Of course the anti-war protesters were not worried about the US losing. To say that is to completely miss the point. They were worried about what would happen after the war, how unstable the region would become, what would happen to Iraq and its people. According to the most recent reports, soldiers were completely unprepared, or unwilling, to stop looting in Iraq. This is just one singular example at the beginning of the occupation, so there is no evidence it indicates a trend, but that doesn’t make me feel any better.

“We were ready for the bombs,” Amin said. “Not the looters.”

As she quickly walked through more than three dozen rooms, Amin did not catalog what was missing or damaged. There was just too much. But every few minutes, she would stop in front of an empty pedestal or a decapitated statue.

“This was priceless,” she sobbed as she pointed to two seated marble deities from the temple at Harta that had been defaced with a hammer. Later, after observing more damage, she broke down again. “It feels like all my family has died,” she wept.

Aid workers, Iraqis, even US officials all believe that this action was predicted by all and the US should have done something to stop it. And yet, our military, our very effective and powerful military, which did do a very good job of taking the country, was unprepared for this?

Privately, some U.S. officials involved in reconstruction have expressed concern that failure to quickly crack down on looting could have worrisome, long-term consequences for the transitional government that the Bush administration wants to set up here. “By not being more aggressive now, there is the risk of bigger problems later,” one official said.

Wonderful.

I saw a course listing for a writing class and it said you had to submit a three page short story to be considered. On a whim I opened a text editor and composed this terrible little story. There was no thought, no plot, and it is certainly not three pages. I’m just posting it because otherwise I would throw it away.

We approach the Protagonist on a hot spring day. Spring, yet snowing. The snow appears yellow. It is not snow at all, it appears to be sand. Interesting. The Protagonist appears unfazed. He is circumventing the natural order in his mind.

Our Protagonist stands by the bank of a river. He glances around at the vast expanse, sees people behind him but only water before, an insurmountable barrier, an ever-flowing yet immutable obstacle, an unforeseen wrinkle in his most carefully laid plan.

And yet, the Protagonist is unfazed. He looks around again. He stops. He scratches his bearded chin. He stands, he squats, he perches, he totters. He grabs his walking staff for support. He smiles.

He stands, he struts, he moves forward…slowly, but with a power his people had not before seen. A few whisper questions, ask questions aloud, shout questions, but the Protagonist does not speak. He is committed, he is calculating. He is ready for this, his greatest act.

He stands atop a rock, shields his face from the sun and sand, and looks at the river ahead, the army behind, the ever expanse of yellow leading to a yellow sky as the yellow sun creeps slowly lower.

It is time to act.

He raises his staff and thrusts his arm outward, upward. He shouts words in an ancient tongue. He leaps about comically. And, amazingly, the water begins to part. You see he is wearing one of those new-fangled digital watches.

You wonder what time it is. You hear a ring.

You hit pause. Pizza is here, Charlton Heston will have to wait.

(It might have helped had I seen the movie)

With this war mess, America has gone farther then ever before in scaring off the world:

In fact, while the United States has the backing of a dozen or so governments, it has the support of a majority of the people in only one country in the world, Israel. If that is not isolation, then the word has no meaning.

Newsweek takes a look at what can be done. It is about time this issue got a cover story.

I like it when people call my cell phone from their cell phone. Campus phones just list caller ID as “Brandeis University,” which is unhelpful. We have a complicated little ritual here in America. “Hello?” “Hello, is Frank home?” “This is Frank.” “Hi Frank, this is Bob.” It is a silly, four-part process for establishing something that should be readily apparent. Why the questioning hello? Why the challenge response? In Germany, you answer the phone with your name, and the other person resonds with theirs. *ring “Frank Brown.” “This is Bob Jones.” And so on. Much more convenient.

I might not want to put arbitrary “value” on my time, but I do know when I feel I can be disturbed and when I would whether not be. What is tremendously helpful in these situations, which include most times of the day, is to know who is calling me. I can prioritize calls based on necessity, schedule, and feelings, and take only those calls that are important. At the same time, I can avoid the tedious four-step process and just answer the phone with, “Hello Bob.” This instantly establishes that I am myself and I know who the person is who is calling. We can get to the point quickly and without awkwardness. This is only effective, however, with personal phones, which today means cell phones, because home phones can be shared, dorm phones are without caller ID, and pay phones are anonymous.

Finally the powers that be are allowing us number portability so that we can carry cell phone numbers with us across carriers and throughout our lives. The next step are whitelists and blacklists, explicitly allowing or denying access to our phones based on various criteria, the first being who is trying to call us. Since phones are increasingly location-aware, the next step can be restricting calls based on proximity. No business calls while I’m on vacation, unless it is the boss. No non-urgent calls during class. Etc. These advances will make telephone conversations much more useful.

As I get more involved in student government, I start to rely on my cell phone more and more.

I’m not living my life deeply enough. I fell asleep last night at 11:00pm or so, which is 10 plus a daylight saving hour, and I woke up this morning in the 8s, which of course is 7 plus a daylight saving hour, and I felt much more excited then I normally do when I wake up.

The morning is full of possiblities and excitement and change. It becomes lighter as the sun rises, people begin to awake and to scurry, I can see them out my window. The guy sleeping in the plexiglass box on the side of Chapel’s Field begins to stir, he opens a book, sits and takes in the world.

The morning is full of possibilities for change. I eat eggs and potatoes and bread smeared with cream cheese, I sit and read a book, I get up and wander around aimlessly. There is no hurry, no rush, nothing that needs to get done NOW must be turned in NOW, must be finished NOW. It is morning.

They say it will snow tonight. And the world turns. The American mystery deepens.

Maybe it is because of budget cutbacks, or maybe this is just a strange year, either way, I can’t for the life of me find any classes to enroll in next semester. Since I can’t find anything exciting, I’m trying to finish the last of my requirements — a non-western, a quantitative reasoning, and, somehow, a creative arts, although I can’t find anything in that area. Humph.

If the rockets filled with chemical weapons are confirmed, and these rockets violate UN regulations, and they are “weapons of mass destruction” (and that does not mean the same or less destructive than a conventional weapon), then I will admit I was wrong. But until that happens, I have to maintain what I have continued to say — I do not believe Iraq has WMD. They have weapons, yes, some very nasty weapons, but not weapons of Mass Destruction, with a capital M and a capital D. And if our major justification for invading Iraq rests on Iraq having WMD, our justification is wrong.

The campus search program that I started writing last year and perfected 😉 just a few weeks ago with its 2.0 release is now offline, possibly permanently. The Recording Industry Association of American, an “industry trade group,” has decided to stop with its cease-and-desist letters and quit with its DMCA infringement notices and simply start suing college students. Along they way, the RIAA has come up with some fun new terms to compliment their old standby “piracy,” a term which is not only confusing in the visceral reaction it provokes but is also completely wrong.

Also completely wrong is the RIAA, which seems to believe that instead of growing as a business, embracing new technologies, and giving its consumers what they want, it can simply sue all of its consumers out of existance, surely not a good tactic for continued profitability. The RIAA mantra is, “Music: Our Way or Jail!” This latest round of evilness involves calling campus search systems “Napster networks,” a complete misnomer since they are neither networks nor at all Napster-like.

The best story so far is probably the one from The Chronicle, although I don’t really like the ending.

The comprehensive 350-ish page report says that cancer deaths will be up 50% by 2020. Here is a London Times story. This’ll be on the news soon enough, if the networks deem it scary enough in the face of war. Of course, they don’t find SARS relevent, because it doesn’t affect Americans. This report, however, does single out California…as an example of what is right. Lung cancer dramatically lower than most of the rest of the US thanks to strict anti-smoking laws. Still, our culture of apathy is causing a lot of problems even without the smoking. Culture of apathy, I like that phrase. But wait, that includes me! Uh oh.

Self congratulations here, after a fun and drawn out process, including Union Judiciary case, I won the second attempt at Secretary elections, 346 to 295. I never did actually talk to my opponent, Alyssa Krop, but hopefully there aren’t any hard feelings. Of course, nothing I did was ever directed at her (i.e. signs, campaign stuff, or case), so I hope she doesn’t have any irrational hatred of me that might manifest itself in a deranged killing spree…but the one time I saw her she seemed pretty nice, so I’ll assume no. 😉

Also, Adam Herman informs me that the last 3 presidents (before our new one, pres-elect Josh Brandfon) were all secretaries first. Neat-o.

Three people now have told me to try marijuana for my sleep problems. Three. And people say medicinal marijuana is fake!

Lots of tech professionals with pretty packed resumes are unemployed right now. And not just between jobs, seriously unemployed. So many of them in online postings and such casually drop that they’ve been out of work for 5 or 6 or 7 months, some for a year or more, and there just aren’t any jobs. That can’t be good. This doesn’t inspire any hope, either.

Igor alerted me to Fox’s response to the New York “die-in” protests. They used their huge ticker to poke fun at the protesters:

Fox News had its own response to the demonstrators. The news ticker rimming Fox’s headquarters on Sixth Avenue wasn’t carrying war updates as the protest began. Instead, it poked fun at the demonstrators, chiding them.

“War protester auditions here today … thanks for coming!” read one message. “Who won your right to show up here today?” another questioned. “Protesters or soldiers?”

Said a third: “How do you keep a war protester in suspense? Ignore them.”

Read all about it at North Jersey Media Group. Perhaps I should be outraged at the news empire’s bias or whatever, but I’m just sitting here laughing…

I’m very upset at my body right now. Every day since we did the all-nighter preparing my UJ case I’ve been falling asleep somewhere between 4 and 6 am, and not waking up until past noon. Tonight I got tired at 10:30pm, and seeing my chance, tried to sleep. Three hours later, and I’ve gotten sick of lying in bed. ARGH!!!

A bit more site news. I’ve put up a new design that I think addresses most of my problems with the older one. It is more subtle but serves pretty well to differentiate the posts and the side navigation. I like it, and people I’ve talked to seem to like it. There might still be problems with IE/Windows, so I’ll have to look into that. Stupid Windows.

Posts are now being categorized, and clicking on a category takes you to the newest 10 posts in that category. At some point I’ll make a little category navigation menu on the left, but the left side is pretty big already as it is.

Finally, I’ve added a widget to the bottom of the page that allows you to go to the next ten posts. now when you’re on the homepage or click a month to view, it shows the newest ten posts with the link on the bottom to go to the next ten posts or back to the previous ten posts. I like it, hope you do as well.

Unless, of course, you have a C-Band dish and can tune into Al-Jazzera. And yet, this is whats happening. Slightly more newsworthy, in my estimation, than grainy green night-vision shots of tanks sitting around in the desert.

The reality of war is always death and destruction. It always spews out dead bodies — torn, twisted and charred bodies — and legions of injured and maimed. It always creates prisoners of war. It always leaves in its wake homes reduced to rubble, lives blighted, families destroyed. It always brings suffering and misery, disease and hunger. It is not a computer game or a movie where, when it is over, we can get up and go and have a meal and a laugh. It is horrible and evil — which is why it must always be the very last resort — something that so many governments, so many people, told Washington and London, but something that they ignored — so convinced were they that it could be played and won with computer-like efficiency.

The ArabNews Editorial is a pretty well-balanced criticism. They make us read dozens of war-is-hell books in high school, to the point where 10th graders all want to commit suicide because our world is so terrible, but after a few years everything we’ve read has sunk away. Maybe everyone needs to be hooked up to a computer and virtually shot and killed once a year. Might help us with the perspective.

War is hell. War is sometimes unavoidable. But in this war, all of the rhetoric on both sides seems very…fake. George W. Bush and even Colin Powell don’t convince me that they mean it when they talk about this terrible burden. Meanwhile, the Hollywood-provided peaceniks aren’t very coherant. Sigh. Whatever happened to “vigorous public debate”?

Artists are people, but not normal people. Artists are their own species, I’ve decided. Shaina is an artist of sorts, in a school of artists, and she has become more of an artist because of it. There is something interesting and somewhat unique about an artistic high school like the one Shaina goes too — there is this fundamental give-and-take between the artistic pursuits and the academics. They aren’t entirely incompatible, but there is certainly a resentment between them. Like cats and dogs, each is unique, sometimes they get along, sometimes not. They have personalities.

If artisty is about creation, uniqueness, beauty, soul, inspiration, and learning is about study, repetition, fact, testing, proof, there is a disconnnect. And yet, both pursuits are about truth.

Still, artists are different. On the one hand, they have tremendous emotional drive that other people probably don’t have. More prone to mania, depression, or whatever we as society are classifying it as today, but it is raw and unfettered emotion, and that is what art is about.

While artists can be extremely insightful, they can also sometimes be extremely dense. While at times that they can be so thoughful and caring, at other times they can also be incredibly brutal and uncaring.

Artists are difficult to live with. Sometimes, you need to do some artistry of your own in attempting to mold them into a more subtle model…possibly slightly less artistic, which is a shame, but more livable, which is good.

It is the real world vs. the artists. It is the universal give and take. It is strange and scary and confusing and prone to small failures. And in taming the artist, one might dampen the artistry a bit. Sad, difficult, fraught with peril, possibly harmful, and yet so potentially rewarding. It’s probably worth it, I think.

I cancelled my semi-evil Eryxma account, and they shut it down a few days early (argh!). Luckily, I was able to recover the two posts I was missing from a Google cache and the two comments accompanying them from the auto-emails, so everything should be the way it was.

I finally fixed the problem with archive view, it no longer limits to ten posts, so you can actually see every post I’ve made in a given month instead of the last 10, so my Sept. 11-era posts are back online, along with a lot of others.

I’ve expanded the photo gallerys substantially, basically getting all the pictures that were in the old gallery into the new one (finally), so they make good browsing. I like our mexico trip albums, and the pictures of the cats 😉

A few people have been concerned with email addresses in the comments box. Don’t worry, they’re somewhat spam protected by each character being converted to Unicode. Most browsers should be okay, and most spambots should choke.

Thats all in the site news for today.

While buying groceries the woman who sells the vegetables was talking to another about the approach of American armies to Najaf city and about what is happening at Um Qasar and Basra. If Um Qasar is so difficult to control what will happen when they get to Baghdad? It will turn uglier and this is very worrying. People (and I bet “allied forces�) were expecting things to be mush easier. There are no waving masses of people welcoming the Americans nor are they surrendering by the thousands. People are oing what all of us are, sitting in their homes hoping that a bomb doesn’t fall on them and keeping their doors shut.

Where is Raed? makes a very good read.

Is the House of Representatives a real lawmaking body, or just a joke?

In other news, is BBSpot a joke news site, or is it the only sane one in a nuthouse full of TV news?