Sunday, September 29, 2002

Attack reindeer loses antlers. A male reindeer which gored two hillwalkers is taken off a mountain after having its antlers removed by a vet. [BBC News | UK] heh. Attack reindeer. heh.
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Gun battle outside British embassy. British embassy staff in Yemen escape unhurt after a gun fight near the building in the capital Sanaa. [BBC News | UK] Remind me never to go to Yemen - it's hot, it's dry, it's full of al Qaeda supporters, and gun fights break out near Western embassies. Oh yeah, and things seem to blow up in their harbor. Whoops.
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Law and Order. A great line in a recent Law and Order. Lenny Briscoe, played by Jerry Orbach, is interrogating a suspect. The suspect tells a story and reaches a point where no one believes him, not even the suspect himself. Lenny says: "Now there's five minutes of my life that's lost forever." [Scripting News] I've heard variations on this line for a long time - actually, a wrestling reviewer was the first place I saw it, referring to bad matches as "five minutes of my life I'll never get back". heh.

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Ha! A.J. Soprano is reading Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States on the Sopranos tonight. They're getting in a brawl with Native American protestors over Columbus...oh, this is great. I'm lovin' it. =)
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Give 'em hell, Al. With a series of fiery speeches, the former vice president recovers his voice, his backbone and his place as the 2004 Democratic front-runner. [Salon.com] I'm trying to figure out how it happened, but Gore grew himself some balls. In one speech, referring to Ashcroft's spending $8000 on drapes to hide the "Spirit Of Justice" statue's exposed breasts, Gore said "He put Lady Justice in a burqa." Right on, Al. Let Lieberman, the Republican-in-Democrat-clothes, bend over for Bush. Let Gephardt close his eyes and hope that the war issue goes away when he opens them. Fight the good fight - someone's got to.

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War Talk Shapes Fall Elections [Washington Post: Front Page] This is the PROBLEM! This is WHY we're going to war! Below the main headline is the following: "Democrats' Ability to Use the Economy Against GOP Wanes" and that is EXACTLY what the Bush Junta wants. If it weren't for this crap clogging up the media for the last two months and the rest of the time leading up to the election, the Dems would be walking away with the House and Senate...now it's a lot more unsure. Worse, there's nothing that can be done to stop them from succeeding in their vile plans. Damn them.

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You Gotta Have Friends [New York Times: Opinion] A very good read by Thomas L. Friedman. He points out that the American people care more about other things (the economy, terrorism) than Iraq, and they're not all that keen on going it alone. He then busts out a simply great line: "Mind you, I think some of Mr. Bush's wild and crazy unilateralist rhetoric — STOP ME BEFORE I INVADE AGAIN! — can be useful now." And then, miracle of miracles, he spends the rest of the editorial making that great line make sense! Seriously! While Friedman has more confidence in our ability to run roughshod over the Iraqis and win really, really quickly and really, really easily than I do, we can both agree that eventually the US will take over. What matters to Friedman (and is actually more important to me than the initial conflict as well, though that's worth resisting in and of itself) is what happens afterwards. We need to build a nation in Iraq that currently doesn't even vaguelly exist. We've done well on this in the past (Germany, Japan, and Friedman's more recent example, Bosnia), and we've done poorly (Somalia sticks in my mind, as does Friedman's example, maybe our greatest failure in this respect: Lebanon). We need allies to pull this off. Why, you say? If we're talking solely in terms of economic and military capability, yes, the US could, on its own, rebuild Iraq, no problem at all. True, we have some cultural deficiencies if we're trying to work with Muslim peoples, like the various peoples of Iraq, but hey, we can always drag Turkey and Kuwait in and make them help us, right? But here's why that's not enough: the US gets bored. Quite frankly, when it comes to international affairs, we're quitters. Once the whiz-bang stuff stops, the American people have a tendency to go pretty isolationist. We'll eventually start to bring troops home, cut back on aid, etc...and odds are we'll do so before that's safe. We need the other big democratic (or mostly democratic) governments to help out, too - to keep us committed to the process, and to help fill the hole left when we start to pull out. If we want to build Iraq, here's who we absolutely need to have involved: the UK and Turkey (both of whom are almost certainly already on the bus, as it were), France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany (the obvious major NATO powers), Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic (those three'd be mainly a symbolic move, including the most important former Soviet bloc states now in NATO), and most importantly of all - Russia. Russia's got the deep economic connections with Iraq, and while Muslims don't exactly like them either, having the US and Russia working together carries an immense legitmacy in the non-Muslim world.

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Why? Because We Can [New York Times: Opinion] "Why are we attacking Iraq, which may someday team up with terrorists, instead of Iran, which has already teamed up with terrorists?" "Midterms." "Multiple choice, right? I hate those essay tests." That's taken from the above, a dialogue by Maureen Dowd between Bush, Rumsfeld, and Rice. Funny, funny stuff.
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Giganotosauruses on the Field [New York Times: Opinion] Ok - this is an editorial on the size of defensive and offensive linemen in the NFL. Seriously. The Cowboys just cut a 410 lb. lineman, and still average 335 lb. per offensive lineman. Wow. Those are some big guys. No wonder football doesn't seem real to me...
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