Yet Another New Addition To The Blogroll

A new Seattle-area tech/warblogger (well, new to me at least), Howard's got some good bloggage going on over at his pad. Check him out if you get a chance.

The New Ugly Americans

The urban bourgeoisie are in a state of severe anguish.

Sometimes I really hate living in Seattle. The signs pop up everywhere these days. On telephone poles, outside homes, and even in storefront windows, these cardboard rectangles that stare at me throughout the day. Their red white and blue design, some kind of appeal to what little resurgent patriotism exists in Seattleites post 9-11, jar against the grey concrete, ashen sky, and emerald foliage that makes up the city's landscape.

"No Iraq War" is their pithy little message. The concentration of signs lead inevitably to the many small protests which are gaining in popularity. The signs are a call to arms for the pacifist faithful, and a stunning example of mindless herd-think, made material in double sided paper stock.

Even in the quiet, residential neighborhood where I live, the protesters gather in small groups, blocking the sidewalks and snarling already unpleasant rush hour traffic. These gatherings, never consisting of more than a half-dozen participants, are usually not staffed by unwashed, rough looking, dreadlock sporting 19 year olds, or even by elderly hippie burnouts, but instead by handsome late-20s-early-30s Gen Xers with conservative clothes and stylish preppy haircuts.

Undeterred by the Northwest's punishing January downpours, these cheerful looking people carry their signs with a look of intense smugness and joyous self-righteousness, giving exuberant thumbs up and waving when a rare passing car honks in support. The whole thing is like some high school football team's car wash. Occasionally they shout one of their beloved phrases; "no Iraq war!" Or "say no to Bush's war!" Or "no war for oil!" They never seem to forget that oil part. And of course you can't forget that Bush's greedy war will lead to the inevitable deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi Women and children. I mean, that's the point of war, to target civilians, right?

I walk though them on my way home from work. In years past I would normally stop and at least heckle them a little, but I can't do it now. Their willful ignorance simply infuriates me too much.

Back in my college days I had to deal with protests groups all the time on campus, and I was Mr. Heckler. Never did a distributor of the World Worker Weekly, or any other socialist pamphleteer, pass my sight without a bellowing, "Go back to Boston ya pinko," or "If you love socialism so much, move to Canada you red bastard." (In fairness, the Young Republicans always got a loving, "Go to Hell, ya damned God-boy!") Surprisingly, I'd often find a few people joining in after I'd yelled a few times (usually stupid, drunken frat boys, whose one great value, bless their brainless hearts, was in heckling). It was all great fun.

A part of that fun lay in the fact that these yahoos were harmless. I wasn't necessarily angry with the poor sods. Irritated, sure, but pity for their defeated worldview and their impotence prevented any rage. I'm sure the objects of my scorn were a little intimidated by a 6'1", 220 lbs, often intoxicated, Hawaiian shirt wearing man with wild ass-length hair (yes, I was a damned, dirty longhair during school) screaming McCarthyite slogans at them, but, fortunately, I am a peaceable man, and never had any violent intentions.

However, there is no fun to be had with these latest rounds of protestors. These are serious times, and they require thoughtful points of view. The best these yuppie wannabe Gandhis (I would call them useful idiots, but they wouldn't get past the base insult to understand the Leninist meaning of the phrase) can offer in the way of thoughtfulness is invective thrown at Bush, and tired pacifist slogans. The smarter ones might be able to quote some tripe they pulled out of one of our two nearly identical incestuous sister newspapers, or some even more insipid bits of information from one of the city's two equally similar alt-weeklies (Dan Savage in The Stranger seems to be a rare exception).

My fury grows as these same people who, in there great hipness, followed the cause of liberation for the oppressed people of Tibet, now join the latest cause celeb, allowing Saddam Hussein's viscous oppression of the people of Iraq to continue. I could confront them on their hypocrisy and probe the depths of their thoughts, however shallow that might be. So what, I could ask them, if inspectors haven't found any of Saddam's hidden weapons? He denies ever having the ones the UN inspectors knows about from earlier rounds of inspections. So what if oil is involved in the war equation? If oil is all we wanted we could just make a deal with Saddam. So what if we backed Saddam in the 70's and 80's? Any of our past foreign policy decisions, however immoral or stupid, can't erase the fact that Hussein's Iraq is one of the world's most brutal police states?

"But think of the women and children that will die if we attack!" they would reply with doe eyes. Well, unfortunately, I can't deny that civilians will inevitably die in any attack. Terrible as that may be, the numbers will be small, far smaller than if Hussein's regime is allowed to starve segments of the Iraqi populace disloyal to him for another five years, all the while building new palaces and weapons with UN oil for food money. And they will also be smaller than the number of Israelis killed when Hussein gives the Palestinians the weapons to destroy Tel-Aviv. And smaller again than the number of Arabs that would die when Israel retaliates by glassing every major Arab city.

"But we can deter him," one of the brighter meatbots would say. There is some truth to this argument, as he cannot openly develop his weapons with UN Inspectors in country. Unfortunately, the inspectors will eventually leave, weapons-free Iraq or no. The UN will tire of the issue and forget about it, as happened through the 90's, and then we're facing the same threat. And, although we have no hard evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, the inspectors cannot prevent Saddam from transferring weapons he already has to unsavory agents of terror.

At this point, one of the protestors would call me a filthy Bush-loving Republican warmonger, and he and his friends would all look quite pleased with themselves. This would be followed by my fist encountering his face repeatedly, my subsequent arrest for assault and battery, and the possibility of having a large cellmate named Bubba who thinks my lips are 'purty'. This is why I must never engage these people in debate. Self control over my rage would be impossible to maintain.

Of course, all these affluent young "peace activists" grew up in a society where their idea of oppression was getting busted for smoking pot in a high school bathroom. On the oil front, they drive cars as big and inefficient as even the most gas-guzzling environment hating Republo-meany. They grew up in a nation protected from foreign aggressors by a mighty army, protected from banditry by police forces reined in by the rule of law, and protected from the ambition of ruthless politicians by a government designed from the ground up with checks and balances.

There hasn't been a government sponsored mass-slaughter of civilians in the United States since the end of the Indian wars. Those acts were abhorrent then, but they are simply unthinkable now. Government-sponsored discrimination has been outlawed since the 60's. No Americans have ever been silenced by a secret police system, regardless of what Noam Chomsky or Michael Moore might say. Perhaps these protestors are simply incapable of imagining anything worse than their boring, pointless, middle class existence. Perhaps they truly are capable of equating John Ashcroft with Osama Bin Laden, or George Bush with Saddam Hussein. If so, they are only worthy of my disgust and hatred.

I don't know what it's like to live under oppression. And unless you've immigrated from one of the world's hellholes, neither do you. I certainly can't imagine having friends or family members disappear into the secret police headquarters, never to be seen again. I don't have to experience that to know that, even though they're born in a shit heap of a country on the other side of the world, Iraqis still deserve a better life. And the US military can deliver it.

For both Right and Left, the humanitarian justification for a war on Saddam Hussein's regime should overwhelm any potential costs. If the values that American society stands for and has benefited so much from (individualism, freedom of thought and speech, etc...) aren't worth bringing to the people of Iraq, why bother protecting them here at home?

The pacifist trendoids and their celebrity gods argue, with Sheryl Crow style eloquence, that war is always evil, and peace always good. I will be accused of being a Bush lackey for quoting the president's SOTU speech, but, "a future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all." And peace with an oppressive regime still intent on regional conquest and armed with a growing arsenal of devastating weapons is unconscionable.

Rednecks are often derided in literature and foreign opinion as "Ugly Americans". Well, as ignorant and unsophisticated as the rural middle and lower classes may be, nothing beats the oh-so sophisticated urban middle and upper-middle classes, The New Ugly Americans as I shall call them from now on, for raw hypocrisy, pointless contrarianism, and true indifference towards the suffering of distant peoples. And they can all go to hell for all I care.

For Those Who've Got The Maniacal Laugh Down Pat

Well, it looks like the Villain Supply website is down, which is a great blow to aspiring tyrants, madmen, and evil geniuses everywhere. Fortunately the market abhors a vacuum, and a new supply store is on its way: I present The Home Despot -- Shop. Destroy. Rule.

Their prices on unquestioning minions, self-propelled artillery, and, best of all, midgets are all quite reasonable...

Via Memepool

The Game

Oh, and before I forget, go Raiders!

HALFTIME UPDATE:
God. Damn. It.

FINAL UPDATE:
Ugh...

The Horrors of War

Click to view full size.

New Addition to the Blogroll

Proving once and for all that being a damned, dirty Lefty doesn't necessarily mean one has to remove their brain and sign on to the Chomsky Choadsuckers Brigade (known as CCB from now on), Michael J. Totter has a site filled with delicious big-brained goodness. Sure, his devotion to the Nader troubles me, but heh, se la vie, as those irascible frogs are known to say...

Thanks to that Ken Layne guy for the link.

King Teddy

It's funny, when I think about Teddy Roosevelt, I can't imagine a better voice for him than Richard Dreyfuss... How the hell does that work?

I Love The Single Life

Or how I learned to stop worrying and enjoy being a hermit.

What's the perfect accompaniment to Chef Boyardee's mini ravioli? A 2000 Columbia River Valley Syrah, to be sure. Such a fine flavor combination.

Ah, a fine night indeed. Watching terrible sci-fi (Stargate to be specific), playing awful songs on my guitar, and reading some of my favorite poet's insane supernatural philosophy. Life is good.

And speaking of Yeats' automatic writing kick, I'm watching this Dream Team show on the SciFi channel right now. I do love dream interpretation. Sure, it's worthless psychological games, with no scientific basis whatsoever, but like a good tarot card or palm reader at a party, it's entertaining as all hell. This show, however, is not entertaining. If it wasn't for me drinking a bottle of wine and typing this thing out, that channel would be changed, lickitysplit.

The show does have one thing going for it; I learned tonight that all women dream about looking at, or having sex with, other nekkid women.

What can I say, the SciFi channel knows its demographic. If they'd only get rid of that John Edwards weenie.

The Big Time

Well, it's official, everyone's favorite hard-rocking girl band, The Donnas, have made it to the big leagues. They just did their performance on Saturday Night Live, which was pretty good, despite the horrid quality of the rest of the show.

I think they're pretty high on MTV's TRL, and I've heard them several times on the radio. So they're not the cool little secret they were a few years ago. And here I thought I was the hip music insider or something...

Intellectual Catfighting For Your Amusement

The ever irritating Studs Terkel is not happy with Christopher Hitchens. In a letter to the editor of The Nation on Jan. 6, Terkel accuses Hitch of being a washed-up drunk, who’s betrayed the forces of good to join Bush and his fellow bloodthirsty "wanton boys" (and what is it with pompous ol’ pricks always bringing poor dead Billy Shakespeare into everything?).

The Hitchster first sends a short reply, and then a more lengthy exchange with The Nation’s Victor Navasky, in which he throws out a few bitch-slaps of his own. Read it and enjoy...

(Via The Christopher Hitchens Web)

Napoleon: Liar, Idiot, Or Both?

The Professor links to an amazingly stupid post by Dutch wanker Henk Ruyssenaars. In it he blames the USA for the nationwide strike that has crippled Venezuela, and places the responsible for every bad right-winger to ever rise up in the world on good ol' Uncle Sam. Before he leaves to masturbate over Noam Chomsky’s latest insane tiradescholarly work, he leaves us with this fine quote to think about while we ponder our many crimes against humanity:

There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind.

The source of this quote is, of course, everyone’s favorite philosopher and pacifist, Napoleon Bonaparte. Now, ignoring the fact that ol’ Bonney was a tyrant who dragged Europe through decades of unending and bloody war, this snippet lends little credence to Mr. Ruyssenaars’ letter. In fact, if we were behind the massive labor uprisings in Venezuela, wouldn’t that, in fact, be us using our clever imperialist minds to gain control of that distant land, instead of our brute military force, just like Napoleon suggests?

L'Empereur did indeed use the sword. He used it quite a bit, actually. And his reign of oppression wasn’t brought down by thoughtful, pensive, diplomatic types applying non-military pressure. It was at Leipzig in 1813 (the Battle of Nations), where an army of 400,000 pissed off Swedes, Russians, Austrians and Prussians began to destroy his empire in violent battle. He was defeated once and for all by the British and Prussians at Waterloo in 1815, again by canon, and not kindness.

To be fair, I’m sure this angry Dutchman just did a search for quotes and found something he liked. Napoleon is great for that sort of thing, I mean look how many great ones I found, and I wasn’t even looking that hard:

Women are nothing but machines for producing children.

Good and decent people must be protected and persuaded by gentle means, but the rabble must be led by terror.

Morality for the upper classes, the gallows for the rabbles.

Europe is a molehill.

If you wish to be success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.

I have come to realise that men are not born to be free.

In politics stupidity is not a handicap. [I hope our good pal Henki Henk realizes that this maxim has its limits...]

Such wisdom. A fount of enlightened progressive thinking, that Bonaparte. Surely, he was the original man of peace and love. At least he must have been, in the screwed up alternate dimension where this Foreign Press Foundation thing operates from.

Dumb bastards...

North Korean Fruitloop Watch

So, the Bush administration has offered to break with its self imposed silence towards North Korea, and begin negotiations on defanging Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities. This is, of course, a very public win for Kim Jong-il and his pals in the fugly Korean vampire club. It means that, at the very least, he’ll be keeping what weapons he already has for use as future blackmail. Plus he’ll get generous food and energy aid, all on Uncle Sam’s dime.

Now, your average, only moderately insane, tyrannical regime would take this deal and run with it. You’ve outfoxed those damn Yankee Imperialists swine yet again comrade, now it’s time to cash out and leave the casino. Surely this is what Kim wanted all along, right?

Well, we’re going to cave and start talking to the NoKo’s, even after they blatantly broke our earlier agreement, and have withdrawn from the Non-proliferation treaty; a clear reward for threatening us. And they respond to their victory by leveling paranoid accusations and making more unreasonable demands.

This is a tough nut, because North Korea really is batshit crazy. The country’s leadership is paranoid, the military is aggressive, and the population starving. They’re a cornered animal ready to strike.

We’re not going to be using our conventional forces to deter the North Koreans, because we’re not willing to take the chance of Seoul being destroyed (the north could shell it to rubble using only conventional weapons) if a ground war starts. We don’t want to use our own nuclear weapons, for obvious geopolitical reasons. Diplomacy is ultimately ineffective with a regime that doesn’t honor its agreements. A payoff may buy us a few months, or maybe a year at most. Orson Scott Card’s piece on China’s role echoes some of my recent thoughts. Relying on Beijing to pressure Pyongyang is, unfortunately, the only reasonable non-military, non-payoff approach, but I have my doubts that the Chinese will go along with it, even if we apply significant pressure.

We have no good long-term solutions, other than wishing upon a star that Kim dies and the regime collapses. Even if Iraq wasn’t an issue, this would be the case, and we would still be buying them off. Bush will buy off Kim again, because all other solutions are worse or probably won’t work.

However, I don’t see how delaying the Iraq attack, which also seems to be in the administration’s plans, will help this situation. We’re committed to Iraq, and pulling back now to face North Korea would weaken our position in both theaters. Hopefully our diplomatic / bribery plans will buy us another six months of the status quo in North Korea, but the sooner we’re done with Iraq, the better for us to deal with any further craziness coming from Pyongyang’s pack of inbred syphilitic mobsters.

Random Drunken Observation

Surely, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the greatest. movie. ever. How can this, most excellent of movies, be damn near 15 years old already? Madness I say...

Holy Absentee Webmaster Batman!

Sweet merciful crap. It's been a week since I've posted. Such disgusting slothfulness. I haven't even been drinking my self into stupors. Actually, that's probably the problem. Without beer acting as high-octane blogtrolium fuel, this site sadly languishes. Damn that job for keeping me sober!

So, I had a pretty good new years. For once, I didn't end up face down in a pool of bile tinged champagne, which I think may be a growing sign of maturity. Or not. The key was to stick strictly with gin the whole night. But, now that I think about it, when is that not the key?

Anyways, work is keeping me busy, and the boss has hatched a malevolent scheme to keep me in my place. You see, he loaned me the first book in Patrick O'Brian's 20 volume Aubrey / Maturin series, and it is somehow insanely addictive. I just finished the second book, a tale of adventure and drama in Britain's Napoleonic era navy, and I wait sheepishly for him to bring me the next volume, needing my sweet, sweet hit of softbound crack.

Imagine, if you can, C. S. Forester (of Horatio Hornblower fame), Charles Dickens, Tom Clancy, and Jane Austin (yes, that Jane Austin) getting together in a mad night of passion, mixing their juices and producing a literary child. That child would be O'Brian, with his description of 19th century life, his maddening level of detail covering every aspect of Napoleonic naval technology, and a fascinating set of characters. The terminology is daunting, with ancient naval jargon thrown about without mercy. The action is almost cartoonishly non-stop, while at the same time it's brutally realistic and gory. I'm hooked.

So, if you don't hear from me much over the next couple of weeks, you'll know why. Mojo's gotta have his medicine...