BurningbirdRecovered from the Wayback Machine.
I don’t know what the fuss is about with this Operation TIPS. Personally, I think it’s a great idea myself.
Think about it – all those unamerican people grouped into one organization, easily tracked, as well as highly visible with little stickers in their window. It’s never been easier to spot and know the enemy.
Great idea. The Bush administration should come up with more like that.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
The mighty Glenn Reynolds has written another of his edifying columns out at Fox, this one on the LAX shooting.
As expected, he echos the other punditry’s concensus that the shooting was an act of terrorism. Hadayet was from Egypt, most likely hated Jews, objected to an American flag over his apartment and might possibly have met with an Osama Bin Laden associate in 1995. Therefore, this wasn’t the act of a man who went beserk, grabbed some guns, found a target and started shooting – this was the pre-planned, carefully thought out action of a terrorist.
What do you know, terrorism is occurring on the streets of America every day. Fancy that.
I’ll give him this, the Pundit One does have a different take in how to deal with these types of situations:
The clearest lesson of the Los Angeles International shooting is that diffuse threats like terrorism are best answered with diffuse defenses: lots of people, preferably armed, who are ready to respond in a hurry.
Lovely idea – arm a paranoid populace with guns and tell them they’re America’s first line of defense against terrorism.
Glenn Reynolds is nothing more than a thinking person’s chew toy.
Seems as if Dick Cheney, fearless co-leader of the US, is being sued for artificially boosting stock prices while he was CEO of Halliburton.
This follows on the SEC’s investigation of Halliburton’s accounting practices. Not surprising – Halliburton’s accounting firm was Anderson.
I worked for Sierra Geophysics, a subsidiary of Halliburton in Seattle. SG was great. Halliburton was shit, closing down our productive and successful operation primarily because we were in the Northwest and got uppity at times.
Anderson was the company that recommended Halliburton close us down.
Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do
What you gonna do when they come for you.Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do
What you gonna do when they come for you.
Diana King, Bad Boys, 1995
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Today was not supposed to be an ‘angry’ day. I thought we’d covered the subject and were ready to move on. But then I checked the news. I read that the “earth is dying” (mentioned in previous weblog posting).
And then I read:
Bush rejected comparisons between the transactions that masked losses at Harken Energy Corp. and those of executives and accountants at such companies as Enron and WorldCom that have resulted in billions of dollars in red ink.
His own case, Bush said, “was an honest disagreement about accounting procedures.”
And then I read:
“I actually didn’t read the whole story,” he said. “But people shouldn’t speculate about the desire of the government to have a regime change. And there’s different ways to do it.”
And I’m angry all over again. Tell me: how does one respond to reports such as these with love or compassion?
I am angry, and through this anger, I am determined to ensure by any legal means necessary that Bush is not re-elected and that he and his cohorts are kicked out of the White House. And through this anger, I plan on doing everything I can until that time to ensure that Bush’s hypocritical and idiotic acts are exposed for what they are.
I am mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore. And if my honest emotion is a reason for shaking your head in pity of my lack of control and inability to redirect said emotion into a more positive center, well then, you can just kiss my grits.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Mike Golby is a man in his 40’s, Catholic, married with kids, who lives in South Africa. I’m a woman in my 40’s, non-religious, divorced, with no kids, living in the US. Outside of our age and the fact that we weblog, we two also share one other thing in common: we’re angry people.
Mike continues the discussion about anger from this weekend, and in particular, the responses to it:
Why did people automatically equate anger, i.e. ‘intense dissatisfaction’ with rage, i.e. ‘violent anger’, as defined by the OED? Why are so many people who seek a fuller, more productive life so brittle, thin-skinned, and reactionary?
Good question, Mike. It does seem that the more we as a society seek to eliminate anger, the more acts of unreasoning rage occur. In the last few decades, where once anger was considered an emotion not unlike any other, now it’s considered taboo. And in that same time frame, where once a worker killing a boss would be front page news for weeks, now it’s becoming commonplace.
And like you, Mike, I puzzle at the extreme reaction to the Hesham Mohamed Hadayet shooting. An entire airport security infrastructure is changing based on one person’s actions; we see terrorist plots and government cover-up all based on a shooting that, from all indications, is nothing more than an example of a person going beserk.
In fact, Hadayet doesn’t seem that different from Benjamin Smith a white supremacist who went on a racist killing spree in Illinois and Indiana. Yet Smith wasn’t called “terrorist”, and we haven’t added to the police that exist on every corner in the country. Nor is Indiana University an armed camp – I know, my brother teaches there.
Making Hadayet into a terrorist solely because it suits certain agendas makes me angry. I am angry.
What the hell has happened to my country in that anger, in any form, is ‘bad’, but Bush and Ashcroft detaining a man without giving him due rights under law – under law – is acceptable?
What the hell has happened to my country that people support a president based solely on his ‘War on Terror’ without regard to any other of his actions and lack thereof?
What the hell has happened to my country that people get incensed because the Pledge of Allegience is declared unconstitutional based on the words ‘under God’? To make matters worse, these same people then have the audacity to say that this country was created on a platform of Christianity, and we should all accept this – my country was never based on the principles of separation of Church and State.
This really pisses me off.
How far will we go in selling our rights, our sense of decency and humanity, our membership in the world, our very souls, just to call ourselves safe?
Mike is an angry person. His anger speaks out every time he writes about injustice. Anger threads throughout his words, and forms a platform for his writing.
And we need more angry people, not less.
Update Make that three angry people.