Who uses the word negro these days? This is just strange.

[15:01:08] naz: erm
[15:01:18] naz: do you see the ad on the right?
[15:01:37] Bluegerm: what about it?
[15:01:53] naz: the uncf one?
[15:02:08] Bluegerm: fight global warming
[15:02:19] naz: oh right different ad then
[15:02:31] naz: ill show you, its a bit weird
[15:02:32] Bluegerm: i got unicef students now
[15:02:57] Bluegerm: the rockets from the kids head
[15:03:08] naz: yea
[15:03:13] Bluegerm: he could be a rocket scientist you know
[15:03:16] naz: isnt it the weirdest thing ever
[15:03:28] naz: united negro college fund?
[15:03:29] Bluegerm: or his head will explode
[15:03:33] naz: wtf is that
[15:04:21] Bluegerm: College scholarshps for black people
[15:04:35] Bluegerm: funded by rich black people?
[15:04:39] naz: paid for by launching satellite from the students skulls
[15:04:43] Bluegerm: hence united
[15:04:47] naz: tiny satellites
[15:04:52] naz: to monitor the hood
[15:04:56] naz: from outer space
[15:05:04] Bluegerm: it’s the ad on the side of the rocket that makes
the money
[15:05:17] Bluegerm: NIKE
[15:05:19] naz: bizarre

It’s March, must be pontificating bullshit time!

I recall the justifications evolved something like this. (Justification is important, who wants to support an unjust war except extreme nationalists & armchair generals?)

1) Arabs did 9/11. Saddam is Arab. Arabs are bad. Saddam is bad. Ipso facto, lets invade. All this equated to the administration drawing a line connecting the secular baath regime which regularly tortured citizens that prayed too much and the jihadists. It held water in the U.S but not really outside the U.S and it’s generally been refuted since. The U.S needed some help, and Tony Blair knew the British are too clued by their evil liberal media and their interest in the world outside their own borders to swallow it.

2) WMD. The grand poohbah! A complete and utter farce. I feel most sorry for Colin Powell for his part in this. I remember watching the UNSC meeting where he outlined a massive weapons program that turned out to be bullshit feed to him by the scumbags pushing the war, who hated him anyway. That’s his defining moment in history now. I heard a quote attributed to him from the night before I’m not reading this, this is bullshit. Should have stuck with his gut and resigned there and then. He would have been horribly vilified initially, but completely vindicated by now.

So it was complete crap and we all know it now. The cynic in me tells me that the U.S already knew there was nothing or next to nothing before they sent in the troops. Why? Because if there was a significant deterrent, the U.S would have taken significant casualities, tens of thousands. Untenable, especially with an election the next year. That’s speculation.

Regardless, the genuine situations with North Korea and Iran WMD programs were completely glossed over and this showed to me that the U.S had settled on WMD as a classic strawman in the argument for the Iraq war. I was arguing with Sinner about it at the time about the ins and outs of it and he came out with this statement:

Iraq constitutes a direct threat to me and my family and so we need to neutralise the threat (paraphrasing)

He lives in the center of Canada for christ’s sake. Time has proven that the fear drummed up by the hawks public pronouncements, mushroom cloud imagery by the Veep etc, was just plain silly. It was fairly obvious then too. But trying to argue against WMD before the war made it seem like like you were appeasing a potent military force who was plotting to kill you and yours. As the race to Baghdad showed, you could have blown over the Iraqi military.

3) Saddam threatened his neighbours. Oh yeah Iran. The US was really upset about that :P. Kuwait? Saudi Arabia? The Gulf War, sanctions and the no-fly zones effectively ended Iraq’s ability to project power outside it’s borders, it couldn’t even reconquer Iraqi Kurdistan. Easily refuted at the time and the ease of the ground war underlined that.

4) For freedom and democracy. Another strawman. Hate the Iraq war? You must hate the Iraqi people, they need our help. You think the U.S and U.K publics want to pay $250 billion to help Muslims after 9/11? Not that they’ve made a good job of it. It’s a civil war, forget the humming and hawing, if 10000 + Iraqis are dying a year, it’s a fucking civil war.

5) It has become the central front in the war on terror. No shit. After they invaded. No argument there. Isn’t the War on Terror supposed to reduce terrorism?

So, a lot of bullshit and lies. It’s happened before, Remember the Maine?

So what was it for, really? What has been accomplished? What’s it for now?

I’m not anti-US or anti US-military intervention per se, it was justified in the former Yugoslavia, Afganistan and prolly in Iran if the West has the stomach for it. The Iraq war, though, stinks to high heaven.

This is a film that came out last year about a jewish guy (Elijah Wood) who visits the Ukraine to find out what happend his grandparents during WW11. If that sounds like ‘worthy but dull’ territory, fear not. The piognancy of it’s theme is offset by the comedy that arises out of the clash of cultures between the morose, fastitidious, middle class vegetarian American and the eccentrentic dirt poor, hard boiled yet happy go lucky Ukrainian family he hires as translator/guides.

Setting off in an old Trabant in search of a village that’s not on any map and that no-one seems to have heard of, Jonathon (Wood), ‘Grandfather’ (Boris Leskin) and grandson Alex (Eugene Hutz) get nowhere quite slowly, driving aimlessly through vast, flat, blank countryside that is stoic and silent, unwilling to give up it’s secrets, the Grandfather taking sudden, unexpected diversions through forests for no apparent reason, as if steering to an internal compass that may well have been driving haywire through years of grief or whatever madness time sets in the minds of old men, to the helpless consternation of the passengers.

Everything is illuminated is one of those rare films which is brave enough to constrain it’s emotional power within the thousand things unsaid than the few things that are. The elephant in the room rarely glimpsed but it’s presence always felt. It’s a film that reminds you that people are made up mostly of memories that are never spoken of but always there. And that a person can be killed in an instant and the person beside him merely lose his life, left with a whole lifetime to die. That the past is unseen, invisible and everywhere, buried iside us and beneath us, the foundation of the present. And tht sometimes it needs to be revisited, dug up and reburied properly, to make some room in the present for the future.

Check on it

Original:

(Slim Thug)
You need to stop playin’ ’round with all them clowns and the wangstas
Good girls gotta get down with the gangstas
Go head girl put some back and some neck up on it
While I stand up in the background and check up on it

(Beyoncé)
CHORUS
Oh, boy, you looking like you like what you see
Won’t you come over check up on it,
I’m gon’ let you work up on it
Ladies, let ‘em check up on it,
Watch it while he check up on it
Dip it, pop it, twork it, stop it
Check on me tonight

Translation:

(Slim Thug)
You need to stop spending your time with all those fools and fake gangsters
Good girls need to spend time with the real gangsters
Girl, I encourage you to dance in a sexy way
While I stand up in the background and watch you dancing

(Beyoncé)
CHORUS
Oh, boy, you look like you like what you see
Won’t you come over and watch me dance?
I’m going to let you watch me and get excited
Ladies let men watch you
Pay attention–he’s watching you
Dip your body, thrust your hips, move your buttocks against him, stop it
Watch me dance me tonight

via Oink