Author: Gordon

All through the night

Still sick. It hasn’t helped that the office’s router and firewall machine got hit by a cosmic ray or somthing — the disk was totally corrupt. So I spent all night last night rebuilding it.

On a lighter note, I watched Bend it like Beckham and The Core yesterday. Bend was, as someone said recently, pure joy from beginning to end.

And surprisingly The Core was somewhat of a ripping yarn, regardless of the fact that the science was completely bogus, and the design of the ship was determined by quantum plotodynamics (water launch?). There was just enough pretense of character development to just barely hold my interest. And there were a bunch of sci-fi and computing in-jokes. “Unobtainium”, forsooth. “Sixty-three computer fraud indictments.” “No, sixty-four.”

Note that the above paragraph does not imply any endorsement of aforementioned motion picture, nor will the author be held liable for wasted rental fees, etc. if gustibus is disputed.

The Calculus of Death

Bill Whipple is back!

Here’s a math quiz for you:

During the 30-odd years he was in power, Saddam Hussein murdered at
least 300,000 of his own people. These are the ones we are finding in
mass graves in Iraq. Another 300,000 at least were killed in his war
with Iran and his two conflicts with the US. Those are bare-bones,
undeniable, non-speculative, minimums.

That darling arithmetic works out to no less than 20,000 people a year
killed by that lunatic, or about 1,700 people a month.

So how many innocent people have not died as a result of the Iraq war?

I get about 13,000 so far.

Thirteen thousand is about the size of a good basketball game. Perhaps
we can convince the Lakers to play a charity game against the Spurs,
say. Then we can put 13,000 Iraqi men, women and children into the
Staples Center, and make Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon, Tim
Robbins, Sean Penn, George Clooney, The Dixie Chicks, Janeane
Garofalo, end every single person who signed the Not in Our Name
petition kill those people in cold blood electrodes, acid baths or
shredders, to get the full effect, although the weak-stomached should
be allowed to merely shoot them in the back of the head.

Because that is exactly what would have happened if these people had
gotten their way.

Roast Chickenhawk

Well, for someone who is (falsely) accused of dodging military service, I’d say President Bush displayed a fair amount of personal courage flying into an airport that had just seen a SAM launched at another plane. Bravo.

And to those yammerers who complain about the media blackout: can you say the word “embargo”. Thought you could. News stories are held back all the time for the most trivial reasons. Complaining about an embargo on a story about the President of the United States putting his life in significant danger simply goes to show your agenda, folks.

French Perfidy

Two French reporters were present when anti-American terrorists fired a SAM at a DHL cargo plane. As Den Beste remarks:

One has to wonder what Paris Match would have done if their reporters had been invited to Africa to visit an insurgent group fighting against French forces. Would they have passively watched an attack which might have killed French pilots? Would Paris Match have published the pictures?

I suppose one could compare this with the embedded reporters in the American campaign. But wait, the French keep saying they’re allies.