Shabbir's Diary

Web satire rules

Although I often find Mark Fiore too trite for his own good, I consistently consider him to be the most innovative web satirist around. In particular, his use of sound in his Flash animations is nothing short of brilliant. Take a look at his stuff.

Jungles of Randomness

There is today and will always be a gap between what we know, and what we don't know about what will happen five minutes from now. How an individual handles the unknown of the future is a window into their soul. Those who cannot adapt are forever prisoners of the unexpected. They can become, as a close colleague did, control freaks: unable to risk anything because they're sure it will result in something bad happening to them. (And it always does.)

Media haiku

Fickle crowds switch.
Tired of Iraq-O-Tainment.
Just turn it off, please.

The war officially ended yesterday, by the way – not with any White House pronouncement but with the decision by the cable networks to dump out of a Donald Rumsfeld press conference to cover a California coroner talking about missing woman Laci Peterson. Iraq? That was so three days ago. Local crime rules once again. [WP]

Looting

Explain to me how this works. The Iraqi people are looting their museums, their banks, their hospitals, and suddenly, it's the fault of the U.S.? If you don't have enough respect for your own community to even make an attempt at protecting it, how is it my fault?

While it's all tragic, I think it's a small price to pay for the transition. If in the next year we can actually get the Iraqi government running well enough to start profiting from it's own oil, we will have accomplished an amazing feat.

I'm very excited to see it happen. There's an entire industry of people here in DC who focus on creating democracies and you know, they don't get that many opportunities to practice their craft. In addition, I find the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan fascinating. Afghanistan is a religiously-governed country with a long history of extra-governmental warlords who have run the country for years. Iraq has little of that baggage, and despite it's nearness to Afghanistan, will probably do much better.

White Lines: Writers on Cocaine

Every once in a while, I read a book or see a film that makes me want to take a long shower and brush my teeth because I feel so damn dirty. The last thing I remember that did this was the 1992 film Bad Lieutenant: the story of the downward spiral of a NYC police lieutenant (Harvey Keitel) who is so awash in hookers, drugs, and corruption that he ends up living in a hell of his own creation.

The little UN that could(n't)

Help me understand this: We're blamed for causing the failure of the UN because we failed to obtain Security Council approval for the War in Iraq. But where was this blame when the Russians roll tanks through Georgia? For Israeli tanks in the Palestinian refugee camps? The list of UN resolutions that are ignored is long enough to fill a phone book [PDF].

And if the UN is so valuable, why does it seem likely that states that call for respect of the Security Council also seem to violate the Council's ban on arms sales to Iraq?

I don't think we can be cavalier in our foreign policy, but it's certainly not fair to hold us to a standard that other members don't bother to adhere to. If that's how it's going to be, then the UN was doomed before all this began.