News – A.D.D (American Dream Disorder)

The remainder is,
An unjustifiable, egotistical, power struggle,
At the expense of the American Dream,
Of the American dream, of the American, of the American.
–Sytem of a Down(A.D.D)

Former Iraqi spy chief Farouk Hijazi is now in US custody. Very little info on this arrest. Tareq Aziz surrendered as well. He’s been Saddam’s front man for some time. Some ordinary Iraqis take this as a good sign that, if alive, Saddam is now on his own in a relative sense.

Reuters seems to recognize the lesson in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the parallels it has for the modern day. Another Iraqi cleric is calling for rejection of US presence.

After years of shunning the Mujahideen, Iranian exiles in Iraq, as terrorists some think that the US might use them to pressure Iran to leave Iraq alone. Personally, I don’t see this as a good idea. Every time we ‘use’ someone, it comes back to bite us in the ass. Seriously.

US officials in Iraq are hoping to get government ministries back to work by the end of next week. Set your timers if you like. Another highlight of issues between US forces and Iraq is present in Mosul, where the president of a gutted university will have nothing to do with US guards, instead requesting assistance from Kurdish Peshmerga.

The seeking of stolen items form Iraq has its own name now. Operation Iraqi Heritage. We’ll just see how much actual heritage they save. But so far there’s no actual heritage saved, just some souvenirs of mundane items of varying degrees of value.

Fighting Words has an alternate look at Chalabi. Is he not so bad as others make him out to be?

Bush has revealed that evidence(that remains unshown) suggests Saddam is injured or dead. By now, no one really cares. Or I don’t, at least. Come back when you have the body, we already know he might be dead or he might be alive. We don’t need to be reminded every week. On a more interesting and annoying note, he also conceded that getting democracy in Iraq could take as long as 2 years. For all our sakes, I hope it won’t take that long. We won’t be tolerated in Iraq more than one year at this rate. And since he’s not planning to invite Chirac to his ranch, seems he’ll be holding a grudge against France for some time. He even wielded the trite term, anti-American. Personally, I hate that term as much as anti-Semitic. You can call any disagreement with you anti-(insert term here) and get people to react stupidly. Get over yourselves, people.

International Papers has something that I thought might appear sooner or later. A new catchphrase among the youth of Zimbabwe, which has been going sharply downhill as a country. “Mr. Bush, when are you coming to liberate us?” Sorry kids, either get some oil, get some WMDs or sponsor terrorist groups to attack the US(Depending on what you think is the most important motivation of recent aggression). You’ll never get a thing otherwise. Today’s Papers have many different views of what’s going on with N Korea. Who knows what’s going on.

Chatterbox highly doubts Newt Gingrich’s claims that France twisted arms in Turkey to get their parliament to vote down allowing the US a northern front through their country.

SARS has claimed its first deaths in the Philippines and Taiwan has quarantined a hospital, with 1,000 medical personnel inside. WHO is concerned about densely populated countries like China and India, and I’m inclined to agree that an outbreak in those countries could be disastrous. SARS has seemed to help define just how much and how little of China that Hu Jintao runs. If you don’t know who that is, that’s part of the point. 😉 He’s the General Secretary of Chinas communist party. In other words, he runs China.

Japan has stepped up to say it would offer aid to North Korea if it scraps its nuke program. A good sign. More enticement to get rid of da bomb.

Colon Powell says he wants action on the Middle East peace plan between Israel and Palestine. Good luck to him getting them to not argue the details, he’ll need it.

Here is an amusing look at The Twins, new villains in Matrix: Reloaded. Apparently, some think that the tendency to make albino’s in movies could be a bad thing. Personally, I doubt it. One amusing bit is this: The Matrix characters do wear sunglasses, however, suggesting that they have at least one thing in common with albinos, who often must avoid sun exposure because of their lack of protective pigmentation. Umm.. did the writer ever see Matrix? Everyone wears sunglasses in the Matrix! It’s part of the cool, bad ass motif Sheesh. 😉

We all hate telemarketers. MSNBC has a nice little look into their tactics. The first rule of winning is to know one’s ‘enemy’. So study up. 😉

A cure for buffer overflow worms? Seems like, but the hard part will be getting it in use, as it rethinks how operating systems and applications work, which could require some heavy change on the part of many forms of software.

Pick and Choose?