War Liberal has Moved

Well, I'm 99% sure that the vast majority of people who read this (all 10 per day) already read War Liberal (that's how you found out about this blog, I bet), but just in case... Mac Thomason's War Liberal has moved to his own domain at warliberal.com.

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The final evidence he has caved can be found here. He even asked Congress to postpone a resolution supporting Israel. This has gone on far too long to be considered some form of "Rope-a-Dope." It should be abundantly clear by now that the Administration has chosen to side with evil. I'm sure the Bushophiles will point to the fact that Israel swept through some more West Bank towns today as saying "See, rope-a-dope." But I don't see that. I see the fact that Israel is a sovereign nation, free to ignore the Shrub, who is earnestly attempting to carry out his Saudi Master's demands. I suggest we, as a nation, do something about this. Write your Congressman, they still seem to care.

Did Bush Cave?

Well, it looks like he did. See here:

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Bush emphasized the common ground between the United States and Saudi Arabia, saying the two nations share a vision for peace in the Mideast.

The president said topics of discussion included the war on terror and the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians. He also praised Abdullah for his leadership and vision in proposing a peace plan in which Israel would exchange land for peace with Arab nations.

Not only that, but he also says he formed a "strong, personal bond" during the meeting. Great, the President has a strong, personal bond with our greatest enemy. People, you need to realize that George W. Bush is litterally owned by the Saudis. Without Saudi money, his whole family would lose its fortune. He has no ground to argue with Prince Abdullah, Prince Abdullah is clearly in a superior position from the Shrub's point of view. As long as oil families run this country, we're not going to oppose the people who control the oil. Bush isn't brave enough (or he's too sensitive to Colin Powell's needs) to seize the oil from Iraq or even Saudi Arabia, he's just going to keep giving in to the Saudis. He has to go.

I Hate it When Other People Post These

which children's storybook character are you?
this quiz was made by colleen

But I'm nothing if not a hypocrite.

More on Manhattan Explosion

Well, the authorities are now saying the blast had something to do with volatile chemicals used by one of the companies in the building. Apparently, the boiler has been released as no longer under suspicion. They still insist that it was a tragic accident, and it probably was, but I hope they at least seriously investigate the possibility that it wasn't. The lack of fire and smoke in the area really lends credence to the "tragic accident" point of view, in my mind, but then I'm not Israeli so I'm not exactly familiar with the standard effects of explosions.

Explosion in Manhattan

CNN.com - At least 50 injured in Manhattan blast - April 25, 2002

The explosion happened in a building housing the offices of Kaltech Industries, a manufacturer of fabricated interior and exterior signs, authorities said, and no foul play was suspected. Authorities said plumbers were working on a boiler in the basement and that "may have had something to do with it."

OK, I don't understand this. Why is no foul play suspected? If they don't even know whether the boiler had anything to do with it, why would they not at least suspect terrorism? I understand boilers can explode, but really... all the reports I saw on this emphasized, from before the authorities said anything about plumbers in the basement, that they didn't think it was terrorism. And there are some contradictory things... one eyewitness stated

"I just ducked because all the glass and flames and fire was coming toward me," said Steve Jaisingh, who works in the basement of the Kaltech building. "If I didn't duck, I would have died."

But people on the scene now say there is no smoke and no flames (which, I suppose, would be consistent with a boiler explosion). It certainly could be a boiler explosion (actually, though, that still doesn't rule out foul play, even if it makes terrorism less likely), and I don't know enough about such things to say for sure (but shouldn't there be water everywhere? If not, then I really don't understand the concept).

Which brings me to my point: the authorities are awfully quick to dismiss terrorism as a cause for anything these days (or at most, they claim it is domestic, vis a vis anthrax attacks). Are they afraid of riots in the streets? I should think not, there weren't riots on 9/11/2001, why would there be riots now for a much lesser event? No, if that's the reason then they are truly being very silly. I do have a theory, and it has something to do with this. The Administration does not want the "American Street" to rise up and demand a true accounting from the Saudis. Today in particular would be a bad day for terrorism, as the Shrub is meeting with his Master, the Crown Prince Abdullah. I'm positive I will have a lot to say about that particular issue if things develop the way I expect them to. However, now I've really strayed from the topic at hand, so I'll save that for later.

SDI is a Giant Boondoggle

I could rant on that for a while (and I probably will at a later date), but right now I'm just going to point to Mac Thomason's post on the subject.

Palestinian Lies Piss Me Off

There was no massacre at Jenin, that much is clear now. There was, apparently, a bloody battle, but that's to be expected in this kind of thing. But that is only the most recent lie... gah. I've run out of steam. I'll try again later.

Testing Mail-To-Blog

OK, I've tried using this beta feature a couple times, but it has never worked. I have now tried changing some settings around, so I'm trying it again!

UPDATE: Wow, I sent this message two days ago, and it only now went through. Talk about beta! Oh well, maybe it's working better now...

UPDATE 2: Yes, it's working better now, the Palestinian Lies message was mailed in and appeared immediately.

Happy Birthday XFree86

Slashdot | XFree86 10 Years Old

Well, I never promised this would cover only politics. I use XFree86 every day for things like GAIM and so forth. It runs on nearly every platform known to man, including Windows (with Cygwin) and Mac OS X (natively). Sure, it's bloated, but with Xft at least it isn't necessarily ugly anymore. And yet, it's binary and backwards compatible with the original version. So, congrats to the XFree86 team for putting out a great product!

Priests and Pedophilia

I'm Catholic, so I suppose I should weigh in on this. I think the scandal is something quite different from pedophilia. Really, the vast majority of the cases have been between priests and teenagers, which is something other than pedophilia. It's still morally wrong, of course, if for no other reason (and there are other reasons) than a priest has supposedly sworn off sex. But even that isn't really a scandal, it's just a problem that needs to be addressed. The scandal comes from certain Bishops' decsions to re-assign the offending priests to areas where they can continue their "activities," instead of properly getting their problems addressed. Which sounds like they're all pedophiles, they need mental help, but that's not entirely what I'm saying. The (very) few that are real pedophiles should be treated by a mental institution. The vast majority, however, are simply gay men (or even straight men who take advantage of young femal parishoners... that may even be the actual majority) who lack the self-control required to be a priest. They should be defrocked and sent to make a living doing something else. But that's not really a viable solution, even if it's the correct one, because of the severe shortage of priests. The only thing I can think to do about that is recruit more priests from places like South America, teach them English, and ship them to other parts of the world. I'm not entirely sure why this hasn't been done, actually. Is there anyone out there who can enlighten me on that?

Blog*Spot is Irritating Me

This is the second day in a row that Blog*Spot has been down for a significant amount of time. I am finding this extremely irritating, but what can I do? $12/year for ad-free, push-button service? Pretty good. Obviously, when you read this whatever their problem is will have been fixed. The really suprising thing is that Netcraft reports that blogspot (well, at least libimperial.blogspot.com, but I imagine all the different sites are just virtual hosts) runs on Apache on Linux... so I'm shocked it appears down so often. It probably has something to do with their ISP or bandwidth limitations or something, rather than the host going down. They may also have bugs in the custom software they've written, I suppose. Well, here's hoping it's fixed soon!

UPDATE: My theory that it's their software and not their host is confirmed: the website is still down, but the host is definately still up (FTP is running, etc).

Sgt. Stryker Gets Zen

Well, really the Sarge's rant is called "To War or Not To War," but he does get very zen toward the end of it. In general, the Sarge says lots of things I agree with and lots of things I disagree with. This particular rant, though, is right on the money (especially if you're into balance). It makes the point that pacifism doesn't work, something I had just mentioned a little while ago...

Terrorist Warnings?

CNN.com - U.S embassies in Gulf warned of threats - April 23, 2002

Well, I suddenly realized that posting links and then talking about them is probably the easiest way to do this kind of thing. Anyway, I wonder what effects these repeated warnings are actually having... Are they, in themselves, scaring the terrorists into canceling their plans? This seems reasonable, as no warning has yet been followed by a terrorist attack. I'd rather believe that than believe that the agencies responsible for issuing these warnings have been repeatedly hoaxed (which also requires beliving that no one has even attempted another terrorist attack against the US). But then we're running into a "Boy Who Cried Wolf" effect, where eventually these warnings will not be taken seriously. That, of course, would be a good reason for the terrorists to make plenty of threats but not carry them out... but even if the truth is they're scared by the warnings, the result will be the same. Eventually they'll figure that the warnings don't mean anything anymore, and carry out an attack. I'm not sure what the solution could be.

I have not yet received any email from visitors to this blog... I'd love to receive some! Any suggestions?

Blogger Pro is better!

Well, it's true. Blogger Pro is better. I especially like the Mozilla interface, it looks just like the IE interface. And I despise IE, so not having to use it is a good thing. If I hadn't been able to use Mozilla, I wouldn't have upgraded to Blogger Pro. But right now BlogSpot is down, which is not making me happy. It also means that you won't read this until some time after I actually write it, and then it will no longer be accurate.

Still playing with Blogger Pro

And I really, really should be sleeping, too.

Well, I'm just posting this to say "Hi" to those people who are visiting courtesy of the comment I posted on Little Green Footballs. I assure you, as soon as I get back to my normal work schedule (that is to say, later today), I'll be posting fairly often. And, over time, my left-leaning but hawkish tendencies will probably be obvious.

About that Le Pen guy: I know I'm late on this (hey, I was on a date), but I think this is overall a bad thing. The political class of Europe certainly needs a shake-up, but this guy is straight-up a Fascist. His political platform sounds like Hitler's (who was fairly elected... the greatest failing of democracy is that it can kill itself, sadly), only without the overt anti-Semitism. Heck, it's even got that if you remember that Arabs are Semites (but that's a technical detail, the term "anti-Semitism" is generally understood to refer to Jews).

I'm not at work today, so there probably won't be much posting. But you never know.

USS Clueless - Killing and dying

Well, here's yet another link. It's the weekend, I'm in Radford for the weekend visiting a friend, so I don't have time for the thinkering I mentioned earlier... Just go read this.