Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Now, I'm no friend of Saddam's, but Baghdad wasn't a bad looking city a few years ago. I've posted pictures here before from the 90s that included advertising billboards, single women walking freely, modern cars, Coke machines, and so on. These ones below are a little older pictures, but you get the idea. It's important for people to understand that when they hear about Falluja or wherever being bombed, that it's a city just like the one they may live in.
For comparison, you can take a look at this “after” picture and see for yourself how much the US aggression has “improved” Iraq, and how much better off the people must be now that they're ruled by the Bush Cartel rather than Hussein and his psychotic kids. Welcome to
Baghdad 2004:
Big improvement, right? Maybe if you're lucky, Bush's policies can make your city look like this too.
I've heard a lot of noise about how we're risking Iraq becoming a religious extremist state like Iran. Oooh. Oh no. I've even made this noise myself here, but I didn't get it — run the numbers for yourself. Unfortunately the sad truth is that America has more religious extremism by the numbers than Iran or Iraq have — 44% of Americans currently identify themselves as Evangelical Born-Again Christians, attend church regularly, pray, and consider themselves devout. The vast majority believe that the rapture is coming ASAP, or to put it in clearer terms, we're talking about history's largest doomsday cult.
And guess what Southern Baptist who's publicly professed a belief that the second coming is upon us has his hands on the nukes? I saw a TV minister a few days ago telling his flock not to prepare for the future, because the prophecies of Reveletion will unfold before that. It sounds crazy, doesn't it? Well, tell that to the 100 million Americans who have pledged to die for it.
Monday, November 22, 2004
I liked this (from tomorrow's update) in a geeky-cute kind of way (real caption). If I ever decided to run mainstream advertising in vanilla publications, this is probably how I'd do it.
Monday, November 22, 2004
What's going on in this photo?
I'm not sure if this is a caption contest or just a confused query.
(Original forum unavailable, sorry)*
Monday, November 22, 2004
I've just placed an order request for a new laptop — I say “request” because the company isn't 100% sure they'll have it prepped for me in time for Mexico so I'm just waiting to hear back from them. If not, some of these specs get rolled back a generation… but either way it's more than enough machine to run BME from and do my development and writing work on.
Here are the basic specs (it's better than my current desktop):
- 3.6 GHz P4, 800 Mhz bus, 1 MB L2 Cache
- 1 GB RAM (max 4 GB, but I don't need that), 256 MB Video w/HDTV+SVideo out
- 17″ WSXGA 1680×1025 resolution
- Dual 80 GB SATA drives in a RAID-1 (mirrored) configuration, DVD-R+CD-R drive
- 802.11b/g+Bluetooth, TV Tuner, 56K V90/V92Model, Gigabit ethernet
- 102 key keyboard, touchpad, 5 speaker sound, 7-in-1 cardreader
The company I ordered from was on that was involved with (or was started by, I can't remember) some folks that my father and I used to do development work with, but unfortunately neither of them are still with the company so I didn't get any special treatment.
Sunday, November 21, 2004
Swirly Wanx Sinatra says this would be a good t-shirt to print. Somehow I think the customer base will not be the greatest; church membership is down lately. Hell, I'd go so far as to say this shirt is more of a cosmic TOS violation. I expect it to cause another hardware failure on the server.
That said, the markets drive the presses.
