I discovered slashdot ON usenet, at the 'scary devil monastery'.
There are still groups I want to return to, and I wonder if they're even still around. I do a webcomic now which also runs a serialized novel updating daily. I want to bump elbows with my writer friends on Usenet again, now that I'm committed to doing what they do, daily.
Usenet absolutely still matters, for any group of people who find community through talking to each other.
Go reread Russ Albery's Rant again.
Permit me to start off by saying- hi! I'm slashdot user #580, been around since CowboyNeal wasn't a meme, and I have copyrighted material which I am trying to wedge into the grand old global attention market!
I'm a writer, you see, and since literature isn't the most fun thing to enjoy on the Web, I pursued a long-held dream of teaching myself to also draw, and I began a webcomic. Not only that, it's sci-fi, and some thought has gone into it. Since I grew up on Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein (ok, and E.E. Doc Smith) there needed to be thought if I was gonna be satisfied with the story.
So, I will start right off by asserting that I have a STAKE in this argument, by pointing to tallyroad.com which is the webcomic (and story) in question. This establishes that I have to answer for my theorizing- it's not abstract to me.
Having said that, notice something about that site? It announces the update schedule of monday and friday (there's a subpage, Daily Kitten, that updates every day- I have to draw every day if I'm going to improve) and it announces a web rating, Web MA which means the strip may have graphic violence, nudity, sexual situations, basically all the stuff I was enjoying in 1996 on usenet:D
But it doesn't have my NAME on it, or a copyright notice. What the hell?
I'll tell you, then you can tell me if I'm out of my mind or if I've hit on something new here.
I see my webcomic and artist compatriots flipping out about copyright these days. There's legislation in the US underway called the Orphan Works act, in which a company could take your IP, not succeed in finding you, use the IP for profit, and then if you turn up they are required to pay some sort of set fee. The whole point is to open up the commons and make materials more available by default. As someone who's written code under the GPL, I'm more sympathetic to this than a typical artist, but there's a serious catch to that proposal.
The catch is, if you do an end run around copyright that way, you open up 'dead' commons and material created by people who honestly cannot be found, BUT the most likely users are large corporations, and it destroys the ability of a creator to be offended and seek statutory damages for infringement. It's the 'calvin pissing on a logo' problem institutionalized. It becomes really easy to use IP against the creator's wishes- again look at Bill Watterson's refusal to build a licensing empire. Look at Disney's determination to never have their IP associated with anything seamy- Disney fired some animators in a rage for having made a stag reel just as a private joke. I'm inclined to think that when a creator or copyright holder is really passionate about what's legitimate use, they should have a say- maybe not forever, but they start off with a say.
We're looking at that breaking down- we're also looking at hypertrophy of copyright privileges but it's all centered in corporate hands. I agree it's depressing, but where some of my friends are losing their minds over this, I have a different attitude that might carry the day.
You see, I figure art is an ACTIVITY. If you're an artist or an IP creator of any note, you have a particular flavor all to yourself, and it's your business to develop that. If you're no good, maybe it doesn't get anywhere. If you're fantastic, maybe it's a huge hit, and people want to imitate you- and some imitations will get traction- but if people want NEW IP of that flavor, they have to come to you.
This is why I'm not hammering on the copyright or plastering my name all over Tally Road- I've got the domain, and thanks to Slashdot I've got it registered at a French registrar to roadblock any funny business in case US law gets flakier around domain name ownership. More importantly, I have the story for Tally Road worked out on paper and no possible imitator could know exactly where I propose to take it- or pull it off the exact way I'll be do
I'm going to put up a link to my comic since I was mentioning it anyhow, but I have a much more important link, something written by Russ Albery in net.subculture.usenet a decade ago.
How depressing. I discovered Slashdot through Usenet, specifically the 'scary devil monastery'.
My life is way cooler than it was, but it's still poorer without the magic, infinite simplicity of Usenet, that microcosm of what the Web is now.
Back then I just had one little identity and way too much free time. Now I earn my living through airwindows.com (a domain I've owned since like 1996) and am even, right this second, frantically avoiding a self-imposed deadline for a webcomic I started at tallyroad.com (I may possibly be the oldest slashdot user operating a webcomic). I picked the registrar (Gandi) through searching Slashdot discussions. I'm doing all this over broadband on a computer with eight gigs of RAM.
But I will never forget what it was like to be posting to Usenet on a 33 mhz Mac Performa 575, pumped because I had a Global Village 56K modem, marvelling as it took hours to download the full group list of that moment.
Yeah- I was there when that was happening:) not right at the beginning, but I was there. If you don't believe my senile ramblings- check my beloved Slashdot ID#. hehehe.
...livejournal but without wasting your time actually socializing:D
Seriously, I'm liking it, because I get very isolated working, and like to feel slightly more like I'm in some sort of context more intimate than the far side of the moon.
Also, I find that if I post just what I'm up to, it motivates me to have that be something productive, and that's useful to me.
Seems to me it's a good fit for anybody entreprenurial, because it lets you sort of 'connect' a bit while stopping you from wasting any serious time. You're firing off telegrams from where you're at. If you enjoy terse turns of phrase, all the better.
I can't imagine wanting extensive dialogue on Twitter. can haz IRC nao? And if you follow 67 million people you are attention-seeking. And there's no point paying attention to those who follow you, because you keep getting spammers.
Consider it 'dispatches from the front', to heighten your own awareness of what you're up to as well as for anyone who's curious- and leave it at that.
But then maybe I'm an interweb celebrity, being the oldest slashdotter on twitter. (don't tell me, CmdrTaco and CowboyNeal have accounts. Surely they'd write their own, in perl or something?)
Actually, more than half as good as gasoline is pretty damn good. If anyone managed to do energy storage more efficiently than hydrocarbons it would really be impressive...
Bear in mind that Wikipedia is going to be gamed by people for free advertising that's not even identifiable as such.
I was called in on one such case- the CD mastering entry had been edited by a fellow who's very clever at selfpromotion. He'd taken the existing practice of mastering using 'stems' (submixes of specific elements) and made a whole promotional apparatus out of calling this 'separations'... and then proceeded to go into Wikipedia and write extensive notes which seemed to be legitimate but used terminology that was more or less exclusive to his own business. If you Googled that stuff, you got him and only him.
I'm not a big-deal mastering engineer- I'm OK at my experience level and get my own 'sound'- but I do know lots of them, and I knew enough to be able to spot what was legitimate and what was not, which is why I was called in. The fellow who noticed this happened to know my email and wrote me- could have been a number of other people that would have done as well, but the thing is none of us were paying attention to the Wikipedia entry.
And, I haven't checked it lately, either.
Never assume because Wikipedia is decentralized that it is unbiased. Given enough attention and direction, it is as unbiased as anything you'll find, but this attention is not a given. For a time there, the Wikipedia CD mastering entry was in fact a stealth infomercial and nobody knew enough to identify it as such until working mastering engineers got roped in to fact-check it.
I've got to post my thanks simply because the first thing I did when I heard was go to Slashdot. I knew;)
I'm old enough that I played the first version when it came out. The most notable story I've got is when a neighbor kid's wizard made his roll for changing a monster attacking us from the top of a hill- polymorphing it- but hadn't said WHAT he was changing it into. So it was pretty much carte blanche as he'd already made the roll...
He turned it into a burrito. It sort of rolled down the hill and went SPLOT. It was a very large, giant burrito.
Not QUITE what Gygax had in mind, but I think he would've understood:)
I don't know about you, but whether it's 250,000 years from now or next week, my first reaction to a giant space death ray made of binary supernovas emitting a telltale spiral that shows you are looking down the barrel of the thing is still,
"OMFG! THAT'S AWESOME!":D
Come on, be honest, even if we're doomed, giant space death rays are STILL awesome... somewhere, E.E. "Doc' Smith is smiling...
You could bomb someone whether or not they had internet access- at first I thought someone wanted a media blackout within Iran for bombing purposes...
but you CANNOT run the Iranian Oil Bourse and start massively doing oil business in Euros without working communications.
This is entirely a strike at the Iranian Oil Bourse, in my opinion. They don't have to knock every kid with a modem off the internet- but somebody wants to knock out the main informational pipelines so there can't be high oil-in-euros transaction traffic. I'm betting that's it.
"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." -Scott McNealy
This is exactly why Scott's idea isn't entirely a bad thing. The fact is, there is a certain amount of parity.
You and I don't necessarily have privacy from Eli Lilly Corporation should it try to profile things about us in order to make up a more compelling lie to get us to try its products.
But, much to its surprise, Lilly doesn't have privacy either as it tries to negotiate an enormous payoff to the government to escape the consequences of one of its screw-ups.
The dystopia is clearly the idea that consumers and citizens are helpless pawns of the big corporations who can skilfully control outcomes to be anything they want, by controlling their messages and carefully monitoring what people are thinking. They'd get away with murder, because they could always tell what's going to be deemed acceptable and what has to be covered up.
The reality and the counterbalance is: it will always be possible to catch information that's off-message when it slips through holes like this one, and that opens up the controlling corporation to the force of public opinion.
They don't have privacy either. If they insist on being monsters- opportunities will arise to bring that to light.
Keep the parity. Make sure these entities remain vulnerable to mistakes of this nature. If they arranged it so that if you publicised the leak you were sent to Guatanamo Bay, it would be quite the chilling effect- you've got to protect freedom of speech w.r.t. stuff that's accidentally leaked. The burden of self-protection has to stay on the company's side, they can't make it your responsibility to not reveal their shattering secrets when you're not actually part of their organization, or might actually be their enemy.
Wow, THERE you go. That's the missing reason in a nutshell. That's also total mayhem waiting to happen on Monday... just when you thought life couldn't get more interesting.
Yup, he did do it before. I've had a lot of fun tinfoilhatting the whole thing from the deranged perspective of a guy who shoots old men in the face and likes it, and having reached conclusions, I'm happy to let it drop.
Remember, if suddenly we find that Iran has launched a dastardly unprovoked attack and wrecked our navy, that's when we'll know Cheney got his hands on a private nuke stash!:D
And if not- well then we'll ALL be happier, so here's hoping it's just been a gedanke-experiment:)
They're cruise missiles. Good luck getting through the Strait of Hormuz when the Sunburn's range covers the entire width of the Gulf at that point.
What reports I've seen suggest the carriers are off the coast of Iran, which is absolutely within Sunburn range. Hell, more than half the Gulf is. If there are friendly forces in Saudi Arabia or Qatar, or if they can fire Sunburns from ships, every inch of the Gulf is vulnerable. It's not like we have these missiles. They're Russian. The rest of Iran's defences suck. They have nothing worth a damn for protecting themselves against bombing or sea-to-land missiles. They just have that offensive capability, and it's not specifically theirs, it's Russian technology.
"we can bomb all we want" my ass. You make me ashamed.
Zeinfeld, this has nothing to do with Bush. He's a figurehead. I've heard elsewhere that in a speech in the last couple days he looked REALLY bad- which brings me back to how lost he was on 9/11. This guy is not running the show. When things go down, he's given a copy of 'My Pet Goat' and told to sit and be quiet. It's Cheney behind this stuff.
And you can call Bush a psychopath for mimicking a woman on death row begging for her life, but I remind you that Cheney shot a guy in the FACE without consequences- and got an apology from the guy, to boot.
Bush is not behind this. He's a puppet in a flightsuit. Look to Cheney for this one.
And you're absolutely right again, that a further exchange of open warfare (the way things are laid out right now) would cripple the US, just wipe us out. The pattern we're seeing isn't really a plan to win, it's all calculated to score political points at any cost, with a lot of bad assumptions about how things could go.
If this is really happening and leading to the ends I'm suggesting, it's just as well we won't be able to kick everybody around anymore, but I wonder what then will be done about radical Islam. Having the US rendered helpless but then getting thwacked with radical Islam isn't exactly a bargain for the rest of the world. We're not helping- we're making matters worse- but if we go down it'll become a feeding frenzy. Not good.
The tone of that is so dark that I think I want to add a little caveat here: I may be REALLY AGGRESSIVELY trying to sort out what's happening in what might be a major US military operation currently underway- which could well get me dragged out of my house by special ops. BUT...
I'm an American, and consider myself as patriotic as a person ought to be, and if I've correctly guessed what's trying to happen, I have major complaints about the plan. What I'm proposing is that someone, probably Cheney, is trying to execute a false-flag thing (possibly for the second time? I couldn't say), specifically they are trying to orchestrate a strike on Iran for the express purpose of getting Iran to hit back.
Because if Iran sinks our carriers, as they can in fact do, but there's no news of any attack by US, it's 9/11 all over again, which is completely what the executive branch politically needs right now. They NEED an attack, preferably on military targets they can control and order within range of the attack.
BUT IF IRAN SINKS OUR CARRIERS OUR MILITARY IS CRIPPLED. Never mind the rightness or wrongness of secret unprovoked bombings of Iran, that's a separate and worthwhile discussion. Endangering such a major backbone of our military for political gain is treasonous.
So if suddenly OMG they sunk our carriers, that says I guessed right- and THAT says that the people running this were willing to trade off our military effectiveness, literally, for another chance to chant 9/11 9/11 9/11 and get their political way.
I don't think I have to approve of that in order to be an American, or patriotic. My hope is actually that these perhaps-preparatory actions such as making Iran and Tampa (?) go black, and moving the carriers within Sunburn range, were allowed to happen but the actual part involving an unprovoked and secret strike on Iran hits a roadblock and doesn't happen. Then we'd all be left happily guessing WTF happened, and you can tease me about it all you like;)
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! I remember 1998, too :D
I discovered slashdot ON usenet, at the 'scary devil monastery'. There are still groups I want to return to, and I wonder if they're even still around. I do a webcomic now which also runs a serialized novel updating daily. I want to bump elbows with my writer friends on Usenet again, now that I'm committed to doing what they do, daily. Usenet absolutely still matters, for any group of people who find community through talking to each other. Go reread Russ Albery's Rant again.
I didn't know entrails HAD raison d'etre :)
I read it as 'motd' which is certainly slashdotty but doesn't answer your question at all...
Or maybe Chicken Segfault :)
Permit me to start off by saying- hi! I'm slashdot user #580, been around since CowboyNeal wasn't a meme, and I have copyrighted material which I am trying to wedge into the grand old global attention market!
:D
I'm a writer, you see, and since literature isn't the most fun thing to enjoy on the Web, I pursued a long-held dream of teaching myself to also draw, and I began a webcomic. Not only that, it's sci-fi, and some thought has gone into it. Since I grew up on Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein (ok, and E.E. Doc Smith) there needed to be thought if I was gonna be satisfied with the story.
So, I will start right off by asserting that I have a STAKE in this argument, by pointing to tallyroad.com which is the webcomic (and story) in question. This establishes that I have to answer for my theorizing- it's not abstract to me.
Having said that, notice something about that site? It announces the update schedule of monday and friday (there's a subpage, Daily Kitten, that updates every day- I have to draw every day if I'm going to improve) and it announces a web rating, Web MA which means the strip may have graphic violence, nudity, sexual situations, basically all the stuff I was enjoying in 1996 on usenet
But it doesn't have my NAME on it, or a copyright notice. What the hell?
I'll tell you, then you can tell me if I'm out of my mind or if I've hit on something new here.
I see my webcomic and artist compatriots flipping out about copyright these days. There's legislation in the US underway called the Orphan Works act, in which a company could take your IP, not succeed in finding you, use the IP for profit, and then if you turn up they are required to pay some sort of set fee. The whole point is to open up the commons and make materials more available by default. As someone who's written code under the GPL, I'm more sympathetic to this than a typical artist, but there's a serious catch to that proposal.
The catch is, if you do an end run around copyright that way, you open up 'dead' commons and material created by people who honestly cannot be found, BUT the most likely users are large corporations, and it destroys the ability of a creator to be offended and seek statutory damages for infringement. It's the 'calvin pissing on a logo' problem institutionalized. It becomes really easy to use IP against the creator's wishes- again look at Bill Watterson's refusal to build a licensing empire. Look at Disney's determination to never have their IP associated with anything seamy- Disney fired some animators in a rage for having made a stag reel just as a private joke. I'm inclined to think that when a creator or copyright holder is really passionate about what's legitimate use, they should have a say- maybe not forever, but they start off with a say.
We're looking at that breaking down- we're also looking at hypertrophy of copyright privileges but it's all centered in corporate hands. I agree it's depressing, but where some of my friends are losing their minds over this, I have a different attitude that might carry the day.
You see, I figure art is an ACTIVITY. If you're an artist or an IP creator of any note, you have a particular flavor all to yourself, and it's your business to develop that. If you're no good, maybe it doesn't get anywhere. If you're fantastic, maybe it's a huge hit, and people want to imitate you- and some imitations will get traction- but if people want NEW IP of that flavor, they have to come to you.
This is why I'm not hammering on the copyright or plastering my name all over Tally Road- I've got the domain, and thanks to Slashdot I've got it registered at a French registrar to roadblock any funny business in case US law gets flakier around domain name ownership. More importantly, I have the story for Tally Road worked out on paper and no possible imitator could know exactly where I propose to take it- or pull it off the exact way I'll be do
I'm going to put up a link to my comic since I was mentioning it anyhow, but I have a much more important link, something written by Russ Albery in net.subculture.usenet a decade ago.
You gotta read this, if you've never read it.
http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/Rant.html
Let's remember what this network is for.
How depressing. I discovered Slashdot through Usenet, specifically the 'scary devil monastery'.
My life is way cooler than it was, but it's still poorer without the magic, infinite simplicity of Usenet, that microcosm of what the Web is now.
Back then I just had one little identity and way too much free time. Now I earn my living through airwindows.com (a domain I've owned since like 1996) and am even, right this second, frantically avoiding a self-imposed deadline for a webcomic I started at tallyroad.com (I may possibly be the oldest slashdot user operating a webcomic). I picked the registrar (Gandi) through searching Slashdot discussions. I'm doing all this over broadband on a computer with eight gigs of RAM.
But I will never forget what it was like to be posting to Usenet on a 33 mhz Mac Performa 575, pumped because I had a Global Village 56K modem, marvelling as it took hours to download the full group list of that moment.
Yeah- I was there when that was happening :) not right at the beginning, but I was there. If you don't believe my senile ramblings- check my beloved Slashdot ID#. hehehe.
...livejournal but without wasting your time actually socializing :D
Seriously, I'm liking it, because I get very isolated working, and like to feel slightly more like I'm in some sort of context more intimate than the far side of the moon.
Also, I find that if I post just what I'm up to, it motivates me to have that be something productive, and that's useful to me.
Seems to me it's a good fit for anybody entreprenurial, because it lets you sort of 'connect' a bit while stopping you from wasting any serious time. You're firing off telegrams from where you're at. If you enjoy terse turns of phrase, all the better.
I can't imagine wanting extensive dialogue on Twitter. can haz IRC nao? And if you follow 67 million people you are attention-seeking. And there's no point paying attention to those who follow you, because you keep getting spammers.
Consider it 'dispatches from the front', to heighten your own awareness of what you're up to as well as for anyone who's curious- and leave it at that.
But then maybe I'm an interweb celebrity, being the oldest slashdotter on twitter. (don't tell me, CmdrTaco and CowboyNeal have accounts. Surely they'd write their own, in perl or something?)
obLink- I'm 'jinxtigr' there.
Yes- this fellow seems, shall we say, cooperative to anyone else in the same position, and he has called every bluff they have, with ruthless glee.
:)
Best thing I've read all MONTH. Just beautiful
My God. I've been on the internet since around 1996, and nobody has EVER hated Apple before!
Actually, more than half as good as gasoline is pretty damn good. If anyone managed to do energy storage more efficiently than hydrocarbons it would really be impressive...
Bear in mind that Wikipedia is going to be gamed by people for free advertising that's not even identifiable as such.
I was called in on one such case- the CD mastering entry had been edited by a fellow who's very clever at selfpromotion. He'd taken the existing practice of mastering using 'stems' (submixes of specific elements) and made a whole promotional apparatus out of calling this 'separations'... and then proceeded to go into Wikipedia and write extensive notes which seemed to be legitimate but used terminology that was more or less exclusive to his own business. If you Googled that stuff, you got him and only him.
I'm not a big-deal mastering engineer- I'm OK at my experience level and get my own 'sound'- but I do know lots of them, and I knew enough to be able to spot what was legitimate and what was not, which is why I was called in. The fellow who noticed this happened to know my email and wrote me- could have been a number of other people that would have done as well, but the thing is none of us were paying attention to the Wikipedia entry.
And, I haven't checked it lately, either.
Never assume because Wikipedia is decentralized that it is unbiased. Given enough attention and direction, it is as unbiased as anything you'll find, but this attention is not a given. For a time there, the Wikipedia CD mastering entry was in fact a stealth infomercial and nobody knew enough to identify it as such until working mastering engineers got roped in to fact-check it.
Ah, those were the days.
You kids get offa my lawn!
I've got to post my thanks simply because the first thing I did when I heard was go to Slashdot. I knew ;)
:)
I'm old enough that I played the first version when it came out. The most notable story I've got is when a neighbor kid's wizard made his roll for changing a monster attacking us from the top of a hill- polymorphing it- but hadn't said WHAT he was changing it into. So it was pretty much carte blanche as he'd already made the roll...
He turned it into a burrito. It sort of rolled down the hill and went SPLOT. It was a very large, giant burrito.
Not QUITE what Gygax had in mind, but I think he would've understood
I don't know about you, but whether it's 250,000 years from now or next week, my first reaction to a giant space death ray made of binary supernovas emitting a telltale spiral that shows you are looking down the barrel of the thing is still,
:D
"OMFG! THAT'S AWESOME!"
Come on, be honest, even if we're doomed, giant space death rays are STILL awesome... somewhere, E.E. "Doc' Smith is smiling...
Well, it wasn't an intentional mistake.
:)
The guy who measured it had his thumb on the Milky Way, and you have to remember that the Milky Way is mostly vacuum. He squished it flat by mistake
You could bomb someone whether or not they had internet access- at first I thought someone wanted a media blackout within Iran for bombing purposes...
but you CANNOT run the Iranian Oil Bourse and start massively doing oil business in Euros without working communications.
This is entirely a strike at the Iranian Oil Bourse, in my opinion. They don't have to knock every kid with a modem off the internet- but somebody wants to knock out the main informational pipelines so there can't be high oil-in-euros transaction traffic. I'm betting that's it.
"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." -Scott McNealy
This is exactly why Scott's idea isn't entirely a bad thing. The fact is, there is a certain amount of parity.
You and I don't necessarily have privacy from Eli Lilly Corporation should it try to profile things about us in order to make up a more compelling lie to get us to try its products.
But, much to its surprise, Lilly doesn't have privacy either as it tries to negotiate an enormous payoff to the government to escape the consequences of one of its screw-ups.
The dystopia is clearly the idea that consumers and citizens are helpless pawns of the big corporations who can skilfully control outcomes to be anything they want, by controlling their messages and carefully monitoring what people are thinking. They'd get away with murder, because they could always tell what's going to be deemed acceptable and what has to be covered up.
The reality and the counterbalance is: it will always be possible to catch information that's off-message when it slips through holes like this one, and that opens up the controlling corporation to the force of public opinion.
They don't have privacy either. If they insist on being monsters- opportunities will arise to bring that to light.
Keep the parity. Make sure these entities remain vulnerable to mistakes of this nature. If they arranged it so that if you publicised the leak you were sent to Guatanamo Bay, it would be quite the chilling effect- you've got to protect freedom of speech w.r.t. stuff that's accidentally leaked. The burden of self-protection has to stay on the company's side, they can't make it your responsibility to not reveal their shattering secrets when you're not actually part of their organization, or might actually be their enemy.
Wow, THERE you go. That's the missing reason in a nutshell. That's also total mayhem waiting to happen on Monday... just when you thought life couldn't get more interesting.
Yup, he did do it before. I've had a lot of fun tinfoilhatting the whole thing from the deranged perspective of a guy who shoots old men in the face and likes it, and having reached conclusions, I'm happy to let it drop.
:D
:)
Remember, if suddenly we find that Iran has launched a dastardly unprovoked attack and wrecked our navy, that's when we'll know Cheney got his hands on a private nuke stash!
And if not- well then we'll ALL be happier, so here's hoping it's just been a gedanke-experiment
Touche, sir. But remember, we're talking about the White House. They're CRAZY. You expect the things they do to make sense, and work? :P
http://www.google.com/search?q=operational+range+of+sunburn+missiles
They're cruise missiles. Good luck getting through the Strait of Hormuz when the Sunburn's range covers the entire width of the Gulf at that point.
What reports I've seen suggest the carriers are off the coast of Iran, which is absolutely within Sunburn range. Hell, more than half the Gulf is. If there are friendly forces in Saudi Arabia or Qatar, or if they can fire Sunburns from ships, every inch of the Gulf is vulnerable. It's not like we have these missiles. They're Russian. The rest of Iran's defences suck. They have nothing worth a damn for protecting themselves against bombing or sea-to-land missiles. They just have that offensive capability, and it's not specifically theirs, it's Russian technology.
"we can bomb all we want" my ass. You make me ashamed.
Zeinfeld, this has nothing to do with Bush. He's a figurehead. I've heard elsewhere that in a speech in the last couple days he looked REALLY bad- which brings me back to how lost he was on 9/11. This guy is not running the show. When things go down, he's given a copy of 'My Pet Goat' and told to sit and be quiet. It's Cheney behind this stuff.
And you can call Bush a psychopath for mimicking a woman on death row begging for her life, but I remind you that Cheney shot a guy in the FACE without consequences- and got an apology from the guy, to boot.
Bush is not behind this. He's a puppet in a flightsuit. Look to Cheney for this one.
And you're absolutely right again, that a further exchange of open warfare (the way things are laid out right now) would cripple the US, just wipe us out. The pattern we're seeing isn't really a plan to win, it's all calculated to score political points at any cost, with a lot of bad assumptions about how things could go.
If this is really happening and leading to the ends I'm suggesting, it's just as well we won't be able to kick everybody around anymore, but I wonder what then will be done about radical Islam. Having the US rendered helpless but then getting thwacked with radical Islam isn't exactly a bargain for the rest of the world. We're not helping- we're making matters worse- but if we go down it'll become a feeding frenzy. Not good.
The tone of that is so dark that I think I want to add a little caveat here: I may be REALLY AGGRESSIVELY trying to sort out what's happening in what might be a major US military operation currently underway- which could well get me dragged out of my house by special ops. BUT...
;)
I'm an American, and consider myself as patriotic as a person ought to be, and if I've correctly guessed what's trying to happen, I have major complaints about the plan. What I'm proposing is that someone, probably Cheney, is trying to execute a false-flag thing (possibly for the second time? I couldn't say), specifically they are trying to orchestrate a strike on Iran for the express purpose of getting Iran to hit back.
Because if Iran sinks our carriers, as they can in fact do, but there's no news of any attack by US, it's 9/11 all over again, which is completely what the executive branch politically needs right now. They NEED an attack, preferably on military targets they can control and order within range of the attack.
BUT IF IRAN SINKS OUR CARRIERS OUR MILITARY IS CRIPPLED. Never mind the rightness or wrongness of secret unprovoked bombings of Iran, that's a separate and worthwhile discussion. Endangering such a major backbone of our military for political gain is treasonous.
So if suddenly OMG they sunk our carriers, that says I guessed right- and THAT says that the people running this were willing to trade off our military effectiveness, literally, for another chance to chant 9/11 9/11 9/11 and get their political way.
I don't think I have to approve of that in order to be an American, or patriotic. My hope is actually that these perhaps-preparatory actions such as making Iran and Tampa (?) go black, and moving the carriers within Sunburn range, were allowed to happen but the actual part involving an unprovoked and secret strike on Iran hits a roadblock and doesn't happen. Then we'd all be left happily guessing WTF happened, and you can tease me about it all you like