Boston.com / News / Nation / Kennedy calls case for Iraq war `a fraud’:

‘There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically,’ Kennedy said. ‘This whole thing was a fraud’

Kennedy may well be right, but reconstruction is still going to have to be paid for. If the administration has it’s numbers right (and who really believes they do) it is going to work out to be about $300 for every man, woman and child in the US. What’s really sad about that, is that it is all going to be wasted, along with the considerable goodwill the US has built up, at considerable expense, over the last hundred years.

The “investment” in Afghanistan is already in steep decline. Distracted by Iraq, US and coalition efforts to date are being squandered as warlords re-establish themselves and the Taliban is allowed to leak over the border from Pakistan and pursue a brilliant campaign to discredit not just the US, but every other foreign power involved. They shoot up aid workers, disrupting aid efforts, and then wisper convincing lies pinning the failure to deliver aid on us. In short, Afghanistan will once again be fertile ground for backwards-ass medieval thinkers with access to 21st century killing technology. Hell, we fucking fertilized the ground for them.

In Iraq, we have a big payment coming due just as the US economy shows some signs of life and politicians, sensing an issue they can play to their political advantage are wary of writing the check. Bush appears to go looking for help at the UN from the very people he alienated so completely in the spring, and to show his sincerity, he uses the same rhetoric that worked so well for him before.

Directron.com Looks to have a good selection of mini/micro/flex-ITX cases and bare-bones systems. Cool, because i’m looking for a compact, quiet, lower-lower platform to use to replace this ATX midtower I’m using for a firewall, and perhaps one I can use to build a small file server.

F*$k Verisign. They are wildcarding most domains, so if you type in an improper host name, you get a Verisign web page, so it appears they own the domain.

Israel is a democracy, the only one in the Middle East. This fact is often used to as part of an explanation of US support for Israel, but is it a good reason?

For a democracy, Israel has a remarkably old fashioned way of dealing with the world. It seizes the land and property of another religo-ethnic group and confines them to ghettos in the name of its own survival and security. It brands many members of this group as criminals and administers justice by summary execution of the offender, and, for good measure has a policy of destroying the property, if not the bodies, of the offenders immediate and extended family. You might call this behavior “medieval,” but one could probably look further back to see it codified.

But, surely, it is a democracy, in which case, the majority of its citizens bare the responsibility for such barbaric policies.

Due Diligence:

“Call me naive – [Chorus: You’re a hopeless naif.] – but I’ve got this quaint idea that the idea of a business is to add value. And that the value is judged by the customer, not the seller. By its obstinate and culpably idiotic refusal to understand that technology has changed the way in which the value of music is delivered and understood by listeners, the RIAA and the labels it stands for have turned from value creators into value destroyers, in many different ways. They are well on the way to permanently damaging an industry that has been part of America’s cultural heritage, as well as a decent part of our exports to the rest of the world. The bill of particulars…”

need to remember to read this site