So, what will happen when The Day After Tomorrow arrives? When the global warming shuts down the Gulf Stream conveyor and freezes a sizable portion of the Russian deep-sea ports solid?

It's gonna be a flashback to the bad old days when I got frostbite on sentry duty outside our tent. Yep, I've done my tour of duty in the Army. I wanted to go Soviet sub-hunting, but the waiting list was too long so I wound up driving a motorbike for the Royal Swedish Artillery instead. We all knew why the Teboil stations in northern Finland had much larger diesel tanks underground than they ever needed. We all knew what the Soviet subs were doing outside our Baltic naval stations. We all had a needle with atropine ready. We did decon drills and outdoor showers in -15C. It was just a matter of time.

Pulling sentry duty in temps of -30C and a bit of wind chill factor while waiting for the moment when "Superpower Red"[1] came for us will seem like a summer-time walk in the park when the tanks bearing the blue, white and black flag finally come rolling in. Putin's going to be wanting some of that old lebensraum for his precious rodina and he's going to go west to pick it up.

[1] I think I've mentioned this before, but all of our drills and exercises were based on the premise that "Superpower Red" would attack us from the east with a great big tank rush. Except this one exercise when some joker at HQ labeled the aggressor "Superpower Yellow". We all got a good laugh out of that one, what would they do - dig a tunnel to us?

Read this and tell me it doesn't remind you of something happening right now. Here, let me help you:

...In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in Iraq, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Iraq or Afghanistan by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart....

We found most people didn't even know the difference between terrorism and democracy. They only wanted to work in the desert without helicopters strafing them and bombs burning their mosques and tearing their country apart.

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Iraqifying the Iraqi....

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Iraq? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says and says clearly:

But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is terrorism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the Terrorists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.

But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight terrorism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now....

We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the Congress of the United States of America which as the power to raise and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power to declare war.

We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we should be out of Iraq now....

We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to ask where are Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, and so many others. Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded.

The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....

...

Editorial Note: Concluding his formal statement, Kerry commented about administration attempts to disown veterans and looked forward thirty years (to 2001) when the nation could look back proudly to a time when it turned from this war and the hate and fears driving us in Vietnam.

Yeah, right. Welcome to the doubleplusgood future.

Yesterday I read the local newspaper summary of the recent dig in Habra, Iraq. There are a bunch of mass graves, probably from the late 80s and probably filled with kurds, at least 300 of them but there could be up to a thousand in there. The Iraqi butchers had separated the men from the women and children. One boy still held on to his ball. One young mother was found tightly clutching her infant to the chest. The infant had been shot in the neck, the mother in the face.

The parallells to My Lai/Song My and countless other war-time atrocites (the Holocaust, anyone?) are way too strong to ignore. It seems that almost all warfare since the dawn of time has hinged upon de-humanification of the enemy and subsequent slaughter of non-combatants. A leads to B which leads to genocide and ethnic cleansing. Easy as that.

And for what?

What did the Third Reich actually gain from waging war on their neighbours? How did killing six million jews, twenty million soviets and millions of gypsies, disabled and retards actually help the nationstate of Nazi Germany prosper? What did they gain from occupying large parts of western Europe, stretching their military all over the continent? Why did Saddam (and Turkey) insist on not giving the kurds their own state and instead expend billions of hard-earned dinars on keeping a resistant people in check? Why doesn't Putin simply walk away from Chechnya? Why did the US step into Vietnam after the French gave up and called it a day (as an outside observer, being neither a yank nor a frog, it's pretty obvious the French are a lot smarter about picking their battles than the US.)? What is Israel doing in Palestine? How about the former partly ethnically cleansed republic of the remains of what was once known as Yugoslavia? Rwanda? What's with Sudan, right fucking now?

What's in it for the aggressor?

For one, they get a lot of problems. They have to keep the occupied peoples quiet, ie post large military forces there to keep them down. A resistance to occupation is as natural as day and night. Northern Ireland, say no more. This drains the economy of the invader and puts significant stress on their own population once the "us or them" rhetoric wears off. Is it to get at natural resources? Maybe, but historically those don't directly lead to genocides, large land grabs or occupations - they are targeted military operations like Rommel's in Africa and the first Gulf War. And it doesn't have to be oil, it can easily be water like with the Golan Heights. So what else can prod national leaders to whip up a frenzy and take up arms against their neighbours?

In some cases, it's a convenient way to rally the people around yourself and create a climate for pursuing an agenda - like the second Gulf War. So why exactly did Argentina try to take the Falklands? And why did Maggie want them back? Strategic values? Please. Let's go to war over a bunch of sheep and a lighthouse. Yeah, good idea!

What The Fuck Are They Thinking?

Are they thinking, at all? I just don't know anymore... If we get the politicians we deserve, I wonder what the fuck we could have done to deserve these. Some days I'd like to just nuke the whole fucking planet and let it do a hard reboot.

I mean, it's not like the germs and cockroaches would do worse than us.

Gaia #> shutdown -r now

They came in the morning.

The small farming village in the midwest, let's call it Backwater because that's as good a description as any, had just woken up and gone to work when the villagers heard the choppers. The invaders had finally come for them. Most of the farmers were already out in the fields, breaking their backs tending their crops when they landed and the soldiers poured out. Two companies threw a ring around the village while C company went in. Phil Johnson and his wife hid out in the fields when they heard the first shots, afraid not so much for themselves as for their children - they had left their 7-year old daughter Mary and the small boys Tommy, 5 and John, 4 in the village. They didn't dare return to their house until nightfall, long after the soldiers had left.

The leader of the soldiers were a man named Mohammed Al-Tikrit, a regular joe in his civilian life before the war. A stable family background, no known psychological issues, no problems. Well, except his fear of the Americans - the difference in his and their culture was too great so Mohammed and his CO had built a sense of distrust and hate against the natives among their soldiers. Today, that strategy would pay off. They had begun by killing captured enemy soldiers, went on to kill captured enemy civilians suspected to be guerilla soldiers and finally they killed anyone with white skin they could find. If they weren't soldiers, they probably helped the guerilla movement or was thinking about it. Formally, this was prohibited by the invading force, a punishable offense. In reality, noone cared. The whiteys weren't really people. The American Freedom Fighters, as the resisting guerilla called themselves, were just animals that should be slaughtered before they could slaughter you.

It began as soon as the soldiers came out of the heilcopters. A farmer in a nearby field waved and got a short burst of bullets in the chest for his troubles. The villagers ran for cover and the soldiers all started shooting them as they fled. One of the first to go down was young Sarah Hansen with her infant brother Chuck tightly clutched in her arms. Pumped up on adrenaline, the soldiers broke up into small bands of looters roaming the village, dragging people out of their houses, screaming at them in a foreign language and then, frustrated when they didn't get a coherent reply, shot them on the spot.

One invading soldier chases a duck with his bayonet. Another shoots a pig. A group starts pumping lead into a cow, watching it disintegrate before their eyes as the carcass slowly sinks to the ground in a pool of blood. An old woman looks in despair from behind a bush and when the soldiers see her, they all turn to her, ripping her frail body to pieces. Bits of bone flies through the air. One of the soldiers only has a grenade launcher and desperately tries to trade it for an AK-47 so he too can take part. He finally gets one and shoots the head off old Jack Pearson, watching him fall as his brains spill out on the ground and the gushing blood forms a red cloud around him. One of the invaders vomit, but most of them are like robots. Killing indiscriminately without showing any emotions, even laughing. Another opens fire at Courtney Jackson, but he's 25 yards away and only manages to shoot the face off the baby in her arms. She slips into the Post Office and the order is screamed to find and kill her.

Some soldiers finds the time for other activities. One stops Jenny McCabe and puts his pistol against the head of her baby sister to make her suck his cock. After he's done, he kills them both with shots to their heads. One girl gets gang-raped and is rewarded by getting a stream of bullets up her vagina.

A group of women and children are brought out of their shelter near the gas station, by a small grove of trees. Anne Rich, one of the few survivors, tells the harrowing tale: "17 of us hid from the soldiers, but we were dragged out in the morning sun. My sister-in-law and her five-year old son stood in the front of the group and when the soldiers ripped off her blouse and started touching her breasts, she tore free. They didn't like that so the shots started to ring out. They aimed for the heads. I stood to the back, clutching my 3-month old baby to my chest as my friends started to fall. I was lightly wounded in the head and fell under the bodies, holding my hand over little George's mouth to keep him from screaming. They left us for dead, awash in the blood of our neighbors."

A few soldiers tried to fight against the massacre. One tries to bandage wounded Americans. Others let villagers flee. Some refuses to kill the women and children, break down crying or simply walk away. A helicopter pilot sees the killing from above and lands, seething with rage, threatening to kill his fellow countrymen if they don't stop the slaughter - saving a few villagers while keeping his own kind at gunpoint. Some soldiers perform mercy killings; a 5-year old boy with a puzzled look on what's left of his face runs into a group of soldiers, not far from the Texaco gas station. His left hand has been shot off and he's bleeding profusely. One of the soldiers walk up to the boy and turns his head away as a three-shot burst from an AK-47 is heard.

The grand finale took place at the outskirt of town, by Jake Williamson's farm. He had this big old irrigation ditch there and the soldiers, led by Mohammed Al-Tikrit, pushed the remaining villagers there and stood them up in a line by the edge of the ditch. He gave the order to kill all of them and started pushing them into the ditch. Some cried and screamed. Tommy and John started running, but a soldier got John with a bullet in the back and he was lying slumped on the road when his brother, who had gotten away into shelter behind some rocks, ran back to cover him with his own body. The invaders shot them both where they lay and threw their small bodies in the ditch where Phil Johnson found them, long after the soldiers had left.

Mohammed started shooting into the heap of people in the ditch. First one, and then more and more soldiers helped him. Bodies twitched in spasms as the bullets rendered their flesh. Blood gushed in clouds. Pieces of brains, tissue and bones flew through the air. A few granades was tossed in, for good measure. Then all was still, except for a small boy of two. It was Jake's son, Charlie. Like a bloody apparition, he dragged himself out of the ditch crying silently and started to run for his father's house nearby but Mohammed catched up with him, carried him back to the ditch, tossed the toddler back in the heap of bodies and shot him.

---

This is a true story. This is what really happened on the morning of March 19, 1968. But the village wasn't really called Backwater, USA. It was Song My, Vietnam. Mohammed is a man named Calley. Tommy and John were really a pair of gooks named Ba and Cu. The AK-47s were M-16s. Anne Rich is a woman named Le Thi Huynh.

The invading soldiers were Americans. Four of them would stand trial for their actions. One of them, William Laws Calley, was convicted and spent all of three days in prison before being confined to his house and then subsequently pardoned.

When John Kerry testified in front of the senate, he was trying to restore the honor of all the thousands of American GIs that didn't take part in the Song My massacre or any of the other atrocities that occur in wartime. He did not steal anyone's honor, no more than that helicopter pilot did when he tried to stop the massacre. They tried to give honor back to the ones worthy of it. The real blame lies on the politicians and military top brass that swept the crimes under the rug, bundling all the honorable soldiers with a few war criminals instead of clearly separating the two. Those are the real thieves here.

The movie Stolen Honor isn't about John Kerry stealing anyone's honor by telling the truth. It's about stealing an election by trying to, once again, sweep war crimes under the rug. Pretending they didn't exist and thereby painting all Vietnam veterans with the same blood-stained brush normally reserved for psychopatic war criminals. And that's the real theft of honor here.

In my quest for stuff that can be modeled in a FPS game engine, the turn has come to the filesystem.

I know there's a project for interacting with and fragging processes in Doom, so why not navigate the filesystem the same way? Walk into subdirectories and find a bunch of Doom3-style PDAs that you can pick up and watch, listen to or read. Want to delete a file? Reach for the plasma rifle. Move? Drop the PDA in another room or just teleport it across the network.

For version 2.0 - combine them. Watch your processes as they read and write files. If one of them tries to open a file it shouldn't - frag the bastard! Open up a door to create a new room or make it a link to an existing room.

Windows' new background update service is really getting on my nerves. I. Want. To. Restart. LATER! I DON'T want to have my computer asking me every five fucking minutes if it's OK to restart. What, my computer's got Alzheimer's now? Can't remember what I answered when it asked me the same stupid question just now? I'll restart Windows when I'm fucking good and ready to restart Windows. Get it? Stop stealing focus when I'm writing!

I'll be coming over to Redmond soon, asking around for the idiot that came up with this "feature". I'll be packing a friend. It will be listed as an "enforced Darwin award" on the autopsy. The jury will want my autograph. There will be websites singing my praise. (There's a bit of video. Watch it. It's disturbing as all hell and still oddly satisfying.)

It seems Google is now giving out invites like candy (thanks to freejung for that soundbite). I got four of them with no apparent takers. Anyone? Even Gmailfortroops.com have more invites than troops right now...

Also, I was kinda hoping this would be a smash hit, earning me lots and lots of money. No such luck. It seemed a good idea at the time(TM).

Alsoalso, GMail's Report Spam button doesn't work. I (Sergey, it was a mistake, I swear!) hit it on the Welcome to GMail message and it disappeared to the Google basement where they keep their old surplus KGB torture equipment, but newbies still get the message so I guess they let it off with a warning. I was kinda expecting a dialog box, BTW.

Alsofurthermorealso, my initial plans of registering user accounts 1@gmail.com through 999@gmail.com to create a TB of online storage fizzled out as I 1) realized that Sergey would come home to me, say "Terabyta piraata bastard!" and tug my earlobes really hard, and 2) I wouldn't be able to come up with, not to mention remember, a thousand secure passwords. Besides, I already have a TB online. :-P

So I had read the Scientific JFK Assasination site and was all content with LHO as the lone gunman when that pesky Altman photo showed up again. With Lee Harvey Bloody Oswald standing in the doorway of the bottom floor of the Texas School Book Suppository at the same time as JFK is choking to death on a pretzel. No wait, wrong prez.

Anyway, it occured to me - in one of those rare absolutely crystal moments you get just before you fall asleep - that it should now be perfectly possible to re-create and simulate Dealey Plaza using one of the commonly available 3D game engines around - Source and the new fancy Doom3 one comes to mind. Put all of the people in there (there are enough photos and info available to account for every man, woman, child and alien killerbot in that square that fateful day - we can even add E Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis for the conspiracy buffs). Put a Mannlicher-Carcano on a box near a window and press play. Take a shot. Hell, be my guest. Take three shots. Make the bullets leave a trace in the air and stop the action after the third shot. Is it magic? Did the Governor's hand line up with JFK's throat? Did his head jerk backwards or forwards? Try it out for yourself.

Go ahead. Make the mod.

Take the shot.

Back and to the left.

Before we bought our house a year ago, we rented a house in this very same village. That house was on a sheep farm, built in the '30s to accomodate the old folks of the farm so the younger generation could have the big house to themselves. Anyway, we lived there for ~3 years and occasionally, I helped them feed and water the sheep (~70 ewes, some bad-tempered rams and upwards of 120 lambs at most) for a week or so when they went on holiday. Sometimes during lambing season, we saw the vet's car. Nothing major, they lost a lamb now and then and sometimes a ewe. Life goes on.

Thursday, I was on-site with a customer, fixing things as usual. It took me a while so I didn't bother dropping off my backpack of tools (a 20GB USB drive, misc bootdisks, screwdrivers and stuff) at the office but instead brought it home. After dinner, I got the idea to walk down and see if they still needed help with a computer (I'd ran into them a few days before and they mentioned some issue with updating Norton Anti-Virus). When I got there, they were in the farmhouse, gathered around a ewe, looking worried. Monica had her arm in there, swearing and cursing. Turns out, the ewe had given birth to one lamb, but there was another one in there. Stillborn, except it wasn't born yet and Monica had been at it for close to an hour and was getting mighty tired in the arm. One of the problems with stillborn lambs are their teeth. Their mouths drop open and the teeth are sharp as knives. Not good for neither the mother nor the midwife. I helped fetch a few things but after a while we got the idea to lift the backside of the ewe to try and make it easier for Monica to move around in there. I got changed into an old orange overall atleast 3 sizes too small and got in the pen with them. The straw on the floor was soaked with blood, sheepshit and only God knows what else, but we lifted and after a while, she got the head out.

However, the lamb's front hooves were still in the way, Monica's whole arm was going limp and the ewe wasn't getting any better so I asked if I could try. They exchanged glances like "what the hell, she's dead anyway - we might as well get some entertainment out of the deal" and a quart of Iodine, soapy water and medical lubricant later, I was going in.

I had half expected a smooth, fleshy tunnel of sheepy vagina. What I got was a coarse trip through bone canyon without a paddle. I could tell by the sounds coming from the front end that my hand and wrist were way bigger than Monica's, but I was rested and pressed on. After ten minutes or so of navigating through remains of miscellaneous membranes I decided that I had to push the head back in to make way. We tied a noose around it, I pushed it back in, the ewe screamed like a banshee but I got a hold of the right front leg and pulled it out together with the head. It wasn't enough, it was still stuck. The vet was way off at the other side of the county, the ewe was dropping off and we knew we had to hurry if the first lamb was going to have a mother. I lubed up and went back in. My hand started to cramp just as I was grasping for the other hoof but I gritted my teeth, managed to bend it inwards and pull it, the neck and right leg out. Monica screamed with joy and kissed me on the cheek. :-)

I got washed, changed out of the overalls, washed again and was offered a wide assortment of destilled beverages and a ride home but I declined all offers and walked home to a very long, hot shower. My parting words were "When you get the vet here to check up on the ewe, ask her to fix the computer and we'll call it even". ;-)

Monica dropped by yesterday and told me that the ewe hadn't eaten much since, but she'd gotten a shot of cortizone and some lime and she'd started to drink water and appeared a little friskier so they have good hopes for her. She's not producing any milk so the first lamb is being bottle-fed for now.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

FAIR has a nice little summary on media reporting on the end of the UN inspections of Iraq 4 years ago compared to their reporting on the same event today:

Excerpt:

The chief U.N. weapons inspector ordered his monitors to leave Baghdad today after saying that Iraq had once again reneged on its promise to cooperate--a report that renewed the threat of U.S. and British airstrikes.
--AP, 12/16/98

Information on Iraq's programs has been spotty since Saddam expelled U.N. weapons inspectors in 1998.
--AP, 9/7/02

On the use of Sarin gas in the war against Iran, the US State Department issued a stern verbal protest against the legitimate government of Iraq (guess who) but balanced that out with the following reprimand against Iran:

"The United States finds the present Iranian regime's intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations."

Bada-bing!

"In September (1988), the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill to impose sanctions on Iraq. These sanctions were nothing like today's global embargo. They called for a halt to U.S. military aid, commodity credits and loan guarantees and a ban on U.S. imports of Iraqi oil--which, in a global oil market, would have a token effect compared to the post-Gulf War global blockade imposed by the U.N."

The Reagan and Bush administrations "adamantly" opposed the bill, calling it "premature" (New York Times, 1/8/89, 9/15/88), and eventually the bill died quietly in a conference committee after being further watered down. Sanctions "would hurt U.S. exporters and worsen our trade deficit," Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly told a congressional panel in June 1990, six weeks before the invasion of Kuwait. (Kelly is now the Bush administration's top State Department official for East Asia.)"
Source: http://www.fair.org/extra/0209/iraq-gas.html

Read:
FAIR on Iraq
Human Rights Watch on Iraq
Perfessor Multigeek's journal
Twirlip's journal

The latest (but most likely not last) breach of security in MSIE details a way to run any program on a user's computer from a remote webserver. A demo site runs logout.exe which promptly logs out the user from Windows. The official response from a MS Sweden representative is to rename logout.exe to something else. He did not specify what one should rename format.exe to; maybe stupidbastards.exe would be a good idea?

But seriously, is anyone stupid enough to still use MSIE? I mean, they should be on Jackass or a special online edition of the Darwin Awards. It's like breaking into a military biological research facility only to drink from all the sealed vials you can find.

The other day, while playing Counterstrike online, the thought occured to me to use the same basic rendering engine for more than just a lot of FPS games. I have heard of someone building a flightsim around the QII engine, but never seen it. Yesterday, a friend told me about C&C Renegade, a FPS game based on Command & Conquer.

So what if someone (this means iD, Blizzard, Westwood and/or Sierra/ValvE) were to make a hypermassive multiplayer online RTS/RPG/FPS? With almost all aspects of war integrated? Imagine someone playing a flesh-and-blood general on a tactical level, sending out orders to real, live players in a flight sim with F/A-18 Hornets to attack a SAM site staffed with more real, live people. On the ground, there would be battles fought between tanks and Delta Force-style snipers would seek out the opponent's leaders.

The client would use the same basic engine for gameplay with different GUIs for the different levels, kinda like Counterstrike is a mod to Half-Life which basically is a mod of Quake. When starting, you select if you want to be Air Force, Navy or Army and then what you want to do: Pilot a fighter, manage supply routes, man a SAM battery, aim a howitzer, crack enemy codes or be a grunt with a machine gun. Imagine the clans/platoons/squadrons that would evolve. Positions that no one wants would be filled by computer-generated players on the servers. Ah, the servers. One game on a cluster of servers world-wide. And there would be real-world money in it. Arms dealers would spring up on eBay. Whoever makes this game will be rich - if they do it right. And I've got prior art. ;-)

Of course, this doesn't have to be set in a realistic world, the Game could easily work StarCraft-style or for NOD vs GDI or for replaying most of WWII.

Now, methinks this can be built. Should it be done? Would it help ease tension in the world - act as an outlet for agression if you could bomb the crap out of a simulated Afghanistan? Or would Al-Qaida use it as a training camp? Discuss.

One client to fight them all, and on the battlefield smite them.

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