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4.04.2003



who's the evil empire now?

ok. more madness that i blame on being post-call (or, really, post-post call, but who's counting.) if you want to get infuriated by how poorly americans are educated about world history and how easily they swallow corporate propaganda, read these comments posted against an entry at talkleft.com entitled iraq as america's stamping ground for world domination. i find it illuminating that my comment on the fact that the philippines was an imperial american colony for nearly 50 years has been thoroughly ignored, despite the fact that some pro-iraq-war folk insist that the u.s. has never "invaded, conquered, or colonized another nation."

how about we end this post with a cheery quote from our good friend adolf hitler: "what luck for rulers, that men do not think." this is no longer the america that our ancestors fought to defend. sad, sad, sad.



the madness of looking through raw web logs

hey, "r," i hope you don't mind me posting vaguely about things you e-mail me (and if you do, well, you are the admin of this blog...) this is in regard to how easily privacy can be breached on the internet, and how easy it is to find out strange things about strange people, and how easy it can be to track down who exactly is linking to your site.

you would think that i would have better things to do with my free time, considering how little of it i actually have, but no, i am most definitely a nerd and a geek. for some reason, someone linked to an ancient blog entry of mine. (yeah, ancient is a relative term on the internet) geek that i am, i culled the referring url from my server logs. now i must admit that i read the linking post while i was in a post-call stupor, so i took it for granted that i wouldn't understand what was going on, but even now, after 6 hours of sleep, i still can't figure out what the post was trying to say, and i have absolutely no idea why there is a hyperlink sitting there leading to my own post. something about fubar. (or, to the unix geek, foobar) ah well. i know better than to hope that someone will explain things to me and make everything clear, but i'm going to post this anyway because i believe in the beauty of futility. (how's this for confusing and incoherent?)



technical difficulties...

i don't know where the rest of my posts from this week went. i'll investigate it more when i get home from work. hmmm...

4.03.2003



the mirror has two faces

look what i found: another blog using the same blogger template. i'm thinking we're more like fraternal twins, then identical twins; we share genotypes, but our phenotypes are completely different. i wonder what would happen at our blogger family reunion.

4.02.2003



in the other kitchen...

the war machine-backed dubya administration thought they could whip up an oil war in the name of "liberation" without cleaning up after themselves. i fear that years later, some high school history textbook is going to dilute in a couple of paragraphs this god awful war long after the hundreds (and only hundreds as i right this, who knows how many more) of iraqi civilians who have been slaughtered for profit, and the sacrificial us-british soldiers (i don't even know how many of they will fall, either) are long buried. if we're lucky, the history books might even have a sentence that may imply that the reasons for why the US invaded iraq was for ulterior motives using falsified evidence--there was no terror threat from iraq, no lofty, altruistic dreams of "liberation" for the iraqi people; there was just the goal of profit and control of this planet's limited resources. but then again, i'm still waiting for some rogue, ex-CIA agent to say, "we killed JFK!!" though it is hard, i try to sit in and listen to the radio to the reports of all the civilians dying in this war because i never want to forget how much this should never happen again. america has become such a virulent disease to the rest of the world. beyond that, i don't know what else to type.



i'm back in the kitchen of dissent

i just got back yesterday from out of town after teaching another workshop. on friday night, while sitting in the airport shuttle, i listened to the news on the radio. i heard of how the FBI is interviewing iraqi nationals in the U.S. and asking them stupid questions like, "do you like Osama Bin Laden?" it has gotten down to this asinine level... it ceases to amaze me in how utterly ridiculous it is to believe that all-powerful myth that the US is some beacon of democracy for the world to follow. let me list the ways in how it utterly fails!

1) so, what is freedom of the press, again? even the veteran members of the media establishment have to keep their mouths shut and take whatever propaganda the dubya administration has to offer naive, middle america. i just hope peter arnett decides to take the lead from other independent journalists to not tell the news only as the corporate war mongers in this country see fit.

2) the recipe for a feigned democracy post 9-11 (this dish is best served when corporate-backed figureheads (though, w/ not much of a head) who steal the US presidency are in season). step 1: sweep up, interrogate, and indefinitely detain at guantanamo bay's "house that halliburton built" a hodge podge of resident aliens, illegal aliens, and american-born citizens. step 2: conduct closed trials exempt from public scrutiny for hundreds of these countless and nameless detainees and deport them to god knows where. or, if you can't get osama bin laden's or saddam hussein's e-mail address and/or GPS coordinates, then "oops! my bad!" release them months later. that's right, with this gross disregard of basic democratic ideals of an "open" society, we can only know and say quietly to ourselves that the government is doing wrong, since now the evidence has been discreetly whisked onto a plane and flown off to somewhere else. garnish and chill before serving.

3) votes are in: americans prefer only the "colossus" at six flags magic mountain (valencia, ca). if you're tired, go to vegas to gamble where they pump fresh oxygen into the casinos; if you're poor, we'll give you "tax relief" to those making $1M or more by getting rid of the dividend tax--you can live vicariously through them!; if you're a member of huddled masses and you're a teenager who looks like you could be in a gang, you better make sure you don't walk in groups of more than three or we'll sweep you up into the juvenile "justice" system; if you're "yearning to breathe free," you're outta luck--participating in environmental treatises isn't our top priority, neither is producing hybrids--we need more lincoln navigators; if you're part of those "homeless, tempest-tossed," then we need to detain you indefinitely--we prefer you to enter the US illegally across the canadian border than on a boat from haiti to the florida shores. remember: lady liberty will be lifting her lamp beside the golden door!

if this is liberty, give me death!