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| Wednesday, January 19, 2005 |
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Facing evil 
| | I can barely write. Or think. |
| | My whole mind, right now, is filled with the picture, on page A5 of today's Los Angeles Times, that bears this caption: |
| | Nighttime Anguish
An Iraqi girl screams after her parents were killed by U.S. tr4ops during a dusk patrol in the northern city of Tall Afar. Witnesses said the soldiers, from the 1st Battalion, 25th Infantry Division (Stryker Brigade), fired on the family's car after i failed to heed warnings to stop and come toward the troops. One of the five children riding in the back seat was injured. The military said it was investigating. |
| | The girl, squatting in a spot of light with a soldier's boot at one edge, is spattered with blood. Her expression cannot be erased from a caring mind. To me, it ranks right up there with the this one from Vietnam. |
| | There's another picture, I suppose of the same girl, taken from a different angle, on this page. The original, #52018179, is on this page here, from a Getty Images search. It's for sale there. I can use it here for 2 years if I pay $235, I just figured. |
| | Ever since the election, when a majority of my fellow voters gave President Bush another four years, I've kept quiet about this war. |
| | But sometimes the heart will not be silent. This is one of those times. |
| | I know pictures like this serve as propaganda for the enemy, which has no remorse about routinely doing worse than what these American soldiers will regret terribly for the rest of their lives. |
| | We can debate strategy for the duration. Meanwhile, we have this, and countless other tragedies like it. Blame who you will; it won't make this little girl one bit happier. It won't bring back her parents, who lost their lives for... what? |
| | I don't have an answer. If you do, tell it to that girl. |
| | All I can do is share what this picture means to me: That war at its best is a lesser evil; and that it is no less important to face the evils we commit as it is to fight the evils we oppose. |
Podcasting as (literally) open source
| | If you read my recently published opinion piece on how enterprises should consider the deployment of subscription-centric software infrastructures, you'll notice how that it relies extensively on the quotes of Scott Young, CEO of Userland. What you'll also notice is that where it quotes Young, there also appears a code like [MP3 23:21]. This code is a pointer to the exact location in the MP3-based podcast of my interview with Young where his quote can be heard. |
| | Where could we go from this sort of journalist's electronic bibliography? Any number of directions. As an infrastructure choice, podcasting makes sense because it enables multiple multimedia enclosures to be packaged together for delivery on a subscription basis. A journalist's audience can optionally subscribe to and review some of the material that was used to assemble a story. |
Other than that, it's a fine Wednesday morning
| | I now find myself welcomed by various majordomos to mailing lists concerned with police news, crime reports, commission alerts, spanish news and calendars pertaining to book discussions, exhibits, nature, recreation and other topics. |
| | I have mails from four listmanagers for Novell products. Also for four Malibu local government concerns (employment, community events, council agendas). |
| | Also, perhaps becuase the virus didn't get all the way to signing me up for them, I'm asked to confirm subscriptions to a pile of email news lists. |
| | (Probably not) finally, I am also included among the long lists of cc's (not all the same) sent out to people at intel.com and various .edu domains urging us all to stop responding to "Symantec Email Proxy Deleted Message." Which, of course, I never responded to. |
| | Sorted by date, most of this falls between Aliens Being Fukked and Alternate Chowder. |
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