A special assistant to Donald Rumsfeld was upbeat. “We’re going to get better over time,” said Lawrence Di Rita. “We’ve always thought of post-hostilities as a phase” apart from combat, but “the future of war is that these things are going to be much more of a continuum. … We’ll get better as we do it more often.”
Eeeeeee! The US is always scariest when it has a burst of honesty.
It’s competition time! The question is, who’s next? Syria, North Korea, or Iran? Personally I wouldn’t rule out Venezuela. Perhaps somewhere on Africa’s oil rich west coast?
I don’t think it’ll be North Korea. Not if they’ve succeeded in convincing the Pentagon they actually DO have weapons of mass destruction. And it’d really annoy China. The noises coming out of the administration regarding Iran’s nuclear program could certainly be laying down some sort of foundation for operation “Iranian Freedom”.
The Father of the US Senate, Robert Byrd said, before the war began:
“Today I weep for my country. I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned.
“Why can this President not seem to see that America’s true power lies not in its will to intimidate, but in its ability to inspire? May God continue to bless the United States of America in the troubled days ahead, and may we somehow recapture the vision which for the present eludes us.”
Why does no-one ever listen to the voice of reason?
Wheee. Just added a comments system, and seems to be working. Interactivity. We like.
Three days on, and it looks like the Odigo story has sunk without a trace. I guess the news that Reagan thought that sex was evil pushed it out.
In other news, the American Film Industry has awarded the first Charlton Heston award to….. Charlton Heston. Now, I don’t want to suggest that he isn’t worthy of an award, but rewarding him simply for being Charlton Heston strikes me as a bit weak. Now, if the award was for being a gun-happy American biblebasher he’d have much more competition, and I’d respect his victory over the field all the more.
A little story from the Israeli based newspaper Ha’aretz Daily, that I doubt will make it into any mainstream papers, though I may be proved wrong.:
Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli and American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the original sender of the message predicting the attack.
Micha Macover, CEO of the company, said the two workers received the messages and immediately after the terror attack informed the company’s management, which immediately contacted the Israeli security services, which brought in the FBI.
“I have no idea why the message was sent to these two workers, who don’t know the sender. It may just have been someone who was joking and turned out they accidentally got it right. And I don’t know if our information was useful in any of the arrests the FBI has made,” said Macover. Odigo is a U.S.-based company whose headquarters are in New York, with offices in Herzliya.
As an instant messaging service, Odigo users are not limited to sending messages only to people on their “buddy” list, as is the case with ICQ, the other well-known Israeli instant messaging application.
Odigo usually zealously protects the privacy of its registered users, said Macover, but in this case the company took the initiative to provide the law enforcement services with the originating Internet Presence address of the message, so the FBI could track down the Internet Service Provider, and the actual sender of the original message.
It’s a weird story. Why, if you were going to warn someone, would you choose a couple of guys sitting at a desk in Israel? Why haven’t we heard about it until now? Were they the only people warned? Was the identity of the sender discovered by the FBI, and if so, who the hell was it?
I’m not cynical enough to believe that the struggling Odigo made it up just for publicity. That’d be too grotesque, and too dangerous. Going to track the story as it grows, if it grows. There be answers here.
Meanwhile, here in Norwich, life is just getting interesting again. University is back, with all the wonderful friends and pesky annoyances it brings. Maybe even new friends and annoyances will be encountered.
The Concord Coalition has warned that US federal deficits over the next five years are going to total almost $2 trillion. Which is concidentaly roughly the same as the entire national debt built up by the US in it’s entire history from 1776 up to 1999.
That’s, umm, quite a lot of money. $2000,000,000,000 to be precise. Or $6847.42 for each for the 292,080,070 US citizens. Or $316.55 for each of the 6,317,919,680 people in the world for that matter.
I don’t begin to understand world economics. I know from personal experience that the moment I go into the red the bank sends me a nasty letter, and charges me for it too. By that count, it’s a wonder they can get the door of the White House open, with all the red letters that must be sitting on the mat.
Luckily, the US controls the bank. But presumably there must be a limit to how much money it can owe? What happens when that limit is reached? I have no idea, but I have a suspicion that it probably isn’t very nice.
Population data from http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
Oh, BTW, been off the net a few months. Back now, and will try to keep up my usual level of updating.
“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip up the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.” – Julius Caesar
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