Wars - especially one potentially with religious underpinnings - can get quite nasty.

Especially wars in the Middle East. Throughout history, the Levant (most of which is currently occupied by Israel) has been the seat of much bloodshed and outright exterminations of people, particularly "civilian assets". 

As a former member of the military, my analysis of Israel’s current aggression would tend to support Israel’s case against the Hizbollah: while Israeli foreign policy over the past 10 years has been largely concilatory and actually quite accomodating to the Palestinians (allowing them to attempt to form thier own nation within the 1967 "disputed" borders) and the Lebanese (withdrawing from occupied territory held for nearly 20 years)… they still allow terrorists to operate from within thier territories.

This also include several peace treaties with nations that were formerly quite hostile to Israel’s existence in the Levant, such as Egypt and Jordan. Perhaps a significant plurality of the citizens in those countries are still hostile, but the autocratic governments of those countries ably suppress popular dissent for the sake of "peace".

Not so with Syria and most likely Iran (which recently has repeated made calls for the annihilation of Israel) - they keep pipelining all of those $3.59/gal. gasoline windfalls into Hizbollah Zelzab missiles and bomb parts to kill people with.

I say that Israel has been more than conciliatory, given the abundance of several rather hawkish factions (the least of which is Likud) that would likely take the approach I am about to detail in the next few paragraphs below…  they have rolled back many of the Jewish settlers that were planning to rapidly develop thier stakes in the Disputed areas, granted the PA a large measure of autonomy in thier "authority", and have been much more tolerant (as compared to the USA) of belligerents operating close to thier borders, lobbing in rockets and deploying IEDs in civilian Israeli areas (read: terrorist bombs and the "martyrs" that wield them).

The USA for its part, would quickly operate against a terrorist cell hiding out in Mexico (for example) if it was routinely attacking civilian points inside US borders. Perhaps not to a massive degree (involving cruise missiles or carrier operations)  - although we have definitely landed occupation forces as far into the Mexican south as Veracruz, a long time ago.

The (Israeli) bombing of Qana is indeed a terrible thing. 54 people - 37 of them children - having to pay the price of thier lives for the actions of the Hizbollah terrorist is an awful thing.

Yet, if it is true that the Israelis had given them warning, then that calamity could have been avoided with the timely evacuation of that building. Thus far, Israeli has been largely very specific with its attacks, allowing for a certain margin of error in accuracy.

Which is better than what I would have recommended from the outset of hostilities (either in Gaza or in Lebanon)… my tactic would be not to send in ground forces, but to offer a suspected target site 24 hours notice to evacuate.

Then, reduce that city (and a 10km radius around its city limits) into a dust pile… carpet-bombing into the stone age in the Dresden style of WW2. No city, no infrastructure, no  mass of people to invisibly blend into after rocketing the Israelis. 

I think that should Israeli have done something like this from the start (with the 24 hour notice), the first few cities that got flattened (ideally the ones launching the Zelzab missiles) should leave a decent and uninhabitable buffer that can be more easily reconned and controlled by Israeli air forces.

Undoubtedly, this would create a humanitarian crisis of nightmare proportions… and stir Arab hatred of Israel all the more.  But this would probably be not much more than what has already been done. Yet, perhaps Olmert’s handling of this campaign is much more shrewd than my utilitarian (and arguably quite horrific) notion of how to deal with an enemy attacking your nation. 

Now, why have I titled this entry the "Samson Approach" ?

I read an interesting essay on something Samson was famous for - smiting (killing) heaps of people:

But it came to pass within a while after, in the time of wheat harvest, that Samson visited his wife with a kid (young goat) and he said, I will go in to my wife into the chamber. But her father would not suffer him to go in.   And her father said, I verily thought that thou hadst utterly hated her; therefore I gave her to thy companion: is not her younger sister fairer than she? Take her, I pray thee, instead of her.

And Samson said concerning them, Now shall I be more blameless than the Philistines, though I do them a displeasure.  And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails. And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and  olives.

Then the Philistines said, Who hath done this? And they answered, Samson, the son in law of the Timnite, because he had taken his wife, and given her to his companion. And the Philistines came up, and burnt her and her father with fire. And Samson said unto them, Though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged of you, and after that I will cease. And he smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter: and he went down and dwelt in the top of the rock Etam.

(Judges 15:1-8) 

 Here may well be a perfect illustration of the dealings between Israel and its neighbours, especially the PA and the Lebanese government in trying to control its proxies (Hamas terrorists
 and Hizbollah terrorists). By failing to actively police thier own people for the terrorists within thier cities, they show a form of complicity with those terrorists organizations.

Though they had repeatedly promised Israel that they would police up thier own, they give the appearance of being deceitful (and certainly neglectful) whilest the terrorist lob missiles and bombs and IEDs that shred Israeli children and women. Therefore, Israel in its defence, must be proactive to engage the threats to its security.

The USA has been rather quiet about restraining Israel’s aggression (which is probably just as well, since we really haven’t much right to speak against any nation’s extraterritorial activities given our own raging imperialism at the moment). 

According to this entry at the Matthew Henry Commentary, Samson generally kept his escalation of hostility commensurate with the harm the Phillistines inflicted upon him. It did escalate up to several thousand Phillistines being killed (by one man!) before some semblance of normal relations were restored.

Perhaps we should give Israel a little more time to deal with things its own way.

I’d sure hate to see more of our young men and women get deployed to some new hellish Middle East war. 

As boring as a Friday can get at 2:30pm… I decide to peek over at the propaganda news on the web.

In lieu of a real post fleshed out with thoughtful content… here are a few headlines, and the thoughts to go with them.

North Korea may consider leaving ASEAN: … Gotta feel a little sorry for Kimmie-poos (Kim Jong Il) here. With Iran wanting to build nukes and missiles to solve that pesky "Israel issue", the bloody quagmire in Iraq, and the Israel-Lebanon-Hizbollah row threatening to widen out into a much nastier war, our favorite far-east Asian attention monger can’t even get the smallest bit of airtime, even after shooting off seven missiles.

Except for Japan… given the animosity between the two states and Japan’s proximity to the Korean peninsula and defense arrangements with the USA… Japan is well worried that it will be drawn into any conflict between the DPRK and the USA.

Minimum Wage Hike to be tied to Millionaire Inheritance Tax Cuts/Business Tax Credits: Hmmm. Guess we simply cannot help out our working poor without making insanely rich people even more insanely rich. 

Lance Bass is gay: Now that was certainly a shocker. Heh.

Or it could be that I happen to be running Linux (Xubuntu 6.06 - that is, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS with the XFCE 4.3~ X-Windows manager) on an atrociously old computer that should have been turned into a toilet paper dispenser a couple of years ago.

But since with a baby on the horizon, and fuel prices skyrocketing ever upward, my discretionary spending on new computers is very limited… so running Linux on the old AMD K7 box (733 MHz of pure blazing sluggishness) beats waiting 15 minutes for it to boot up Win XP. 

For all the hype… Linux is not something that "just works" out of the box (or in this case, off of the LiveCD) for most folks, especially if you are something of a "Windows Power User". There is much dinking about in config files, and if heaven forbid that you want to install a program that isn’t in your distribution’s (read: flavour of Linux) package management … you will find yourself actually compiling the program from the source code.

Of course, being something of a geek… that is no problem. It is just when after all the compiling is done, the program barfs up hair on your monitor that looks nothing like the pretty screen shots on the web site you downloaded the source from.

Or worse, you expect the game to actually respond in a reasonable amount of time to your mouse/joystick input. I mean, it could be my drivers or my geriatric computer…. but a part of me is still thinking that the source code could have been put together a bit more nicely: often I will load the Windows flavour of the same program (this time, packaged as a nice little *.exe installer file) and it runs "just right".

And don’t get me going on some of the lame graphics that the "best titles" in Linux gaming has to offer. I guess until there is a rea$on to develop games for Linux… I will be keeping a Windoze partition on my machines.  

Okay, I know that I normally have reserved this category for Linux-realted posts… but other than my upcoming Franken-Komputer project I plan on undertaking sometime this week, I haven’t had much to post in recent months on (Linux) IT stuff.

But, a recent addition to my family of computers is a MacBook that for all practical purposes, my mother-law bought for my wife. Now while they are contentedly purring about "what a cute machine it is" (wife), or "how it will help (my wife) get a job" (Mom-in-law)… I am drooling with excessive greed as to how wonderfully seemlessly it and fast it handles the high-performance graphics software I have access to without horking up a graphics card like my Wintel PCs do every time I try to do something.

Honestly, I can’t say I have any complaints about this Mac - it starts up quick, the GUI (graphic user interface - the windows-like system) is fairly intuitive and has very crisp graphics (Mac OS X "Tiger")… and although there is a bit of a learning curve to it (menus for each application are on the bar at the top of the screen as opposed to the actual application, and it changes as you shift between apps)… 

Overall, I am impressed with it.

As for the looming Franken-Komputer project (so called because it will be the result of my fusing parts from a couple of computers that are taking up too much room)… I hope to make it a dual-boot Windows/Linux machine, as there are yet a few things that can only be done in Windows (such as certain video games I like to play on occassion - and yes, I *could* run them over Wine/QEMU, but this is a cranky old 1.2 GHz/256MB SDRAM machine I’m rebuilding).

But for the most part,  we shall be a Mac/Linux household for the next few years to come.

Ah, the Fourth of July. Hamburgers, hot dogs, other peoples’ children scurrying underfoot, and of course, fireworks.

We paid a visit to our friends in NYC (after carefully weighing the costs and conveniences of which mode of travel was best: by round-trip train/misc. public transit for about $50 USD inclusive, or for about three hours of driving through hellish traffic for about $40 USD in gasoline and bridge tolls - we chose the trains! ) and after successfully aggravating a very ill-tempered server at a Chinese shabu-shabu restaraunt, we enjoyed the Macy’s Independence Day fireworks show from atop said friends’ apartment.

Not altogether bad, aside from the following object lessons: 

1) Never go into a restaraunt that employs wait staff that lacks any ability to speak English in any capacity, or one that almost exclusively serves a non-English speaking customer base (of course, being in Chinatown might have been a bit of a giveaway, but thus far… most Chinatown restaraunts I have patronised have always had someone semi-fluent in English on hand. Of course, if you are actually in a foreign country, it behooves one to at least learn some of thier language or bring along a friend who speaks it).

2) Generally, it is a good idea to avoid bad-tempered servers who publicly curse you and your party out without even the pretense of trying to conceal yourself from view (say, like going into the kitchen and hawking a loogie on our food, instead of slamming on our table in disgust.)  

3) Also, realizing that pointing out to your server the fact that he has misunderstood your order, and  that plate of pork you ordered is in fact, your pork…

… and by having to physically blockade him from the kitchen in order to recover your plate of pork just might provoke him to anger. For that matter, I am still convinced that we did not get our proper servings.

4) Implying to that grouchy server that because we were paying his tip/wage for the next hour, that it would be a good idea for him to at least try a little harder to get everyone’s orders straight without throwing a temper tantrum. Unfortunately, this was not well received either.

Needless to say, the management heard an earful from yours truly about this rather unpleasant - and subsequently untipped - server. Although, I am not quite certain that the management understood me very well either.

5) I had wanted to eat some Korean BBQ, but a combination of market forces and popular opinion overruled my desire for flame-kissed Asian-flavoured swine flesh. However, I have determined to never, ever again listen to a suggestion to eat shabu-shabu (a primarily Japanese entreé) prepared in a Chinese eatery on the premise that it is "cheap and good". Now don’t get me wrong, I love Chinese cuisine. But leave the shabu-shabu to the Japanese (or the Koreans, they have a local variation of it).

Gripes about the restaraunt aside, the food wasn’t actually bad at all… but the utterly lacking service.

If I wanted to be treated like a schmuck by the wait staff, I’d pay for it and go to some snobby French place and hear the waiter’s insults in English or a reasonably intelligible patois. 

The rest of the night went well, and discovered that my wife’s friend’s husband has a recent interest in something I’ve taken a passing interest in as well - golf. I mean, it is about the only exercise I get for several hours at a stretch lately.

(There is also mowing the lawn, but we are talking about fun things to do here.) So I might be inviting him up for a round or three in the near future.

We wrapped up the night to news (of North Korean missile launches), dodging roving bands of Italian football (soccer) enthusiasts regaling in thier team’s victory over Germany (es tut mir sehr Leit…) and the acrid stench of fireworks exhaust wafting over the breeze that broke up the mugginess of the evening. And of course, just arriving to board the last Metro-North train out of Manhattan by the slimmest of margins… resulting in one very long ride (the last train is a local train that hits every little podunk stop on the line).

But that’s all good. We had the train more or less to ourselves and could rack out on the triple-seater chairs for the duration.