Month: January 2006

Talk about a trip down the rabbit hole.

I glanced into the room while McFadden was talking, and there, plopped in the middle of about five other inmates, sat Slobodan Milosevic. His hair and casual clothes were rumpled, a piece of sheet cake sat on a paper plate in front of him, and he was holding a bite halfway to his mouth on a plastic fork. Right next to him at the low table, also sitting on the hard plastic seat of an elementary-school-style chair, was one of the tribunal’s most prominent Bosnian Muslim defendants. And I thought to myself, the Yugoslav people, to the extent they ever existed at all, have vanished from the face of the earth. But somehow an ersatz version lives on within the walls of this high-tech jail, where Slobodan Milosevic—the Serb once known as the Butcher of Belgrade—can now share a quiet piece of cake with a Bosnian Muslim at a farewell party for their mutual friend.

Coming soon – my weekend in Houston.

Sony kills production of its robotics unit, further demonstrating the lack of vision that is so prevalent in business these days.

The worst part is this could actually work.

I thought the American Jobs Creation Act was a crock, too, especially once I heard who some of the companies were that were taking advantage of the law.

Network neturality is one of those topics that helps the individual by not creating artificial (i.e. greed-based) mechanisms that impede access to all network participants, and thus hurt corporations. As a result, look for this principle to fall by the wayside during the upcoming rewrite of the nation’s telecommunications laws.

You know we’re in trouble in Iraq-Iran when you read something like this.

Inside Iran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps runs a one month training and indoctrination course for members of the Iraqi Shiite militia the Badr Brigades, paying them 75 cents a day during training and 82 dollars a month once they return to jobless Iraq. The Badr Brigades is the militia of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) political party. The SCIRI is one of the largest parties in the United Iraqi Alliance, which won a plurality in the December 15 elections and will control the largest bloc of seats in the new national assembly. On December 13 Iraqi border police seize a tanker truck filled with thousands of forged ballots that had just crossed over from Iran. Mr. Bayan Jabr Solagh of the SCIRI and Badr Brigades is the Iraqi Interior Minister, controlling Iraqi police and police commando units, which are thought to be heavily infiltrated by Badr Brigades fighters. Secret detention and torture centers and death squads, targeting Iraqi Sunnis, are all linked to the Interior Ministry. U.S. troops encounter sophisticated, factory-made devices utilizing armor-piercing explosively-formed projectile (EFP) technology, identical to those employed by Iranian-backed Hezbollah against the Israelis in Lebanon, in the hands of Sunni insurgents in Iraq.

Why is Bin Laden still around to offer up this dribble? If our President is really so concerned about his Global War on Terror shouldn’t he have removed this guy already?

“We have no objection to responding to this with a long-term truce based on fair conditions,” the speaker said.

“We do not mind offering you a truce that is fair and long-term… so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan… there is no shame in this solution because it prevents wasting of billions of dollars.

“Your president is misinterpreting public opinion polls which show that the vast majority of you support the withdrawal of your forces from Iraq.”

So far as this stupidity goes, I don’t see this as a ploy targeted to “Western” audiences as the BBC indicates but instead targeted toward Muslims. After all, support for the jihad is predicated on a widespread sympathy that Bin Laden is standing up for the interests of the common adherent. By extending this “truce” he’s working to maintain that image by contrasting himself with the big, bad US who invades Islamic countries and harms their citizens. He’s playing up that “we’re only hurting you (Muslims) because we love you” angle. If the US would be reasonable and declare a truce we wouldn’t have to engage in such a violent way.