Sharma Family Journal

When will the Bush hawks learn to stop deciding which ruler governs democratically and which one doesn't ? It's pretty obvious that the Americans staged a coup in Haiti.

This is the most ridiculous quote I've seen in a while.

“We think it's a bad idea. We believe that President Aristide, in a sense, forfeited his ability to lead his people, because he did not govern democratically,” White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) told NBC's “Meet the Press.”

Recently there have been a lot of articles in the press about the anticipatory I/O scheduler in Linux. But I've seen very little credit given to people who proposed it first. I had to find out about this from a BSD mailing list.

Example article:

New Linux Speed Trick

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=75&e=2&u=/nf/20040405/tc_nf/23603

Original SOSP paper and FreeBSD implementation:

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/r/antsched/

… has shown that press independence in the US has been non-existent or the media don't have the teeth when it comes to challenging the government.

While NY Times has been saying some of this, Fox news is still peddling O'Reilly criticizing the “elite” media for calling it an “uprising”. CNN is just devoid of any opinion and risk averse.

The War's One Simple Truth
Iraqis Do Not Want Us

By ROBERT FISK
http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk04092004.html

My grandma recently passed away. She was approximately 94 years old, and my only grand parent alive, when I was born.

Just read about Dr Pavanaja's weblog in Kannada.
http://pavanaja.blogdrive.com/

ಕನ�?ನಡ mailing list ನಲ�?ಲಿ ಪ�?ರಮೋದ�? ಪವನಜ ಅವರ ಅತಿರಹಸ�?ಯವಾದ blog-ಅನ�?ನ�? ನೋಡಿ ನಮಗೆಲ�?ಲ ತಿಳಿಸಿದರ�?. ಅದನ�?ನ�? ನೋಡಿ ನಾನೂ ಸ�?ವಲ�?ಪ ಪ�?ರಭಾವಿತನಾಗಿ Linux ನಲ�?ಲೂ ಈ ಕೆಲಸ ಮಾಡಬಹ�?ದೇ ? ಅಂತ ಒಂದಿಷ�?ಟ�? ಕಿತಾಪತಿ ಮಾಡ�?ತಾ ಇದ�?ದೆ.

Some have suggested that this was an isolated incident. But people around the world seem to believe otherwise.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/98692C2F-8950-4298-A2D0-354B11BBC470.htm

Human rights watchdog, Amnesty International also said the incident was not an isolated case. “Our extensive research in Iraq suggests that this is not an isolated incident. It is not enough for the USA to react only once images have hit the television screens”.

The US govt is likely to say these are “private contractors”. I think “merceneries” would be a better term to describe them.

That compares to the 136 US Troops killed. Unless Americans are sensitive to non-american death toll, it's just going to inflame further hatred. And lead to disastruous consequences in the long term.

Hopefully, the 40% of the Americans that polls say still support Bush's war will wake up and smell coffee.

story

I spent a couple of hours closely watching Rumsfeld's testimony today. What amazed me was the “moral certainity” and the straight face with which a lot of senators commented about the war. The words “Freedom” and “Terrorist” have been so widely abused that anyone who utters them more than a couple of times becomes suspect in my eyes.

The democrats who tried to criticize Rumsfeld seemed to give lengthy speeches, instead of resorting to pointed questioning. Only Senators McCain and Levin did a good job. Senators Kennedy and Byrd literally had no questions. Republicans spent more time applauding the secretary than questioning him.

One only needs to talk to someone who's not American to appreciate how deluded Americans who support war in the name of freedom and using a larger than life and evil image of Saddam Hussein artificially created as a tool.

Those who don't support Bush, but are staying quiet must realize their accountability and the price their children will pay for the crimes commited by the American Army. People I talked to used to say - Americans are stupid enough to link Saddam to 9/11. Not any more. Stupid is too mild a word these days it seems.

I have an idea. How about dishonorably discharging Saddam Hussein from the Iraqi Army as a punishment for his crimes ?

Everytime I travel international to Asia, it takes me about a week to get over the jet lag. It's usually worse when I come back to the US. However, I've noticed that something I call “sh*t-lag” is harder to get rid of. It took me about 3 weeks to reset my cycle to the new clock. I guess, part of the problem is that you can get by with the sh*t-lag for a longer time, before getting fed up with having to leave meetings just because the time is 3pm PDT = 6am in the other time zone!

If you've turned on TV or radio recently, you can hear senators, commentators and anyone who wants to say anything about Iraq, give a long discourse about how the “men and women of the military” are doing a great job for the country.

Once they've proven their patriotism, they go on to say, our forces need to be there to “provide security”. We can't “afford to fail”. The vast majority of our military is decent and a vast majority of Iraqis are “with us”. We want to “bring them democracy”. And harp about American idealism (Mr Safire at NY times) and freedom (to drive gas guzzling SUVs) and values.

What these guys don't have a clue about is - what do Iraqis want ? Even the “coalition” polls show that more than 80% of Iraqis don't like the American presence.

The seemingly excessive quotation in this weblog is meant to be a criticism of American media which adapts these terms without questioning them.