The Journal of Gregory Lightyear

Funniest thing I've read in a long time...

2003-10-16T23:07:02Z

Okay, it ain't from Detroit, and it ain't intelligent...

I've been one of those bizarre, avid readers of As The Apple Turns for... well... as long as I've been a Mac owner (I will never be able to thank F.M. enough for that)...

And this one rocks:

(in particular, Bono showed up to claim that he doesn't always "kiss corporate ass," which is technically true because we think there was one time back in the early '80s when he blacked out and his lips came off for about twenty seconds or so)

Funny how the years of "Bo Knows Hos" become "Bono Knows Brown-Nose". Hardware, software, music, *and* sugar water. Now that's an industry first.

Nerve Gas, Duct Tape, and Stupid People.

2003-10-11T17:37:54Z

Okay, I'm lost for words. I followed a link from slashdot to an article discussing the fascinating recent events going on in the Midwest - an invasion of ladybugs, it seems, has overpowered the local populace.
Or, at the very least, outwitted. As for why I'm guessing it's not that difficult:

"I decided to duct tape the cracks around the doors and windows, like George Bush suggested to keep us safe from the terrorist gases," Grgurich said. "But it seems that the ladybugs are more invasive than gas. The duct tape isn't stopping them; it just seems to slow them down."

Okay, so someone tell me this guy doesn't *actually* think that duct tape on door cracks is going to save him from a nerve gas attack. Or any gas, for that matter. Doesn't anybody ever question what they hear on the news anymore? It's like those nuclear fallout shelters they built in the old days, where all of us gradeschoolers would listen for the nuke alarm and hop on down to our 'nuke-proof' cafeteria in the basement to wait out a nuclear winter's worth of radiation and death. In third grade, I can understand why it doesn't cross your mind that your cafeteria isn't going to be much protection from a nuclear bomb going off anywhere in your vicinity.
As an adult, it's unthinkable and unforgivable that someone thinks that duct taping the little slit under your door is going to protect you from a chemical weapon. What, the little biotoxins will get stuck on the sticky duct tape, and say "fuck it man, let's try that house over there; this guy's too clever for us."
Sheeple. Lots and lots of Sheeple, hearing some burning Bush on TV telling them to barricade themselves in their bathrooms, and it's taken them a full year to figure out that hey, this duct tape shit might not do much. That if the bomb went off, the only thing more unlikely than me spending days in my bathroom, with all my worldly possessions surrounding me, eating canned food and drinking bottled water while I wait for news on my little wind-up FM radio is the likelihood I'd actually be alive in that room, instead of dead, surrounded by a bunch of useless shit, with a little perplexed look on my face when I had that last "gee whiz, why didn't that duct tape work" thought pass through my feeble little brain.
In case of actual emergency, this tone would be followed by you being very dead, not by official news and instructions.
This concludes this test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

Squeaple died today.

2003-09-27T21:38:11Z

Motorcycle accident.

I've been flipping through various photo albums; Norm has a few photos of him, and I've got some old photos from the Catcher's birthday party in 2001, but I haven't got much of him that's recent - I haven't seen him in quite some time.

Most of the time, the fact that I haven't seen many of my friends in a very long time doesn't get to me; I still think of them the way they were the last time I saw them, a frozen memory I can reconnect to anytime I felt like doing so. Most of them are no more than a phone call and a pub away.

Or they were, until tonight. And now, for Squeap, all I have left is that frozen memory.

Not one of my better days; and it's left me with a lot of questions over what, on closer inspection, looks like pretty questionable behavior on my part. "Endeavouring to do better" isn't going to make him any less dead.

I'm okay - feeling a bit numb about it. It doesn't help knowing that he died in a motorcycle accident, of course; having just about barely survived one myself, I seem to have woken suddenly to the awareness that everyone I know, just about, is now riding one - including M., the other half, N., who I just got off the phone with, and J., one of the guys I work with. The only time the list gets shorter is when one of them ends up as roadkill or gets an all-expenses-paid morphine addiction courtesy of their nearest NHS A&E.

I'm definitely going to the funeral; I just don't know how I'm going to react. Of the many people I know who've been in accidents, this is the first of my friends to die on one. I want to see him again, to give him a hug and say goodbye, or something. Instead, I'm left wondering whether there's going to be an open casket, and trying not to imagine how it's going to feel to know he's lying there. I imagine this horrible moment of falling to pieces at the casket, just for a moment; it's hard not to think about the purple elephant shaped like your dead friend in a silk-lined box.

This will be the last thought on this I'm going to allow myself before the funeral, I think. Unlike job interviews and dates, funerals are not one of those things you're meant to go over and over in your head, rehearsing and imagining outcomes of. You don't build little scripts of funerals in your head. Or shouldn't, anyways, I think, and so I'm going to give a damn good try at not doing so.

A Tale of Two Experiences

2003-09-19T23:23:21Z

Similar, in that both were beautiful stories; different in that only one of them was a well-told masterpiece.

The first was a film for adult minds who wish to see a world of magic through the eyes of their own childhood again; the second was a film for children who wished to see an adult's vision of a world of magic without using their minds.

The first film was Miyazaki's Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi), and it was more than just an animated wonder of cinematography; it was a beautiful story, full of allegory and rich in cultural references, a window into the soul. It was an experience I won't soon forget, and it brought back wonderful memories of the time I spent in Japan, wandering through Kyoto's temples, shrines, and streets. The movie is rich, brilliantly animated, inventively concieved, excitingly told, and stunningly executed. It is, without doubt, one of my top ten films of all time.

The second film was Underworld, and I regret stepping foot into that darkened room to waste my time. Oh, it's beautiful - an attempt to do film noir in color, a film that reeks of B-movie storylines and execution. A shining example of just how much special effects can do to turn a poor movie into one which can at least draw audiences, it's often visually stunning - unfortunately, the acting, and the storyline, are mentally jarring, and I found myself more than a little frustrated.

Without doubt, I had expectations: I was a lover of White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade; their detailed depictions of centuries of history of Vampire society through the curse of Caine by god and his transformation and inevitable self-exile from the world of Man, and the dance of the Masquerade, hiding themselves from the world of men, fearful that the cattle, so many in number, would rise and destroy them if they ever became aware of their presence.

As a fan of the genre - of more than just this particular set of intricately woven legends - I wanted to like this film. How horrific to find that I was unable to find it within myself to see what was essentially an Immortal's take on Romeo and Juliet, a world where Werewolves, once slaves of their masters, become the hunted and sworn enemies of the Vampire clans living their decadent lives in glorious gothic scenery. A heart-rending story, when told well; an utter disappointment when incarnated in this lifeless body of cellulose, the light passing through it adding no illumination to the imagined thoughts passing through the mind of that director when he finally decided that film was done.

One of these films is worth seeing. Take your best guess as to which.

First day...

2003-09-02T07:34:27Z

This is a record of my first day on the job. I'll file what happens on it as comments, as I don't want to fill my journal with more crap than it's already full of. :)

Response to Guardian's "License to drive a computer"

2003-09-01T07:24:23Z

I've become a relatively gabby poster on the Guardian's online newsblog at http://www.onlineblog.com/. I saw a comment today that caused a few of the hairs on my neck to rise, and thought I'd respond; both there and here, as it's one of my less fond memories.

The article on the Guardian I was responding to was on Microsoft's operating systems, and how users should be more responsible users of these complex machines.

While there may be a few nuggets of truth in the article, to pretend that the majority of security problems in Windows are caused by open network ports is, at best, misleading.

You could, for example, install a firewall. You could also stop using IIS, Exchange, Outlook and/or Outlook Express, DirectX, and disable OLE.

The fact is, Microsoft ships with a bunch of ports that have *no reason* to be shipped that way in a world where everything gets connected to the internet. This isn't users being too dumb to configure their systems correctly, this is Windows assuming that there's no reason to add security to something which can easily be made public. This is a design decision made by Microsoft, and the blame belongs exactly where it lands: on Microsoft's shoulders.

Blame users for not patching. Blame Microsoft for needing to. That's not unfair.

But that's not the majority of concerns; you're a hundred times likely to get hit by an e-mail virus that abuses Outlook and goes through your address book than by any of the major patch abusers.

I worked for Netscape during the time of the browser wars; I remember the move into Groupware, and the reason we opened all of these cans of worms in Microsoft's (and our own) mail client in the first place.

The 'corporate market' demanded a bunch of functionality that you could only get through scripted mail. In order to get that corporate market to move away from custom groupware and into standards-based e-mail, scripting and HTML support came in early. At the same time, Microsoft started pushing native office integration through OLE view-in-place of more than just a few JPEGs, and ensured that their scripting languages could access a broad range of internal stuff for scripting workflow-like behavior.

It was the corporate market, and its request for things that would make it feel more at ease about switching away from its proprietary groupware platforms, that eventually spelled the downfall for e-mail security and opened up the can of worms. Netscape very early on in 4 closed off access to the address book from JavaScript; Microsoft did not. Netscape killed off auto-open and most OLE; Microsoft pushed ActiveX into it.

Everyone pushed for features, features, features, and people were way too busy trying to woo a bunch of big blue corporates into switching to [Netscape Messaging Server, Exchange Server] and away from [Novell, IBM] groupware to sit around scratching their heads wondering what would happen if everyone got saddled with them.

To pretend that this is about a firewall is grossly negligent of the truth: this is about trust. Ten years ago, we trusted what we ran. Today, you can't - but most people are still running an operating system with a mindset developed ten years ago.

The reason unix is more secure has more to do with that fundamental axis than anything else; these multiuser systems were quite literally designed to prevent people from stealing CPU time and resources from other users of the system, and the secure mindset evolved from that. These systems were the first to prevent applications from writing into each other's memory (or reading it) and securing processes from each other, and the first to implement heavy multi-user security to prevent file access by unauthorized users and programs.

The advent of Windows 2000 into mainstream Windows usage eliminated a whole class of viruses - the implementation of a 25+ year old design pattern of protected memory prevented an application from stomping all over its neighbors. Every time Microsoft takes a step towards pushing those 25+ year old features into Windows, another class of viruses will vanish; then, at that point, the stream of attacks on end users may slow down to a more sane rate.

Until then, we can expect that Microsoft's continued design choices will result in millions of people panicking to push the windows update button.

Users can protect themselves from Microsoft's design choices, yes - but you're under an illusion if you think they're anything other than that; design choices. Your OS didn't get this way by accident.

Someone congratulate me. :)

2003-08-29T14:32:31Z

I've just been hired as the new CTO of What's On When, which provides worldwide event services to everyone from LastMinute.com to Travelocity.

I'm very happy. :)

IBM's Compilers on MacOS/X

2003-08-29T12:56:07Z

Well, there's been a major announcement - IBM has just released beta versions of their XL compilers on the Mac.

As to why this is important...

G4/G5 CPUs are unusual beasts. As are most CPUs. Each of the mainstream CPUs diverges from 'orthagonal' purist CPU design in a variety of ways; generally to get specific optimizations.

The most common compiler in use today is GCC; it runs on and builds code for a wide range of platforms - many more than most people have ever actually used in their daily lives. It's the standard compiler on which most people tend to think in and use; the most commonly used compiler suite on the planet, in all likelihood.
And yet, it suffers from poor performance. Not because it's a poor compiler - it's one of the best compilers on the market - but because it's a universal infrastructure, that models an orthagonal, generic CPU design.

Real CPUs don't look like the internal CPU representation that compilers use to generate fast, efficient, optimized code. As a result, the code gets the job done, but can be wasteful in terms of time and efficiency (and size, for that matter). Jack of all trades, master of none.
So, application developers looking to use the best their hardware has to offer - from geneticists running BLAST to search for genomes to mathematicians in Mathematica, from graphic designers in Photoshop to web monkeys in Dreamweaver, are generally using code compiled not with GCC, but with a vendor-specific compiler.
Intel users often end up using the Intel compiler; it generates more efficient, and higher quality, code than the competition, by a sizeable amount. On large runs, this can mean differences in runtime of anywhere from seconds to *hours* of real-world twiddling-of-thumbs time.

Traditionally, MacOS/X is a GCC box, as is Linux. Our Operating System is compiled using it, as are all of our applications; we rely on GCC to provide us with the quality and support that GCC has traditionally offered, and rely on application authors to hand-tune their code to work on our systems using either assembly language subroutines or pseudocode like the AltiVec extensions on G4/G5 systems.

This announcement means that the Mac OS is headed for a kind of parity that it's not traditionally had; while historically G4 AltiVec performance has trounced that of its Intel competition, even with the GCC compiler in comparison to 'native' compilers on those platforms, that we're about to see a new kind of compiler that has the promise of really using more of the CPU we already have in our machines; in other words, change compilers and your applications run faster on existing hardware.

More importantly, these compilers, as well as more accurately modelling our G4/G5 CPUs than GCC, often offer features that, right now, you just can't get in GCC. The most promising of these is called OpenMP - it's a language extension which allows you to write parallel code at a low level easily. What this means for us is that it will become very easy, using IBM's compiler, to turn algorithms in applications, even if they don't know anything about threads, into applications that, for those computation-intensive times, know how to use the fact that many of the Macs shipping today ship with more than one CPU. It means that multiple CPUs will get used more often, and that means a lot less thumb-twiddle time.

Today is a good day for mac developers; it promises to make tomorrow a good day for mac users. Today, we should be thanking IBM; tomorrow, your investment may have just become a better value for money.

Current GCC vs XLC performance comparisons show optimized GCC vs optimized XLC compiles showing improvements of anywhere from 11% to 51% on SPECint2000 scores. For floating point performance, the difference is even more extreme - more of the numbers are over the 50% mark than under; the G4/G5 have always had stronger floating point, and now the compiler backs that up with the appropriate optimizations to make use of the unique features of the architecture that enables that to be true.

For more information, have a look at IBM's presentation on their current and future compiler features along with some performance notes on how they got there. While not an example of how this will perform on a Mac, it's definitely a sign of just how much can be accomplished by moving to native compilers - something we can all look forward to in future releases of software on our embattled platform.

The Music Industry

2003-08-29T09:31:02Z

There's a raging discussion going on in the rafters; most of the hub-bub was kicked off by a rip-off of the iTunes Music Store website by downhillbattle.org; it's raised some questions, as has what has turned out, for me, to be a very enlightened response by thehypercube here at LJ..

The issue, of course, is around Apple's profits in the iTunes Music Store, and the share of that money which actually makes its hands into the pockets of artists. Apple takes 35% of the cost of a track or album - that 99 cents, or 10.99. But the downhillbattle site also takes umbrage with the fact that the record companies will likely only hand back between 8 and 14 cents.

The argument is that this was the artist's choice - CDBaby, for example, a well-known label which offers the necessary CD production without bogging individuals down in overhead, takes its share and splits it 9% for CDBaby, and 91% for the artist/band.

In other words, the band knew this when they were walking into the label and signed the contract. They knew that the label would front all of the money for their production and release, and they knew what they'd be getting out of it.. The market isn't nearly as closed as people think it is, and there are other ways, other than the big labels, to get your music out there. These bands are choosing the 'get rich quick' offerings of the major labels, but they had a choice; this wasn't always true in the past, but it's true now.

So I don't actually have a problem with the labels anymore. The RIAA, of course, I still have a few bones to pick with - hence and my involvement with that project. But in the wide world of music, you do get what you pay for; and if you're dumb enough to give your music to the big labels, then they deserve to get your money.

The funny thing is, it's not like everything the big labels produce is crap. Some of it is fantastic, quite frankly - and some of the smaller labels that have been bought by Sony and others have every ounce of the music quality they had before they were swallowed whole.

Artists have a choice; that choice is that they can do for themselves or find elsewhere the things that a big label is willing to do in those package deals that we believe screws the artists out of millions of dollars. Hopefully, we'll see more of them make that choice, as the means with which to get our attention become more accessible.

Oh yes...

2003-07-23T22:15:25Z

It's good to be back. :)

The Nature Of Shame

2003-07-23T22:12:23Z

Today, the BBC is airing a set of episodes on that ever-popular issue, Asylum. This issue has, over the last few years, ripped across the EU; it was the single most important political issue during the set of elections in Austria, leading to the election of the far-right Freedom Party, at least partially in response to the Serbo-Croatian conflict's influx of new refugees of all of the races, including Albanians, into their territory.

Germany, another 'sufferer' has had public cries of dissent over the influx of Turkish, Albanian, and other major nationalities seeking asylum; East Germany still echoes with right-wing comments on this influx. France saw the rise of Le Pen, again in the rural areas, as does the UK and the growing popularity of the British National Party.

We are standing at the edge of a great sea of darkness; throughout Europe, rural individuals are quickly becoming hardline in their support for anti-immigration and anti-asylum policies.

Tonight, this program saw 25,000 viewers call in to overwhelmingly 'vote' to refuse asylum to four individuals of varying claim. In each, one group of people asked their opinion sought to use the rules of asylum to find a way to say no to an individual; another group sought to use those rules to find a way to grant asylum to the individual.

Two entirely different approaches; two entirely different sets of reasoning. Two entirely different outcomes.

On the whole, the responders were wholly against giving asylum to the individuals; whether it be an intermarriage with a Rom resulting in public attacks and medical miscarriages of racism, or a woman who gets into a transport container with her eight family members and arrives as the only survivor, unconscious, her whole family dead from lack of oxygen, the people of Great Britain have spoken, and the words they spoke were unconscionably inhumane.

Utterly horrific. And as such, for one of the first times I can remember, I find myself utterly ashamed to be here. To be sure, things are not much better in America; I have little doubt that people fall through the system there - not the least of which for the reason that Milwaukee was literally full of illegal immigrants; which one might argue is actually a far greater problem than asylum seekers in that country, but who knows. What I can say about my feelings is that I no longer consider myself an American, though I may not be a proper subject of the Queen either...

Utter shame that people are trying to find ways to disqualify people, regardless of their horrors or their stories, regardless of the validity of their request, in the hopes of using rules to deny people asylum and return their to the terrible life that has brought many of them here.

This is the road to fascism; this road, the road these people are choosing, is the same road they damned Austria for being on, the same road that so many poorly educated and desperate East Germans looking for work find themselves on, the same road that led to Le Pen's rise in France, and the same one behind the BNP in the UK. This extremism is based on a lack of education, a populist smearing through media and social fallacy, and gut reactions to inflated propaganda.

Oh, to be sure, there are problems with the system - but so long as people approach the problem of the rules of asylum as a mechanism to disqualify instead of a mechanism to assist people in need, the rules will never be good enough for individuals to feel good about what takes place.

Today I can lower my head; because while I can see that the BBC is trying to do something pure and honest in trying to inform people on the facts of the problem and show people their own harsh interpretation of the issue, I can't help but believe that the road to honest treatment of asylum seekers in this country is a long, long, long way off.

Al-Jazeera translation offline...

2003-03-25T11:36:51Z

That link I gave previously for an automatic translation of al-Jazeera into English from Arabic is no longer possible without registering to Ajeeb and paying a monthly service fee. Unfortunately, there appears to be no other service like it on the web.

If anyone else knows of a free arabic->english site translator on the web, yell. Until then, I can't read al-Jazeera anymore. :(

A Landslide Brought Me Down

2003-03-24T09:51:40Z

The door to my closet remained firmly locked for the majority of my youth. Like many Midwesterners growing up in towns and cities like Milwaukee, where the suburbs were in many ways untouched by the ravages of time that has changed our culture, I grew up in a world void of people of color, of any apparent sexual persuasion other than heterosexuality, and of poor people.

I won't get into warm, fuzzy memories of hot lunch tokens and government cheese. There's no point. We were poor - and like a lot of poor people, we had a pretty tough life. Looking back, I wonder how I survived. At the time, it didn't seem nearly as hard to live through as it does now to look back at. Perhaps that's just youth; perhaps children are more oblivious to the circumstances of their lives than I have the ability to pen into words. I don't know. I have my memories; some good, some bad, and most bring up painful moments in my life. That past shaped me to be who I am today, and I don't know who I would have become had I not lived through those years. I don't often think about who that person might be, or what he might be like.

Anyways, I digress. Like most Midwesterners at the time in the area I lived in, and the areas I knew of (I'm trying to avoid saying it was like that everywhere - but I'd be lying if I didn't say it felt true) I believed being gay to be a relatively filthy, dirty thing. My level of contempt and disgust of homosexuality was fed to me by a culture that gave us the wonders of monster trucks, truck pulls, and WWF sundays. And so the slow and painful realization that I was gay wasn't easy to accept, and I accepted that I was gay long before the image of being gay was positive.

I remember spending a lot of time crying in my room. I used to curl up in bed, in my black bedroom (which, evidently, remains black to this day - my father seems not to have repainted it, even though he moved into the room) with the curtains drawn, listening to music, letting the words evoke tears from within the folds of the blankets. I remember how good it felt, how it felt like anything I could ever want to say had already been said and sung, and all I needed to do was to find the right music, have those words spoken in song, and I would, for a moment, be free from the pain of silence.

It took many years to become comfortable with the idea that being a gay man wasn't something perverse, or disgusting, or wrong, or dirty. It took a lot of tears, and a lot of help, and often that help simply wasn't there.

The big turning point, where I first realized I had a problem, was when I was walking home from somewhere; I was living on 6th Street, near enough to the bad areas of Milwaukee that people didn't spend a lot of time walking around chatting to neighbors. I was walking home when the white pickup truck drove past me, a couple of guys in the front and one in the back; as they drove past, they shouted 'faggot' and jeered, and I turned on one heel, raised my fist into the air, mouth open, lungs full of anger.

And said nothing. I stood there, frozen, and suddenly realized that I was, indeed, and I'd better get used to the idea. The name, that label, had so much negative connotation, so much venom, and yet there I was, a gay man - one who had never told his friends, nor so much as looked cross-eyed at another gay man. I'd never had sex with another man, never kissed another man, never dated or so much as touched another man in that way, and yet I knew, and I had a problem. The problem was, I had identified myself as gay without ever removing my hatred of being gay.

I don't know if it is like that for everyone; maybe it is. It seemed especially hard to undo what had been a lifetime of associations with homosexuality; parents who hated them, a brother who used the words as slurs and the ideas as invective, a whole family of farm-bred rednecks who essentially despised homosexuals and who had ingrained into me the idea that there was something wrong with them - now something wrong with me.

I remember that moment was the turning point, a moment of clear realization when one becomes aware of the immensity of the problem. A moment where one suddenly stands back from the minutiae and details of moment-to-moment life and saw, for the first time, myself - standing in the middle of the sidewalk, watching a now distant white van, tears streaming down my face and arm hanging weakly in the air, afraid of who I was becoming/had become, and feeling desperately alone.

University gave me the chance of going to the local gay/lesbian/bisexual community; I remember seeing a poster for the GLBC, and wandered the halls looking for it, afraid to ask anyone where it was or where I was going. I found a small room in the furthest corner of the community offices in the student union, a cubbyhole; the door was locked, and there was a board with some times on it stating when it would be open. I returned twice and walked straight past it before being able to stop and go in. I was terrified; the memory of that terror is still palpable, and I know now that I must have looked ashen and meek, nervous and afraid. I was welcomed in, asked my name; someone got me a cup of coffee, and I just sat around listening to people as they filtered in and out, chatted with the staff, had ordinary conversations about ordinary things.

They accepted me long before I accepted myself. The memory of that fact is strong, yet the memory that always rises to the surface, like an oil slick on water, is always that one moment of recognition where I saw myself for the first time, ran home, went to my room, put on a CD, and cried myself to sleep.

Read Different.

2003-03-20T15:09:08Z

If anyone is interested in reading the news of the war from a different point of view, how's about reading it directly from al-jazeera?

A translation service which is surprisingly fantastic at translating Arabic to English can be found at Ajeeb, which appears to either be Yahoo or something very Yahoo-like, and translates pages, a-la Babelfish, into and out of Arabic.

To read al-Jazeera through this service, try this link, which does the job nicely.

Note that's a big URL; you can either cut and paste it into your browser's URL box, or click it from a bookmark - but it will not accept a followed link with a referrer different than ajeeb's own service.

Lord of the Rings: The Very Secret Diaries...

2003-03-20T13:49:14Z

Okay, so I stumbled across what must be one of the most funny things I've read in a very, very long time. cassieclaire has written a set of Very Secret Diaries of our favorite Lord of the Rings characters; and as fan fiction, it's some of the funniest stuff I've ever read. While you can follow the link, you can also fetch some of them off of that website.

However, they're better read in her journal, where she's done even more.

Failure to Communicate

2003-03-18T19:15:29Z

When us left-wingers aren’t busy rolling up and smoking our copies of the High Times, we like to relax with a hot cup of FairTrade coffee in our bio-conscious, locally made ceramic coffee cups, and read our copies of the The Guardian before mulching them and putting them into the compost heap in our backyards’ home recycling area.

Today’s comments section has an article by George Monbiot, entitled “Left behind to starve”, lists some interesting figures on our failure to secure the peace instead of securing the war by securing the poor:

Bombing the Iraqis will cost an estimated $12 billion a month
Only $65m has been offered to providing them with food, water, sanitation, shelter, and medical treatment.
Around 60% of the Iraqi people, today, are entirely dependent on the oil-for-food programme, administered by the Iraqi government, suspended by the UN yesterday due to the US/UK war plans.

Now, I don’t doubt that number being given for aid will improve, but here’s a bit of our track record over the past few years, provided by the same article.

Of the UN request for $163m for Eritrea, where 70% of the 3.3m people are vulnerable to famine, it has received $4m.
Burundi received 3% of its UN request, and is now officially the poorest nation on Earth. 1/6 of the inhabitants have been forced out of their homes by conflict and national disaster.
Liberia, where the western part of the country has been rendered uninhabitable by rebels and a half a million people forced out of their homes, has been given 1.2% of the UN request.
Sierra Leone, whose refugee camps are being ravaged by lassa fever, 1%.
Guinea, which has recently taken in 82,000 refugees from Code d’Ivoire where the French are trying desperately to secure a lasting peace, 0.4%.
Somalia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, each less than 6%.

But more telling is the conflict zones with which ‘western’ government has been so closely involved in: Palestine has received 2.9% of the required aid, and Afghanistan 8.4%.

Bush and Blair both made hefty promises of not leaving Afghanistan out in the cold; of handing the country back to its people. It quickly found out that it hand handed it back to a different set of warlords, that security in Afghanistan is falling apart, and the UN’s estimates that $10 billion would be needed for reconstruction over the following five years ignored.

The U.S. spent $4.5 billion bombing the country; it offered $300m for reparations and refused to make any future commitment. This year, Bush forgot to produce an aid budget for Afghanistan. Congress, thankfully, forced his hand and provided another $300m.

The afghan government has an annual budget of $460m - half of what the U.S. still spends every month chasing al-Qaida through its mountains. They’re effectively bankrupt. Upon begging George Bush for cash, good old George responded by handing over $50m, $35m of which is required by the U.S. to be spent on the construction of a five-star hotel in Kabul.

Fortunately, we can expect entirely different behavior when the majority of money the U.S. plans on funnelling into helping the Iraqi people will go directly to the corporate coffers of some of the biggest U.S. companies to have backed Bush’s candidacy for president and full of that corporate 'brotherly love’ we’ve all come to expect..

And Palestine? All this talk about helping the Palestinian people, and we can road map the problems all we like, but our funding of those feelings, evidently, should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

Re: Eric's short response

2003-03-18T14:41:20Z

In a comment on the previous journal entry, E. wrote:

The pertient facts remain:
It is clear that weapons of mass destruction are a goal of his.
It is clear he will not comply unless convinced by a show of force.
France would not let us try impressing him with unified force, so that route is dead.
Therefore, we are using force.

This is a response to that entry.

This isn't a show of force. Having the machinations of war surrounding the country was a show of force. This is a use of force. That clarification is necessary; a show of force does not violate the soverign rights of a nation, a use of force against a soverign nation does.

And in response, let me dig out some more facts:

The weapons inspections during the 1990s destroyed more weapons than were destroyed during the whole of the Gulf War.
A great many terrorist regimes remain supported under current U.S. policy - this is a 'war on some terrorists', like the 'war on some drugs'.
The history of western 'democracy', as put, is responsible for some woeful acts of murder and terrorism of its own; hence, his being in power in the first place.
The majority of the world's people are not represented by American ideals of freedom.
Many of those countries do not have a democracy.
Many of those countries do have the ability to inflict serious damage on their neighbors and enemies; those powers are kept in check today because of diplomacy, and often through direct intervention in the U.N. and other, regional worldwide diplomatic bodies.
The neighbors of the country currently in question, those most likely to receive direct attack, do not want that war.

The next nearest neighbors, namely Europe, is for the most part resolutely against a war on both popular and governmental levels.

And as for whether or not 9/11 is related, no links to terrorism have been proven. The best argument anyone can come up with is that someone might get their weapons from him and use them on America - but North Korea has always been the world's most shady and most reliable source of weaponry, and in almost all respects, represents a much greater danger because of that. Iraq is the easier target - not the better one. And it's only easier if it doesn't destabilize the region.

France believes, and possibly rightly so, that we are ignoring real terrorists threats today which continue to persist, and forgoing those to go after someone who can provably (at least historically) be dealt with through sanctions and an inspection regime. There are, in the eyes of many, a broad number of real hard targets out there which represent groups with not only the capacity for terrorism, but an interest in performing that terrorism against Western targets. As the West plays into the stereotype associated with it by terrorists, that of cultural domination, it increases the risk of activating those terrorists. In the eyes of France, America goes to war and France suffers the repercussions.

Iraq, unlike North Korea, has not been known to provide its weapons to others. Unlike Sudan, it has not harbored volumes of terrorist enclaves. Unlike Saudi Arabia, it has not financed them. Unlike Israel, it has not recently been accused of genocide, and unlike Palestine, is not sending suicide bombers into Iran, Turkey, or any of its other neighbors. Unlike al'Quaeda, it is not global in scope. Unlike terrorists, they have not directly attacked their neighbors or anyone else in a very long time.

All of these things infer that war may not be necessary; certainly the experts we (that's a We the International Community through our governments via our diplomats in the Security Council of the U.N.) asked to review the state of the country, the weapons inspectors and nuclear inspectors, did not find the threat so advanced, found much that was provided to them to be fabricated or false, and specifically requested more time, told the security council that their actions had represented true progress in removal of weapons of mass destruction from Iraq.

The response to the U.N.'s unwillingness to sanction a war this early has resulted in a U.S. decision to go to war without a resolution from the Security Council. Nor would it get the mandate from NATO - because Russia and France, and then Germany, would reject such a mandate. The U.S., unable to get permission to ignore the soverign power of Iraq, has decided to ignore the soverign powers of its partner countries in these organisations. The repercussions have yet to be seen; but it represents a large setback in the ability of the U.S. to use diplomacy to solve its problems, making it ever more reliant on war as a mechanism with which to solve disputes; a mechanism it will need to solve the North Korean issue now rising.

But the idea of running around installing democratic societies in the Middle East is a wider issue than just terrorism, or the sponsoring thereof (of which, by the way, there is no proof of in the case of Iraq to date). Saudi Arabia has some of the highest sponsorship rates of terrorism - and like most Middle Eastern countries, doesn't have anything like a democracy in place. The removal of 'despots' from power is a slippery slope; a slope which one might argue could even be navigated well with careful diplomacy - diplomacy which the current U.S. Government has shown no ability to provide.

The world is full of dictators and non-democratic regimes. Electoral democracies represented 120 countries out of 192 existing countries in 2000, constituting 58.2% of the world's population. At the same time, true 'liberal' democracies, countries which were regarded by Freedom House as having been free and respectful of basic human rights and the rule of law are only 85 in number, and represent only 38% of the global population.

In other words - many of those democracies don't provide their peoples with freedom; and 85 out of 192 countries lack the rights you cherish today. 1 country out of the 192 in 2000 cannot provide a replacement for the remaining 68 countries which do not operate in a democracy, nor enforce legal reform on the 107 countries which do not provide 'freedom'. Not even the 58.2% with a democracy could be guaranteed to succeed in enforcing it on the remaining 41.8% of the world's population. When put in this context, diplomacy seems to be the only answer if we're all meant to get along on this planet.

America and the countries of Europe do not reflect the same type of governments as those operated around the world; previous foreign policy was dedicated to the idea that free trade agreements and inclusion in the world community would loosen the hold of those governments and provide a way for those rights to be spread throughout those governments.

This 'plan', that of replacement through war for those deemed along the 'axis of evil' is a very different policy. More importantly, this policy is not and cannot be applied to all countries named in the 'axis of evil'. Bush is single-handedly responsible for destabilizing North Korea, and endangering the whole of the stability of the tiger economies, who operated primarily on the belief that improvements in trade and communications would result in long-term change for the countries which lacked those freedoms. One man destabilized that balance, which took many years to construct, through one sentence. One careless inclusion.

Democracy, in the last few hundred years, have a pretty bleak record of creating war, strife, condoning executions, installing dictators, and committing general mayhem. Their record is NOT clean. And yet, towards their own peoples, Democracy tied to a free market economy has proven an effective rule. But the history of mankind is littered with the decisions of governments to wage war on others to usurp or destroy the soverignty of a nation; Britain has fought more than a handful.

Name one other country in the Middle East that has a Democracy in the image of America, or even anything in Europe, though. Even Israel is not truly in that class - religion still holds strong sway, enshrined in law and lacking equal rights under freedom of religion. Will Israel be changed from outside? Will we replace the King of Jordan? Is Sudan next, or Egypt? All are full of human rights abuses, all are replete with a broad range of dictatorial and genocidal behavior. Jordan, Palestine, and Egypt have all previously been involved in aggresive war with Israel, with the results you see before you today.

And as for being 'on board' for the next stop in this 'caravan of caring', hopping from country to country and installing peaceful democracies out of thin air? No, the next stop on this list will not be Iran. It will not be North Korea. Any ideas otherwise are folly, one would hope - the Middle East will not allow gradual, selective replacement of their governmental systems, which are not today democratic, by a U.S. military force; nor will the Tiger economies, well within the destructive reach of North Korea, allow the current warmongering result in considerable destructive force that could be unleashed upon the peacable democratic of South Korea anytime soon. That's not pragmatism, you're offering - it's death. And that's from someone who knows full well that North Korea is probably the biggest arms dealer, other than the U.S., and Britain, and France, world-wide.

What you are doing is exactly what everyone accuses Americans of around the world: forcing your vision of the world onto the world. You're living up the very stereotype that made America a target for al'Qaeda terrorism in the first place. Ask any terrorist why he hates the U.S., and he'll list Israel. America gave us the concepts of freedom and democracy; it also gave us Nike's abuse of third-world workers, the monetary strangulation of the World Bank, and pushed globalization down the throats of a broad range of cultures and countries.

What previous policies were all about was getting everyone to adopt those characteristics by showing them its benefits; what current policies are all about is enforcing a very American ideal onto a very foreign sovereign nation; a policy that, the last time it was used by Germany, led to World War II.

What you are saying is the antithesis of what a democracy means for those outside of that democracy; these people are not being given a choice by their ruling parties, and next, they'll not be given a choice by the U.S. and U.K., except to have their choice forced on them after a destructive war and death; that blood, you'll find, sticks to that flag we all pledged our allegiance to, and the blood could take another 50 years to wash out. If America cannot show that it respects the soverign rights of other nations, it's in breach of everything the U.N. was created to prevent - and everything you're saying is just evidence of that slippery slope being present.

Today, we stand at the edge of what could be a very large cliff; and the fate and lives of many rests on the shoulders of those who make the decision of whether to step over that edge.

By the pricking of my thumb...

2003-03-18T11:08:35Z

I know that as a man who was once a military man (Navy), and one who took part in the command and control centers of one of the naval fleet which orchestrated much of the attacks during the first Gulf war, my ex-boyfriend has a very different set of opinions on this than myself. Historically, we've almost never seen eye to eye on the use of military force, and I've never been a proponent of supporting the political leadership just because they happen to be using military force and military men might feel bad if I don't.

As a matter of fact, now that I think of it, I seem to have a strange habit of picking up boyfriends who are distinctly more right wing than my socialist-leaning self. Hmm.

Anyways, I've been written with a note which basically makes fun of the U.N.'s Britney Spears impression (Oops I did it again / Hit me baby one more time) when it comes to the last 17 resolutions on Iraq.

So here's a bit of my point of view; while not the whole truth, it's the part of the truth I find most compelling, that part of the truth which most strongly shapes my opinions on what seems to be an inevitable war:

Bitch all you like about Saddam. After all, :

America put him in power.
The U.S. supported his terrorist regime with CIA training to get him into power in the first place.
Britain built his chemical factories.
America sold him the anthrax facilities and chemicals.
America then screwed the only revolt previously attempted in Iraq against Saddam and left those Kurds to be slaughtered by Saddam, thereby implicating themselves in their deaths; Americas hands, having blood on them from having put him in power, then gained blood on their hands from having kept him there. American politicians have some of the responsibility for the gassing of those Kurds. It's not as if they didn't know he was a madman, they paid for his CIA training, remember?
Britain and America knew at the time of this revolt of both his posession of WMD and his willingness to use them.
Germany then sold him parts for a big gun to shell Israel with.
Britain gave loan after loan to the Iraqi regime during Thatcher's period in power, driven by BAE Systems and other UK military companies.
The reason that 15,000 page document became 2,000 pages when it ended up in the hands of anyone who wasn't the main 5 members in the council is because the names of the companies who equipped him were listed an implicated there.
The reason that this was old news is because the U.S., U.K., French, and German governments were required to grant their permission on those sales before those sales could take place.
The power of the military lobby, at the time, was strong enough to lobby those things through, thereby continuing to prove that Western governments are rife with the kind of moral and political corruption that get us sponsored as Terrorist targets in the first place, and that we need to go through some serious restructuring of our political systems to end that kind of lobbying.
No evidence that the 'big gun' ever worked exists. Lots of evidence it failed was found.
The U.S. and U.K. made what the nuclear inspectors called "childlike mistakes" in their accusations of Saddam having obtained nuclear materials from Africa
The U.K. lifted the majority of it's big intelligence report from a student, directly plagarizing most of the material. Many of the claims which didn't come from the lifted text have afterwards been proven false (the obtaining of nuclear materials) or no evidence has been found (U.N. inspections of the locations named in the report).

There's no denying he's a dangerous man. That's why none of the Middle East countries, surrounding this country that the U.S. and U.K. have decided they want to attack, actually support the war. And just about all of those who are allowing them to use their soil or airspace regardless of their lack of support are doing so for financial reasons.

E. and I have never seen eye-to-eye politically; and I guess I don't expect us to start doing so now. I was young - I was what, 21, and he was 31? There were ten years of difference, and ten years of life experience I didn't have; and yet I know I would have felt then exactly as I felt now, as I remember distinctly sitting paralytic in front of the television watching the previoustime we shelled Baghdad. I've never been a Patriot, and I've had but fleeting moments of feeling any particular love towards America; I was pretty sure I'd seen the worst that America could dish out when I was growing up. I'm not especially pleased to be living under the shadow of it darkening my skies once more' I thought I had left that behind when I left it. American nationalism has never been a force for good in the world - it lend-leased Britain during World War II into financial disaster and delayed entrance to the war until the last possible moment; it saved Europe from the German empire at the cost of the British one, and became the world's largest superpower on the backs of third world manufacturing and a mass media that's so tightly integrated into society that nobody seems to notice that the great majority of your media is run by either News Corporation or Hearst. America is a perfect example of a market-driven morality; the American media the perfectly shaped blinders that allow that market-driven reality to steamroll much of the world. And I honestly believe that America has probably done more damage in the last four months than fifty years of funding the U.N. will have done good - and like Germany today, should things go desperately wrong, it will spend another fifty years atoneing for the sins of their politicians.

The French have some pretty strange opinions (l'exception francaise, for starters); I know, I lived there for two years in Paris, and learned the language. The French have been responsible for more dodgy politics in Africa than you can shake a stick at, and have one of the most corrupt political systems in Europe at the local and regional, if not federal level. And for most of the misgivings of the French - much of which American media pays little attention to, or for that matter the British media - they've made an honest point and an honest stand. France is not in a position to argue with the 80% of its population who do not want war. Neither is Germany. Neither is the U.K., frankly, though it seems that we're close enough to the U.S. financially that our markets practically demand it now.

To pretend that the issue is anywhere near that easy to simplify is preposterous - I've seen world diplomacy at work, in person, and I can tell you that they're nowhere near that frivolous or stupid; the French position was made perfectly clear with the first signing, which the U.S. barely got its 'unanimous' decision on, that they could not condone the path to war, and that an additional resolution would be required. To say anything other than that took place is both political spin and a bald-faced outright lie - and if you don't believe me, go back and read the transcripts of the last UN meeting before the signing. The French haven't changed their position on this in four months now, and the U.S. and U.K. seem to be pretending that France has pulled a last-minute veto out of a hat like a drug-addled Merlin. They haven't. Their position has never changed. And frankly, it is no surprise that a country with close political and popular ties to Algeria, a current hot-spot of *real* al-Qaeda terrorist cells, and other troubled African nations, whose modern population is closely linked both in language and nationality, is unwilling to agree to that war knowing that the problems it would create with its modern population would be rife with difficulty and stir a hornet's nest. In the eyes of the French, this war is wholly unrelated to the real and important fight against terrorism, a fight which is more real to France today than to America. To them, this war is political and real suicide - and they made that clear in November, before and during the signing of 1441.

The fact is, Bush and Blair have not won support of the majority of the members of the council or their member nations, the majority of the European population doesn't support a war, the majority of the Middle Eastern governments don't support a war, and the majority of the Middle Eastern nations, save Israel, are made up of a population of people who don't like the U.S. or Western ideology.

The U.S. and the U.K. lost their gambit. But the dangerous man in power in Washington, who didn't want to go to the U.N. in the first place, doesn't give a flying fuck what the other nations happen to think. And so Rumsfeld gets his war.

To call this war anything but a dangerous unravelling of the power structures that ensure peace in the modern world is folly. The U.N. was not created as a puppet organisation for the U.S.; it was specifically chartered, after the fall of the League of Nations, and the closure of World War II, for being a venue through which nations could discuss their differences to avoid war. It was meant to be an alternative to war. Not a conduit for committing one.

And to think that I could turn a blind eye to that and pretend that I support military action just to keep the boys in camouflage feeling perky and confident, and thereby offer that support to British and U.K. governments is unthinkable.

During the recent march in London, and the corresponding marches around the world against war in Iraq, the U.S. accused anyone who refused to support the military buildup as supporting Saddam by 'muddying the waters' as to the need of compliance. Now, more than ever, those of us against the war cannot be seen as 'muddying the waters' through declaring support for the men in the military and thereby condoning the unilateral actions of our governments.

For as long as this war goes on, I shall fight for my government (the U.K. government - I am powerless to help or hinder America) to end it. We owe those who will die in this war nothing less than our complete and total committment to have done everything we can to prevent their deaths from taking place. If that means that our military struggles on without our support, so be it - the spin doctors would ensure that any support for the military would be spun into support for the actions of our governments.

Blast From The Past, Part 2: On Israel and Palestine

2003-01-31T10:54:55Z

I've had to give a good hard think about something over the last... well, few hours to write, and then three episodes from Season 2 of Sex in the City (why the hell is this show so compelling?) then more work, then Manon at the ballet... anyways. I've had some time to reflect on the subject.

Questions of bias have been raised, and I hope I have provided a response to those; but more importantly, and more to the point, an opinion needs to be re-analyzed in the current context so I can decide how I feel about what's currently taking place.

The question I have to ask myself is, has anything changed since that journal entry? Do I feel the same as I did when I wrote it in June of 2002? Rereading it, I see a good amount of anger present; and the subject of the message wasn't really about how I felt about the Israeli-Palestine conflict so much as it was about the way the media covers it here in Europe. I still find that media coverage upsetting; I still find Europe's insistence on banning discussions of anything that touches that part of its history, or attempts to reflect upon the current day to be the single most frustrating thing about being here. Israel is still untouchable in German media; their national guilt trip to this day prevents them from stating any opinions different than those of complete and total support out loud. Here in the UK, though, the press has definitely changed. Only The Economist, it seems, remains strongly in defence of Israeli policy; but the broadsheets and other media follow a broad spectrum of opinion on the subject, and the level of discourse about what the problems really are have improved much since the original entry was posted.

Anyways, as I see it (with the awareness that it is admittedly flawed in that I'm fed my information by media, websites, personal contacts, and a wealth of nth-hand information), since that time, things have gotten worse - though not in the necessarily obvious way. The worst thing, I feel, to have happened since I wrote that post has to be the elections in Israel and Palestine.

The Will of the People

An election in Palestine resulted in what appeared to be the obvious outcome - the reelection of what many think of as a known criminal and perpetuator of human rights abuses, murder, and mayhem (think PLO less than a decade ago). A man who, without question, must be held responsible for the actions of his people. It was believed by some that if Palestine chose to elect Arafat, then people would be forced, diplomatically, to acknowledge that and deal with him in a solution towards peace. To the Israeli government, the election of Arafat meant nothing of the sort.

An election in Israel likewise resulted in what appeared to be the obvious outcome - an even more unfortunate occurrence, as this now compounds the danger. The papers today talk of the hope that now that Sharon has won the election, Palestinians will do what the Israeli government did not and acknowledge Sharon as the man with whom they must negotiate. But even after his re-election, Sharon refused to meet Arafat; Arafat accepts him as the choice and voice of the people of Israel, but Sharon insists, unrealistically, on ignoring the Palestinian electorate, even in the wake of re-election pressure to create a unity government and settle for peace. Many of us had stronger hopes for a Meretz-led government/coalition, perhaps unrealistically in light of election results.

Why has this happened?

In the case of Palestine, the Palestinian people reacted to American pressure and calls for the removal of Yasser Arafat by thumbing their noses and reelecting them; that however, is not the only truth. There is actual truth to the fact that there are few, if any, in a position to provide leadership, and the American press and government stressed strongly the need to bring in fresh political blood and prepare those people with the skills needed to take those reins of power, so that credible people with the skills needed CAN succeed in running for political office there. There is also truth in that there are a large number of people who voted for him because of his links to terrorism, and their belief that Arafat may be the only one who can provide them with survival. Not peace, survival.

In the case of Israel, we have the Labor party, with corruption scandals on what seems to be a quarterly basis, and whom, we're told by the Guardian's writers, the Israeli people blame for having made the 'unworkable' Oslo agreement in the first place. And of course there's Meretz, the 'peaceniks' of the political system in Israel, and whom everyone seems to think has been body-snatched by Muslim Invaders from Outer Space. However, that isn't the whole story either - the fact is, they've chosen to reelect someone whom a great number of people ALSO think is a known criminal and perpetuator of human rights abuses, murder, and mayhem (think Lebanon, at bare minimum, and you're kidding yourself if you don't - even the Israeli's own government once deemed him unfit for office) - and those views aren't just limited to the Israeli/Palestine conflict. Again, there are questions as to whether anyone but Sharon is capable of succeeding in the political office in the role at this time. And again, there is truth in the statement made by many, that his re-election is about his ability to provide survival, not to provide peace.

Palestinians still line the streets supporting Hamas and other terrorists groups, and the hardline elements of Israeli society continue to grow in political power and strength. Even now, Sharon attempts to point blame at Likud for not joining a coalition government and thereby strengthening the power of the right; in reality both governments are responsible for a preposterous level of propaganda in the hopes of swaying opinions at home and abroad, and neither is doing a whole lot towards actually creating peace. Both sides have decided to make their decisions based on 'survival', and both sides have made their choices.

Governments in the region then stick their oars in, and start supporting terrorist attacks on the settlers as valid targets; governments outside of the region do likewise by demanding that people elected via popular vote be ostracized and ignored as a matter of policy and diplomacy. Everywhere one looks, people appear to be making the waters darker, more cloudy. And still, no real concessions on either side appear to have been made.

Does the election of the men who perpetuate the hatred between the two peoples in question provide implicit support for those ends? I don't know. It certainly suggest that there are elements, popular elements, on both sides of the 1967 borders, who feel as strongly as they ever have that no peace is possible.

And even now, both sides are equally to blame. Now more than ever, though, one wonders whether the popular mandate will grant each side the opinion that the other side has given popular mandate to the kind of murderous acts we've been witness to now for many years; no longer is the leadership alone to blame when a conscious decision by both sides resulted in the return to power of hardline elements.

France was recently confronted with this problem - they were forced to face that hardline elements within their own country were willing to elect hardline leaders; the French reaction to this was immediate and complete - a lot of introspection, a lot of rallying, and a lot of belief that it was the role of every man and woman to do what they could to ensure that these elements weren't given the power to carry out their beliefs.

This hasn't happened in Israel, and it hasn't happened in Palestine. That's more than just unfortunate; that's terrifying. Even more terrifying, it hasn't happened in the U.S., either. Electing hardliners seems to be rather fashionable this decade.

There is hope, though.

On Murder and Exodus - Hardliners in Politics

Ten million people live between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, according to this week's Economist. That's 5.5 million Jews, and 4.5 million Arabs, and in 10 years, that's going to change, in favor of the Arab population. If the conflict didn't exist, and all were members of the Israeli nation, the Arabic population would have more voting power than the Israeli population by the end of this decade, 2010. They aren't, of course, living in blissful, peaceful coexistence, for the most part. That's 4.5 million people living disposessed, without a nation to call their own. 4.5 million people insisting on having one. And the number of disposessed Arabs living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean will outnumber the Israeli population by the end of this decade, 2010 - even without including the return of those exiled from their homeland.

Most European countries have been in this position before - England had India, the Jewel in the Crown, a nation of people ruled by a foreign monarchy, and lost it in blood and war because it was never England's to rule. Admittedly, that's going to be a rather controversial point of view - and standing where we are today, it's hard to imagine this being Israel's story when told a hundred years from now. However, given the growth in population, it won't be long before the Arab members of that small area of land far exceed that of the Israeli counterparts, and as the numbers game changes, the call for freedom will be heard no less loudly than that of the Indian people's insistence on their own self-rule. Rarely is that voice heard without the call of blood.

However, there remains only one nation in the Middle East with a strong military capability and nuclear weapons; that nation is Israel. There is one power in the Middle East with the technical capability to commit genocide; that power is Israel. They have not done so. However, one does not congratulate a government for not committing genocide, in the same way that one doesn't give the U.S. a pat on the back for having killed innocent people in Afghanistan and wiping out a bunch of people at a wedding instead of obliterating the whole country. Israel has held back much of its ability to attack its opponents; it has not done so. This alone says that the far right does not hold total control.

And Israel has reasons to fear - it is surrounded by hostility. But a great deal of that hostility comes not only from the conflict of interest present within the Holy Lands themselves, and control of sacred places like the temple mount, but it arises also from the plight of the Palestinian people - so much so that Jordan allows the Hamas 'press office' to continue to exist within its borders. (And if that's a press office, I'll eat my hat, to boot.) Egypt's own rulership is, well, 'interesting' - most people are well aware of the recent oppression going on there, and the return to hardline religious politics as the economics become more difficult. Even without this, however, the conflicts with Syria and the history of aggressive behavior from the Arab League must factor into any conversation about why the Israeli military has the strength it does.

The economic downturn is strong in the region, as strong as it has been anywhere else; and just like our western societies, facing a surge in support for the political right-wing hardliners (Freak elected as U.S. President, film at 11; Le Pen; The Netherlands and Pim Fortuyn; Austria; etc.) the middle-eastern rulers have seen a return to right-wing religious law where once things were a little more lax in interpretation. New, tightened policies replace the old, more permissive ones, and country after country in the Middle-East has seen a heightening of conflict as they turn their gaze from the hardening of internal policy to the hardening of their foreign policy.

Hardline leaders of Hamas do indeed profess the removal of every Israeli from Israel, screaming Palestine for Palestinians from the rooftops. And the hardline leaders of Israel talk just as much about their belief that the only peaceful existence with the land of Palestine can be a Palestine without any Palestinians in it; there are Jews in Palestine who still insist on having all the land. Both are far from center, and both involve the kind of fascist behavior that gives rise to the atrocities of our fathers' and forefathers' ages. It is our duty to prevent either from happening, both as human beings and as unwitting participants in this play on the world stage - for our own governments involve us in this conflict, through diplomacy and support, on both sides, on a daily basis, and as such, we are all complicit in the actions taken there.

But the political systems of Palestine and Israel, as well as the needs of the people themselves, are such that the people have not given the voice and power to men of peace. Believing that Arafat can somehow turn over a new leaf and remake hardline organisations like the PLO and Hamas into peace-abiding political activists overnight is as much fiction as believing that one morning, the whole of the membership of the IRA is going to wake up, have a cup of coffee, throw their munitions in the bin, and go have a fry-up with the neighbor across the road. Things are never that simple. Nobody's trying to insist they are - or will be. The Oslo accord assumed that over time, the leaders of the region would be able to move the people towards a level of trust where that could be possible. To the layman's eye, that appears not to have happened.

At the same time, while we can all sit around and demand peace, only Israel and Palestine have the power in their hands to make it happen; power now held in right-leaning reins, in bloody hands. Reins handed to them by their own peoples. In both cases, worse choices existed; what we are left to believe is that for both people, their choices reflected their best hope for a future without war. We have to hope that their newly elected leaders know that, and are able to step beyond their personal atrocities and deliver what their people most need - peace.

Blast From The Past, Part 1: Bias

2003-01-30T22:07:26Z

Recently, an anonymous person commented on a previous entry, Honesty Breeds Contempt.

A., one of the guys I work with, turned around when I told him about the follow-up, and my comment afterwards, and told me that actually, I did know someone from Israel; her name is S., and I've likely mentioned her before. I must admit, it never even crossed my mind. I'm generally not good at guessing nationality and worse at remembering it.

My hangups over S. are tied up in her behavior towards myself and others; its a long and complex story. Doubtless she's changed since then; as such, I must admit it isn't S. *now* that I have hurt and damaged feelings over; it's the S. I remember. I wouldn't even recognize her now, in all likelihood. Or for that matter, P., whose forgiveness I once begged for; today I could walk past him in the street and probably not even realize I'd seen him. Doubtless the same is true for them.

But I still live with the memory of my problems, the wake-up call from P., and the cold shoulder from S. I'm not the man I was; and though I begged for forgiveness, doing so now, even if I met them in the streets, wouldn't be appropriate. Like a man who's gone to prison, I've paid my debts in distant lands, and spent a long, hard time trying to undo the damage I'd done to myself that led to that shattering.

Fact is, the people who read this journal probably know more about me than the gang ever did; most of my time I spent silent. I want to believe they knew me; I want to believe I knew them. Or would today. Or could. But I ran away for a lot of reasons, and fear prevents me from reaching out now to find out if there's anything left to rebuild on; I can only assume that either they don't know I'm back, or don't want to. Either way, I've built a new life now, and while I will always have regrets over my behavior, I will never regret knowing them and once calling them friends.

I caused a lot of pain and anguish as I 'fell from grace' (I don't know, I find it hard to say 'lost my mind', 'became a freak', or 'became a delusional, dysfunctional being') and I don't much like the fact she kicked me when I was down - but then again, as I said, I caused a lot of pain and anguish for my friends on the way. Some of those friends have stuck by me, and some haven't, and that's life.

I'd always said I'd live my life without regrets; and like most who make such promises, I failed to do so. I wouldn't trade that time for the world, but if I could go back and change something, it is the one thing in my life I'd have changed the outcome of. Perhaps I am different from having gone through that - but I wish I could have done so without putting others through the emotional wringer along the way.

I don't know. It's a difficult subject - everything around that time in my life is, but that one moment in the hotel room in Germany is probably one of the hardest moments in my life; at that moment, I needed help more than words could say, and... I don't know. I wish I did. I wish that she could have said something other than she did. That call is one of the few remaining scars of a hellish wound; it never quite heals.

As I said, though. She's S. The act of reducing her to 'Israeli' and extrapolating that upon a nation of people is part of what causes many of the problems in the world we live in today. I won't do that. Couldn't. Because in my mind, she's never been 'S., Israeli'. She's been S., there, in the club, or on the couch, or making tea, or buying glitter, or wearing funky trousers and shopping in Camden Market. That's the S. I know. Those things mean something to me. There are bad memories, too - but I don't attribute those to anyone other than the people who are in those memories, and certainly don't overlay any of that into the situation in question.

There's no connection. Feels strange to have to justify that, but there you go.

Anyways, I've had to give a really good, hard think about your comments; you've got some pretty strong opinions, and I don't disagree with many of them, but... anyways, tomorrow. I'll post it tomorrow. I want to re-read it to make sure I mean what I said and said what I mean - it's an important issue, and one I feel strongly about, and I want to record it for my memory as much as for your reading; though admittedly I'm also very interested in your responses.

Back from the dead...

2003-01-24T16:17:25Z

though not by much. Sony is still difficult and depressing; things haven't gone as well as I'd hoped since new management took things over, and the fruits of their (lack of) labor have begun to show a distinct (lack of) fruitiness as of late.

But I have a backlog of confessions to make, so I'll be brief.

M. and I are still together; he seems committed, and permission for him to sleep with others has been re-granted for about a month now, when I realised I was probably okay with it. I was happy to find that for the most part, I was/am, and so we're at least some way along having that trust back.

On the other hand, I will not lie - I think an awful lot more about the possibility of straying than I once did. I know that part of this is 'grass is greener' syndrome, and a certain restlessness, but some of it is certainly a feeling of having taken a wrong turn; that strange feeling at the back of one's mind that you're a bit lost.

More later; I have a train to catch.

Troubled Waters

2002-10-29T10:00:51Z

Sometimes, the water is smooth; the current pushes you along and you swim happily in what seems like a calm pool of possibilities and potential, and life is good. Sometimes, it's all you can do to keep your head above the water and stay afloat. The last few days have seen stormy seas.

There seems little point in describing the metaphysical equivalent of flailing one's arms about, and so I find it difficult to find a good place to start the story; and so, I'll start from today and work my way backwards, in the hopes that, like some of the music of my childhood, it makes more sense when played in reverse than it did when played normally.

It was friday morning, the 25th of October, just over one year and one month after we met for a drink in the Loft in Soho. I woke up next to M., as I have during most of the days during our now more than one year long relationship (Just over one year, two months). I had all of my usual difficulties getting out of bed, of course - in addition to my early morning hypersensitivity to bright lights, and bizarre dreams, and my usual lethargy; as the sunlight fades in the winter months, so go my motivation and my ability to wake in the early morning (the clock is now set to 6:45, and the extra 30 minutes don't actually seem to improve my state of restfulness). Light deprivation is something I've always had problems with, and my seasonal inability to wake up is as frustrating for me as it is for M. The bizarre dreams just seem to become more difficult to want to wake from.

And last night's dream was bizarre - I lay on a psychologist's couch, in a room which extends as far as the eye can see with other little couches, each with a single brain cell lounging on them, rapt in thought and listening to the voice of the psychologist on the loudspeaker. The voice is my own - I'm providing meditative guidance to the cellular contents of my skull, speaking in soft, echoing tones. We start simply enough; breathing exercises, eyes closed. The voice asks us to imagine a beautiful, white house, with a picket fence; there's a tree in the front yard, and it's autumn, and the colored leaves have fallen on the green grass and on the path that leads towards the front door. The narrator takes us down that path, to the front door, and the door opens, and each of us steps inside. Eventually, the narrator takes us through the rooms of the house, and out the back door, where it asks us to look at the blue, sunny, cloud-frosted sky and wake at the count of three; one, two, and suddenly I'm conscious of being awake.

Aside from the remnants of the dream, I awake to the awful sensation of actually being in my body. At the moment, it's not a pleasant environment to live inside - I went to the gym at the office on Tuesday evening, at the end of my work day, to restart my gym schedule. I had overdone it, to say the least - and for the last two days, I've been unable to open doors without feeling my arms and chest muscles erupt in agony, found it difficult to remove clothing. I needed M.'s help to get undressed after he came home and we had our discussion.

The discussion (Thursday evening) was about honesty and trust - and we both decided that we knew where the problems in our relationship had been, where it all seemed to derail. While the little problems were always there - I'm untidy, and tired often, and aren't always as engaging as I should be in my life at home - there was the underlying feeling that we were at a crossroads. I make little promises and fail to deliver - whether that be about taking out the dishes and washing the trash, or planned evenings, or even just phone calls, but it's endemic; I fail to do given tasks often enough that one is left wondering, after I've said I'll do something, whether I'll actually do it or not.

In return, his failure to follow my single request - to inform me, in advance, if he had planned on sleeping with someone else, and to not have 'unplanned' encounters with strangers, so as to allow me to not worry and to plan my own time doing something else, was trodden upon three times in the last two months. He had told me this as a 'clean start' to our attempt to repair our relationship, and my shock and anger over not having been told were palpable. I've even (since) met one of the shags - he had invited the gentleman, B., over to the house for dinner with several other guests and he's a lovely guy. I'm not remotely upset over the carnal part of the actions. It's the failure to follow the one rule I'd set out, a rule that I refused to bend on, that I was hurt by.

I never wanted to have to guess. I didn't want to know after the fact because I would then wonder whether, when he did come home, whether he was going to tell me that it had happened. I wanted to know in advance so that I didn't have to think about it, so that I could tell myself that whatever reason he was late would be unrelated to any encounter as any encounter would have been informed previously and consent, in all likelihood, unquestioningly given.

That rule was broken. Three times. The resulting breach of trust led to me bringing it up in a discussion when he got home at 12:15 due to late train service on the Central line.

Of course, he was late from the party, and I knew this; I had been in attendance at that party earlier, for a half hour or so, before I realised that my muscles weren't going to let me enjoy the evening and I retired home for a long bath, an evening I would later spend wondering why he wasn't at home, and wondering where he was, and wondering in the back of my mind if, when he came home, he'd be obfuscating yet another encounter. The trust was gone. When he came home, I told him about it, and we talked about what I had thought about while he was at the party.

That party was hosted by a friend of ours, who seems to find himself aging another year soon. He and his partner run a small web agency, and are two of the most lovely people I've met/re-met in the time I've known M. K., specifically, I knew from my previous life in England before all the moves - even lusted after him for a while while he was dating J. And at this party were a host of other friends of ours - people I very much wanted to speak to and see, but I simply didn't have the energy.

I had come home early from work, after a pretty good day - but was feeling a bit tender. I'd gone to the gym that day, a recent addition to the Sony offices in Basingstoke.

I had decided to take it easy; but once I sat down at the rowing machine, I began to realize how much harder it had become, how much I've lost in the last ten months or more of not having been to the gym. And instead of taking it easy, I set about proving to myself that I could still do my own workout. Fourty-five minutes later, and I'm dazed, my heart is pounding, and I'm feeling light-headed. I go back to the shower, feeling lethargic and in need of sugar, or carbohydrate, or anything - I do occasionally feel that around this time of day - and get dressed. Returning to my desk at 5:30, I was still shaking and lethargic; I thought maybe a bit of a snickers bar would clear the shakes. The result was quick, and violent; prayers to the porcelain god were answered, my sacrifice of the day's lunch resulted in calm relaxation and a return to normal mental processes.

I got up that morning feeling pretty rough - I knew that his having asked me on the previous day to stay, and not go live with M. in Finchley, hadn't solved the problems that led to his breaking up with me in the first place, but it at least gave us the chance to work it out.

That day had been difficult; I had every intention of staying in bed late, and did so, rising from bed no earlier than 9, to the sound of Matt rushing downstairs, hoping I'd still be home and wouldn't have already left. He came into the room, looking like he'd been crying, and asked me to stay, and we would try to work things out. I must have looked sleepy and dumbstruck; I certainly felt it. I told him that I hadn't actually wanted to go in the first place, and of course I'd stay, because I loved him. And that, of course, was the twisting of the knife in me - because I knew that he wasn't about to respond in kind, he simply didn't know. I consigned myself to live with that fact for a while, until things became clearer.

He said "Before you answer, there's something I have to tell you", in that same tone of voice he'd used to break up with me in the first place. And the following sentence took me hours to digest and get properly pissed off by - that he'd slept with three other people. What would upset me later wasn't that he'd actually slept with them, which he'd quite frankly have my permission to do had he just asked, it was that I was finding this out long after it had happened. I had one rule that I demanded any partner I was with to follow: that I will be told, in advance, of anything that was going to happen with someone else. These soirees would be planned events, not accidental encounters, and he'd still be home that evening. No overnights, no missing persons, no wondering when the other person's coming home, and never a doubt as to what the other person is doing, and with whom.

I retained, or would have retained had I been told, veto rights - but none of the situations I was informed of actually sounded like things I would have wanted to veto. I question his selection, of course - they're certainly not to my taste. B.'s a nice guy, sure, but the random shag in the office and the chicken leave a funny taste in my mouth; certainly not my kind of men to choose. It's being told after the fact, and knowing that he'd kept these secrets from me; he'd even informed me that he'd come home and wanted sex from me every time he'd had sex with someone else. Which, while cute, certainly wasn't helping his case any.

Corrolary to that one rule was that the moment he decided to use his priveledges, we'd go back to using protection during sex. But we couldn't have done that until he told me, and he wasn't about to tell me until now, when he was deciding that honesty about this was necessary before I made a decision to stay.

And so, I did decide to stay. But it's with the knowledge that we may not survive this, that our relationship might already have reached the point where the only thing it can become is "over". That trust isn't there now, two weeks after the events that transpired, and I don't know when it will, or if it will, or if, while he's busy trying to grow together again, I'll end up growing apart.

And so, the end wasn't The End; but it may not be a new beginning.

Days of Miracle and Wonder?

2002-10-19T19:32:46Z

I'm kind of lost where to start, because I'm not sure where and how it all ended; but today, it appears, it did.

On the drive home from Calais, after having got my stamp in my passport ensuring another year's worth of life in the UK, M., who I've been with for just over a year now, informed me that he wasn't in love with me anymore.

I don't really want to talk about it yet - though I'm sure I will at some point. Right now, I'm just feeling lots of shellshock; I didn't see this coming. At all. Whatsoever. So my eyes are puffy, my head is tired, and my body just wants to sleep.

I also don't know what it means yet - are we not together, am I moving out, are we ending the relationship or passing through something different - I just don't know. Neither does he.

But today is going to be one of those days I'm going to have a hard time forgetting.

Tonight, M. and I will sit down to another meal, watch a DVD, and try not to talk about it until tomorrow, after a good sleep.

On How Life Is

2002-10-04T23:18:47Z

It's hard to talk about mental illness. I watched a movie tonight; frankly, it probably doesn't matter which one it was, as I disagreed with its portrayal, but it did broach the issue.

And so did I. Talking about past illness - as, for me, it's now a part of my past, not a part of my present - doesn't seem to be any easier now than it was a few years ago, when it was still my recent past. I've been through some really hard times, and had to spend an awful lot of time convincing myself that a very large amount of what I think I knew was a flat-out hallucination. A reality that I lived in, believed in, and preferred to that of consensual reality.

Of course, all of my beliefs, everything I was at the start of my slide into that state, fed into the delusions. It made that new world all the more convincing, all the more a place I preferred to be.

I remember how difficult it was to deal with the first clash, when it all started to come tumbling down around me. In retrospect, I remember the thing that made me realize that I was probably delusional; and for that, I will always owe Pete a debt of gratitude; though Shimrit has never forgiven me for my behavior. At least I no longer feel I need that forgiveness to forgive myself; and I did that some time ago. Which is much to my surprise, actually, as I've only realised it as I've written it now.

They say that one in four people suffer from mental illnesses in their lifetime. In that statement, I'm pretty sure they probably meant depression, or something rather more mundane than schizophrenia; certainly more mundane than creatively paranoid delusions that wrap everyone you know into a reality that's warm, comforting, and as far from living in the real world you can get and still appear to be so many as a functioning human being.

And I did appear to function; or at least, I assume I did - because while everyone seems to think I was a bit crazy, nobody suspected that I was secretly an awful lot crazy; and nobody suspected that I knew it, I think. None but a few.

The strange thing is, it's hard to remember why. I remember that I needed to choose between the two; that I couldn't really go on living both. Oh, I tried. I held up a pretty good job, and lived a pretty normal life, and most people seemed to think I was a wee bit on the eccentric side. And sometimes, when I'd be a bit drunk, I'd find myself sliding back in that direction - but eventually, it faded. It didn't disappear; I didn't wake up one morning to find that I was perfectly sane again, whole and mended. Even now, the wound is tender to the touch, and I avoid the memory of the details as though it carried the plague.

Oh, I experimented a bit. Dropped fourteen tabs of acid in my flat as an experiment to see what would happen if I decided to write it all out - everything - to produce, on paper, the full delusion in a state where I could see nothing but. The next morning, I went to the N.T. cafe in Darmstadt to have a coffee, as was my weekend morning habit, and read through it, and scared the living shit out of myself (for lack of any better turn of phrase).

Yet, for anyone out there who might be quietly suffering, know this: you have a choice. And somewhere inside each of us is the ability to choose sanity, and to choose insanity. Down the road of delusion is a life that can lead to nothing but misery, as reality chooses again and again to disagree with the world in our minds, leaving us to pick up the pieces. Choosing sanity isn't the comfortable road; for those who've already hit bottom, it's the furthest from comfortable to imagine the world ignored, the world misunderstood, or the world harmed by our actions.

And yet, I sit here now with the firm knowledge that drugs and doctors can't fix mental illness; healing starts from within. And it took a long time; it took months before I felt normal at least some of the time, and years before I felt normal most of the time. And on occasion, even now, I can still see the other side of the fence, and the green grass that grows there; but that grass doesn't give life, and crossing that fence doesn't bring happiness.

Once I realized I had a problem, I realized I could choose. And I chose to live in this world, with all of its faults, and all of mine. I made that decision years ago, and though it took a while for it to become true, it eventually did. Belief is a choice. Sanity is a choice. Not an easy one, nor an instantaneous one, but a choice nonetheless.

Tonight, I told M. a little of what happened. He had that shocked, sheepy look, said it was all a bit much to digest out of the blue, and has gone to bed. I'm pretty sure he's okay, so far.

To a reader, I owe a debt of gratitude for having been there to listen. Thanks.

Years down the line now, I believe I've come out a better person than I went in; though I don't recommend it as a method of self-knowledge. I've seen a part of the human psyche, from within, that most people would never want to see in any person.

I've seen how I can shape my entire perception of reality by choosing what to believe, and how belief filters my perceptions of the world, stains the glass of our view of the world outside. For some the stain is light, pretty, and comfortable, but provides little or no distortion of what's on the other side. For others, during portions of our lives, often by our own hands and sometimes in the hands of others, the stain is darker. Even in the darkest of rooms, in our darkest hours, the choice remains ours.

Choose wisely.

Honesty Breeds Contempt

2002-06-19T08:50:18Z

It's in all the papers, of course. Another Palestinian attack on the peace-loving people of Israel, more bloodshed in the West Bank, and tanks moving into Jenin to contain the perpetrators in a sheath of weaponry.

What isn't in all the papers, of course, is the discussion raging on in Germany. And it should be, because Germany right now is a small mirror of the rest of the world's current suffering - and one we should peer into.

Recently, a book was written by a German author (who happens to be dogged by a Jewish critic) about a fictional author who happens to be dogged by a Jewish critic, and the difficulties he encounters. Sections of it were to be printed by the Frankfurter Allegmane - but it was decided that discussion of that nature simply can't take place. And it's not the only instance - not in Germany, or anywhere else. Everywhere, people are being silenced over the iron-fisted response of countries to 'terrorist threats' worldwide, whether that be in Russia over Chechnya, in the U.S. over its role in Afghanistan and the 'axis of evil' and warmongering over Iraq, in Israel over Palestine, and in the world on any of these subjects and more.

This self-imposed exile of rational discussion is the worst kind of behavior. Our inability to hold this discourse will ultimately end with our own culpability for our inactivity. A handful of Americans have begun to resist this change in their own society, but it isn't widespread yet. Not enough. And those who disagree with even having the discussion aren't afraid to use words like 'unpatriotic', or 'Nazi', or 'fascist'.

Let me make this as clear as possible: Nothing is more unpatriotic, or Nazi-like, or as fascist as the elimination of open discourse.

Israel itself has become like God - unquestionable, pure of motive, and free from blame. Ms. Blair made what is now being called an 'unfortunate' comment about how unfortunate it is that the people of Palestine believe they have no hope and turn to suicide bombing; and Israel's back hair stands up so high that Mr. Blair is forced to come forward and publically defend Israel's role as victim and their right to defend their state through the use of overpowering and excessive force, murdering more innocent in the name of killing the guilty. UN peacekeepers are refused entry Jenin to examine claims of genocide, and the world sits quiet.

Let's not pretend there's nothing that could be done. If the U.S. wanted a Palestinian state to be created, they could force Israel through nothing more than cutting off their funds. The U.S., in large part, is responsible for the creation of Israel, and is in large part responsible for its continued existence and funding. The U.S. has the power to reshape Israel, draw new borders, and change the landscape of that war - or at the very least, to change the discussion. To pretend that the U.S. has no responsibility in this is to ignore what the U.S. has done over the last fifty years with and in Israel and the surrounding reason; America, too, has the blood of Palestinians on its hands, just as so many others.

That's not to say that Palestine is without blame, either - and Yasser Arafat, leader of his people, must and will likely do what all leaders do: take credit for success, and be held responsible for failure. Arafat will be held responsible for every failure to stop terrorist attacks on Israel, regardless of whether or not he is able to control or stop these attacks. Likewise, one would hope, Sharon will be held responsible for war-mongering and bloodshed.

But not in this climate. Not when we can't talk about Israel and use the word 'blame' next to in the same sentence unless the direct object happens to be 'Palestinians' and fails to contain the word 'shared'. Not when we can't paint a picture containing Israel as anything other than the victim. Not when we can't have a hard look at the strong-arming that Israel has done to the rest of the world, nor the smoking gun of the Holocaust they hold at the temples of the people of Germany and the world for past wrongs incurred against them. The actions of the Jewish nation of Israel have more in common with Nazi propaganda than we are willing to admit or discuss publically, and this tendency has spread throughout the world's governments to manifest itself in America, whose behavior has given new license to other governments to commit heinous acts in the name of national security.

America, for the most part, has become a land where people are left completely unable to question their President's behavior or their country's part in open war and bloodshed without being villified as 'unpatriotic'. It has become a country, like Israel, which has granted itself the holy backlighting of the word 'victim' - and paints that word upon tanks and weaponry as they roll into the territory of whomever they consider to be 'evil' this week.

Ordinary Palestinian people pay the price for our silence. Ordinary Afghan people pay the price for our silence. Soon, ordinary Iraqui people will pay the price for our silence. And it will continue until such time as the media is able to show enough people enough bodies, killed as much by our governments as by our silence, to break our repressed social constraints.

If something doesn't happen soon, the societies we live in, tied down and constrained by our inability to speak freely about anything, will pay the price as well - this kind of silence will only reinforce underground anti-semitism, and push those hatreds into a place where they will fester and become gangrenous. Eventually, we will be the one with our backs to the wall. The Republic of Gilead isn't ever as far off as people think it is, and the Handmaid's Tale is one worth telling again.

Recently, it's become public that Israeli requests for German citizenship have skyrocketed; it's well known that there's provision in the German constitution for anyone they wronged historically to, at any time, request and be granted German citizenship. Let it be said, out loud, for the world to hear that if the Israeli people believe they can burn their own country to the ground, and the Palestinians with it, and then re-create their Republic of Gilead in Germany after they've ruined their own, that they can stay home and sort out their own mess instead. Germany's a nice place, and it doesn't need that kind of attitude making it the inhospitable nightmare that Israeli people have turned their own country into by their inability to separate religion from politics.