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September 30, 2003
A good day for baseball.
Saw seven innings of the Twins beating the Yankees (it was 3-0 when I left; the
final was 3-1), had screenwriting (which seems like it will be fun and has nothing to do
with baseball but it happened to go there time-wise), and then watched the Cubs beat the
Braves. The extent to which this game was frustrating and then nerve-wracking can
barely be measured, but it's the first Cubs playoff game and probably one of only a
handful I actually watched from start to finish (on television, that is; I don't believe
in leaving the stadium early). Although my superstitious self was nervous as crap to
have up a Cubs away message, wear my Cubs jersey, and watch the game (and, now, write
about it), my pragmatic self knows that, as a die-hard Cubs fan, it would be far more
stupid not to do any of those things, regardless of whether it seems to
"cost" the Cubs or not. (Since I'm an atheist, it's not obvious what
exactly would be able to transfer my actions into losses for the Cubs, anyway.)
At any rate, Wood pitched a great game and drove in the
winning runs. The offense was not exactly spectacular, stranding something like
80,000 baserunners (including blowing a bases-loaded, no-out situation in the fifth), but
it got the job done. Tomorrow's game scares the crap out of me, what with Carlos
"10.25 ERA in his last two starts" Zambrano taking the hill. The Cubs hit
Mike Hampton pretty well in his one start against them this year, getting five runs on 11
hits in seven and a third (though the Braves won that game by roughing up Prior in his
worst outing of the year - but I suppose we can thank them, since that was the game in
which he was injured, after which he came back in massively dominant fashion), but then
the Braves pounded Zambrano for seven earned on eight hits in just five innings two days
later. Unfortunately, I like the Braves' chances to win a slugfest (wouldn't you?),
but I suppose Zambrano, who is going on a little more rest at this point (his last start
was September 25), might always regain the form he displayed as recently as September 14
(when he gave up one run on four hits in a complete game, and lost when the Cubs
failed to score any runs against the fucking Reds of all teams), instead of it being the
case that his arm went dead. We can always hope, anyway, even though, being Cubs
fans, we've learned to expect only so much.
September 28, 2003
Where does the time go? We had the New Student
Week quiz bowl tournament tonight, and five teams of freshmen showed up. Not
astounding, but we only had three staffers, so not too bad. A lot of them seem
pretty pumped about quiz bowl and ready to come back, too. They also found the gag
prizes - a fine selection of crappy film novelizations that Colby and I had hand-selected
at Bargain Books (motto: "We're on Dodge, not Ridge") - pretty funny, which sets
them up well for a career of receiving things that cost practically nothing but have
relatively high humor value to be found in their crappiness. One of the teams -
predictably enough, the one composed of girls - actually left after the second round,
which resulted in a little schedule shuffling on my part. It ended up working out
pretty well - the two best teams faced each other in what became a de facto final due to
point differential, so we got to trim off a round and save everyone some time. More
importantly, most of the freshmen I talked to enjoyed themselves, and that gives better
odds that they'll come back. Of course, we may or may not have the kind of money
necessary to drag several teams to every tournament, but this organization has to survive
somehow. Some of the frosh actually live on my hall and are pretty cool, which is
always good. Also amusingly, a few of them (not the NMQ ones, but other ones) had
been to this website and called it "pretty cool" or something. They're
probably just buttering me up, but if they're reading this, thanks.
A new Top 20 poll, for
your perusal. It is a tad skewed by the fact that some people apparently noticed
neither MSU's defeat of Iowa nor Wazzou's pasting of Oregon, but that's okay.
I'll be working my ass off tomorrow and over the next few weeks doing
stuff for Wildcat, so let's hope I can juggle that with everything else. It's not
that I thought quiz bowl president wasn't going to be any work, but damn, there's a lot of
work to be done.
September 19, 2003
Saw Lost in Translation with Drew tonight. It came very highly recommended from Marc, which I don't think surprises me at all. I don't know if I liked it as much as Marc did, but I think it takes the lead for my Best Picture so far. I also think I wrote a pretty good review of it, but that's just me.
September 19, 2003
The twelve-hour drive was fairly uneventful. It did end
up taking pretty much exactly twelve hours - that's with 45 minutes of stoppage time, but
then I was going 80 pretty much the whole way. (Case in point: it took me just four
hours and fifteen minutes to cross Pennsylvania, which is well over 300 miles long.)
Pics of the new room. This first one looks from the
door toward the window. You can see that we've got a repeat of the first two years
with this freaking gigantic monitor; thankfully I have this wireless mouse and keyboard
now, so I'm way over on the bed, instead of having my eyeballs touching the screen.
In the second one, you can see
what makes this room so expansive compared to your average single - it's basically a
double, except one side is slanted in so you don't have all the room of a
double. The two closets, one on either side of the door, are the vestigial remnants
of the room's doubleness. (The room actually had two sets of keys, which confused
the RAs to no end until they realized that it wasn't a real double with one
person in it, but rather a very large single. Why there were two sets of keys, I
have no idea. It's clearly not big enough for two people, though it's ample for one.
The floor space - my god, the floor space!)
September 17, 2003
I leave for school tomorrow. Crazy. My digital camera and card reader are both working now, so expect lots o' pictures (if you really love the Australia journal - well, you're weird, but you'd better read it now, because I'm likely going to remove it soon for the space). For example, I got new shoes.
Oh, new movie review.
September 14, 2003
A new Top 20 poll is up. Also, if you missed it, Dave and I are at it again. I know you care.
September 11, 2003
Well, it's September 11. It's a time for
national remembrance, somber reflection, and by all means, unquestioning support of the
administration that has gotten us through these tough times.
Skip it. Aside from those who actually lost loved ones in the
9/11 attacks, I think few people have been as affected as I have. Not just because I
came pretty close to joining the former list, but because I'm the guy who wants to pretend
9/11 didn't happen. (Remember?)
Oh, there are people who seem more affected, of that I've no
doubt. But there is a difference between actually being affected and being affected
because you feel a responsibility to be. I don't mean to criticize anyone here; the
Bush propaganda machine is strong, and I don't think anyone is pretending a sorrow over
9/11 they don't feel on some level - but let's face it, most people in this
country didn't have even the slightest connection to the attacks. Neither they nor
anyone they knew were even close to being in harm's way. They take national moments
of silence (I was quite silent at 8:46 this morning, unless I snore) because they think
they should, and because the government tells them it's a good idea.
This brings me to the difference between
people like me and people like them: the way in which we remember. Some people
remember with blind patriotism, an unquestioning support of the government that, put
simply, it hasn't earned from us (more on this below). The rest of us remember by
not taking our civil liberties for granted just because the government tells us it would
be useful for them if we did. If you stand for the American way of life, you can't
support blind patriotism. People confuse the two all the time. Supporting the
government is not supporting American values if the government is seeking to inhibit those
values.
The biggest deterioration of our national security and personal safety
since George W. Bush was elected is due to a single group. What's that? No,
it's not al Qaeda. It's not Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party, either. Ready?
It's the Bush administration.
According to Al Franken's wonderful book Lies and the Lying
Liars Who Tell Them (buy
it, liberals), the Clinton administration was responsible for preventing acts of
terrorism all over the world, and was going strongly after al Qaeda. On its way out,
the Clinton administration decided it didn't want to hand Bush a war, and instead gave the
new administration a comprehensive plan for the eradication of terror in general and al
Qaeda in particular. Franken quotes a senior Bush official who said the plan
amounted to "everything we've done since 9/11." Which is special and all,
but this was a year before 9/11. Despite this plan, a February 2001 report
that cautioned of massive strikes on U.S. soil, and new information turned up by the FBI
and CIA in the almost eight months between Bush's inauguration and the attacks,
effectively no steps were taken by Bush to combat al Qaeda.
Elsewhere, a report recently released by Sonoma State University's Project Censored, a
project designed to highlight stories that went underreported in the mainstream media,
says that the neoconservatives had a blueprint in place for worldwide military domination
during the first Bush administration. As reported in the San Francisco Bay Guardian
(thanks to Marc for pointing this one out):
Back in the early 1990s, hawks in Bush Sr.'s administration - notably, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, with the help of General Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz (at the time, Joint Chiefs of Staff chair and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, respectively) - drew up a plan that was virtually identical to the National Security Strategy unveiled in September 2002.
Their blueprint - first spelled out in a classified internal policy statement in 1992 titled "Defense Planning Guidance" (later repeated in Cheney's "Defense Strategy for the 1990s," formally released in January of 1993) - called for the United States to assert its military superiority to prevent the emergence of a new superpower rival.
It called for the United States to diversify its military presence throughout the world, offered a policy of preemption, argued nuclear program while discouraging those of other countries, and foresaw the need for the United States to act alone, if need be, to protect its interests and those of its allies. Sound familiar?
Yet the neocons knew they faced a hard sell as Bill Clinton took office. "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources," a report released by the Project for the New American Century in 2000, stated that the United States needed a catastrophe - "a new Pearl Harbor," as the authors called it - to jump-start the neocons' blueprint for all-encompassing military and economic world dominance. (PNAC was founded by none other than Cheney, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and other former Reagan and Bush administration hawks.)
Then came the attacks of Sept. 11 - just nine months after the Bush administration took office. The events of that day provided the perfect excuse for Cheney and company to finally see their plans to fruition.
Top on their list of targets was Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Within 24 hours of the planes hitting the World Trade Center and Pentagon - and without so much as an inkling of evidence as to who had carried out the attacks - Attorney General John Ashcroft was already calling for war on Iraq, according to a report by Bob Woodward in the Washington Post.
Taking this combined information at face value - and I have no
reason not to - there is only one reasonable conclusion to draw: the Bush administration
allowed September 11 to happen to provide an excuse for the beginning of a plan to execute
United States dominance all over the world.
This might not be such a bad thing (well, yes it would, but bear with
me for a second) if it weren't for the strikingly bungled way in which this plan has so
far been handled. Not only do most nations of the world hate us right now for our
unilateralism, but both Afghanistan and Iraq have been massive failures. Consider
the following:
1. As also reported by Project Censored via the Bay Guardian,
the United States is financing warlords in Afghanistan in a desperate attempt to root out
the remaining al Qaeda fighters. The result is a nation that is no better off than
it was under the Taliban, except perhaps in the capital of Kabul, the only place where a
meager 5,000-troop security force has any effect. Life expectancy is still only 46,
the heroin trade is skyrocketing, and women's rights have reverted to Taliban-like levels
in many regions.
2. An article in the Washington Post the other day, and also reported
by Nic Robertson today on CNN.com, reports that al Qaeda is now working on opening a
front in Iraq. When Saddam Hussein was deposed, a power vacuum was created - not
unlike the one created in Afghanistan, only with fewer warlords - and that vacuum enabled
foreign terrorists to operate much more effectively. In particular, terrorists with
al Qaeda training have been making their way into Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, al
Qaeda would not have been able to operate effectively from that country - Bin Laden had no
more love for Hussein than he did for the United States, and vice versa. (This is a
primary reason why attempts to link the Iraqis to 9/11 are fruitless at best and massively
deceptive at worst.) With Hussein gone, the door was opened for foreign intruders,
and with hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops providing easy American targets, the
terrorists had all the motivation they would need. Congratulations, Bush
administration: you've made the war on terrorism drastically easier. For the
terrorists.
Go ahead and remember September 11 by trusting the government to do the right thing, if you want. I'll remember it my way: by remembering that the government used the terrorists, their actions, and, most disgustingly, the memory of the people they allowed to be martyred as excuses to restrict freedom all over the world, including at home. Truly, the best way to honor the memory of those who died on 9/11 is to vote for a Democrat in 2004. Another four years of neocon leadership is a more dangerous prospect than a dozen al Qaedas.
September 9, 2003
After various Internet troubles, the first week's poll is finally up. Some of
you may have already managed to find it (it's been up for a little bit, but only linked
from the main page).
Went to play trivia last night with Shannon and Tamica. Fairly
fun, not that we were even close to winning (come on, Muhammad Ali theme round? I
ask you). Can't wait for the 1800.
September 1, 2003
Oh yeah. Couple things. First of all, there will
be another NFL Picks contest between me and NJ Dave this year. I'm working on
inputting the schedules right now. I know you care.
On to things you might care about if you are not named Flax or Dave.
The BigFlax.com College Football Top 20 Poll will be back for another season.
E-mail me to sign up, but I must stress the following:
If you're going to do this, you have to get them in.
I said it last year, and apparently no one believed me. If you know right now
that you're going to be out of town on weekends a lot, such that you couldn't possibly get
me a Top 20 list at any point between Saturday night and Sunday evening, DO
NOT BOTHER. It's annoying for me to have to sit around waiting on
one person, particularly when they end up not sending anything in. As long as
whatever you're doing wouldn't keep you from getting me a poll by oh, four or five pm on
Sunday, no problem. Even as late as eight pm, wouldn't be the worst thing in the
world. If you're not going to be able to get me anything until Monday, though, just
don't sign up. And I mean basically at all here. Not "oh, you can't
do it this one week, that's fine." This couldn't take more than 10-15 minutes.
If you know you're going to have weekends where at no point on Sunday could you
spare that amount of time, just don't get involved. It's not that hard. I'd
rather have five people every week than eight, then six, then seven, then five, etc.
It's just annoying. I will not have patience for people who do this, either.
This year, you miss a week, you're out. It's that simple. Sorry to be a
dick, but that's just how I feel about this. It just isn't that hard, people.
Keep your poll saved in a file so it takes less time each week; that's what I do.
But find a way to do it, or don't.
That said, I hope to see a good crowd this year.
September 1, 2003
Jesus, it's September. Here's a new movie review.
There's more! View last month's updates.
Thanks to Tabnet for the domain name and my parents for paying it off.
Want to send me mail? Here.
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© 2003 Barren Malt Fox Productions
This page last updated: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 07:34:30 AM
