Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Chalk up one more evil result of Hitler’s Death Camps:

In the Darfur region of Sudan, observers widely believe that a genocide
is being carried out on a massive scale. Nations are loath to make such
a judgment, because under international agreements they must intervene
to stop genocide when they officially acknowledge it. Nations do not
like to be forced to act against other nations–even to prevent
terrible tragedies. Quite often real genocides are ignored until it is
too late to save the victims.

Joanna Cipolla Moore, “Passion of the Present”

Mass graves in Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere may well be monuments to pious treaties nobody wants to live up to.

“Passion of the Present”, Moore’s new weblog in Dave Winer‘s
Harvard project, is tracking the systematic racial killings in the
Sudan, where an ethnic-Arab militia has targeted local black
communities for extinction. How can you help? Check out the links on
her site.

One piece of good news in the Washington Post (April 24): the UN now plans to investigate.

GENEVA, April 23 — The U.N. Commission on Human Rights overwhelmingly
adopted a resolution Friday expressing concern about the scale of
reported abuses in Sudan’s Darfur region and agreed to appoint its own
investigator.

U.N. officials have accused Sudanese troops and Arab militias of
raping, torturing and killing black Africans in the area, equating such
abuses with ethnic cleansing. …

The
United States, which slammed the text for failing to condemn “ethnic
cleansing,” was the only member to vote against the resolution.

U.S. Ambassador Richard Williamson took the floor to denounce “horrific
events” in the western region of Darfur. He charged that 30,000 people
had been killed in “racial and ethnic targeting.”

Three cheers for Ambassador Williamson! I haven’t agreed with the Bush
administration on many issues, but they seem to be on the side of the
angels in this one.

Just back from seeing The Fog of War. Picture a US government official, talking fifty years later about the decisions that sent kids off to war. As my friend Sidney said, “It’s not hard to see Iraq here.” Yes, thanks to Robert McNamara–who helped spin Vietnam for JFK and LBJ–the prequel of GWB is showing now.

Amazingly, fifty years later, McNamara –soft-spoken and still brilliant in his mid-eighties–doesn’t feel he did much wrong.

Razor-sharp on any technical or historical subject, McNamara gets a fond and goofy smile on his face when he talks about Kennedy and Johnson. He loved those guys. He wanted to help them out. He advised them to pull US troops out of Vietnam, but when they said no–hey, he was just there to give them a helping hand. (Quite a few newsreel clips feature McNamara telling the camera that Vietnam was going incredibly well.)

There’s a long telling clip of McNamara getting an award from LBJ. MacNamara is beaming, happy, teary-eyed–unable to choke out his words of gratitude. LBJ tries not to look too bored and annoyed. “Yes, you prostituted yourself for me, and it was just what I needed. Now let this event be over so I can stop looking at you.”

Errol Morris, who won an Oscar with this film, also directed those wonderful Apple “Switch” ads. And the sad thing is that McNamara (whose IQ must be 999) saw himself as a kind of lovable Janie Porche–“I saved Christmas!”

Janie Porche saved Christmas for her family and friends, and I’m sure they were grateful and happy and loved her for it. Her brilliant success was their delight. But Robert McNamara made a career out of trying to generate that kind of delight in two throat-slittingly ambitious career politicians. He still doesn’t get it that he was cynically used.

And he still feels that sending young soldiers off to die–or ordering bombs that would burn civilians alive–well, it was worth it, really, because he loved Kennedy, and he loved Johnson, and they loved him in return. Didn’t they?

The Future of Freedom Foundation:

One of the most common lies in the criminal-justice system is the “I don’t remember” lie. The reason people use it is that they know that it is extremely difficult to prove that the statement is, in fact, a lie — that is, that the person really does remember the event, contrary to his representation. One of the reasons the feds were able to successfully pin the charge on Martha Stewart was that the conversation she supposedly didn’t remember was “too important” to have been forgotten.

Friday, February 20, and the big news today is  election day in Iran. 

CNN disagrees. CNN thinks today’s top
news is Schwarzenegger’s opinion of gay marriage. Further down the
front page, but still well above Iran–a piranha was found in the
Thames. Bzzzt! Sorry, CNN, but thank you for playing.

Many liberal voters are staying away from the polls to protest–so
the ultra-conservative minority expects to win by a landslide. 
Some liberal leaders argue that refusing to vote is political suicide.
Others hope to undermine the legitimacy of a conservative takeover by
publicizing their boycott. Iran TV stations, who know what’s good for
them, are broadcasting
photos of long peaceful lines of voters. Out of the picture–boycotts,
protests, moderate candidates shut out of the process, opposition
newspapers shut down. 

The excellent group blog
iranFilter is publishing live and realtime eyewitness election reports from Persian blogs.
Bloggers are publishing photos of empty streets and idle polling
places. Bloggers are asking why the TV film of “voters” shows people
dressed for a warm summer day instead of the actual  chilly
weather today. (Not coincidentally, iranFilter is Feedster Feed of the Day today.)

News media don’t want to cover this story for us, but bloggers do.

Remember that story about White House sources leaking the CIA connection of Valerie Plame, as a move to discredit her husband Joseph Wilson?

Sure you do. I remember it. So does Salon blogger Michael Parker. I bet the CIA does. But Big Media cares a lot more about Michael Jackson.

I looked for that story in Google News this morning–gone. Erased from the planet. Karl Rove and George Bush and Dick Cheney must be so happy.

The most recent mentions (last week) come from (I kid you not) Manila and Pakistan.

It’s just not an important story. Big Media, left and right, agree about that.

Michael Jackson, OTOH, made the front page of the New York Times.

Who’s watching out for our $87 billion? Hey, I’m in favor of helping to rebuild Iraq, but I’d like some government oversight of how its spent.

Republicans disagree. According to
Klaus Marre in The Hill

A decision by the House Republicans to strip the Iraq supplemental bill of an anti-profiteering provision has outraged the Democrats…

The provision — included during the Senate Appropriations Committee markup with unanimous support but removed in conference — would …slap penalties on those who “materially [overvalue] any good or service with the specific intent to excessively profit from the war, military action, or relief or reconstruction activities in Iraq.”

OK, call me suspicious, but this missing provision sounded good to me. Why? For a number of reasons….

• Last week, the Center for Public Integrity reported that Halliburton, Bechtel, and other big winners so far of Iraq reconstruction contracts got billions in contracts after giving mere millions in campaign contributions.
• Last week, even conservatives like David Brooks expressed outrage that a cushy lease deal for Boeing in Iraq, on the fast track thanks to Republican intervention, would cost taxpayers $5.6 BILLION more than just buying the airplanes we need.
• Last week, Halliburton had to reply to charges that it was charging the US three times the going price for gasoline in Iraq.

But, as the old joke says, “Who’s counting?”

Not our Republican leadership, that’s for sure.

Corporate heavyweights like Disney and RIAA have been gaming copyright law for years. Congress played along, giving the big guys one “feature” after another. Now the whole system is an ugly mess.

Two MIT students, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, just set up a music-sharing network that deftly dodges every copyright bullet, or do I mean bully?

“The students say the system, which they plan to officially announce today, falls within the time-honored licensing and royalty system under which the music industry allows broadcasters and others to play recordings for a public audience. Major music industry groups are reserving comment, while some legal experts say the M.I.T. system mainly demonstrates how unwieldy copyright laws have become.”

NYTimes, October 27, 2003

Sensible rules–like “Thou shalt not kill” or Sergey Brin’s “Don’t be evil”–are simple. Simple rules are easy to obey and hard to dodge.

“More isn’t always better, Linus. Sometimes it’s just more.”

I never realized before that teaching evolution in our schools has long been a secret project of Apple Computers.

My gosh, I’m going to throw out my Macs and get a PC, because now I know secret agenda of Apple–to quote just a few here–

• The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called… Darwin!
• Consider the name of the company and its logo: an apple with a bite taken out of it. This is clearly a reference to the Fall, when Adam and Eve were tempted with an apple by the serpent.
• [The BSD-Unix] OS — and its Darwin offspring — extensively use what are called “daemons”…. If you are using a new Macintosh running OS X then you probably have these “daemons” on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! This clearly illustrates that not only is Macintosh based on Darwinism, but Darwinism is based on Satanism.
• Apple has just announced the “eMac”, a Macintosh computer designed specifically to smuggle Darwinism into our schools…it should be obvious to readers by now that it’s really a cryptic tipping of the hat to their true agenda: “Evolutionism”.
• One additional technique that I have noticed while perusing their new literature is the common cult tactic of indoctrination through a special insider language….For instance, an industry standard connection for peripherals is idiosyncratically retermed “FireWire” (or should we just be honest and call it “HellFireWire”?)

HellFireWire? Hey, give me the Blue Screen of Death!

The Bush team once again shows its support for our troops–by demanding reserve troops spend a full year in Iraq. Remember, reserve troops are the kids who signed up expecting to do their duty on weekends while holding down jobs–plus maybe some summer weeks in hardcore “training.”

I went to see what Lieutenant Smash thought about this news, which only Reuters was publishing when I found it. (I found his live-from-Iraq blog months ago, and he sounds like a decent, hard-working, honest guy.) I was pleased to see he’s already made it home, away from the 120 degree summer heat and the duststorms and bombs and bullets.

I then checked out Smash’s blogroll of other “live from Iraq” types. Nearly all are home or else on their way home. The squeaky blogger gets the discharge?