Before 2003 there was no connection between Al-Quaida and Iraq. Of course now that the war drags on in that country, it sounds real great if ‘our troops’ fight ‘those terrorists’. After all: the 9-11 shock can justify allot of stuff in many peoples minds. So the news sounds often like US troops would be engaging Al Quaida Terrorists. Since there were not any before 2003 those people have to be either Iraquies that became terrorists during the occupation, or they come from the outside. One of these arguments that can often be heard is “fight them over there, instead of here”. This article focuses on the origins of those foreign fighters. What I found more shocking is the number: 135 of them are being detained right now. So it takes more than 1000 US troops to detain one of these foreign fighters??? If capturing terrorists would be the goal then the US would have spend 3.2 Billion dollars to get one of those detainees. Of course these numbers are simplifications. Of course the situtation in Iraq is probably complicated. Much more complicated than most USAmericans would understand. Wether they are here or fighting over there.
Category: politics
It seems that things have changed in the last decades.
Of course, I can not spell, even if my life would be depending on it. But I am not in the business of making public displays. Lame excuse. I know.
Democracy works really best, when there are three powers that have to interact in predefined roles with each other.
Some democracies have people in power that don’t really care
yikes,
Supposedly USA Today printed
this
Inlcuding a sentence like:
That amount is equal to $516,348 for every U.S. household. By comparison, U.S. households owe an average of $112,043 for mortgages, car loans, credit cards and all other debt combined.
Those are some rather long last throes
It seems as if there is a system to track all incidents around nuclear power generation. Which is great. It’s also very good that this information is public. It’s not that easy to use or understand. And in all that data the real juicy details might be well hidden. But it’s still a great concept to make the operations accountable to publish their results. I would guess that Iran does not have such a system for their similar activities. But I am afraid that that the current regime in the US would not install a similar system themselves.
I am usually not a big fan of performance art. The whole ‘let’s put a human in a Zoo’ situation is so predictabiliy of interest.
This art installation combines it with a painball gun controlled over the internet, which isn’t new either, and makes it actually interesting. Horrible too.
images of fast food: ads vs.reality
I would not be surprised if you would ask people what they just ate and showed them both pictures they would pick the one from the advertisement. Not the one from reality. The romans left their vast cities for centuries to people that had no clue how you could make such things. The Colosseum was actually a housing complex for most of the 2000 years it existed. Our civilisation will leave billions of silver discs with all sorts of ‘realities’. Like movies, TV shows and games. People might not be able to make new ones, but they sure will inhabit our cultural spaces. Fake or not: we don’t care today. We eat the burger from the billboard rather than the one in our mouth. Why should people care more in 200 years when realities might have deterioated even more.
Want fries with that?
My sister needs a new computer. These days I would recommend the cheapest MacBook with 1GB memory and 80 GB harddrive upgrades and -of course- Apple Care. Which comes down to 1473 US$. Which is not a bad price for a powerful and reliable machine.
In Germany the very same machine does cost 1518 Euros. That’s looks similar. However with todays rate this comes down to 2126 dollars. In 2000, before Bush started to dabble in economics, you only had to pay 1395 dollars for the same amount of Euros.
All my servers moved into the new DST successfully. Which makes it easy to postulate the following:
If your computer or software shows the wrong date next week then your technology install sucks.
Either the people / company you pay to maintain it are stupid, incompetence, lazy etc, or you don’t
have support in the first place.
Oh, and it was the stupid Bush administration that caused this. Not OBL or anybody else. It’s a selfmade problem.
Born out of stupidity.
Next week will show how stupid / smart America really is.
update: the register calls the panic off and the register is always there when panic can be created