dannyman.toldme.com

According to the New York Post:

Even though he wanted more time for inspections, Blix said yesterday that he didn’t know if he could ever be sure that Iraq wasn’t hiding the illegal missiles.

Feedback Welcome

I just finished watching a movie, so I decide to flip channels and check on the War. The satellite television is tuned to BBC America, and is in the middle of a live audio report from a British reporter who is reporting from the front lines as Marines take in Iraqi Prisoners of War.

The War in question is being broadcast live around the world. It is being waged so far with an eye towards avoiding not only allied casualties, but civilian casualties. At the same time cities around the world are dealing with protesters, who oppose the war because they see it as the precedent of imperialism on the part of the contemporary empire.

The empire regards itself as a fairly benevolent, often isolationist Republic that is being forced into acting in this war on the grounds that since it is the world’s great empire, it is threatened by barbarians who pose a magnified threat because in our time, there are weapons of such fantastic destruction and cruelty that would be used without warning.

I think a good reason to have children, is so that if I live long enough to meet them, my grandchildren ought to blow me away on a consistent basis.

Feedback Welcome

From an e-mail responding to an Argentine friend who is suddenly extremely upset about the War, typing in all caps and on the cusp of anti-Semitism. I try to explain things from the perspective of an American Citizen:

Changing Iraq’s government is only one reason I support the War. We strengthened Saddam’s hold on power when he fought Iran, we left him in power in 1991, when we shouldn’t have. America is already responsible when he tortures Iraqis, just as we are responsible for Pinochet’s crimes. In removing Saddam, we are trying to right a wrong that is our doing. Just as it is wrong to go to War, and it is wrong to impose our will on other peoples, it is also wrong to strengthen a brutal leader and then ignore the suffering of his people, it is also wrong to leave that leader with weapons that he could sell to terrorists, it is also wrong to believe that “containment” will work when it has apparently only further strengthened the bad guy and increased the suffering of the people, and it is also wrong if you believe that you will have to go to war to wait longer to fight when waiting will only make the situation worse. I see two sets of wrongs to choose from. The lesser of these evils is the “right” answer, in my mind, to a question that has no true answer.

As for the Palestinians, nobody has rationalized a solution to help them out. It is the Israelis who are rightly scared of the Palestinians, and the Palestinians who are rightly angered that nobody in the world will ever help them. We are guilty of Palestinian suffering because of our aid to Israel. The rest of the world, especially the Arab world, is guilty of Palestinian suffering because they will not give the Palestinians refuge. If America proposed a solution to this problem, I might support that as well. But we haven’t, and there are a million other injustices that are not being addressed, so I don’t see what the problems of the Palestinians has to do with America’s entanglements in Iraq. I am neither an Arab nor a Jew: I’m an American who is, as always, trying to figure out if the things my leaders do in my name is right or not.

Feedback Welcome

Say what you might about the folly of getting in the way of bulldozers, but thanks to the power of the Internet, and international travel, Rachel Corrie provides us with an insight into life in the occupied territories. If you’re going to risk your life and die doing something, the cause of helping the world understand itself is certainly a noble and worthy one.

Feedback Welcome

Whatever your feelings on the coming war, bear in mind that you can make the best of a bad situation.

You can strike a decisive blow for that which is good and decent about our country and give a pint if you can. With the military deployment, our blood supplies are stretched all the more thin: the Pentagon plans ahead for the fact that we’re going to lose quite a bit of it in the desert sands.

http://www.redcross.org/donate/give/

The nation needs your blood. If they don’t want your blood, for whatever reason, they can probably use your money, or your time. If you click that link at the bottom, www.givelife.org, you can register and search local blood drives online! Yow!

Feedback Welcome

My second shift tonight was pretty nice. Smaller boat, smaller crew, St. Patrick’s Day celebration! I had a hearty meal of corned beef, potatoes, salad, and carrots up in the pilot house. There was considerable activity at the Port of Oakland, giant container ships attended by beautiful white cranes, pulling containers on and off the waiting ships one after another: zip, zip, zip, zip! I saw one ship with a bunch of Hanjin containers, and I was thinking “Hanjin, Hanjin … Han Chin? Han Chinese?”

I got into a discussion with one of the guests who was also standing at the stern, watching the port. Those ships are from the other side of the Pacific! Those containers are International trade – goods, which employ people. Containers of hope floating across the ocean of a troubled world.

Jessica lost her retail job today. While she was dismissed for performance reasons, I suggested that he may have been looking for a pretext to cut staff without resorting to layoffs, on account of Unemployment Insurance premiums being based on claims made against an employer. I hope she’ll be okay.

It was a laid-back, middle-aged crowd who ate well and drank well and danced only a little. At the end of the night the tips were split four ways among the service staff. $22 in my pocket sure feels good.

Feedback Welcome

> How is the situation in the US today about the Iraqi issue? Are people
> upset or excited or…?

They’re rebroadcasting his speech on the radio. I don’t like George Bush, but I think it was a very good speech and that often times when he delivered it, his voice sounded like Reagan’s. I don’t like Reagan either, but he had charisma.

Americans are very conflicted. Some tempers are high, but I think that those who oppose the war are coming around to accept its inevitability. I think his speech should help rally those who support him, and soothe those who are on the fence. Those who oppose him can go on fighting, or turn their energies to other activities that should actually bear fruit.

Feedback Welcome

I got to work on Saturday night. One of three shifts I’ve got with the catering dinner cruises on the bay. Barring some implausibly huge tips, the money will still be less than my month’s “burn rate” but some income is better than no income. Tomorrow I should perhaps call the Unemployment Insurance people and explain that if I don’t get a hearing on my appeal soon, I might never be able to attend such a hearing because my destitution may force me from the area. We’ll see. I’ll also cruise around a few more restaurants.

There were no tips on Saturday, we had a high school dance. It was pretty interesting even if the young’uns don’t tip the bartender for booze they can’t buy. I was the only male on the dining staff. I think that this was the reason that I was selected to jump off the back of the ship when we pulled up to the dock to secure a line. Adventure! Excitement!

Another shift tonight! The management is very chill. “If you want to eat, just make yourself a plate and hide it behind the bar.” The Chicanos in the kitchen relax on the latter leg of the cruise, chatting on cell phones. Our path was out of port in Alameda, a wide loop around Treasure Island, and back under the west span of the Bay Bridge. It was quite wonderful to look up in the sky and cruise under a beautiful, grey, man-made structure.

Feedback Welcome

So, Saturday I attended the second-round interview for the ship-board catering position. “You’re a veteran, so you should be familiar with our drug-testing policy.” Round two was basically paperwork, before a three-hour mandatory safety-meeting, where all the company’s employees reviewed safety procedures, including “man overboard” and “fire” and other stuff. We went on a short cruise where the senior staff retrieved an imperiled PFD from the frigid waters of the bay. It was a pleasing ride in beautiful weather, and one of the older employees, a bartender, explained how it was handy to respond to difficult guests with the response, “Sorry, these are Coast Guard regulations.”

So, how do I, having formerly rejected an office job over drug testing rationalize my consent for a catering position? Easy: Coast Guard Regulations. While drug testing remains a pretty crappy way of safeguarding employee performance, some degree of paranoia is forgivable when the staff are charged with the safety of drunken guests in the frigid waters of the San Francisco Bay. I can also change my mind, if I like, once I’ve secured some other source of income.

The job search seems to be looking up a bit. I applied at a slightly creepy theme restaurant smack dab in the middle of the Fisherman’s Wharf tourist trap. Okay. Then truck it over to the Mission to apply for a position at a pizza restaurant that had a nice little homely feel about it. The guy seemed interested in my pizza-specific experience, explained that the owners were going to be changing something in the near future, and that he’d refer my application to them.

A few more places to visit tomorrow, then I have to ask the catering company about getting some hours under my belt, and eventually pester Zachary’s to see if they’ve reviewed my application yet. Other good news from Brian is that a chunk of forwarded letters has, at long last, arrived at Mountain View, including the bank statements I back-ordered! Yay!

Feedback Welcome

There is great wisdom contained in this piece by James C. Bennett. I originally was going to quote and comment on a few bits, but really the whole piece is entirely excellent and should be read. And acted upon.

Feedback Welcome

Marc Andreeson answers two questions in a recent interview:

Q Do you blog?

A No. I have a day job. I don’t have the time or ego need.

Q FCC Chairman Michael Powell calls TiVo “God’s machine.” What’s your equivalent?

A I have four Replay machines. Each has 360 hours of storage and they are plugged into my home LAN (local area network). I have 1,400 hours of video storage. What’s on it? All kinds of stuff, like the last 80 episodes of Charlie Rose.

So, he does not have the time or ego to put his thoughts on the web in a “blog” like what I’m doing here, but he does have the time to store 1,400 hours of television, including eighty hours of Charlie Rose, and the ego need to brag about it. This incredible visionary can at least offer that “four Replays” is his “equivalent” of “the TiVo”.

3 Comments

Well, Janet Dahl is pretty conflicted over the War. Thanks, Linky, for the heads up. Her concern boils down to, “Sure, it seems like a great thing to get rid of a horrible dictator” versus an understanding of the cost of war’s destruction.

I like to take things from here. First off, let’s admit that our President may not be the best leader we could ask for. He may in fact, even be a petty, vindictive asshole who does what the money and his own sense of reactionary moral outrage tells him to do. The timing on this war is questionable, what with Sharon in power, oil prices already really high, North Korea looking for trouble, and the ever-present whining about inspections. The fact, as many of us see it, is that America is led by a lunatic who would be little better than his enemies were he not hamstringed by the Constitution that he’s been trying to rewrite.

So, a lot of folks, understandably, get very upset when he wants to send our nation’s young men into battle in the sandy hot desert, dodging not only bullets, and anti-aircraft weapons, but exploding refineries and oil wells and petroleum falling from the sky. On the home front, we expect more desperate young men to find their ways into Terrorist training camps to perpetrate ingenious new ways of murdering us here at home.

Many of us doubt his sincere intentions to commit to rebuilding this destroyed nation, with a democratic government. We sense that the required military occupation, on top of the war itself, will incense the passions of the Arab world. We want no part of messing with this.

But what can we do? Shall we protest in the streets about how awful war is? Do we complain about the legal precedent of invading a sovereign nation? What would we do in the President’s place? Wait another four months and hope that either Saddam Hussein has a change of heart, after over a decade, and disarms, or that maybe he will go away, either into exile, or is perhaps deposed by another aspiring dictator in the Baath party? We could wait until, say, July, when it is hottest in the Persian Gulf, and then fight, in the sun, or we could just wait and ignore him until he proves that he has weapons of mass destruction by passing some stuff along to an intrepid band of Terrorists who show it off in an American city.

One of the things I’ve managed to do with my character is to get over the sense that the world would be a better place if only everyone agreed with me. This doesn’t mean I’ll stop arguing in favor of what I think is the best way to go about things: this is, after all, a favorite hobby of mine. I look at the situation now and I see a big old lemon. I could suck on the lemon and complain about how bitter it is, or I can sit back and watch George fumble with it and hope for lemonade. Given that the lemon is in George’s clenched fist, hovering over the Middle East, I’d just as soon let him try and run the show.

But we’re invading a sovereign nation! What value is a sovereign nation run by a tyrant who murders his own people, who has no respect for other sovereign nations? The enemy in question would have no right to raise such an objection. Indeed, if you refer to the American Declaration of Independence, we understand that nations “[derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” Our own sovereignty is founded upon the basis that sovereignty is derived from popular consent. What is Iraq’s claim to sovereignty: a lump of competing ethnic groups ruled by a bloodthirsty dictator within the lines drawn on a map by the British Empire?

What of the Iraqi people? Again, our founding document goes on: “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” In the South and in the North of Iraq, the Iraqi people have risen time and again to throw off their Government, only to be crushed by their Despot, strengthened by our arms and our complicity in allowing him to crush his people. We are already guilty when it comes to Iraqi suffering. Bush’s insistence on “regime change” and the formulation of plans for a transitional government are evidence that America’s intentions, this time around, are purportedly to assist the Iraqi people in their duty to throw off Saddam Hussein.

What of all the terrorists that will be recruited in the wake of Iraq’s destruction? Iraq is already mostly destroyed, and a pretty miserable place to live. Young men leave the country to find their live’s glories elsewhere. Under a less-tyrannical US Military Administration, transitioning to some sort of more benevolent, representative government, there would be plenty of work to do in rebuilding a nation. There will also be less justification for US Military to protect the holy land, and troops will follow existing pressure by the Saudi Government to leave Islam’s heartland alone. Yes, there will be many vulnerable young men whose hearts will be wounded by their personal losses, inflicted by the United States. There are many such men already in Iraq, with nothing to distract them from this pain, and a dictator and Terrorist leaders offering them a chance at vengeance.

Whatever the President’s intentions, whatever his abilities, qualities, morality, or lack thereof, I see that our military has been assembled, ready to strike an avowed enemy, under the auspices of United Nations agreements going back over a decade. A lot of nations are opposed to letting Bush have his way with the UN’s blessing, because he is an unelected unilateralist idiot with undue influence on the world, who withdraws from those few International Treaties that his predecessors have signed. Nonetheless, the unilateralist idiot has picked his enemy well, if not his timing, and stopping what is already in action because we don’t like the guy behind it strikes me as so much futile resentment. The way I see it, the Iraqi people need a hand. If the vagaries of International politics have conspired in such a way as to give it to them, we shouldn’t stand in the way.

Feedback Welcome