11.30.04
Posted in Good Stuff at 11:14 pm by Thomas
It’s usually not my style to go around and gloat, but this is my blog, dammit! 
Yesterday I finished NaNoWriMo 2004 as a Winner, which pretty much means I can call myself now a novelist. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, I’ve written a book!
Just in case you haven’t heard about the insanity that is NaNoWriMo, the point of this site is to get everybody to finally sit down and do what they always said they wanted to do – write a book.
We’ve all heard the sentence before: “One day I’ll write a book about that!”, usually exclaimed with a little sigh at the end. You may even have said that yourself… But do we then actually sit down in the long winter evenings and write that book? Of course not. Everything else suddenly looks so much more interesting – and nothing is as scary as sitting in front of an empty screen, waiting for inspiration to hit.
That’s what NaNoWriMo is all about – you promise yourself to write your book in one month. November. Thirty Days. No Sleep.
And you know what? It’s fun! Of course I’ve been missing a lot of sleep, but after only one month of moderate typing, I have now a manuscript in front of me that I should be able to whip into shape so that I can actually think of sending it off to a publisher. How cool is that?
Thanks for enduring this little Happy Dance.
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11.18.04
Posted in Modern Life at 11:34 pm by Thomas
So how easy is it to hack the Diebold machines that have been used in many states here in the US during the last elections?
How about 5 minutes start to finish with no audit trail and no possible way to recount or restore the original results.
Here’s how.
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11.15.04
Posted in Rants at 8:53 pm by Thomas
This is quite possible the most amazing – and horrifying – example of circular logic I have ever seen. This is the exact quote from this New York Times article, but I’ve added the bold tags:
Military commanders point to several accomplishments in Falluja. A bastion of resistance has been eliminated, with lower than expected American military and Iraqi civilian casualties. Senior military officials say up to 1,600 insurgents have been killed and hundreds more captured, altogether more than half the number they estimated were in the city when the campaign began.
The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.
Does anybody else see a problem here? Oh – and since when is it OK to shut down a civilian hospital in a war zone?
Here is a quick refresher from the Geneva Conventions:
“Civilian hospitals organized to give care to the wounded and sick, the infirm and maternity cases, may in no circumstances be the object of attack but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict.”
I hope somebody is saving all this for a future war crimes tribunal.
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11.14.04
Posted in Rants at 10:59 pm by Thomas
So the US military spent the last week celebrating Bush’s re-election by flattening a city and by all accounts, killing indiscriminately.
Here for instance a little news item from Fallujah:
ABC pool video footage showed Marines continuing to search door-to-door, blowing the gates off houses with explosives. A bit of bright colour stood out on one of the city’s ubiquitous gray, rubble-strewn streets — a pink dress on the body of a small child crumpled next to the curb.
I am not able to mentally digest these few lines.
What makes all of this so much more horrifying is that it is utterly senseless. The US military is not going to stay in Fallujah. They will behave like complete barbarians for another week or two, and then they will leave. Behind them, thousands of people who would have otherwise lived their lives in relative peace, will put up weapons and join the insurgency.
Their houses are destroyed. Their jobs are gone. Their families are dead. Their dreams and hopes have been flushed down the toilet. All they have is an AK-47 and a newfound hate for everything American.
Every twelve-year-old who plays computer strategy games seems to have more knowledge of the history of guerilla warfare than the US military. Have they every heard of Mao’s fight against the Japanese? The fight of the Afghans against the Russians? The Algerians against the French? The Vietnamese against the French and then the Americans? Or the Iraqis against the British? Doesn’t ring a bell? They all ended in complete and utter defeat for the larger, better equipped occupying forces. This is what they call a hint.
I do not understand this strategy. It’s not a secret that I opposed the Iraq war for pretty damn good reasons, but that is another rant. What this is about is that the military planners seem to completely disregard humanity, decency and history. With one word, these people are complete idiots.
For more quotes on this that make your brain explode, check out TomDispatch’s latest. And also, check out this great article by Scott Ritter.
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11.09.04
Posted in Rants at 10:51 pm by Thomas
Tom Engelhardt over at TomDispatch has a great feature by Mike Davis, called The White House Rodeo – imagine the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are grazing their horses on the White House Lawn, and nobody acknowledges them. Here’s the interview.
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