cellio | Entries tagged with war

The project for which I'm tech lead had its first release today. Yay. Now maybe I'll have more brain cells for other tasks. :-)

Heard from Dani while he was playing Diablo with a friend: "The client is willing, but the server is weak".

Time to clear out some of the browser tabs:

If you use a radio adapter to get signal from your MP3 player to your car stereo, you might find this search engine for empty FM bands handy (from

cahwyguy, I think).

Tech-support inspirational poster (courtesy of

dr_zrfq).

The great pizza-orientation test (I forget where I found this).

Iraq by the numbers collects together some interesting statistics in one place.

Bruce Schneier has an excellent essay on what the terrorists want. Excerpt: The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer. (I think I got this from

goldsquare.)

On a lighter note...

I found myself wondering the other day about wisdom teeth. What's the connection between teeth and mental acuity, and what does it mean that most of us end up having them pulled out at some point? Do wisdom teeth grant wisdom, or consume it?

Tonight Dani and I drove past a (closed) store called "Bird Bath". This seems rather specialized for the amount of real estate involved. I suggested a garden shop that, perhaps to stay in business, also sells fountains and planters. Dani proposed an avian spa. I kind of like that: imagine your songbird or parrot in an itty bitty jaccouzi, maybe with a shampoo and grooming -- maybe even massage and pedicure. Would the bath end with itty bitty blow dryers, do you think? Or would feathers respond better to towels and time?

From the Dilbert blog (lost the actual entry link, sorry): Allow me to explain the business model of a cruise ship. When you set sail, the ship has a billion tons of food and a few thousand humans. The cruise company's objective is to end the cruise with something on the order of one leftover cupcake and a billion tons of feces. I'm fairly certain that if that goal is not met, a busboy from Mozambique is thrown overboard as a warning to the other crew members. We ate our share just to make sure Pooka Muuwa was safe.

My lilac bush is finally blooming! It seems like everyone else's did that a couple weeks ago.

Our congregation's annual meeting was tonight. I am no longer worship chair (term expired). For the first time in four years I have no official position of responsibility. It feels odd. I'm going to see if I can change that. :-) (I mean, an incipient sh'liach k'hilah ought to be able to do something useful, and official, around the place...)

I like this pitch for minyan attendance (forwarded by xiphias). Very talmudic. :-)

CNN reports: "An 86-year-old woman was jailed after police said she called emergency dispatchers 20 times in a little more than a half-hour -- all to complain that a pizza parlor wouldn't deliver. [...] She also complained that someone at the shop called her a "crazy old coot," Giannini said." Um, yeah, that sounds about right to me. :-)

Old news for some, but anyone who hasn't yet seen the UK memo about fixing the case for the invasion of Iraq should do so. (I first saw it via profane_stencil.)

Tonight while driving through Squirrel Hill I noticed a large crowd walking up the sidewalk. As I parked the group reached me and I saw that they were protesting the war ("no blood for oil" being the pervasive chant). I walked with them for a block or so, raising the average age a bit, before veering off for groceries. It occurred to me only later that its placement on Veterans' Day was probably not an accident.

Our usually-reliable DSL service has been having random short outages for the last several weeks. (Usually 10-15 minutes, a few times a week.) I'm not sure how to test whether it's the DSL service itself or our 5-year-old modem, though, short of acquiring a test modem. So I sent mail to our provider asking if they had other reports and/or debugging hints. (I noticed in passing that their service hours now end at 8PM. I've had productive conversations with them at midnight in the past. Oh well. 8PM is reasonable; I'd just gotten used to hacker hours.)

Ok, Embla is capable of making normal meowing sounds, as opposed to that quiet chirpy thing she usually does. It just has to be Important. Like, say, being trapped between the window and the screen on a cold evening. For calibration purposes, the time a contractor sealed her into a wall she was silent for a long time, even though I was in the room calling her.

(What was she doing there tonight? Well, our sink was plugged up, so we had initiated chemical warfare, but the chemicals gave off mustard gas or something, and we had to open the windows to help with dispersion. I didn't notice the cat on the windowsill when I pushed the window closed later. Fortunately, she was quick to alert me.)

Wow. This picture of the Eagle Nebula is gorgeous.

More information on the police attack on peaceful protesters in Oregon (link from dglenn). I wonder if the owners of that site could be convinced to provide an RSS feed for their "new McCarthyism" reports.

Marry an American is a web site aimed at Canadians who'd like to rescue folks from a second Bush term if it occurs. "We envision a movement where everyone wins: Freedom of expression and a politically convenient marriage with love and igloos for all." (Link from ladymondegreen.)

Top ten ways the Iraq war is not like World War II.

Someone was selling, on eBay, invitations to a wedding he didn't want to go to. The running commentary is kind of funny. Thanks to patrissimo for the link.

Gee, Enterprise did not actually hit the reset button that I thought they would. I'm impressed. (Spoiler alert:) The seven million people killed in the first Xindi attack are still dead after all the mucking with the timeline.

Speaking of Enterprise (sort of)... Having finally had a successful encounter with the insurance company of the person who hit my car last month, I took my car in to be repaired today. It takes two days to do paint, so I have a rental. It'a s Dodge Neon -- much better than the last rental car I had in most ways. I was surprised, on climbing into it, how low to the ground it is; I hadn't realized that my Golf is so much higher. (I think the Neon is comparable to my old Mazda in that respect. How quickly we acclimate to new cars. :-) ) And in the small-worlds department, the person at Enterprise who handled my rental goes to my synagogue. He recognized me first.

Last week one of my coworkers showed me that Firefox has a mouse gesture for "magnify". This does text and images, and you don't have to go to the menus to tweak settings. It also overrides hard-coded fonts, because it's magnifying the whole window. So I downloaded Firefox, but there was no magnification joy to be had. I checked the list of extensions they offer, and I didn't find it there (though I did find, separately, text zoom and image zoom). Someone else told me this works for him with the scroll wheel on his mouse, which I don't have. I couldn't find an answer via Google. My current theory is that on the original coworker's laptop, diagonal click-drag simulates a scroll wheel. Bummer. (So I've gone back to Mozilla 1.7, because on first glance I don't like the Firefox UI as much.)

There is something distasteful about the popular desire to watch a war in "internet time". Wars take time, guys; remember in the past when you made do with daily updates? I'd really rather that CNN, MSNBC, and the other news sites would go back to prominently covering other news. I should be able to find more hints of other doings in the world on the main pages of such sites. Sure, of course the current news from the war should be there, but what else aren't we seeing because it's taken over?

All that said, if you're looking for a summary of war news from varied sources around the world, check out http://www.agonist.org/ . I must conclude that the guy who runs the site has no job. I've been glancing at it about once a day to get the highlights, and I think it's providing better coverage than any of the conventional sources on the net.

The evil melding-of-church-and-state bill passed the House. Bah. Yes, it doesn't really mean anything on its face; it's just a resolution for the president to say some words to endorse religion, and he does that on his own all the time anyway. But it's still offensive coming from Congress. I don't want to live in a theocracy, even if I got to choose the theology.

I got an auto-response from my representative yesterday saying, basically, thanks for the email and expect a paper letter in several weeks. He voted for it, so I'll probably get some patronizing piece of drivel about how in these tough times we all need to unite and do God's will or some such. Sadly, an elected Democrat from Pittsburgh need not fear reprisal at the polls. (How did your rep vote?)

Speaking of government, I should really get around to ordering a copy of my birth certificate. Maybe even getting a passport, just so I'll have it. I can probably make off with my parents' copy of the former to help with the Pesach trip to Canada in a few weeks. I've never had my ID challenged at the border, but times are different now and I'm travelling with a non-citizen who was born in the middle east.

Speaking of Pesach (sort of), frozen gefilte fish is much better than the stuff that comes in jars. I'm never going back.

Speaking of religion (ok, the transitions are getting weak): For those who were interested in the "conversion reruns" journal, see shira_reruns. It'll get off to a slow start (I didn't write as much at the beginning), with the pace picking up in June.

Apropos of nothing (hey, I can tell when transitions are a lost cause), I had a very pleasnt lunch with a friend and past co-worker yesterday. It's way too easy to lose track of people when you no longer see them on a daily basis. He also found this journal, which intrigues me because it's not googlable. Not that I mind, of course; I was just surprised.

I've advanced another hole on my belt, and many of my pants now require a belt. Woo hoo. But Pesach is going to be bad for this, isn't it? I guess I should work on keeping matzah consumption down; being dense, it's probably even worse than pita for calorie/benefit tradeoffs.

The House is currently considering a bill to declare a national day of fasting and prayer to seek help from "Providence" in these times of terror and war.

My representative will certainly be hearing from me about this blatant disregard for the separation of church and state. Much as they would like to make it so, we are not a Christian nation -- just a nation with a Christian majority. This has no place in government.

From the bill:

Whereas all of the various faiths of the people of the United States have recognized, in our religious traditions, the need for fasting and humble supplication before Providence;

"All the various faiths"? I don't think so. For starters, atheism can be a "faith" rather than an absence of faith. And I'm not so sure that all of the eastern religions have this concept.

Whereas humility, fasting, and prayer in times of danger have long been rooted in our essential national convictions and have been a means of producing unity and solidarity among all the diverse people of this Nation as well as procuring the enduring grace and benevolence of God;

Asserting it does not make it so. Show me those roots in our essential national convictions, Mr. Akin (the sponsor).

Thanks to

magid for the link.

Where have all the Muslims gone? (link provided by

msmemory)

We do not have a significant middle-eastern population here, and I haven't noticed any changes -- but, given the demographics, I wouldn't. Can anyone else corroborate or contest this observation?

Update 3/27/03: According to this post, his family apparently left voluntarily. It's not known why, but they seem to have gone to Amsterdam.

I've heard a lot of people in the last few days arguing that we're attacking Iraq at Israel's bidding. This is ridiculous for a number of reasons, including the fact that no ally has that much control over US foreign policy, but that's not what I focused on in this letter.

Editor,

If the US had really gone to war on Israel's behalf, as some of your letter-writers have suggested, then we would not be bombing Baghdad. We would be bombing Ramallah and Gaza. This war actually works AGAINST Israel's interests, becuase the US is expending all of its resources, military and diplomatic, going after a second-order threat instead of dealing with known terrorists with known supplies of weapons. From Israel's point of view, how smart is that?

Those who would place the blame for initiating this war beyond Washington have not made their case.

(Signature, contact info, etc)

(I've been writing this in dribs and drabs over a few days, so sorry if it's choppy.)

Last week's Torah study produced an interesting conversation (which I predict will continue this week). What do we do when confronted with a Torah commandment we find distasteful? (The triggering issue isn't really important for this discussion, though we kept coming back to it.) ( Read more... )

This thought was queued up in the back of my brain when I met my rabbi Thursday to study and he asked me what I think of the war. ( Read more... )

Then we went on to study. When last we left our heroes, Rabbi Yose was standing in the ruins of the Temple having a conversation with the prophet Eliyahu. (And you thought the talmud was dry!) ( Read more... )

Somehow we wandered onto the subject of studying Torah for its own sake -- that God desires this behavior, and so it is salvivic even if we gain nothing practical from it. (Ah yes, I remember how we got there: there is a discussion, after the Yose part, about the prayer/study habits of King David, who some say studied all night. Some Chasidim strive to emulate him.) We then discussed why we study, as this is not the theology that either of us follows. I'm not going to share my rabbi's reasons here, but I will share my own. (Hey, he knows about this journal, though I don't know if he reads. If he wants to share his reasons, he will. :-) )( Read more... )

It is extremely rare for me to speak well (extemporaneously) in a public setting. I am much better with the written word than with the spoken word. Tonight at the board meeting, however, I had a rare moment when things seemed to click.

Our meetings always include, along with the business matters of the month, an educational section (usually short). We're a synagogue board of trustees; we should learn some Torah, or discuss theology or philosophy, at least briefly.

This afternoon our rabbi met with some Christian and Muslim leaders to try to work out a joint statement on our country's current hostilities. (I'm not sure what purpose such statements serve, but we didn't go there.) A point of contention for them had been the statement "We pray for [adjective] soldiers". The argument was whether it was necessary/permitted to pray for all soldiers, or just for ours. So he put the question to us.

The predictable arguments were made on both sides, and then I got my turn. I said approximately the following (and I'm trying to preserve words here). The question, as stated, is incomplete; it doesn't specify the prayer. There are certainly many prayers that we ought to say for everyone in the combat zone. However, we might reserve prayers for success for the soldiers on one side.

Judging from the reactions I got, most people in the room hadn't thought of it that way. While I don't think it was particularly clever or insightful, I find myself pleased by the positive responses I got anyway. Maybe it's just that I usually trip over my words when trying to speak in such situations.

Eloquence escapes me, as it has for the past several days. There's nothing I can say about the war that hasn't been said better by others. I am disappointed in the methods used by our supposed leaders. I resent being held hostage by a government that behaves as if above international law. While Saddam Hussein is an evil man, I regret that we will be seen as descending to his level. And Saddam is far from the only threat out there; why haven't we targetted the others too?

War is sometimes necessary. This one might be -- but we did not follow an appropriate process. We are acting like vigilantes.

I hope that this ends quickly with a minimum of casualties among our troops and among civilians.

A possibly-morbid thought experiment for a Friday afternoon:
( Read more... )

Lots of good links in this post.

I don't know if it actually matters, but when I write to my congresscritters I try to apply honey rather than vinegar, showing how we're not so different even though we might be on opposite sides of an issue, and so on. (I do not, of course, lie, but I attempt spin. I don't claim to be good at it.)

That said, here is the letter I sent to my two Republican senators today.

( letter )

How'd I do?

So tomorrow is September 11th. The media has decided to mark the day by showing lots of specials and retrospectives and whatnot. If you watch TV tomorrow, you're going to see the planes hitting the buildings every damn ten minutes.

This is appalling. It's sensationalist crap that is a disservice, not a tribute, to the victims. At least give them the option to end their mourning and move on, for crying out loud. When I die, I want my survivors to remember my life, not the way I died. Especially if it's tragic. Maybe I'm weird, but I don't think I'm completely alone on this one.

9/11/2001 was a tragedy. But it was far from our only tragedy, and certainly far from the world's only tragedy. It was an act of hatred, but there are places in the world where hatred is recurring and systematic. We could, in general, stand to get a lot more perspective.

On the other hand, if we fail to learn from this, if we fail to empathize with those who face terrorism on a weekly or daily basis rather than once, or if we fail to distinguish between evil individuals and their races or religions, that will be a tragedy far more serious than planes flying into buildings.

I pray for a diminishing of hatred. I also pray for justice, that those responsible for terror -- all terror, not just ours -- be brought to account. And I pray that this doesn't take as high a price in liberty here in the US as I fear it already has.

But I will not build a shrine to the dead, and I will not spend the day watching the carnage on infinite loop, I will not attend any of the memorial services being held around the city tomorrow, and I will not change my daily routine out of fear. Living normally is the only response that makes sense to me.

Tomorrow, God willing, I am going to go to work, study talmud with my rabbi, and socialize with friends. Just as if tomorrow were the 10th, or the 12th.

I guess according to Ashcroft we're all just a bunch of whiners or something, criticizing his plans to end terror at the expense of civil liberties and all that... See this story.

Let me see if I have this right.

Government-sponsored (or at least -protected) terrorists attack civilians in the latters' home country. The militarily-superior victim demands surrender of those responsible, the demands are ignored, and the victim then attacks with a fair bit of restraint to try to minimize civilian casualties.

This is appropriate behavior for the US but a horrible sin for Israel.

Huh?

For the US government to continue to criticize Israel and tell them they should accept terrorists blowing up restaurants and assassinating cabinet members boggles the mind. I mean, we're not exactly leading by example, are we?

So let me see if I have this right. Bush demands that the Taliban turn over bin Laden (presumably for trial), the Taliban says they want to see evidence first, and Bush says that's not good enough? It sounds like a perfectly reasonable expectation to me: show us what you have on him and we'll give him to you, and if not, not. After all, weren't we going to go through at least the pretence of a trial if we got him? Wouldn't that require evidence?

I expected a long, protracted argument about what was considered good-enough evidence. But Bush is bypassing that question entirely. This reminds me so much of the schoolyard bully whose only argument was "because I say so". Hmpf.

What he's doing is making the validity of our grievances against various folks completely irrelevant by his bad behavior. It will end up not mattering if bin Laden was behind it; we'll go after him the wrong way and the world will judge against us for it. The whole "turn over bin Laden" thing is just a ruse to set up a fight Bush wants to have regardless. I resent that.

Current Mood: irritated

Services Friday night were packed. There must have been 500 people there. On a normal Shabbat (when no one's celebrating a bar/bat mitzvah), we get around 100. We also got more than normal Saturday morning, though the contrast wasn't as pronounced. (This is the early-morning informal singing minyan, usually around 30-40 people. I'd guess we had 60 yesterday. I almost never go to the later more-formal service.)

After services yesterday Dani and I went to Coronation (SCA event), which was in Jennserstown, about an hour and a half from here. (If that name sounds familiar, that's where early reports were placing the PA crash. We were about 20 miles away from the site, though.) The event went well, except that we missed the bulk of morning court (including the actual coronation ceremony) because the starting time was changed after the newsletter announcement was published. Oh well. Even if I had known, I'm not sure I would have been happy about skipping Shabbat services this particular week in order to go. Among things, we have people who are in need of help and support for reasons completely unrelated to Tuesday's events, and with everyone focusing on that, people like Jan (who just lost her father) can get short shrift, and that's not right. This may sound weird, but I felt like I needed to be there to hug Jan on this particular week. (Jan's not the only one.)

On the Mark had its first practice since before Pennsic today. Andrea took a one-year teaching job out in the middle of the state (about 4 hours by bus), which makes things challenging. She can come back to Pittsburgh every other weekend, so that's when we'll practice. Our next scheduled performance is Thanksgiving weekend, though we jut talked about trying to perform at an SCA event two weeks earlier because we'll all be there anyway.

Sign seen while approaching the Turnpike toll booths last night: "please use all lanes". Terribly sorry, but Dani and I do not own a vehicle with which we could comply. :-) (Maybe they mean over time -- every time we visit that toll booth we should use a different lane until done.) They could clarify their intent by changing the sign to "please use any lane".

I'm looking forward to meeting Ralph and Lori's kittens tonight.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Crossfire (EFC soundtrack)

Y'know, I've been feeling for the last few days that we need to respond, in a violent but targetted way, once we actually have a target. (We also need to make some long-overdue changes in our foreign policy, in my opinion.) But I'm frightened by the progression in Bush et al's talk from appropriate response to an "all-out war on evil" or whatever he's calling it. We're going to try to root out every terrorist in the world and nuke every country that supports them? This is crazy talk. We are incapable of this, and it's not our decision to make. If world governments united in this larger goal that might be different, but I worry that we are about to make an even bigger foreign-policy mistake than we've made in the past.

We can't return to the pre-WWI days when our goal (as Washington put it) was to be friendly with everyone and allied with no one. But we also shouldn't strive to be the big bully in the public school yard, either.

I truly hope that a middle ground is possible, where we do not roll over and let the terrorists get away with murder, but we also don't launch WW III.

Current Mood: scared
Current Music: The Secret of Strandhill (EFC soundtrack)

Many people are praying for peace right now. I find that I cannot pray for peace. I hope for peace, but I pray for justice. (Justice includes not going off half-cocked against the wrong people.)

Baruch dayan emet. Damn.

Well, it's not like there's anything most of us can actually do about today's attacks, but I feel like I should write something. So, so disjointed thoughts.

Wow. This really, really sucks. My heart goes out to the tens of thousands of people whose lives have been destroyed by this.

I want vengeance. Vengeance won't bring the dead back to life, but I want it anyway. Not on innocent bystanders, of course; terrorists play that game but we civilized people don't. But once someone unambiguously claims responsibility, or the feds figure it out on their own, I hope they will spare no fury in their retaliation.

Targetting innocent bystanders in attacks is the most despicable thing one can do. If you have a beef with some other country, then by all means go after the military targets if you must -- have a war or whatever. But what possible benefit can come from targetting just plain folks? It's not like "just plain folks" can actually do anything, after all. Ordinary people don't control national policy. (Yeah, in theory elections do that in the long term, but most people don't really pay attention to the platforms they're voting for, if they vote at all, so even that is dubious.)

I really, really do not understand what goes on inside the head of a terrorist. I don't mean the brainwashed ones (like the kids being raised in the PLO today); I mean what goes on in the heads of the guys thinking all this stuff up. Well, I guess part of it is that the guys driving the process aren't the ones who are getting killed, so to the extent that they can send sheep out to be martyrs, they win. But aren't they afraid of creating martyrs with their attacks?

Pity I never took any courses in behavioral psych.

If it is Arafat's thugs, as early reports indicated, I wonder if even this will be enough to cause the rest of the world to stop doing the PLO's will and open their eyes to what's going on over there. Or will Europe and the media keep acting as if everything is the fault of Israel and anyone who collaborates with her? There's plenty of blame to go around, of course, but the distribution is far from even.

I can see from the windows here at work that outbound traffic in Pittsburgh is hopelessly snarled. I think if a strike is coming I'd rather be in a building than in a gridlocked car -- more options.

The consequences go far beyond the lives lost and property destroyed today. The collateral damage, both economic and morale, will be enormous. (For a very small example, who do you know who's actually getting much work done today?)

We have a TV going out in the main hallway here at work. I would never want the live-reporter job, but my mind boggles at some of the trite things that the commentators say to fill air time. Oh well.

The six planes that are still unaccounted for (last I heard) should be close to out of fuel by now. How about some news of them? Where did they leave from, and where were they last spotted? Maybe the guy at NBC who apparently spent the morning designing their "attack on America" logo could go investigate this instead.

Monica

short takes

short takes

short takes

Thursday bits (protest, DSL, feline antics)

short takes (mostly links)

war coverage

lunchtime short takes

this is so wrong

frightening if true

the war: ridiculous claims

law, process, and study

a bit from the board meeting

And so it begins

war question

Iraq

semi-obligatory 9/11 entry

(no subject)

double standards

pissing match

misc

frightened

tzedek tzedek tirdof

Thoughts

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