silveradept | Took a break from it all

Did no work today. Same impasse, no questions have been answered, no advice given. Since I don’t feel like I can do any work, I’m not doing any work. Hopefully tomorrow there is the fountain of enlightenment and lots of work gets done. I’m a little nervous about this database project, simply because I haven’t heard anything from my partner yet, and it still looks like there’s still a long way to go. before it’s all done. At the same time, it is a team enterprise, so I have to trust that my partner will pick up her end of things and will produce some work. Otherwise, I’ll go crazy. Period. I’m also about ready to take a hammer to my router for it’s nearly hourly disconnections.

Starting off in a place where I left off yesterday, two takes on the same idea - Robert Fisk sees fear in the hearts of Americans, fear engineered by the Administration's (and Fox News, and others) threat of terror coming to America if we don't "stay the course". If he’s on target, the Adminsitration is undermining its own efforts to get the populace behind the war. There are other problems, as Jesus’s Genreal points out, like many of the enthusiastic enlistment-age supporters of the war not signing themselves up for a tour of duty. Oh, and also a bit about Michelle Malkin’s inflation of numbers on the whole Gathering of Eagles bit - nobody official made any estimate at all, and the numbers that are there are a lot less than 30,000. Inflating numbers is never a good thing. In many professions, like accounting, it tends to get you fired.

The high-tension rhetoric continues, with Kevin McCullough asking "Why Do Democrats crave defeat"? He does point out the amount of spending that was inserted into the timetable bill to get it to pass (pork bad), but rather than making a sane argument about how this might show that the political climate is not really right for withdrawal and timetables to pass, he cloaks it in a diatribe about how the Democratic party and liberals in general are actively trying to destroy the country. Apparently, it’s okay to be against the war, but actually acting to stop war is unacceptable. He also sounds like he’s bought into the idea that if America leaves Iraq, all we can look forward to is wave after wave of terrorists assaulting America unflinchingly and unceasingly.

The solider that I linked to yesterday (the once that was less than fond of Americans second-guessing the military) has made a follow-up marker, where he looks at ANSWER and other organizations and concludes a signifitant number of those who are actually marching in ant-war demonstrations are advocating communism, which is apparently still sufficiently dirty of a word that I got the strong sense that he spat after each time he said it. Oh, and he exhorts the people to “Call these jackasses what they are: Pro-Defeat. Anti-Victory. Pro-Jihadist. Anti-Western. Enemies of Freedom. Or simply, The Enemy.”

It’s like we’ve time-warped back to 2003 (possibly earlier), where the level of rhetoric was the binary - “With us or with the terrorists” sort of stuff, trying to reduce a complex thing to a binary simple. While there are probably a lot of socialists, communists, anarchists (of all the various flavors), and other people who don’t think capitalism is the Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread that are against the conflict and the way that the government is going about its business, it’s a gross oversimplification to lump them all in as The Enemy and demonize them. It’s that kind of thinking that sends New York City police officers out to spy on groups who had planned to protest the latest Republican National Convention. Or to spy on pacifist religious organizations as potential threats.

Stepping back and going to perhaps a higher abstraction level is HaikuBoxer, who combines his dislike of the obsession with how many "friends" you have on teh Intarwebs with a critique that American politics operates at precisely this level. The popularity contest election was supposed to have been left behind in high school (or even middle school/junior high). I know that Liberal Eagle complained about it, and I’m sure there have been many others. Our politics needs to grow up and start looking at issues rather than appearances.

The U.N. Security Council passed stronger sanctions for Iran. Iran’s rhetoric seemed undisturbed by the announcement. We’ll have to see whether there’s more resolutions, or if anyone blinks (or pushes buttons to begin firing.)

Happy fiftieth birthday, European Union. Defying skeptics and people who were sure that international governments wouldn’t be getting along at all, the EU is still around and has plans for the future. It may not end up being the United States of Europe, but it does seem to have been quite good at keeping the continent quiet and generally conflict-free. And without the Soviet Union on their borders, the EU will probably figure out some way of stepping into the void and making itself a power of some sort.

Taiwan is closing a lane of a major highway to protect a migration of more than a million butterflies. The government is also trying to assist the migration through the use of protective netting and ultra-violet lights to draw the butterflies along a safe path and prevent them from being sucked under cars or splatted by them. I’ll bet watching the migration, if it’s in a cloud, is pretty.

Things are still dragging on the Exxon-Valdez oil spill case. ExxonMobil is still appealing the damage award. So to try and get ExxonMobil to pay up, Alaska Native leaders are creating and unveiling a "ridicule pole" to see if shame will work on the corporation. It’s unlikely, but there’s always a chance - maybe if that pole could also have an awareness campaign with it, change could happen. By itself, though, I don’t think it’ll work. (The right place to plant it, of course, would be on the property of the company, but that wouldn’t last long.)

Last bit for tonight! Pancake Art. Who says you can’t play with your food?

Time’s ticking on me. If I can face down the first week of April and sneak through it unscathed, I’ll have the upper hand on my graduation. After that, I can concentrate on two things. And unlike Rails, where I’ll have to think about how to go about doing things, I can write CSS to my heart’s content and not have to worry at all. Except for the whole job thing, of course. But really, after slagging through this semester, a job hunt should be pretty easy.