The userpic is a bit more appropriate than usual in this case. It’s a report about a CIA operation back in the early 80s to deal with how the Soviets were “acquiring” US technology secretly. If this is indeed the case, and I have no reason to believe otherwise, I must say that this was simply beautiful. The story, by William Safire, here.
We live in a strange world.
From Reuters: TV ratings for State of the Union have slipped. Apparently 30% fewer people watched this year than last, because without a war brewing it just wasn’t as dramatic.
I’m always glad, for one, to know that our wire services are keeping such careful track on television rating numbers and what they mean for politics.
(Depressingly enough, of course, these numbers do mean something for politics – or at least, they do now that they’re publicized and being discussed.)
And on a different note, also from Reuters, the rabbi Shlomo Eliahu of Tzfat (one of the old hearts of cabbala, and to this day a thriving center of rabbinical thought) has composed a new proposed standard prayer for surfing net.pr0n.
No, I’m not kidding.
Well, at least it’s topical and relevant in our day and age…
Hrm.
So the GOP is airing its first campaign ad of the new election season, and it urges people at one point to “support the president’s policy of pre-emptive self defense.”
The following is not only politically oriented, but shows my party affiliation pretty strongly. You have been warned.
Odd statement
From an article in today’s NY Times:
“I don’t cast my ballot based on learned behavior.”
I’ve been trying to come up with a rational explanation for this sentence, and so far this is the best I can do:
Mr. Eddings (the speaker) is part of a new breed of voter – literally. Thanks to the wonders of modern biotechnology, he has been designed since before birth to enter into a dramatic frenzy of hole-punching and button-pushing whenever shown his programmed party affiliation. These changes are revolutionizing the once-stuffy polling places of a generation ago; already voters are reporting the normal calm and poise of the booths as being replaced with a zoo-like atmosphere, punctuated by the hoots and howls of the major parties and accented by the spectacular plumage displays of the occasional Green Party member.
Party leaders are hopeful that these new technologies will help ensure high voter turnout in an age of increasing apathy. Reports of more extensive engineering — Democrats programmed to form protest marches and Republicans programmed to eat Democrats — have so far been fervently denied by both sides.
Other parties may soon enter the fray, as well. When asked about a rumored “Project Oompa-Loompa,” Ross Perot of the Reform Party answered “You can’t make hay and cut bait at the same time!” Analysts are still trying to determine whether this amounts to confirmation or denial.
Dear gods…
Something I came across today while working: Students for War.
As far as I can tell, they’re serious. And personally, I find this very disturbing – the attitude of people who very obviously have never been anywhere close to an actual war. Or if they have, and still have this attitude, then this is even more fscked-up than I thought.
Incidentally, they don’t seem to be advocating any particular war. Until fairly recently, their site was advocating war with Iraq; now they’re advocating war with North Korea, and on their site are hints that they’re interested in Syria and Iran soon afterwards. Now, while I may agree with some (most certainly not all!) of their individual statements, the idea of forming a group for the simple purpose of advocating bloodshed in general seems somewhere between lunatic and demoniac.
Perhaps I’m reacting too much to an (amazingly) ill-conceived name; but these people seem like the exact sort of people I would like to keep the hell away from.
Choices of headlines…
From the NY Times front page, at the moment, the two top headlines:
“Strom Thurmond, foe of integration, dies at 100”
“Gays celebrate, and plan campaign for broader rights”
Contrary to what you may guess, these two stories are not related. The latter is about the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas earlier today. But methinks the front-page net editor is having a bit of fun…
Addendum: Reading over the ruling in Lawrence: this is one worth looking over carefully. The court gave a very strongly worded ruling, especially the majority opinion written by Justice Kennedy. It’s clearly meant to serve as a precedent in the future in a very wide variety of cases. In addition to formally stating that homosexuals have legal rights equal to heterosexuals, it makes some broader arguments about the boundaries of privacy and what the government does and does not have a right to regulate. In the long run, this decision may be one of the most significant of the past few decades from the court with regards to a wide variety of social issues.
Wow, some good news in the paper for once. 🙂
…. well, fuck …
[politics filter]
News story here.
I am seriously approaching a loss for words. I’m increasingly of the opinion that the Bush administration has lost their collective marbles completely, is engrossed in some pseudo-messianic or pseudo-cold-war scheme to try to conquer the Middle East, and is actually being run by people stupid or delusional enough to believe that the fact that we have entirely failed to establish any sort of stable beachhead, much less stable local regime or civil society, in either Iraq or Afghanistan, might not merit a little bit more attention before we rush off on the latest half-baked scheme.
Has it seriously failed to occur to anyone that the situations in both of those countries are teetering continuously on the brink of explosive chaos, of the sort most damaging to us, and that without an immediate and large-scale deployment of resources towards nation-building — that hated word that suggests long-term investment that doesn’t return instant profitability — we’re risking dumping all of Central Asia into anarchy, leaving behind wastelands to be partitioned between fundamentalist tribesmen (Pashtuns, Kurds, Arabs both Shi’ite and Sunni, Turkmen, Chechen, etc etc – all the core of the support of the Taliban, al Qaeda, and all the rest of our primary enemies) and possibly China, India, Pakistan, and all the other local countries who are just together enough to be able to make a control grab in a power vacuum? Has it seriously failed to occur to our government that this might be a really bad thing?
I’m just losing all faith in them. I would have thought that cynical self-interest would be enough to keep this administration from the most obviously stupid moves, but apparently there is some sort of scheme of grandiose ambition at play here which outdoes even the survival instinct.
I really, really hope these latest news reports are wrong.
What the…?
You know, this may well turn out to be a dud, or a complete error, but it looks like the Bush administration may have actually come up with a foreign policy initiative for the Middle East that’s a good idea. (Yes, I’ve gotten rather cynical about these things. Does it show?)
If it goes off, OT1H it’s probably a big win for Bush and some of his cronies, but it’s also potentially a win for quite a few other people as well, and it may actually advance peace in the Middle East. And since the cynical advantage part is pretty obvious, it doesn’t make me worry about hidden booby-traps quite as much.
But you know… this sort of policy, of keeping everyone’s hands so far in one another’s pockets that they can’t reach for a gun does sound vaguely like the Clinton doctrine… *grin*
Story here.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 