Wake up, Neo . . .

It’s going to be a great (and long-awaited) summer for fans of The Matrix. Two parts of a series of animated short sequences have been released (and are available for download or via streaming), with more coming soon. The animation was done by Square, the folks who brought us the luscious Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within film.

Do we tend to act too soon or too late?

[I]t was the United States—under Bill Clinton, for those of you keeping score at home—that worked hardest to prevent UN intervention or even from saying the word “genocide” in any official documents.

Read Samantha Powers’ prize-winning account of this, A Problem from Hell, if you doubt this. It is just this kind of combination of ignorance and arrogance that gives rise to anti-Americanism, and no wonder. (And by the way, the Rwanda episode is by far the most shameful act undertaken by Clinton and company.

—Eric Alterman, MSNBC

MyDomain Forwarding Problems—Another Casualty of War

See http://forum.mydomain.com/viewtopic.php?t=1537

The mydomain forwarding service is currently experiencing problems and will be taken down temporarily because of a DOS attack. Specifically, the domain, ALJAZEERA.NET, is currently pointed to the mydomain service and causing service problems.

The forwarding pool which usually has an average of 600 connection setups/second this time of the day shot to over 8,000 connection setups per second. As more and more people discovered the new Ip the connections continued to climb. Our A records have 30 minute TTL's and we have propagated a new zone with null values for the problem domain. We will lift our ACL's as soon as we can.

People Will Believe Anything, 2

I’m going to try to stay out of trouble today, after yesterday’s fiasco of pointing to an extremely inaccurate and anti-semitic conspiracy page.

I have always found the Urban Legends section of about.com (formerly The Mining Company) immensely entertaining. It’s also extremely useful in debunking the ever-present hoax virus warnings and too-good-to-be-true “Forward This to Everyone on Your List” e-mails.

Why are anti-NWO conspiracy theorists typically anti-semitic?

This may fall under the unanswerable questions category, like “Why did The Man in the High Castle win a Hugo award?” but ki pointed out that many global conspiracy theorists and their organizations are strongly anti-semitic. This makes little sense to me, as this future New World Order is, according to Scripture, going to be anti-semitic itself—attempting (and failing) to destroy Israel. Ki suggested that I am looking for logic and reason where none exist.

War … (Swiped partly from www.psacake.com)

War … (Swiped partly from psacake.com)

Here are a few things to consider when talking about Iraq:

  • President Bush and Saddam Hussein … Saddam is the bad guy. Read the Dossier.
  • If you have faith in the United Nations to do the right thing, keep this in mind: they have Libya heading the committee on human rights and Iraq heading the global disarmament commitee.
  • Even if you are Anti-War, you are still an “infidel,” and Bin Laden wants you dead, too.
  • If you believe in a “Vast right-wing conspiracy” but not in the danger that Hussein poses, well then, that explains a lot.
  • If you want to believe in a conspiracy, make it a big one.* Of some interest may be a RealVideo movie (downloadable from various sites) entitled 911: The Road To Tyranny. I will leave you to find it on your own.
  • It’s all about a regime change. Hussein poses a danger to everyone.
  • Whether you are for military action or not, our men and women are overseas fighting for us to defend our right to speak out. We all need to support them without reservation.
  • It’s no wonder the Iraqis don’t trust us. We encouraged uprisings against Saddam in the Gulf War, and failed to back them up immediately afterward, essentially condemning them to torture and death.
  • “And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet.” (Mark 13:7)

*For the record, I’m not looking for conspiracies around every corner, but the Bible does predict a global, tyrannical government under “The Beast.” What isn’t prophesied is when this will occur. Historically, religious leaders have repeatedly been proven wrong by setting a specific date on these events.

The Tigers Pounce

Today our MLS listing expired—We know this because the phone calls from other realtors have started coming in, asking if we want to list with them. One realtor even came to the house fairly early this morning!

We have decided to let our current contract with our realtor expire (it ends at the end of this month), and re-list the house in a couple of months after we finish some cosmetics/minor repairs.

Why does the weekend end so quickly?

Quite a bit going on this weekend. The primary task was to get a project for CenterWatch finished, including using a combination of MS Word's Table of Contents feature and some Excel formulae to generate an index of Companies by Therapeutic Specialty. I discovered a goof on my part; I needed to have one specific named style for the therapeutic specialties on each page, but not use that style for anything else on the page. Every time I would do a search-and-replace to fix this, Word would crash. Finally I gave up, created a second copy of the file, and deleted everything but the therapeutic specialties that was in the style I was trying to index. The section was, of course, 350 pages long! I'm making a list of notes for next year.

We had some good family time for a change (with Nichelle sick/me overworked for the past couple of months). We watched the newly remastered Chitty-Chitty, Bang-Bang, which should have been in Widescreen, but has not been issued that way (except for the opening race scene and credits and closing credits). The sound and picture quality are superb, and the DVD features a cool “sing along” feature for the musical numbers. I need to start a Web petition going about the widescreen/pan-and-scan issue … I’ve e-mailed MGM’s customer support several times, but not once received an answer.

Sunday afternoon we watched the new Veggie Tales Jonah film. I should add that Nichelle and I both fell asleep partway through. The kids liked it. Big Idea did a good job of explaining what the job of an Old Testament prophet was. David, after his class on Sunday night, presented me with his coloring sheet of the 10 Commandments, and said, “This is a message from the Lord.”

Sunday night I jumped over to Shine! to make a quick edit (remarking out a live performance that had past). When I went to check my work, I discovered that the site had been defaced by some juvenile crackers with an obscene anti-war message. Apparent Interland had a little security problem sometime early Saturday morning. Other evidence indicates their mail server was commandeered as well. Just what John Harris needs—his site defaced on a day when people were likely to be visiting the site to get directions to the performance Saturday evening.

The war news was negative for the first time so far. We have six people from our church on active military duty, plus another moved-away friend (he started riding our bus to church when he was in fourth grade—right now his neice is in Nichelle’s and my 4th grade Sunday school class.

I am reminded of Robert A. Heinlein’s essay, “Pravda Means Truth”:

“Iraq's Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf scoffed at the American statements declaring that the coalition forces have continued advancing into Iraq.” (From http://reuters.feedroom.com)

Here’s a rough transcript of remarks by Iraq’s Information Minister:

“Therefore, what had been mentioned in some stooge’s media is completely unbased, in regard to Kufasa [sp?], in regard to Kafou [sp?], and in regard to their stupid columns moving and now stopped fully, and they will be surrounded near Nassaria and near Ur, historical antiquities there.”

That being said, I am reminded of the human cost of this war, both with the servicemen and woman who have died, and in the inevitable collateral damage.

“The causalites on civilians up to now we have in hostpitals 207 injured children, women, and other civiliians. We are going to take you, if you like, to visit them.” (Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf)

This, of course, pales in comparison to the millions of his own people Saddam has been responsible for killing, including the 500,000 exterminated after the Gulf War.

Regarding how accurate the specific targeting of regime facilities for propaganda, the KGB-like secret police, communication, and military sites, has been (at the exclusion of civilian infrastructure), U.K. Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said, “The lights stayed on in Baghdad, but the instruments of tyrrany are collasping.”

War, indeed, is a depressing subject. I continue to hope and pray for a rapid end to this conflict.