I watched, with a friend, a movie titled, Waltz With Bashir. This movie is actually an animated documentary from Israel about the 1982 Lebanon War. The movie is not entertaining at all. I hadn’t read any reviews of it before going, and the way it was described to me gave me the impression that it was at least mostly a work of fiction. That was so not true hehe.
Waltz With Bashir is a very honest look (at least in my opinion) of the Massacre that took place in Lebanon (by Lebanese Christian Phalangists directly and by indirect aid, the IDF) in the Sabra and Shatila camps. If you are not familiar with the Sabra and Shatila Massacre I suggest you click the linkage and read about it (you may draw your own conclusions). The documentary was done by a man who was there and interviews people who were present at the time. The interesting thing to me about the entire affair is that, in my opinion, Israel has (and it’s not just related to the massacre but in other actions) in some ways participated in Nazi like dehumanisation of certain groups of people (be they labeled terrorist organization, or what basically amounts to refugees). But that’s for another discussion.
The movie/documentary is really well put together, and ends with some startling imagery. It was a little long, but at the end even though I wasn’t entertained so much as made informed of Israel’s complacency in the matter and how that further created tensions and militants in Palestine. This documentary (by an Israeli) will give you some more depth with which to think about the tensions that exist between Palestine and Lebanon and Israel. I believe there are torrents of the movie abound.
I keep trying to escape it. Trying to not play that damnable game. Here’s pretty much what WoW feels like despite the new content (and I haven’t even played it yet, but my son has a lvl 55 Death Knight). I have friends there, I rather used to enjoy World of Warcraft, but I just can’t get excited about it. I know it’s going to disappoint me with this sort of thing all over again. Bring me 32 bat wings/mooseheads/whatever. I’ll kill 500 of the frickin’ animals and have 2 of the items I need. How does a bat not drop a wing every time? Seriously.
Limitless Adventure, brought to you by Penny Arcade, an awesome webcomic.
How badly does your day have to suck when you get your arm trapped in a toilet? I’d imagine it’s pretty bad, because not only do you lose your cell phone in the process, but you also have the train stopped and a fire department crew cutting the toilet away from the train. Even worse, you end up being paraded out on a stretcher with the toilet still attached!
That has to be the most embarrassing moment in the man’s life. You can be amused by the article here.
I’ve seen several articles talking about terrorists using twitter to communicate with one another. It’s such sensationalism. Anyone that wanted to communicate with anyone else could be using Twitter as well. The media outlets really like to scare people, it’s kind of weird. Of course a terrorist could use Twitter. A terrorist could also use a telephone, or write a letter, or use a cell phone. They could use sign language, or morse code over via lights in a house or flash lights, or whatever.
The point is, I don’t see any articles being published as if it’s the newest threat to our functioning society because a terrorist might decide to sit down and plan something using a good old paper and pencil. They did it to hackers way back in the day, and they still do it today. Technology creates fear among those that don’t know much about it. All this does it get the paranoid people up in a tizzy and give the bright idea to some politician to spy on us some more. Next thing you know the most sensational news story we’ll see on the front page is, “Stash of Computer Equipment Destroyed in Raid”. None of us will be able to possess them for use other than being monitored in our own homes, or something silly like that. We’ll be living in a society as depicted in Equilibrium, which by the way is a good movie. You should see it if you haven’t already. You can view the trailer at the end of this post.
With domestic spying seeming to become more popular regardless of how harmless it might seem or however improbable it may seem today that it will usurp our rights online or just walking down the street, I believe the course of action to take is really simple: Encrypt Everything. I encrypt everything on my laptop because I don’t want it to be stolen and someone have access to my data, but I really only encrypt things that are of real value to me on my desktops. That’s going to have to change I guess. I don’t use Twitter (because I’m not a terrorist hehe), it’s a highly annoying tool to me. 140 character posts without any real conversation, just updates to people’s lives on a regular basis. To me it was rather tedious to deal with; and besides, I have a cell phone if I want to sms something to someone.
A good example of what is happening with these articles about Twitter a possible tool for terrorists is the same thing that happened to me in High School. It was the early/mid 90′s and having access to the Internet in school was very new. As soon as I heard we had access to it I spent my entire class period in American Literature in the computer lab researching cancer for a science project. Don’t worry, I’d already finished my American Literature work the day before. This included finding a chat room that offered medical information in Yahoo! Chat. There was actually (before lamers and l0sers started filling up the chat rooms and advertising sex everywhere or spamming the rooms horribly) discussion about medical things. People were asking questions and what seemed like fairly knowledgeable people were actually answering questions and providing links to information.
Anyhow, a teacher walked up to me and looked at my screen and despite the page and a half of notes that were pretty much direct copies of what people told me about what I was looking up and links written down, her sole focus was on the fact that someone said “shit” on the screen. So they banned chat rooms in the school. They went on to ban Internet access for a while from students as well. It was a totally unnecessary action at the time, but it turned everyone that used the tools as intended into “criminals”. It doesn’t matter that most people had no idea about chat rooms or how the Internet functioned at all because they didn’t have computers at home. What mattered is that it _could_ feasibly lead one to something unsavory, but in my opinion that’s true for getting up in the morning. So should we ban that too? Eventually Internet access became heavily filtered and the students were able to return to using the Net, but that doesn’t change the fact that similar things happen in society. Society is much slower to change than a school with a thousand or so kids.
That’s probably very over the top, about getting up in the morning. I am aware of that, I’m just using it as a tool to bludgeon one over the head with the point. Just because something can be used for nefarious purposes does not make that something evil. It’s important to mention that the last article I read concerning twitter and terrorists did say that nothing of this sort has been done yet. That’s good; however, it only takes one politician or one organization to pick up such an article and begin the process of making Twitter unfit for use by people who have some expectation of not having the rest of their life spied upon because they happen to say something a little off color on Twitter.
I would love to turn on the radio or look at a news site just once and not have the Primaries thrown in my ear or face. I mean, it’s gotten to where (and had been for a while) I don’t even look at American news sites anymore. I just go to the BBC to get my news. The radio, well I don’t listen to it much other than to catch some music here and there to see if I plan on downloading it or not. Sometimes I download music I don’t even like just on principle.
This isn’t about my downloading habits though, I have a friend in Canada by the name of errr, actually I don’t know his name. I call him Graham. Anyhow, Graham said to me the other day, “So, how do you feel about the Primaries? I don’t even live there and I’m sick of that shit already.” Well, I feel pretty much the same way. The constant news coverage (I wouldn’t mind an update once in a while) is just mind numbing. I noticed that the news does this a lot. We’re completely saturated by some event and then it blinks out of existence for eternity. That’s not my personal preference (and who asked me anyway) as far as news goes. What I’d like to see is a slightly more wide spread coverage of “important” events, and no that doesn’t include what star is sleeping with whom and who has made it into rehab for the 24th time. Then, periodic updates on the things that got covered in headlines.
I understand that both of these issues are thus far two of the largest and most important issues to grace our country in this era; however, I don’t think it warrants this kind of media frenzy as it were. I’d much rather get it in small doses I think.
