waking and dreaming moments, is drawn on and payable on their soul and peace of mind and sense of well-being and personal safety.

and that bill gets inevitably bigger for every single hour they hold back; every new sortie they go out on; every new patrol they mount; every new sweep they conduct; every DU round they fire; every artillery fire mission they summon; every house they bulldoze.

not to mention: every borrowed Chinese dollar they use on the chow line, drink down in bottled water; etc. etc.; which their children and grandchildren will be sentenced to repay -- with compound interest and a devalued dollar.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

"Lob Bombs": US's New Biggest Worry In Baghdad


About Iraq

calibration:

even though:

our occupation has caused -- by credible epidemiological assessment, via survey protocols internationally acknowledged in comparable environments -- the deaths of, by now, over 1,200,000 Iraqis;

even though:

our efforts have exiled over 2,000,000 Iraqis, and displaced another 2,000,000 Iraqis within their borders;

even though:

our highly-paid mercenaries now outnumber these "honorable" regulars, operating with violent impunity from prosecution;

even though:

the world knows we still jail thousands more; in shameful conditions; on trivial pretexts and slender evidence;

even though:

the world knows we casually murdered by torturing to death, over a hundred people, in the course of our invasion and occupation of Iraq so far;

even though:

we invaded on grounds the world now knows we lied blatantly about -- to ourselves, and the world;

even though:

a delegation of Iraqi parliamentarians toured the US, weeks ago, telling Americans directly and honestly that "All Sides in Iraq Agree: Please, USA; At Long Last, Fsck Off -- OK?";

even though:

our puppet Maliki (drawing breath at the whim of heavily-armed US agents surrounding him) openly slapped our faces this week -- after Administration efforts to ram its SOFA down the throats of every Iraqi citizen, **raping** their mineral resources for the benefit of a few US-centric corporations -- declaring that the only remaining debate is:

"will you occupying forces leave:

a) NOW;

b) on a TIMETABLE we find acceptable to Go, Very Soon?"


-- *YOU* keep pretending there's anything honorable about any soldier continuing to participate इन...
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

"Lob Bombs": US's New Biggest Worry In Baghdad


About Iraq
> I make this declaration as clearly as possible- All of you making derogatory remarks about US troops fighting, in harms way, are not worth one of their boot laces.

well, batguano, let me make this as painfully clear to you as I possibly can:

those troops you value so much more than any other citizen are presently engaged in the 5th year of the illegal invasion and occupation of a sovereign country.

those US troops are doing exactly the same job, exactly as honorably, as any member of the Wehrmacht, when Hitler invaded Poland.

every Iraqi resistor they kill earns **exactly** the same amount of honor for them and their units as when Wehrmacht troops shot/executed/tortured/maimed partisans, Resistance fighters, and uninvolved civilians alike -- in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, Holland, France...
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

2007-11-18

2006-04-10

first significant new music encounter for decades

omiwotsits - Gogol Bordello!

"Immigrant Punk" was on repeat, all the way to the office. raspy ukrainian gypsy punk, plus...

2006-03-02

testing from Dashboard

this is a hasty post from my laptop, using the Blogger widget.

and boy, does that make it easy and fast.

zero latency and effort from blurt to blog: blunders published in nothing flat.

last night, Alex did a great job on her mountain of homework. I was so proud of her.

2005-05-10

Showing Alex how to blog quickly

She's tired, but amazed by how cool Mac OS X Tiger is... or would be if she wasn't too tired to think straight.

2005-05-03

Mac OS X Tiger rox

straightforward install, cool as everything I've read.

2005-02-14

Scotsman.com News - Ministers Accused over 'Creationist Nonsense' in Schools

Scotsman.com News - Latest News - Ministers Accused over 'Creationist Nonsense' in Schools

More about "The" Bible

The Brights' Movement Forums -> The Saint James Bible: "The people that wrote the original texts believed completely that the Earth was only thousands of years old, the Sun and stars revolved around the Earth, and that plants, animals, and humans had nothing in common. They had no idea that there were 4 more continents on the Earth, the brain was the part of the body that was involved with thinking, or that they lived inside a gigantic universe.
No wonder people today use the word faith a lot when talking about the Bible."

About The Saint James Bible

The Brights' Movement Forums -> The Saint James Bible: "is a mass produced copy of a modern English translation of an old English translation of a Latin translation of fragments of dozens of ancient Hebrew texts written on papyrus from an oral history given by unknown people that lived in strange and foreign lands several thousand years ago."

2004-01-12

CNN.com

CNN.com: "Poll: Dems would be happy with Dean or Clark"

I read this and it makes me laugh...

2003-09-02

Verinform

Verinform: "It's the first comprehensive, web-based system for managing and reporting residency training and Graduate Medical Education programs, completely accommodating the special needs of each of those programs, and effortlessly consolidating all the summary GME data for an entire teaching institution"

2003-07-07

Verinform web site to-do

Verinform -- Powerful tools for residency coordinators, program directors and GME staff.

I still see the nasty scaled logo in the heading. bring on the new site!!

New Blog test

BLogger's new DANO implementation is now rolled out.

2001-10-15

"We must learn to be equally good at what is short and sharp and what is long and tough. It is generally said that the British are often better at the last. They do not expect to move from crisis to crisis; they do not always expect that each day will bring up some noble chance of war; but when they very slowly make up their minds that the thing has to be done and the job put through and finished, then, even if it takes months - if it takes years - they do it." -- Winston Churchill, Speech at Harrow School, October 29, 1941

"The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world" -- Winston Churchill, 1932,Thoughts and Adventures (US: Amid These Storms)

"There is only one thing certain about war: that it is full of disappointments and also full of mistakes." -- Winston Churchill, 27 April 1941

"Dictatorship nurses within itself the canker that must destroy it. The dictators wear out their countries. They demand permanently what men and women are only willing to give in an emergency. And in the end they kill those very qualities of leadership that make them redoubtable." -- Winston Churchill, 1938, Colliers

"It is the English-Speaking nations who, almost alone, keep alight the torch of Freedom." -- Winston Churchill, 1938, News of The World
"now, if you can only turn toward producing something akin to a narrative" saith the sage.

Yes, I realize that an episodic stream-of-consciousness doth not ipso facto a compelling narrative make, but:
-- developing the habit of writing anything frequently [other than overtly commercial marcomm prose] feels like a positive
-- the exceptionally convenient mechanism for capturing continual snippets of expression and compiling them in this way is clearly exhilarating; thousands of people have been taken by it (I'm just very very late to the party)
-- and I can use some exhilaration right now
-- one can set up multiple Blogs, for free, so one (or more) can be dedicated to The Compelling Narrative
-- each posting could be a chapter or other episodic element
-- I like that each "chunk" remains as a discrete editable entity

What's appealing is of course the friction-free instant link between the acts of composition and publication. This has the immediacy of email, with the intrinsic narrative power of the simple passage of time.

After all this enthusiasm, I haven't quite figured out how the dynamics of the built-in archiving system impacts my picture of this process, and won't until the first week has passed -- though in truth I could go surf to figure that out faster.

Well, the morning's tasks beckon -- going to the accountant's for a 10am tax return appointment, and finishing the Final Books for BigWake and turning them in to Ater Wyne.

2001-10-14

Short, profusely-hyperlinked notes:
A happy trip to Powell's. First, to the Technical Book store, to get this book, "PHP and MySQL Web Development" by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson. Then, off to the main book store to get this book, "The Headless Ghost" by consummate pot-boiler R.L. Stine, for Alexandra. And then we trotted back hand-in-hand to the Technical Book store again, to get Space Mucus. In all this sidewalking twixt bookstores, Alex ordered that we were to stomp decisively on all the fallen autumn leaves afoot. On the last block she got tired of that, and instructed that while I should continue on leaf-squashing duty, she would switch back to her standard practice of Not Treading On Cracks. One block short of our destination, I'd caught the eye of a large chap coming towards us -- he smiled at us in a completely warm and natural way, and I smiled back likewise. It struck me that he was very likely jealous.

Quick lunch, then a trip solo across town to go See a Man About a Dog. On the way home this evening, a great chat with Jane and Bill Campbell.

2001-10-13

another long night. This could get me into the discipline of writing frequently...

HAH! What are the odds of that? Well, we'll see.

The narrative burble is bereft of beneficial editing. A constant stream of low-grade verbal effluent ensues. Alliterative anomie.

Good night, Dear Diary!
Ah ha! Pages which use SSI components must have a .shtml extension... renamed index.htm to index.shtml, and it's working now. Changed settings in my Pair Account Control Setting too. At last; the Two Rivers headers and footers can now be moved, which will speed up change efficiency overall, and speed up updates locally in Dreamweaver, too.
Well, I'm most of the way there.

We digressed to the annual Apple Festival at Portland Nursery. Alex had a great time with the Treasure Hunt -- she hasn't quite caught on to orienting the map to the real world yet, but after that she navigates confidently. And she had a perfect score on the puzzles themselves.

Apple tasting seemed a little less thrilling than previous years. The experience was ho-hum, perhaps because the previous visits have taught us what are the standard varieties. Delicious? Cox? Oh, please; spare us those cliched hack varieties. More likely it's just yuppie blase. Or the decline of taste-buds with another year's advancing decrepitude...

On return, I got Server Side Includes working in Dreamweaver - on my local machine, that is. Not working yet on the live site. Ugh. But I did modify the standard Blogger template successfully, and set up a CSS file o' styles for the Blogger output data.
"!!! WRITE !!!", my very good friend told me this week.

As therapy, recreation, career direction, deconstruction or grounds for blackmail? Perhaps, purely to validate the imperative.

Yesterday I recognized that my mounting interest in Web work was pointing toward a Bloggeresque mechanism. So today I went to the source -- and here we go.

Well, provided I can incorporate the output correctly onto my vanity domain. As a server-side include. Within the larger context of a Dreamweaver-template-based site. Geekly Perfectionism R Us, Or Bust.

It's mid-afternoon on Saturday, and I hear the calling of Powell's Technical Bookstore, luring me to get a text on building PHP and MySQL database applications. The host for the three sites I'm throwing together at present supports PHP. Is this retreat to my technical roots an avoidance of the larger Issues of Life?

Certainly.

At present, retreat seems a highly rational response to a brutal month.