the darkerside to rants

What does a society do that is based around the idea of “war and conquest” as the Anglo-Saxon society seems to be, when it runs out of a enemy?

It tries to create a new one.

The US has tried long and hard to find a new “mission” for it’s existence as a super power. There were a few attempts at asserting that power, most prominently through the nineties probably the whole debacle in Mogadishu. When this failed, former Yugoslavia was an appropriate target, but even all the “good things” (note: some idiot is constantly messing with the content, so I linked to an old version) have to come to an end.

The problem for a Superpower is that if they do not have an enemy they are… well, redundant. So for the last decade or so the US has tried desperately to find a new enemy it could point it’s guns at. After 9/11 it initially found a new target in first Afghanistan and then Iraq but neither of them have in 2008 a lot of “cache” with the majority of people. Domestic issues like the Credit Crunch seem to not be enough to distract people. So the whole thing in Georgia came somewhat as as “God send” (though the cynic in me thinks that the US gave “confusing” signals to Georgia).

Either way, the rhetoric in the Western media is…. Well, let’s call it propaganda. To my great disgust “Der Spiegel” managed to chime right in (not to mention TAZ and other Western newspapers).

The goal? To create a new cold war, the idea to “unify” the “West” against the “East” again.

To put it mildly I find it pretty disgusting how we (and yes, I do live in the West) have gone down to “Do as I say, not as I do”. Of course it isn’t really new either…. Politics was never about truth, always about opportunity and my “surprise” about this is…. Well, not really one…

But still…. It annoys me how the Western media plays along, how they paint Russia (suddenly) as the aggressor and how there seems to be at least a part of the population who is eating this hook line and sinker.

We have enough challenges ahead of us, we do not need a divided (or split up in smaller parts) world… We need to work together to overcome these challenges, but once again our politicians and the “fourth power” have betrayed us.

Humans are stupid.

So, now it is all “back to before” I even removed all the plugins on WordPress because something tripped Google up resulting in all Firefox users getting a warning that I am “distributing malicious software”.

The kicker is their own analysis page:

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 28 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 6 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 08/05/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 08/05/2008.

Malicious software includes 11 trojan(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 2 new processes on the target machine.

Malicious software is hosted on 2 domain(s), including 61.155.8.0, wp-stats-php.info.

Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?

Over the past 90 days, thedarkerside.to/rants/ did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.

Has this site hosted malware?

No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

Get this? They say themselves the site has not acted as an “intermediary” for an infection, it has not hosted any malware and yet I am still blacklisted by Google. The error message is uttelry useless to troubleshoot the site, they don’t tell you WHAT exactly tripped them, just that something did.

Fuck, this is like being put on trial in Guantanamo Bay, they charge you with “something” but you cannot see the evidence they have because IT’S SECRET!

Way to go Google. You guys officially suck.

I admit, I am not sure if I should laugh or cry.

The whole thing with the Georgian invasion of one of their former provinces and Russia’s response is… Well, telling about Western Media first and foremost.

A high level history lesson:

After the end of the cold war and the break-up of the Soviet Union, Georgia went their own way, two of their provinces, South Ossetia and Abchasien (German spelling, if someone has the english one, please let me know), decided to go their own way. South Ossetia even had two referendums and in both cases the majority of people voted to split from Georgia and join Russia and North Ossetia.

Georgia initially tried to bring the provinces back and after a bloody war in that ended unresolved in the mid 90s Georgia chose to “ignore” the provinces and let them more or less Govern themselves. In the peace agreement both parties agreed to “peace keepers” in the area, mainly consisting of Russians.

Since then Georgia went through three Presidents and tried very hard (and I guess still tries) to join NATO and to some degree the European Union. The NATO membership is “desired” by the US as it allows them to put troops into the country and “protect” Georgia from the evil Ivan not far away.

Why is the US (and the rest of the west) so interested in Georgia? The answer is simple as usual: Oil. There is a huge pipeline that runs through it, not only Georgia but, as “luck” would have it, South Ossetia, and that is a concern for the West, after all, the Oil Must Flow.

The (recent) Present:

Over the last few years the United States and Israel have “helped” Georgia in rebuilding the military. Officially of course to “prep them for NATO memberhship”, but it clearly had a political dimension beyond that.

As the “reunification” of Georgia is one of the core tenants of any Georgian President Saakaschwili had no choice but to “try and make it happen”. Apparently he chose to use the military option while Goerge W. Bush is still in office and the US could be counted on to back anything Georgia was doing. Using the Olympics as cover Saakaschwili’s army raced towards their goal to bring back South Ossetia before the rest of the world noticed.

And now….

Unless you live under the Rock, it backfired. The Russians didn’t just stand by, they went on the counter offensive. The latest news is that Georgian troops have left South Ossetia (for now) and are back in Georgia, meanwhile the Russian black sea fleet has ships outside Abchasien ready to disembark and make sure the Georgians don’t try anything stupid there.

Saakaschwili meanwhile is screaming bloody murder, trying to convince the West that Russia is the aggressor and his poor little country is under attack for no other reason than:

The war is not about South Ossetia. It has never been in the first place. It is about destroying a small democratic nation aspiring to live in peace, freedom and liberty.

- Saakaschwili

Amazing, first Saakaschwili orders his troops to attack the Russians and South Ossetians and when it doesn’t work and he gets his ass handed to him he claims that he was the one being attacked.

And the West plays along.

In the Media

One could argue that if Georgian’s plan would have worked out the whole “reunification” would have gotten lost in the Olympic hype (the timing of the initial attack clearly wasn’t a coincidence), the problem for Saakaschwili and the western media now is though that it didn’t. Instead of a “Mission Accomplished” the war of the words and the war of the guns continues to rage.

The media, as expected, is mostly trying to “frame” the issue as a Russian problem, in the sense that Russia caused this. Saakaschwili isn’t stupid, he knows what will play in the media, both in the US and in Europe, and reading through the (mostly short) bites of news that are getting posted on sites in the US, Canada, UK and Germany the “plan” seems to bear fruit.

It is interesting to also read the forums that are attached to these news and depending on what part of the world you’re in (e.g. North America vs. Europe) the reactions are quite a bit different. The German sites seem to be a bit more critical of the reporting (in general) than the Canadian or US sites. But still, the war of words is still going on, and the Wests need to try and find themselves a new enemy (even if it is the old one in the form of the Russians) continues on.

What is going to be at stake there is not so much the future of Georgia, as the future of how the West and Russia are going to communicate in the years to come. The West won the cold war, but it seems round two is just starting, and this time we will also have China in the mix.

Got your popcorn ready?

It’s funny really, BC bills itself as the “Best place on Earth“, or at least the license plates do. So I guess you could make the leap to “Heaven on Earth”…

And you know what? In a way this is how I would expect heaven to be if it existed: Beautiful but boring.

Okay, that’s not quite fair I guess, it isn’t really boring per-se, but there is a certain…. Dunno… “restfulness” about Vancouver that at times strikes me as…. Wel, boring.

Looking at the places I know / hang out they are all… Well, not really “happening”, it’s more like the quiet understanding that it’s “good” and that you should be doing it.

There are things happening in the city, but Vancouver is very much “outdoors”, that is, it lives from it’s surrounding and fits well in my observation about BC in general: Image is everything.

“Let’s drive that big SUV while we sip a Latte from Starbucks, but let’s do it in our fleece so that we can feel all outdoorsy”, kinda deal.

And the same is pretty much true for the city. It’s surrounded by amazing, at times raw, nature, but it lacks, in part, the things that make a city a real city. The “community” feel if you want. I wrote about this earlier and before, but in summary my statement hasn’t changed, people here are living next to each other, not with each other, and the city reflects this too.

Lots and lots has been said about “eco density“. Ignoring for a moment that the NIMBY crowd is out again in full force about this, the whole thing has one remarkable problem: It’s stupid. Not because higher density wouldn’t be good, but because the way the higher density has been achieved so far is buy building shoe boxes that aren’t useful for families.

And that’s a symptom for the whole the city: A lot of make believe, very little substance…. I guess that’s true for most of the lower mainland.

Lot’s of potential, very little delivery

So yeah…. Welcome to heaven, extremely beautiful, not always real, but beautiful…. and boring.

Good to know that there is no heaven… Would suck.

It is in a way fascinating to watch banks scrambling to try and find money. The popular opinion on banks is that they are the keepers of our money. You give them your money, and they take care of it for you until you need it, and in between they can use it to make some more profit and you get a tiny slice of that.

At least that’s the theory, but if you look at what’s happening all over the Western World right now (and I am sure in other parts) it seems that the banks really… well, suck in handling your money.

The implication makes me shudder, if not even the experts can keep their books balanced, then how bad in the crapper are we really? I guess we will soon find out, but I don’t think it will be a pretty picture.

The sad thing is that it dawned on me 20 odd years ago while still in high-school, while we learned about the monetary system and how it works. I came to the conclusion back then (and got told that I am wrong by the teacher) that in effect it only works because we’re all just believing that it does work.

And this, it seems, is only the beginning. I think we are starting to hear the end of the Overture and the curtain will rise for the first act in the not too distant future, hold onto your seats.

I noticed in the blip.tv logs for the Chinese fireworks show that a handful of people seem to be using a flash download service in order to grab the video.

This is so funny because:

a.) The movies are Creative Commons licensed anyway (like this blog).
b.) blip.tv offers a direct download link to the uploaded video.

So instead of getting the best possible quality, people are ripping a decent flash copy in order to keep it around.

Funny really…. I guess the “download video here” button isn’t quite as sparkling as it should be.