A while back I noted the Pattern Recognition annotation effort. t.rev pointed out that it sucked so far. It continues to be more criticism than annotation, but you know, it’s the kind of thing obsessives like me read. And it’s done, except for the Themes section.
Population: One
“You are obviously trying to get around the fact that you are Canadian.” Yeah, I see that kind of thing all the time. Sneaky Canadian bastards. Apparently there’s an EBay seller who won’t sell to Canadians — or anyone else who isn’t part of the anti-Iraq coalition. Mind you, if you dig up their EBay policies page, it looks like they’ve never shipped anywhere outside the United States. Which would make this fuss about not shipping to non-coalition countries look a lot like a marketing scheme.
Link courtesy of the non-Canadian kodi. (Or is he?)
The new War News sidebar on the right is because I got tired of typing in URLs by hand; I’m gonna be glued to the news for a while and I may as well admit that and make it easier on myself. It’s not a permanent feature.
I’ve mentioned most of those sites. Flit belongs to a former Canadian military guy (vague, but that’s all I know) and has some excellent unbiased analysis. Sorry about the namespace collision.
E! Online has this to say about Polanski’s Oscar: “Only in Hollywood can Roman Polanski be a convicted felon and an Oscar winner.” True enough, since — as far as I know — Hollywood is the only place they give out Oscars. It would be difficult to be any kind of an Oscar winner in, say, Des Moines.
David Neiwert updated with another post on fascism, this one discussing the risks of abusing the word itself. Like the rest, it’s good reading.
Sometimes people do amazing things.
The Spokesman Review has a warblog with some cool material — there’s a nice piece on archeologist concerns regarding the war, for example. The Agonist is still my choice for up to the minute news, but the Spokesman folks are taking some interesting byroutes. Also, in the spirit of disclosure, I am tickled pink by the fact that they’re linking to me.
Addendum: the Spokesman infographics are nice. Hope they keep up that level of quality.
There’s a new blog out there called The Command Post. It’s kind of a group news warblog, but the bias of the contributors is distinctly conservative and they can’t help but let it seep through. A lot.
So t.rev dropped me a line pointing out this post, which discusses the Fedayeen Saddam, Saddam’s — actually, they sound like his special forces units. The poster compares them to the NKVD, and to illustrate the nature of the NKVD, he links to… Delta Green. As in the game. He links to a discussion of how the NKVD battled a secret US intelligence group over Cthulhoid horrors.
To make the irony complete, the very next post calls the BBC to task for being out of touch with reality.
Not much else to do with my night but mock the Oscars; I wasn’t gonna, but the opening montage reminded me of how painfully bad some of the Oscar winners have been. Thus, they deserve it. It’ll all go in this post so anyone reading this on Livejournal is missing all the fun.
In 1972, Munich was awarded the 18th Summer Olympic Games. It was the first Olympics in Germany since the propaganda-inflected Games of 1936; as is always the case, hosting the Olympic Games was a matter of some national pride. There were 7,173 athletes from 121 nations present.
Mark Spitz won his seven gold medals at that games, with seven world records. Ulrike Meyfarth became the youngest person to win a gold medal in an individual event, in the high jump, at age 16. Olga Korbut became a media star and ushered in an era of gymnastics obsession.
At 5 AM on September 5th, eight Palestinian terrorists broke into the Olympic Village and knocked on the door of Moshe Weinberg. Weinberg was the wrestling coach for the Israeli team. The terrorists killed Weinberg and Joseph Romano, and took nine other Israelis hostage: Kehat Shorr, David Berger, Yaacov Shpringer, Mark Slavin, Andre Spitzer, Zeev Friedman, Yosef Guttfreund, Eliezor Halfin, and Amitsur Shapira. At 9:30, the terrorists — members of Black September, which later proved to be a PLO faction — demanded the release of 200 terrorists (most Arab, but two Germans, the leaders of the Red Army Faction) and passage out of Germany.
Golda Meir, then Prime Minister of Israel, refused to make concessions. In conjunction with Israeli officials, the German police on hand planned to get the terrorists to an airport under the pretense of negotiation, and to kill the terrorists there. Tragically, they underestimated the number of terrorists involved and did not provide enough snipers for the operation.
By 3 AM the following morning, the crisis had ended with the deaths of all the Israeli hostages and most of the terrorists. Three terrorists were taken prisoner. On October 29th, a plane flying from Syria to Germany was hijacked; the hijackers demanded the release of the captured terrorists. Germany capitulated.
In the years following, Mossad operatives were tasked with hunting down and killing those responsible for the Munich tragedy. For the most part, they succeeded. In one case, they killed the wrong person — Ahmed Bouchiki, in Lillehammer.
Germany has not hosted an Olympics since. In April of 1998, the Red Army Faction officially disbanded following a long period of inactivity.
I chronicle this because the Vice President of the United States of America forgot.