Free at last
12/09/2006 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaAfter what seemed like an eternity, the Izzie has now officially escaped house elf slavery until Saturday 18th November. Two whole months of unadulterated decadence.
The broomstick has been out of action since last Monday so got to walk back to the Lair today. Only recently noticed some interesting additions to the landscaping of the local park. Most pretty indeed. So we decides to walk home that way with the grand plan of pottering by the new gazebo and doing some squiggling in our little green spiral notebook to mark the beginning of this momentous occasion. Every single time we've ever gone by this place was not a soul to be seen so was a bit miffed than on this of all days - there had to be a lovie dovie couple lurking and schmoozing. So we found ourselves another park bench but unlike the gazebo - there was no table so looks like the first official squiggle will be at our usual sacred site after all.
Slinked into the Lair around 2pm and scrubbed the scales and went for an afternoon snooze in the garden until 3pm. Could have stayed longer but wanted to catch a bus at 3.40pm. And before our snooze - consulted our To Do list - a certain thing was becoming urgent and could not be delayed any longer. Rang the House Goblins and redrew 4,000 silver sickles and got them transferred to our new credit card (Yesss - the Izzie has had to give in to temptation. Credit cards are easily the cheapest and simplest way of getting the paws on our loot while adventuring overseas)
So, with all that on the card plus $$3,400 available as credit, we should hope that should be quite enough to last until 11th November. While the Iz does not intend to spend recklessly, it would be rather silly to spend this rare opportunity worrying about every single silver sickle. After all, those 8 weeks once gone cannot be relived again and to spend them penny pinching would be just an outrageous waste
It was funny - this simple phone call plus a 40 minute snooze in the sunshine as well as that shower seemed quite sufficient to wash the work right out of our hair and get us into vacation mode.
Original plan was to go see the movie "Thank you for smoking" but since it was such a glorious sunny day and the movie was at 4.40pm - would be an awful waste of our first sunset. So instead we visited the sacred site on the hill near the Parliament that we'd intended to for the two Fridays of September
It was eery slinking home yesterday at 10pm. Vivid memories of 10pm this day many moons ago at the ma's place. Was staying there because she was hopping on the plane two days later for London and it was a last chance to down a bottlie or two in quirky company. Was already in bed by 10pm waiting for Late Night Live. Was feeling rather snoozie and listened to the news and some strange story about a plane having just hit some tower in New York. There was something about TV antennaes. Was kind of amused with visions of some silly Cessna Red Baron wannabee on some sort of subversive Adbusters style mission. Until that day 11th September had been associated with S11 and other assorted antiglobalisation groups. So it seemed like one of their silly publicity stunts.
Had already fallen asleep before the next news at 11 so next day was amazed and horrified to hear that this plane was not a pissy little Cessna but a passenger jet full of people and that the TV antennae was attached to a rather large office block. And by then there was two planes in New York and one at the Pentagon and another in Pennsylvania.
Not having a television, did not get to see all those awful images constantly replayed but the pictures in the papers were bad enough.
One guy at work had turned on the TV and yawned - Oh God -another one of those silly Hollywood disaster movies. It was only when he'd turned to various other channels and seen the same thing on all of them that it dawned on him that they were not all playing the same movie but that it was reality. Televised mass murder. Strange - in the past - most perpetrators of nefarious deeds have preferred to work under cover of darkness but this time was different. Not just broad daylight but at peak hour when the largest numbers of people were likely to be in those buildings and the cameras would be rolling.
And the constant replaying of these images - although surely not intended that way - turned out to be prime time free advertising space for Osama bin Laden and his mob. An awful dilemma. On the one hand - certainly a newsworthy event but on the other - the wall to wall coverage and priceless publicity would only be encouraging more of the same by giving them the one thing they wanted - as Margaret Thatcher so poetically put it - "the oxygen of publicity"
A small amount of money in the hands of Islamic nihilists could strike at the heart of a superpower and all its military hardware and intelligence was of no use at all.
And five years later, the mastermind still walks free while the Bush administration used this event to further their own nefarious purposes. Those pilots who bombed Baghdad back to the stone age and did not have to die trying - they seemed to truly believe that this was payback for September 2001.
We can be quite sure that at least 3,000 Iraqis die every month as a result of the invasion but who will remember them?
The broomstick has been out of action since last Monday so got to walk back to the Lair today. Only recently noticed some interesting additions to the landscaping of the local park. Most pretty indeed. So we decides to walk home that way with the grand plan of pottering by the new gazebo and doing some squiggling in our little green spiral notebook to mark the beginning of this momentous occasion. Every single time we've ever gone by this place was not a soul to be seen so was a bit miffed than on this of all days - there had to be a lovie dovie couple lurking and schmoozing. So we found ourselves another park bench but unlike the gazebo - there was no table so looks like the first official squiggle will be at our usual sacred site after all.
Slinked into the Lair around 2pm and scrubbed the scales and went for an afternoon snooze in the garden until 3pm. Could have stayed longer but wanted to catch a bus at 3.40pm. And before our snooze - consulted our To Do list - a certain thing was becoming urgent and could not be delayed any longer. Rang the House Goblins and redrew 4,000 silver sickles and got them transferred to our new credit card (Yesss - the Izzie has had to give in to temptation. Credit cards are easily the cheapest and simplest way of getting the paws on our loot while adventuring overseas)
So, with all that on the card plus $$3,400 available as credit, we should hope that should be quite enough to last until 11th November. While the Iz does not intend to spend recklessly, it would be rather silly to spend this rare opportunity worrying about every single silver sickle. After all, those 8 weeks once gone cannot be relived again and to spend them penny pinching would be just an outrageous waste
It was funny - this simple phone call plus a 40 minute snooze in the sunshine as well as that shower seemed quite sufficient to wash the work right out of our hair and get us into vacation mode.
Original plan was to go see the movie "Thank you for smoking" but since it was such a glorious sunny day and the movie was at 4.40pm - would be an awful waste of our first sunset. So instead we visited the sacred site on the hill near the Parliament that we'd intended to for the two Fridays of September
It was eery slinking home yesterday at 10pm. Vivid memories of 10pm this day many moons ago at the ma's place. Was staying there because she was hopping on the plane two days later for London and it was a last chance to down a bottlie or two in quirky company. Was already in bed by 10pm waiting for Late Night Live. Was feeling rather snoozie and listened to the news and some strange story about a plane having just hit some tower in New York. There was something about TV antennaes. Was kind of amused with visions of some silly Cessna Red Baron wannabee on some sort of subversive Adbusters style mission. Until that day 11th September had been associated with S11 and other assorted antiglobalisation groups. So it seemed like one of their silly publicity stunts.
Had already fallen asleep before the next news at 11 so next day was amazed and horrified to hear that this plane was not a pissy little Cessna but a passenger jet full of people and that the TV antennae was attached to a rather large office block. And by then there was two planes in New York and one at the Pentagon and another in Pennsylvania.
Not having a television, did not get to see all those awful images constantly replayed but the pictures in the papers were bad enough.
One guy at work had turned on the TV and yawned - Oh God -another one of those silly Hollywood disaster movies. It was only when he'd turned to various other channels and seen the same thing on all of them that it dawned on him that they were not all playing the same movie but that it was reality. Televised mass murder. Strange - in the past - most perpetrators of nefarious deeds have preferred to work under cover of darkness but this time was different. Not just broad daylight but at peak hour when the largest numbers of people were likely to be in those buildings and the cameras would be rolling.
And the constant replaying of these images - although surely not intended that way - turned out to be prime time free advertising space for Osama bin Laden and his mob. An awful dilemma. On the one hand - certainly a newsworthy event but on the other - the wall to wall coverage and priceless publicity would only be encouraging more of the same by giving them the one thing they wanted - as Margaret Thatcher so poetically put it - "the oxygen of publicity"
A small amount of money in the hands of Islamic nihilists could strike at the heart of a superpower and all its military hardware and intelligence was of no use at all.
And five years later, the mastermind still walks free while the Bush administration used this event to further their own nefarious purposes. Those pilots who bombed Baghdad back to the stone age and did not have to die trying - they seemed to truly believe that this was payback for September 2001.
We can be quite sure that at least 3,000 Iraqis die every month as a result of the invasion but who will remember them?
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 07:38 am (UTC)Strange... "September 11"´s first association for me remains the attack on the Palacio de la Moneda. And then the war of Israel.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 12:57 pm (UTC)While it is true that folks outside the USA remember the dead from the invasion and civil war in Iraq, the fact is that you have to really make an effort to be aware of their presence. The attitude of it not being necessary to do body counts makes it hard to find out the numbers let alone the names. In contrast - the Iz could find a list of names of the 2996 killed on the September 2001 terrorist attacks online in around ten seconds
Yesss. Izzie has no problems at all with the people of the USA remembering their dead or the many relatives all around the world but we do object to what sometimes almost seems like a demand that the rest of the world should show the same regard when it is invariably never reciprocated when other people are on the receiving end of either state sponsored or privatised terrorism.
Ridiculous stuff in the last few years of people putting on their headlights all day in memory or a minute's silence or whatever. When you live in a graveyard, you cannot weep for everyone and such silly symbolic gestures serve as some sort of snub to anyone else who has ever suffered or died as a result of violence
But even if it had not happened in the most powerful country in the world with the most influential media - simply the nature of the event - televised mass murder in broad daylight - not just the numbers of people who died and the whole dramatic nature of it but the evil ingenuity of using the tools of the enemy against it. They did not need missiles, tanks or ABC weapons but simply a handful of box cutters and yuppie suicide bombers. So little cost but so so much destruction.
And thanks to this event - so many governments are selling their souls in search of the ever elusive national security Never ever thought that in our lifetime that torture would be seen not as an abomination from the dark ages but as a weapon of first choice with lawyers and attorneys general lining up to justify such activities. (For God's sake - as recently as 2002, way up on the top of the list of justifications for deposing the Butcher of Baghdad was that the mean nasty man tortured people. That particular accusation quickly got dropped. Got waaaay too embarrassing)
And other Osamas will be scheming how to get an even bigger bang for their buck
Beware who you choose for your enemies lest you become like them.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 02:13 pm (UTC)After all, it's not like they kept track of all the Kurds that died beforehand. The other side does not keep track of each individual fatality that enemy suffers. Each side counts their own. Thus is has been since the dawn of time. It's only been in the past century or two that anyone has really tried to count the enemy's losses in a personal fashion and it's only the Western world that gets hung up on it.
It's possible that the missing lists you speak of do exist and are in Arabic. Perhaps you could find someone who reads it who can help you.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-14 01:46 pm (UTC)If the United States government had gone to war openly for reasons such as "That's a nice piece of strategic real estate you've got there. We wants it" or "We seek revenge for 9/11 but attacking the land where most of the hijackers came from would be too embarassing and awkward so we'll look for easier pickings" then not counting the enemy's dead would make perfect sense and be quite consistent with the usual tradition throughout history.
But when the US government make claims that the whole purpose of the exercise is "To liberate the Iraqi people from a regime of tyranny" because the search for those weapons of mass distraction is proving rather fruitless, then whether or not such noble aspirations are sincerely believed by those who proclaim them or are nothing more than spin, then it is quite legitimate for others to expect at least some regard for the victims and to be rather cynical when none is forthcoming
The problem with claiming the moral high ground is that some people may actually expect you to live up to it.
At least that's one thing that can be said about Israel - they do not feel the need to appear concerned about world public opinion. They just do what they feel is necessary to defend themselves and make no excuses for any excesses. No attempts at playing "Mr Nice Guy" just plain simple "Don't mess with us or you'll regret it" At least you know where you stand with them.