Thursday 27 March 2003 at 7:05 pm
blair - "we've seen the reality of Saddam's regime: his thugs prepared to kill their own people, the parading of prisoners of war and now the release of those pictures of executed British soldiers."
ermmmm... parading of prisoners of war? I remember a time when prisoners of war were paraded on the other side of the moral superiority fence. no cries of outrage then...
"More than that, to the families of the soldiers involved, it is an act of cruelty beyond comprehension. Indeed, it is beyond the comprehension of anyone with an ounce of humanity in their souls."
erm... hello? soldiers get shot in battle. explain to me exactly how showing a picture of two soldiers is "beyond comprehension". ah, I understand - they were executed. or so mister blair tells me. on the basis of what evidence? erm. none. interpretation, one might charitably postulate.
in this case as in others, blair has opted to adopt the policy of strategic misrepresentation favoured by the bush monkey tribe. the whole world seems to be going awol. blar and colin powell both seemed reasonable a year or two ago. these days they both mimic the grotesque moral ballet of the thuglican monkeys. what happened - is bushism some sort of viral infestation that spreads through close ideological contact? jutting jaw, penchant for moral posturing and strategic misrepresentation, soulless closely set steely eyes and unlimited moral certainty - just look at blair. the symptoms are clearly in an advanced stage.
coming to a politician near you soon. be afraid. be very afraid.
Wednesday 26 March 2003 at 10:17 am
went back to norway for a 70£ weekend breather last week, to catch up with family and the landscape as well as sign my employment contracts with the norwegian research council.
a certain degree of system shock at finding myself outside the safe confines of cambridge rapidly subsided, and I spent the weekend indulging in a geekfest of massive proportions: eating, reading sci-fi stories and playing dungeons & dragons with a bunch of old old friends who came down from oslo for the occasion. brilliant.
the sea was still like a mirror and there was life in the cold air. spring may be coming and the feeble world waking after winter, but there are still huge mounds of rotten gray snow along the highways.
Wednesday 26 March 2003 at 09:46 am
Wednesday 26 March 2003 at 07:37 am
not much to comment on the war, except I find myself harbouring contradictory hopes about it. on the one hand - I hope it finishes quickly and with minimal casualties, if anything for the sake of the iraqis and the world situation. on the other hand - wishing for swift resolution amounts to wishing for the "allies" not to pay any price for their violent, unilateral, illegitimate, destabilising, antidemocratic, exploitative, greed-driven, deceiving and unjust warmongering.
I really am crossing my ambivalent little fingers for another vietnam. I hope the "allies" are wiped out - simply because a part of me clings to the hope of retributive justice.
also - given the minimal likelihood of anyone taking up arms and assassinating bush, blair or any of their minions, the fallout carnage and career apocalypse resulting from extreme casualties is the most violent damage I can realistically wish upon their heads...
yes, "the solders are innocent human beings". my ass. my sympathy for willing professional soldiers in a war situation - particularly when they form part of an invading force in a conflict I disagree with - is very limited. I don't see why I should pity people who choose killing other people as a profession when they in turn get killed. as I understand it, none of these people are drafted - death is what they signed up for and what they get paid for. theirs or someone elses.
Wednesday 19 March 2003 at 4:24 pm
...who is it that comes up with this crap?
Wednesday 19 March 2003 at 2:47 pm
great. I'm flying off to norway 6 hours after the bushman deadline expires tonight.
not that I imagine the stansted-oslo torp flights are going to be particularly highly placed on the top 20 action agenda of potential hijackers. still you never know.
great isnt it. how safe the world is becoming...
Tuesday 18 March 2003 at 06:04 am
saw the president select's speech last night. 1am UK time.
what can I say. lies, lies, lies - coached in the language of earnestness, intimacy and moral integrity. grandpa and the fireplace. vague threates of 'hundreds of thousands' of dead in America gyrated in a slow waltz past 'nucular' weapons and the ceaseless claims of 'we are a peaceful people', 'we are men of peace' but 'we are not dealing with peaceful men'... threatening ghosts to validate the all too real machinery of destruction that will rain down on iraq.
if you never watched anything but american news, I am sure you might even believe the fucking junk he was spouting. as so clearly did the cheering motherfuckers in the CNN studio.
as a siberian herder in my department keeps saying whenever bush appears on tv, where is my gun.
Monday 17 March 2003 at 05:09 am
Monday 17 March 2003 at 05:04 am
"after weeks of trying to get the minimum nine votes for the resolution, Washington ended up with only one nation, Bulgaria, publicly declaring its support."
I find myself strangely pleased by this. strangely, because the UN is signalling its defeat. pleased, because in defeat at least it occupies the upper moral ground. by virtue of not having caved in to the warmongers.
not that the UN has really ever wielded much power anyway. Im reminded of the little dog snapping at the heels of the Fool, as he strays into the Abyss at the beginning of the Major Arcana, eyes on the skies and infatuated with the bright sun.
Sunday 16 March 2003 at 11:04 am
the war starts next week.
"official" warfare ends within a period of days, a couple of weeks at most. not counting "unofficial" pockets of resistance that will be going on for much longer.
US move in, occupy and control, install new strongman dictator. masquerading as "democracy".
talk of the recently unveiled "middle east peace" plan will evaporate as soon as objectives in iraq are completed.
WMDs will be conveniently "found", just as conveniently as qurans, passports and other "evidence" that always seems to appear at the most opportune times. the credibility of America is beneath questioning at the moment. [yes, this effectively functions as an unfalisifiable belief. I am more inclined to believe Saddam at the moment than the lying jackals and whitecollar psychopaths running the show at the moment.]
with a bit of luck, other countries kept in check so far by the ideal of civilised agreement will not go AWOL at the sight of Americas unchecked wayward monolateralism... and world relations will destabilise into cold rather than hot thermonuclear war.
keep your fingers crossed people...
Saturday 15 March 2003 at 1:38 pm
WHO issues an unprecedented global health warning relating to a brand of unidentified atypical pneumonia. Im telling you: earthquakes, war on iraq, rampant starvation, aids pandemics, a madman antichrist at the helm, and now mystery plagues?
war, famine, disease and death. the four horsemen of the apocalypse are riding and the end is n[e]igh...
[...]
I guess the sad truth is that they've been leisurely trotting around the world for as long as anyone can remember. they're just picking up speed for a gallop.
Friday 14 March 2003 at 1:34 pm
'"The president is still committed to this diplomatic process and is still committed to try to push (the resolution) through the United Nations. We shall see if that can or cannot be done," Fleischer said.'
Im not sure I understand this notion of diplomacy.
ok, the US vs. iraq situation can be reduced to "give me your lunch money/ oil wells or I'll beat the ****ing crap out of you". simple might makes right. apparently fair enough, in the age of the berserk hyperpower.
now, the diplomacy involved in this seems to consist of the hyperbully going round to the group of kids he hangs out with in the playground, saying "I am going to take the bastards lunch money and beat him [hehehe], but I want you to agree with me that this is the right thing to do and then to contribute to paying his hospital fees when the dust settles. If you dont agree, I will do it anyway. You can choose between realising that you are powerless to stop me, and that our alleged group ethic means sweet nothing because I can beat all of you up, or you can be on the winning side and preserve your precious illusion of agency at the expense of your legitimacy. Either way I make the rules: no compromise."
raw power, barely disguised, makes no compromises. diplomacy my ass. ask a monkey to program in java and he'll beat you over the head with the keyboard.
Thursday 13 March 2003 at 10:48 pm
the world is in f***ing disarray. the war will happen. bush will murder the UN, blair will live with the consciousness of having abetted the act. bush can happily ignore the weight of this, as I suspect he lacks the moral mechanisms that might register the significance of his actions.
the thin veneer of civilization that used to conceal the naked brutality of dominant political motivations is thinner than ever.
I have a 10p bet running with a friend, that the war will begin by the end of march. he doesnt think it will. any takers?
---
spirited away - cuddly, wellmade and escapist little piece of japanimation by the studio ghibli people. miyzakis retirement piece, and a wellcrafted one at that.
annie hall - unbearably neurotic, occasionally touching woody allen ego trip... just what one expects: kafka with a light touch, stripped of deeper human meaning.
Thursday 13 March 2003 at 08:25 am
1. waking up with someones hair in my face.
2. the sky on a clear night, or a bright moon behind thin clouds.
3. wearing sandals.
4. fresh coffee and a weekend newspaper.
5. early morning mists across the fields at sunrise.
6. wandering through gardens full of strange trees at night.
7. idle daydreams of someone impeaching gwbush.
Tuesday 11 March 2003 at 5:37 pm
disappointingly the world did not end on march 8. damn.
fear not however. for those of us who nurture vain hopes of the whole damn mess ending brutally, from britney spears to racism and destruction of the rain forest, hope comes in the middle of May, when a rogue planetoid named planet X or Nibiru will flip the earth's magnetic fields and precipitate the ominous "Harvest"... 90% of the world population will die.
courtesy of the lovely and incredibly verbose little folks at
zetatalk.
---
recent films:
predator - joseph conrad and the venice beach bodybuilder club take on alien rambo in simple but ridiculous jungle punchout. where is conrad? no match for hypertrophic arnie, whose android accent and hyperreal musculature unwittingly raise the question of who, exactly, the alien is meant to be.
8 mile - white trash superstar eminem deploys frankly surprising expressive range to sustain trite and predictable gangster self-realisation drama fuelled by fairytale ethics and bizarre plot devices. watch PR conscious gaybasher icon perform for the pink pound and stand up for poor gay factory worker.
Friday 07 March 2003 at 09:25 am
might be staying up tonight to see what
this link is all about .
Friday 07 March 2003 at 06:07 am
American Xtians institute
Fast for Bush . [<--- link]
Sign up to pray for the Holiness of Dubya. "If the President's office puts out prayer requests, we will forward those on to you."
"Our goal is to have 1,000 people fasting for the President each day. That will greatly encourage him and keep him accountable when the Evil One seeks to sidetrack him from his commitment to the Lord."
I am sure it will...
if this is not a sign in the Book of Revelations it bloody well should be. next to the man-eating panzer locusts. I am off to be sick.
I blame this abysmal event on the convergence of several factors: a) a pop culture of mindless and hysterical devotion, b) the vertiginous desecularisation of American political discourse, and c) the everpresent current of minbdblowingly uncritical stupidity that saturates American public life.
GOD BLESS THE WAR indeed.
Tuesday 04 March 2003 at 12:04 pm
Im foodpoisoned & nearly dead at the moment, following a foolishly brash 3am liaison with a sandwich in from the college vending machine. what can I say, 'em little beasties are HARD critters. spent the night externalising the sandwich, then woke up to the essay proofreading crisis of my cypriot pixie liaison... which is difficult to handle when youre constantly focusing focusing focusing, trying to keep your diaphragm from externalising your pancreas onto the keyboard.
my head hurts, my fingers shake and a sour presence lingers at the back of my throat like an evil acid amoeba.
add to this sleeplessly disintegrating cypriot, afflicted with acute grade paranoia and a severe case of mental immune system rejecting any attempt to instil in her a sense of bibliographic discipline. doesnt get any better after 30 hours of no sleep either.
on top of that my computer is screwed, after I tried to uninstall internet explorer last week and everything died between my hands. taking IE out of windows ME is apparently like ripping the heart out of a koala - good work finding this out post facto. yay. following an all-night bout of hyperreal panic I finally managed to reinstall windows - via a bootdisk cheat from bootdisk.com, because mister William Gate$ kindly disabled Real Dos in ME. no booting form the Dos prompt, nonono. let uncle gate$ guide you into painless zombie compliance...
in sheer bloodyminded opposition to the gate$ hegemony Ive uninstalled Office, Word, Outlook and all the other Micro$oft junk I had cluttering my machine, and am operating with an opensource editing program and Mozilla as a browser. I play my avi-files with WinDVD because I don't want realplayer either. half my programs dont work and my harddisk is cluttered with invisible junk.
man... body f***ed, mind f***ed, external nervous system f***ed, liaison f***ed... not a good day. everything is wrong wrong wrong.
and guess what? it rains...
The Iraqi government is between a rock and a hard place. Show POWs and dead coalition troops, and everyone starts hollering "Geneva convention." Don't show them, and the coalition says it didn't happen. Just like that POW they recently liberated. The US had previously considered her....missing. Not a POW. If she is missing, then she definetly isn't lost. Why not state it like it is? It doesn't make Iraq more powerful admitting that they have coalition POWs. This isn't a war on numbers.
Helmy (URL) - 02 04 03 - 07:58
Go go go! :-)
http://www.theonion.com/onion3912/i_shou..
Wonco the sane - 02 04 03 - 09:40
Hey Hugo!
If you are ever bored, take a look at http://www.homestarrunner.com.
I laughed my butt of.
Especially take a look at Strong Bad's emails.
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail.ht..
This is by far the best of those, Techno:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45...
Gotta love it. Must be watched with sound!
Feline (URL) - 05 04 03 - 09:00
I feel like I shouldn't be writing here two times in a row, but I had to inform you that I made a button so that I could like to you from an image. *Grins*
http://www.inspirasjon.net/dagbok/hugo.g..
Feline (URL) - 07 04 03 - 08:52