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musings of mark since 2001

From the New York times this morning, more news that the American public can’t get past the headlines as the first paragraph of an article on drug manufacturers states: “The Food and Drug Administration and several major drug makers are expected to announce initiatives today that will put tiny radio antennas on the labels of millions of medicine bottles to combat counterfeiting and fraud.”

You have to read quite a ways into the article for the paragraph that says: “Counterfeit drugs are still comparatively rare in the United States, but federal officials say the problem is growing. Throughout the 1990’s, the F.D.A. pursued about five cases of counterfeit drugs every year.” This number has increased some in this century, probably more due to the expense of Viagra and Oxycontin than anything else. You create a market, and it will be filled – the thin edge of the wedge described by Orwell is driving home deeper.

Good article on search engines that starts out opining about the differences in the new Micosoft search engine and Google, and then gets really interesting exploring the social problems they have to overcome.

Haven’t been doing much blogging lately, spending my spare writing time creating an article on the new PHP5 for DMXzone.com and the rest of life is just sort of rolling along as usual.

Technical News writing isn’t something I’ve done before, but thankfully a Great Canadian Database Master pointed out to me and the publisher that it’s pretty darn easy to read what I write. Taking them on their word for it, and so far have a 600 word outline on the major improvements in the PHP language and now just have to flesh out the geek speak a bit to make it a readable 2,000 words or so.

Easy to do, PHP isn’t just a freely available, easily typed, precompiled language written in C by a guy that wanted to be able to access his online resumes anymore, but a full blown XML, database, and OOP interface fully complying with the W3C DOM.

I couldn’t say it better than myself, so without permission have reproduced part of Robert X. Cringely’s column for this week, the whole article can be found here

Robert: But what I like best about this picture is the cyrillic caption that clearly mentions Snoop Doggy Dogg. Now THAT’s a sign of America’s international influence. The prelude to true world peace, I predict, will be when Pimp My Ride makes it to Burmese TV.

Back to the election. If the experts are correct, the 2004 election results mean we now live in a country where morality is apparently the major concern of people. Am I wrong, or is the same thing not true in Iran? And if our morality is in fundamental conflict with their morality, which side will be willing to sacrifice more to obtain what they view as their just end? I can tell you it ain’t us.

Back in 1986 I talked Penthouse magazine into giving me an assignment to write the story: “How to Get a Date in Revolutionary Iran.” The premise was that hormones are hormones, and those wacky kids in Tehran, most of whom could still remember the Shah, had to be finding some way to meet members of the opposite sex. So I headed off to Iran to find out the truth. If you are interested in such stuff, the only time a single man and woman not from the same family could be together in private back then was in a taxi (he being the driver), so all the teenage boys who had or could borrow cars turned them into taxis. This, of course, put all the power in the hands of the woman since she could see him but he had to take pot luck.

I eventually finished the piece and decided to go see the war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man’s Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that’s exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.

It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.

Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.

Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can’t really stand in that part of the world. But of course President Bush, who may think he pulled the switch on a couple hundred Death Row inmates in Texas, has probably never seen a combat death. He doesn’t get it and he’ll proudly NEVER get it.

Welcome to the New Morality.

Another day for America, but now the powers that be have a mandate to keep the poor in place and push through their Project for a New American Century, fomenting more war and ill will towards the people of the country they are supposed to be serving.

It’s sad that the populace is so swayed by Fox and CNN that the grandson of one of Hitler’s bankers can win on “moral grounds” and “values”. Forget that this is the third generation of a family that in October 1942, the U.S. authorities confiscated Nazi bank funds from the New York UBC (Union Banking Corporation), whose then president was Prescott Bush. The firm was condemned as a financial and commercial collaborator with the enemy and all its assets were seized. He was also named vice president and partner at Brown Brothers Harriman. Both firms allowed the Thyssens to send money to the United States from Germany via the Netherlands. When the Nazis needed to retrieve their funds, Brown Brothers Harriman, (whom Bush was the Vice-President of), sent them directly to Germany.

The U.S. government also ordered the seizure of the assets of a another two leading financial agencies directed by Bush through the accounts of the Harriman banking institution: the Holland-America Trading Corporation (a U.S.-Dutch commercial firm) and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.

Then on November 11, 1942, an embargo was imposed on the Silesian-American Corporation – another firm headed by Bush and George Herbert Walker (Prescott’s father in law, they kept the money in the family) – under the same Trading with the Enemy Act.

However, in 1951, the embargo was lifted and the enterprising businessman recovered some $1.5 million USD, earmarked for new investments largely to swell the Bush family’s patrimony. One wonders what deals were made with the devil for that to happen.