If I lost my computer and kalilily.net disappeared, the loss to the blogging community would be barely noticeable. If my computer crashed and I couldn

A truly frightening article in the NY Times includes this:
They said Iraqi fighters had often mixed in with civilians from nearby villages, jumping out of houses and cars to shoot at them, and then often running away. The marines said they had little trouble dispatching their foes, most of whom they characterized as ill trained and cowardly.
“We had a great day,” Sergeant Schrumpf said. “We killed a lot of people.”
and
But more than once, Sergeant Schrumpf said, he faced a different choice: one Iraqi soldier standing among two or three civilians. He recalled one such incident, in which he and other men in his unit opened fire. He recalled watching one of the women standing near the Iraqi soldier go down.
“I’m sorry,” the sergeant said. “But the chick was in the way.”
Yes, b!X, I agree with you:
And I’m sorry, but this is the psychological retardation of military
training on display here, and it presents a pretty fair demonstration
of why I don’t participate in any “oppose the war but support our
troops” bullshit.
… even though I have relatives over there. I hope they, indeed, behave with more moral conscience, that they do not get killed or maimed; and I feel badly for all of them — that they have allowed themselves to be duped by this government and brainwashed by soul-less military minds.
Meanwhile, while Dumbya spoke to veterans at the White House yesterday, House Republicans were looking to cut veterans benefits by about 30-40 billion dollars. Well, why not, those wars are over; those vets should get over it. Right???????????????????? What happened to “support our troops?” Hypocrites!

In a recent interview on Dateline, SBS TV Australia, Gore Vidal admits that he’s become a pamphleteer, an essayist — and for good reason. That’s sort of what some weblogs have become as well — and for good reason.
The transcript of Gore’s interview is worth a read. He says, [heh]:
We’ve never had a kind of reckless one who may believe –and there’s a whole theory now that he’s inspired by love of Our Lord –that he is an apocalyptic Christian who’ll be going to Heaven while the rest of us go to blazes. I hope that isn’t the case. I hope that’s exaggeration.
And he reminds us of our long history as aggressors, including:
So we have been at war steadily since 1950. I did a…one of my little pamphlets was ‘A Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace’ –how that worked. I mean, we’ve gone everywhere –we have the Enemy of the Month Club. One month, it’s Noriega –king of drugs. Another one, it’s Gaddafi. We hated his eyeliner or something and killed his daughter. We moved from one enemy to another and the press, the media, has never been more disgusting. I don’t know why, but there are very few voices that are speaking out publicly. The censorship here is so tight in all of the newspapers and particularly in network television. So nobody’s getting the facts………I spoke to 100,000 people two weeks ago in Hollywood Boulevard, down the hill from where I’m speaking to you now. There were 100,000, lots of police, many helicopters overhead which, as the speaker got up, would lower themselves to try and drown your voice out. The press did not record that there were 100,000 people. They said, “Oh, 30,000 perhaps. That might be an exaggeration,” they said.
And then about pamphleteering [and, I believe, weblogging]:
There are ways of getting around official media and there are ways of getting around a government which is given to lying about everything, and the people eventually pick up on it, but things are moving so swiftly now.
And he ends with this [which are my sentiments exactly]:
We’ve never had a period like this and it was –to somebody like me, who is really hooked into constitutional America –this is incredible. We cannot trust the Supreme Court after their mysterious decisions on the election of 2000. We have no political parties. We’ve never had much of them –I mean the Democrats, the Republicans. We have one party –we have the party of essentially corporate America. It has two right wings, one called Democratic, one called Republican. So in the absence of politics, with a media that is easy to manipulate and, in the hands of very few people with interests in wars and oil and so on, I don’t see how you get the word out, but one tries because there is nothing else to be done.
There’s lots more good stuff in the interview. Go read it.

It’s important to let life’s absurdities keep you smiling. This guy is documenting some of the wacky protest signs. The text on his site doesn’t render well in IE, but the photos are great.

That

As a concerned-citizen-weblogger/non-mainstream-sharer-of-political-information, b!X has been trying to understand and work with and within his local government system so that he can have access to the kinds of information he wants to share with his fellow citizens. Part of this effort requires that he try to attend local government press conferences and open meetings.
The local government official who told b!X last week that he could attend a press conference being held today left instructions at the last minute to bar him from the event. He

From here via Karen Hansen posting on Blog Sisters.
The freedom women experience in any particular Arab nation seems to derive from local tradition rather than from the Koran.
I stare through a glass darkly at an exotic culture and my analysis may be flawed. But one point I am certain. To understand the Arab-Muslim woman, I must lay down “the white woman’s burden.”
This is the feminist version of the “white man’s burden”