The RipZAW

The RipZAW

Guaranteed Fair and Balanced, or your money back.

Send a letter to the Editor... err, Writer. Blogger. Something.

Visitors:

Archives

Friday, August 22, 2003

Bloody hell, the Israeli cease-fire is over again. The usual - some Palestinian militants blow up a bus, so Israel blows up a Hamas leader's motorcade, and the eyes for eyes go flying through the air all over again. Bloody hell is right - that's all the Middle East is these days. I saw the Israeli ambassador the the US on the Jim Lehrer NewsHour today. I wanted to cry, seeing how clueless these people were, how certain they were they were winning the battle when all they were doing was feeding the fire. "We're sending a message to the Palestinians that terrorism will not be tolerated," he said. "They have a very rigid command and control structure. If we can take out their leaders, the attacks will cease." Who is this man kidding!? The Palestinians are rioting in the streets over this! They don't have a secret bunker somewhere that keeps telling them to kill Israelis. They don't need one. The average Palestinitan doesn't know what the hell is going on. He just knows that the Israelis keep killing his countrymen and knocking down his friends' houses with missiles and bulldozers. You don't need a rigid command and control structure to make a suicide bomber. You just need an amazingly angry man with a bomb he can get from any number of sources who hate the Israelis as much as he does. Do the commanders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad urge their countrymen on to murder innocent Israelis? Of course they do. But if the Israelis didn't give the Palestinians so much reason to hate, no one would follow such a command.

Somebody has got to say enough. I think it has to be the Israelis. I say this for the simple reason that the Israelis have a functioning government. If Sharon or parliament say to stand down, the Israeli army will stand down. The PA is so full of conflicting commands with conflicting agendas, they couldn't stand down if they wanted to. The only way the suicide bombs will stop is if the Palestinian street can be calmed down enough to love life more than they hate Israel. That will not happen by "attacking the terrorist infrastructure." It will only come by Israel standing down and, as gut-wrenching as it will be, holding back while the Palestinian terrorists thrash themselves to death, probably killing Israelis in the process. The fact is, every act of "self-defense" the Israelis commence does nothing but assuage their vengeance and ensure the next Palestinian attack.

There is no choice. Someone has to step up to bat and volunteer their country to take a bullet for peace. Until that happens, innocents on both sides will continue to take bullets for no reason at all.
posted by Mr. Ripzaw at 3:18 AM
|

Article on CNN here about how students and teachers are showing increased interest in discussing current events (finally!), but, due to vastly increased standardized testing regimens, they are unable to do so. Freaking figures. Why actually help kids be good, involved citizens when we can instill a lifelong hatred of learning in them by forcing reams of soon-forgotten data down their throats to satisfy the inane requirements of bureaucratically-approved standardized testing? Who in the hell comes up with this stuff, three guys obsessed with Roger Waters in his "Just Another Brick in the Wall" days?
posted by Mr. Ripzaw at 2:55 AM
|

Thursday, August 21, 2003

The situation in Texas just keeps getting more ludicrous. The situation I'm talking about is the 11 state senators camped out in Albuquerque to break the senate's quorum so they can't vote on a redistricting bill. The remaining GOP senators, despite not having a quorum, have taken the opportunity to order the arrest of the absent senators, fire their staffs, cut off the mail and parking privileges of everyone in their offices, and impose a $5000/day fine on all of them. Stories in Texas newspapers here and here, just to point out the first two I see. MoveOn.org has gotten into the act now too, raising money to put on ads in Texas pointing out the kind of tactics the GOP are using. I have no idea where the heck this is going, but I gave MoveOn $5 for the ads; the tactics DeLay, Perry and the Texas GOP are using are just absurd, and I'll do what I can to see that they won't stand.
posted by Mr. Ripzaw at 3:50 AM
|

Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Wow, a $22 male contraceptive that works for 10 years and is entirely reversible. Might really bring down birthrates in poorer countries without reliable access to other contraceptives. Leave it to India to invent something that'll make big pharma cry and starving Africans smile - assuming it actually works.
posted by Mr. Ripzaw at 8:08 PM
|

An excellent usenet post regarding possible motives for the attack on the Iraq UN complex:

bobbyhaqq wrote:

Probably not that strange. There has been an expanding campaign of
terror attacks on soft targets with the express purpose of inflicting
as much chaos on Iraq as possible. This is a standard method of
irregular warfare and though the actual targets are hard to guess the
general outline of the future is pretty clear.

Firstly the idea that somehow this is just a handfull of Saddam
holdouts is idiotic to the nth degree and must be rejected by the US.
What Bush has gotten us in to is a major Jihad war with radical
elements in the pan-islamic war. Also his insane obsession with Iraq
while ignoring Afghanistan has simply insured that both nations are
not exploding at the same time.

By attacking the UN headquarters and murdering such a senior important
person the attackers have let all Iraqis know that no one who is even
close to the Americans is safe, that anyone can be a target. This
will most likely end what little support we were getting anyways. For
the Americans the disturbing question as to how these attackers knew
the precise office to attack will continue. Obviously there was a spy
in the building. All efforts to include Iraqis in operations will
most certainly compromise the security of those operations and the US
is faced with a hopeless situation.

Considering the fact the US is approaching 2,000 casualties in this
idiotic war, and that in this month alone the Jordanian Embassy, the
UN headquarters, the oil pipeline and the water supply have all been
effectively struck, we are facing a long hard war with a high body
count leading to an uncertain future. Idiot Bush might convince
himself that Iraq is on a irreversiable road to democracy but few
other humans are that stupid.

The situation in Iraq is far more fucked up than was ever planned for.
It is far more fucked up than I had imagined, it is far more fucked
up than our forces train for. With the distruction of the UN its hard
to see other powers coming in anytime soon. Why would India, Russia,
and France, after effectively avoiding this diaster, now get
themselves involved? Sending troops of men to Iraq is to send them on
a futile mission which will likely cost their lives. Its suicide for
no purpose.

How do we get out? Its going to be hard and a lot more good people,
and bad people are going to die. One would hope that after today
there are some people in the GOP with influence and honor enough to
privately demand Bush not run in 2004 for inflicting this diaster upon
America. Saddly for our military it will waste years on the ground
and be made weaker.

posted by Mr. Ripzaw at 1:22 AM
|

Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Playing on a team can be both more rewarding than individual competition, and infinitely more frustrating when your teammate is an idiot. I speak, of course, of Battle.net, home of the randomly-assembled team which may pair you with a strategic master, or a guy who halfway through the game tells you he doesn't know the controls.
posted by Mr. Ripzaw at 10:04 PM
|

There's a proposal in both houses of congress to remove the constitutional provision that only natural born Americans can run for president. On first glance, I was unable to see any merit in the proposal. Why risk divided loyalty? But, after a little more consideration, maybe it makes sense. Nation of immigrants, and all that. There are plenty of people that move here as a child and consider themselves just as American as anyone else. I especially like the idea that in order to be eligible for the presidency, a foreign born US citizen would have to live in the US for 35 years - the same amount of time a natural born American must wait before being eligible. Probably not that important, but it's best to get this kind of thing out of the way before we regret it. Either way, it's worth thinking about.
posted by Mr. Ripzaw at 8:41 PM
|

Geez. Of all the things to blow up, the UN headquarters? Why would they do that? If they're fighting the US occupation, why would the blow up the one force putting a check on it? If they're former Ba'athists, why would they attack the organization that wouldn't authorize the attack on their leader's country? Even if they're Al Qaeda members, why would they kill people there only to help the plight of the Iraqis, people from countries that Al Qaeda has never condemned. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a Brazilian named Sergio Vieira de Mello, is dead. So are 17 other UN staff, and over a hundred wounded. They weren't even armed. Why? Whose position does this strengthen? If the UN pulls out, the US has free rein, and the resistance probably gets crushed. If the UN reinforces with peacekeeping troops, the occupation will be expanded, and the resistance probably gets crushed. Either way it refocuses attention on Al Qaeda, a suspect in the bombings. So who would do this? And what about the bombing of the Jordanian embassy? Maybe it had something to do with Jordan's granting exile to Saddam's daughters. Maybe not. It's starting to look like its open season for anybody with a grudge against anybody else to settle it with a bomb or an AK-47.

Sooner or later, all this will be over. But right now, we've just watched more innocents get slaughtered. Maybe take a moment of silence for them.
posted by Mr. Ripzaw at 8:33 PM
|

You know what's good? Ferro Wafer Rolls. And Nutella. Yeah, that's some good stuff.
posted by Mr. Ripzaw at 5:59 PM
|

Sunday, August 17, 2003

Fall is coming around again, and that means one thing: Football. That, and going back to school and stuff. But mostly football.
posted by Mr. Ripzaw at 10:32 PM
|

HOME

Links to Stuff

Archives