wolf blitzkrieg
By Todd Stadler · Thursday, September 19, 2002 4:32am
Ooh, look! CNN revamped their webpage. Here are some articles I found worth commenting on.
Let's get cynical! Saddam claims that Bush wants to attack Iraq in order to control its oil supplies.
It's scary to think that I share a cynical point of view with the Iraqi leadership, given that I don't share their propensity for using weapons of mass destruction.
Still, I'll be interested to see how this plays out. Saddam is pulling out all the stops. If the inspectors find something, then Saddam is an idiot. If they don't, then maybe he was just clever in how he hid it.
Either way, we'll likely attack Iraq. But I'm sure we'll drop the bombs in a compassionate way.
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Reading about yet another round of violence and escalation in Israel and Palestine (just how much is left of that compound, anyhow ? a corner?), it occurred to me that there is a lesson to be learned here. And that that lesson will likely go ignored.
Regardless, my thought was that Israel is a nice case study for those who say we can control terrorism through heightening security, diminishing civil liberties if need be.
As I understand it, Israel is a more secure state than America could ever be, barring some wholesale rewriting of the Constitution (not that Bush isn't trying that).
It's a smaller, less ethnically diverse country, which should make it easier to defend and spot potential terrorists. And there seem to be far fewer civil rights, or at least expectations of them, than Americans have. Most citizens seem willing to put up with all sorts of inconveniences to lessen their constant exposure to terrorism.
And yet, Israel experiences terrorism very regularly. Accordingly, it would seem that jacking up security alone will not solve the problem.
But when people (by which I mean "liberals", though not all agree the two are synonymous) suggest that we mitigate terrorism through changing oppressive foreign policies and attempting to improve the lives of would-be terrorists (perhaps by not supporting their undemocratic leaders), they are routinely derided.
Has such a solution ever actually been tried? Sure, we have lots of shoring up to do to increase the security in this country, but that can't ever be enough. Why do we consistently ignore this other option?
Maybe it's because it's better for our oil prices if the people are oppressed by totalitarian, I mean royal, regimes.
Whoops, sorry. Saddam made me type that.
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Enough of the Middle East. Let's move on to the Far East, to China, where they have found bucktoothed dinosaur fossils.
Now people, I thought the era of such blatant stereotyping was over. Next you're going to tell me the dinosaur also wore thick, black-rimmed glasses.
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Finally, a vaguely disturbing article about how messed-up our brains are.
My favorite quote: "Our brains are not built the way we think; the inner mind is more bizarrely constructed than we might think".
Chew on that a bit. Why is it that our brains, the things with which we think, think that we should think differently than our brains actually think? If a woodchuck could chuck wood.
And with phrases like "we count on our brains to sort it all out", the article seems to encourage a view wherein there is me, and then there is my brain. I expect my brain to do things, apparently with an organ that is not my brain.
Not that I don't often talk like that myself. But isn't it odd? Do we exist outside of our brain? Apologies for the freshman psychology ponderings, but, well, I never took freshman psychology.