Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So there's a news story going around right now (officially denied) that quotes Bush as follows,

"I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq...' And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.' And by God I'm gonna do it."

Back in 2003 I made the (then crazy sounding) claim that Bush was framing the context of these wars as a holy war. Whether he's doing that as propaganda or whether he's genuinely insane, if you haven't seen the video yet, consider checking out his statements of March 26, 2003, to troops about to ship off to Iraq.

TWO MEG WMV FILE

Any time you listen to one of these speeches, to flip your prejudices, replace “God” with “Allah” and imagine it's some mullah rather than Bush. If this rhetoric was coming out of the Arab world — and yes, I know that it is as well, on an all-too-regular basis — it would not be well received and it would not speak well for the lucidity of the speaker. But welcome to a world where the single largest sociopolitical issue is a debate over what our invisible friend's name is and who he likes best, and we've spent the last 30,000 years killing each other over this triviality — and God sucks, statistically speaking.

Makes you wish for a more mundane 2000.

Other than that, I got some very strange usage graphs this morning on the server. CPU load was heavy but not totally unnatural, but all of a sudden memory use spiked and then climed for a while, and then suddenly dropped. This memory use made little difference on performance (luckily), and even odder, nothing in the process table appeared to be consuming it…

Anyway… Phil's going to do a members update today and continue training, and I'm going to be practicing for Porn Sunday since I kind of lazed off on pandemic awareness week.