Morbid Fascination

Someone told me today that he reads my site with morbid fascination. I think that might be a compliment but I’m not sure.

I myself am morbidly fascinated by the world around me. I read all the news I can stomach.
The Motley Fool news summary grabbed my eye today: Halliburton has a $1B contract rebuilding Iraq (again.) The article doesn’t mention any conflicts of interest. Maybe because that’s obvious?

The Fool does come through with this little pearl of wisdom:

“I don’t read no papers, and I don’t listen to the radio, either. I know the world’s been shaved by a drunken barber, and I don’t need to read about it.” — Walter Brennan (1894-1974), actor.

Good point. One of my co-workers would agree. He gets annoyed by everyone else’s morbid war-obsession.

But I’m obsessed. I know I am. I can’t stop reading and spinning and thinking. There’s a great take on neologisms and slogans over at Carol Lay’s Story Minute. An interview with a British reporter who’s seen it all before, and apologizes for making comparisons to WWII. An unapologetic editorial about Stalingrad and morass. And meta-coverage of Iraqi TV.

I don’t even read whole articles any more. Once I’ve loaded the page I’m on to the next. Sometimes I bookmark them as I go, and then come back later to find a dozen or so unread outdated articles. It’s the sort of thing that can inspire morbid fascination: Google News is my only friend.

News Sources

If the domestic perspective seems a little right-of-center to you, and you want to know what people with other biases have to say, you could do worse than the English Al Jazeera, translations of the prime regional media outlet. Other sources include the Arabic News, which as far as I can tell is an online-only regional news site with content translated from the Arabic, in contrast to the Arab News, which is a Saudi-based English-language print paper with a web presence.

My conclusion is that we’re not going to see really cool-headed analysis for at least fifty or a hundred years. Read the protestor’s account and especially the comments at the end, which vary from “those fascist pigs!” to “you fucking hippies!” and tell me we’re not polarized here.

Peace is not the product…

AKMA points me to the fact that today is the anniversary of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a tireless advocate for peace in El Salvador who was gunned down while giving mass. The day before his muder, he gave a sermon that included the statement

In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression.

Linky Link

Are you scared? Are you suspicious? Are you freaking terrified? My friend Duncan has family in Hong Kong and is pretty upset. I don’t blame him.

Some people think we can blame fructose for many of our health woes, if not the mystery plague. Of course high-fructose corn syrup is bad for you. That doesn’t mean it’s the one evil food you can cut from your diet and change your life. Remember: moderation, complexity, shades of grey.

For example, when you bring out the word appeasement you’ve usually ended the useful conversation right there. But it does seem that if we’d dethroned Saddam back in ’91 we wouldn’t be in this mess now. Of course, there are a lot of things we could have done to prevent this. What-could-we-have-done is a fun game to play, but it’s useful only to the extent that it can show us what we ought to do now.

In a few years, we’ll begin to see the wisdom of the 1990s welfare reform plan, and whether we should have done something different. We’ve got some data now– but we aren’t sure if fewer people on welfare is really good, or if it means there are a lot of poor people who aren’t getting help.

You can also turn to literature for guidance. Mark Twain is being quoted a lot recently for his rant about war and God. It reminds me a little bit Psalm 137:8-9, which goes like this:

O daugher Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

For Future Reference

Two little handbooks: one about war crimes and and one to help you distinguish one Iraq Pundit from another. The difference between the two handbooks is, one describes dozens of hideous atrocities, and the other is about international law and violations of the Geneva convention.

(Oh, was that mean-spirited? You don’t know what mean-spirited is, so shut your noise-tube, taco human. You want to see mean-spirited? Look at yourself, fucko. You’re a miserable excuse for a sentient being, a waste of space, waste of resources, waste of time and effort and money and oxygen. Go ahead, let that voice in your head run on and on and on, some sort of parasitic spirit, harping endlessly on issues long since resolved, backbiting, second-guessing, revising, rewriting, rephrasing. You little pseudointellectual shitbrain. You’re nothing more than a bitter husk of a person, an emotional corpse animated by modern psychopharmacology and economics, staring out at the world and whining about it.)

Small World

Last night I was on the T making jokes with some friends and three women nearby overheard and laughed at us. Not really at the jokes, they were laughing at us.

But we started talking with them, and one turned out to be from my home town, Charlottesville. And in fact she was the younger sister of this guy Terence I went to high school with. We were on the quiz team together but I haven’t heard from him in years.

He’s apparently in law school at BC, but the only information I can find on him is that in 1998 he liked the television show Felicity, “because I feel like I can relate to it.” I don’t know much about Felicity, but Terence was always a cipher to me– one of the smartest, most dedicated students in the school, well-dressed, intensely private. I always sensed that he disliked me, but of course at that age I was both paranoid and intensely dislikeable, so who knows.

Not that I’m any more likeable now, given the threatening phone calls I’ve recieved about the site.

Obscure Products

I saw a picture on Al Jazeera (couldn’t read any of the text, but the photo series are nifty) of the White House behind some steel blockades. In fact, I could see that they were Blockader Brand Steel Barricades. As with trade magazines for industries I’m not involved in, I like to look at industry safety supplies and specialty catalogs for commercial purposes. Look at the things people want and need, and the businesses that spring up to serve those wants and needs, and you begin to understand the world that goes on around them, commercial and otherwise.

For example, church stores. Nonspecialists work with churches, too, of course. At a conference awhile ago I spoke with the IT director for most of the mid-Atlantic region’s Catholic churches. Powerpoint is big in sermons these days, apparently, and email has made church newsletters much cheaper. And imagine the potential for burka sales! You could shop without having to leave your home and be exposed to the gaze of men. I hear that the burka merchants of Kabul have had some dropoff in sales recently, but I imagine that the Internet could bring them new business from all over the world. Or maybe they’ll branch out into more revealing clothing, like chadors.

The Browsers and The Browsed

I was using the Camino (formerly Chimera) browser, which is based on Mozilla, the basis for Netscape and so forth. But I gave up on a new version coming out, and switched to Safari. Shortly before noticing that there’s a new Camino out. We’ll see which I stick with.

And as to things you can do with that software, I’ve read two web comics recently about violence, lust, and jealousy. One of them is not at all funny and is called Three Men. The other is called
Something Positive, and it’s both funny and wicked.