drewish.com

into california

steve gingold had been talking about going to see the hives for a couple of weeks and when his extra ticket became available i decided to jump on it and go with him. we separate cars to sacramento then carpooled into san francisco. the opening bands (rainning music? and mooney suzki?) were horrible, they were totally into themselves, loud and sucked, any one of which by itself would have been excusable.

the hives were pretty good i think they put more time into rehearsing their rockstar kicks and microphone tricks than into playing but it was still fun. the lead singer either played the role (maybe it wasn't acting?) of a rockstar in such an over the top manner that there was bound to be some animosity. saying it was a hostile crowd would be a bit of an understatement. watching the lead singer argue with the crowd was the best part of the show: "i was told in advance that san francisco is a tough crowd. also i was told that it will be two days, no less than 48 hours, before you realize that this was the best show you've ever seen". the jeers increased at this point, a full beer was thrown and he reminded the crowd that "you all bought tickets, say what you want, it's money in my pocket". when he told the crowd "san francisco i love you but you need to fuck off" it was the highpoint of the show. strangely i was the only one cheering.

steve dropped me off back at my car and i drove on down the road a ways before pulling off on the side of 80 in the middle of a bunch of truckers.

this morning i woke up and headed down to oakdale to see some relatives. since i didn't announce i was coming it wasn't really a surprise that none of them are around. i think i'll hang out a little longer to see if my grandmother shows up, if not i'm thinking about going into yosemite for a day or two. i've got time on my side at this point.

a settlers story

there's a story on salon by a jewish woman who settled in the west bank with her family. i could sympathize with some points but there were so many little things she said that i wanted to take issue with that i'm at a loss for words. primarily her disinterest in the effects simple actions she takes have on the palestinians. what does she think will happen to palestinians that can no longer work in the settlements? that they'll go home and start up their own business in their new found free time? not likely, most of the suicide bombers have been unemployed men with families they can no longer provide for.

fortunately salon published a collection of reader's responses. unfortunately none of them went quite as far as i would have liked.

what did operation defensive shield do?

article in the nytimes about the most recent palestinian attacks had a pretty choice quote:

"Without a doubt," said the deputy defense minister, Dalia Rabin-Pelosoff, "Operation Defensive Shield hit the terrorist infrastructure hard. But it's clear that motivation has risen as a result and more suicide bombers have been created."

Afghans Told No Wedding Shooting Equals No U.S. Bombs

Afghans Told No Wedding Shooting Equals No U.S. Bombs KABUL (Reuters) - Authorities in eastern Afghanistan have urged people to stop firing traditional celebratory shots during marriages after U.S. warplanes mistakenly bombed a convoy of wedding guests, a local official said on Friday.

propaganda

i found this on a the pa's ministry of information website

you can dismiss it as propaganda, but it's still disturbing

that's our creative servicemen at work decorating the bombs we dropped on iraq. you can imagine how that image went over in the muslim world. kind of like mohammed atta wishing us a happy labor day as they flew into the world trade center.

another suicide bombing

there was another suicide bombing in israel yesterday. the really fucked up part is that if they weren't targeting women and children they made no attempt to avoid attacking them. the pa issued a statement condemned the attack saying that it was "harmful to our cause and struggle and to the image of the Palestinian people." no shit.

fighting the evangelical christians

i got kind of a kick out of this: the messiah truth project, i don't really know how to describe but it seems to be aimed a preventing jews from converting to a jewish-christian hybrid. it i met a guy on a bus in thailand who was an israeli jew who believed that jesus was his savior and he was one wacky muther.

leaving tomorrow

i've put it off a couple of days but tomorrow i'm hitting the road. i think i'll head over to see my grandmother in the central valley of california, then it'll be over to the coast and up through santa cruz to oregon. more to come.

new webmail system

i decided to waste a couple of hours trying to get a new webmail system running on mail.drewish.com this afternoon. i used horde's imp system and i've got to say it's pretty cool. it's got support for folders, spell checking and an address book. i'm pretty stoked.

the irony of liberty

they've installed facial recognition system at the statue of liberty, aside from the fact that they don't work and cost a lot of money, i think it's pretty funny. as a representative of the aclu said, "To have such a system in place near the Statue of Liberty ... is both ironic and disheartening".

i'm in

oh i fogot to mention, i got a call from the admissions guy at portland state this morning telling me that i was essentially accepted.

israel to finish turning the west bank into a prision camp

israel is presenting new measures for "securing" the west bank. what they're really doing is enacting what the camp david maps would have done, but instead of dividing the west bank into 4 sections separated by israli checkpoints now it'll be 8. the short sightedness of this is mind boggling, in addition to completely destroying the palestinian economy, it'll just aggravate one of the major complaints of the palestinians, daily humiliation at the checkpoints.

the end times

back in the beginning april i'd started to post this link about the evangelical christian theory of rapture. essentially it says that the israelis have to have a compete state (read west bank) and control of the temple mount, you know the one airel sharon visited starting the current infada, then all the good christians will go up to heaven leaving the rest of us here to suffer the apocalypse. and people made fun of the heaven's gate people.

today salon put up a piece on the way the evangelicals in the bush administration and congress are affecting american foreign policy in the middle east.

jews boycot the ny times over it's biased coverage

two days after i get done complaining that the nytimes is too biased in favor of israel, i read an article in said publication about pro-israel groups boycotting them because they feel it's biased towards the palestinian side.

everybody's leaving

dan left for two months in alaska on tuesday morning. my parents left for two weeks in russia this morning. i guess i'm going to leave next monday for my road trip. as i said in an email to a friend "not really sure where I'm going, thinking north. i've got this compulsion to make it to nebraska... not sure why."

still waiting to hear back from portland state i got a letter earlier this week saying i was denied admission because my gpa was too low and there were no act scores. i faxed them up a copy and the admissions councilor said that they'd get back to me today or tomorrow.

get your war on

i think i posted this back in the day but the guy keeps updating it and it keeps getting funnier with age. go get your war on

a long noam chomsky interview

the canadian broadcasting corporation has a very insightful interview with noam chomsky about us foreign policy. it's really long so if you don't have time for the whole thing i'd suggest skipping to the 4th section.

dude, new herbert kornfield

yo yo yo, the muther f-ing h-dog is back in the hizous. it's enought to make me start checking theonion.com again.

halliburton used enron style accounting

cheney's (and therefor bush's) opposition call for more transparent standards in the accounting industry becomes clear. the nytimes writes that the company cheney was the ceo of, halliburton, used deceptive accouting to hide losses.

foiling finger print detectors

in the vein of low tech defeating high tech: a japanese mathematician devised a way to fool a majority of the fingerprint biometric detectors using the material gummy bears are made from.

musings on the pheonix fbi agent

as more details about the pheonix fbi agent who wrote the memo all but predicting the 9-11 attacks emerge, almost all the articles about him end up painting him as a saint. i'm damn impressed by this guy although wonder if he just had a major stroke of luck. it would seem that if he was a that sharp his reports would make it up the chain of command based solely on his reputation.

another failed anti-cd burning attempt

i really get a kick out of this. sony spends how many millions of dollars to develop and implement technology that will prevent coping their cds and then it turns out it can be defeated by a felt tipped pen

the settlements continue

i've got to start reading msnbc again. the ny times would be the closest thing to a primary news source i have. their coverage of the middle east is a bit more thorough but seems to be a bit too biased towards israel. msnbc seems to be slightly to the left of center on most things and their coverage of the mid-east is the most balanced i've found.

any way they've got an article up about the generous subsidies israel give settlers. the whole deal with the settlers really pisses me off. in the states it's the least reported aspect of the conflict and it's the one that all the palestinians are most focused on. when your "partner in peace" is encroaching on you like it's the oklahoma land rush how can you believe there'll be anything for you to call a state?

george bush?

george bush? he's nice but dim

new mp3 licensing proposal

npr's all things considered had a cool piece on verizon proposed across the board tax on internet connections to pay content producers for video and audio. cnet also had an article about it. predictably the riaa hates it.

rc3.org had a link to

rc3.org had a link to a great newsweek story laying out leading to 9-11

i heard a clip of

i heard a clip of bush's speach laying out conditions for restoring normal relations with cuba. they were so absurd as to almost be commical. he's asking for far more from them than we ask from any of our "allies" in the middle east. almost every "bad" act of cuba's he enumerated the us has done on a much larger scale. i'll try to find a link to his speach.

whooooo... terror

i have a hard time taking cheney's recent claim that future terror attacks are imminent at face value.

"We don't know if it's going to be tomorrow or next week or next year," he continued. "But the prospect of another attack against the United States is very, very real." He said it was "just as real, in my opinion, as it was Sept. 12."

Mr. Cheney did not portray the information as new but said it was "a reminder that we're still very heavily engaged in this war on terror."

it comes off like they're trying to create a justification for not allowing an independent investigation and at the same time giving them something to point to and say "see! we do let the public know about terrorist threats"

atb

friday night i went to renolive (is it metropolis now?) and saw atb. the show was a blast i didn't stay for all of his set, 3 hours was enough for me. they had some technical difficulties, about every 20 minutes one of the turntables would fuck up and there be a great scratching sound before it just stopped. very frustrating.

they're all crazy

for some reason i think the israeli settler's plot to bomb the palestinian school pretty funny. sort of makes it clear that both of them are a bunch of wackos.

nytimes editoral

nicholas kristof has a wonderful op-ed in the nytimes debunking the myth that arafat was solely to blame at camp david.

salon has a piece countering the nytimes' claim that support for isarel is growing

jews control 40% of westbank

here's an under-reported story: about 40 percent of the west bank is now controlled by jews.

regime change?

in the nytimes there was an article about support for israel growing; it tangentially mentioned conservatives calling for a "regime change" in iraq, saudia arabia and palestine. aside from the arab world response to such an action and the improbability of it i wonder those same people here react to call for a regime change here. you know clean out that corrupt american regime elected through questionable circumstances. yeah they love that kind of talk here.

william safire, what a liar

i wish i had a recording of the guffaw sound i made after reading william safire call airel sharon "a centrist".

done with school

yesterday was my first and only final, i think this is the first college class i'll have gotten better than a C in. did a bit of drinking last night, woke up in some kind of way, i think i left my atm card at the bar...

settlers

those israeli settlers are just as fucking crazy as the palestinans in hamas

satirewire scores

satire wire's take on the mailbox bomber.

well the suicide bombers have

well the suicide bombers have started up again. reading that article i felt sick to my stomache, both for the dead and the soon to be.

Uzi Landau, Israel's minister of internal security, who went to the scene of the bombing, called for a tough military response, saying: "We have to keep fighting. The harder we fight, the fewer attacks there will be."

poor christie whitman

it must suck to be bush's figurehead at the epa. everyone beneath you actually cares about the environment and aren't afraid of going around you to help save it. case in point: the letter to the forest service suggesting that snowmobiles should be banned in yellow stone.

bush actually did something right

hey you know, i forgot to say good job to little bush for getting the arafat stand off resolved. hopefully he'll step up to the plate, kick those knuckle heads in the ass and get them moving.

it's time to cut israel

it's time to cut israel loose

i'm VERY upset about the unconditional support israel has gotten from congress. i'd called my representatives a week ago urging them not to vote for it but it happened anyway. today i'm calling back to let them know that i paid attention to it.