Dowbrigade

From tomorrow’s New
York Times:

"CAIRO, Sept. 26 An official of the militant organization
Hamas was killed today when his sport utility vehicle exploded in a
neighborhood of Damascus, the Syrian capital, heavily populated by
Palestinian refugees.

Syria and Hamas officials quickly blamed Israel for the killing of the Hamas
official, Izzideen Al-Sheik Khalil, calling the car bomb a new phase in the
Israeli government’s assassinations of Hamas leaders."

In
this area, if in few others, we are convinced the United States should
emulate the Israeli example. We cannot defeat terrorism
with conventional military movements into hostile territory.  We
cannot capture, imprison and bring to trial all the lost souls who have
dedicated
their lives to killing us. And we should forget about taking them out
with grotesquely inaccurate "smart bombs", which attempt to divorce
those doing the killing from the psychic and visceral repercussions
of the act. Unsuccessfully.

What we need, as the richest, most developed and advanced
nation on the planet is a fanatical cadre of the most professional and
stone-cold lethal assassins the world has ever known.  If the United
States can produce the best scientists, the most gold medal winning athletes,
the greatest business minds and the hottest rock and roll, there is no
reason we shouldn’t have the best world class killers, ninjas, wet work
specialists and dedicated sociopaths as well.

As the Israelis have known since Munich, 1972, when there
is state-supported terrorism afoot the only way to root it out is to
hunt down the terrorists, one by one, wherever they run and try to hide,
and exterminate them like diseased insects. Fairly soon, after the massacre
in Munich, the Israelis discovered the identities of virtually all of
those responsible for planning and carrying out the attack. In most cases
they knew where they were hiding.

Did the Israelis go to the United Nations and ask for a
resolution to turn over these murderers for trial?  Did they go
to the International Court in the Hague and ask for indictments to bring
the criminals to trial? Did they try to convene a Nuremburg-type show
trial for the international community to see?

No. They very quietly and ruthlessly set special assassination
squads on the trail of these guys, and over the following 5 years, one
by one they dropped off the face of the earth. All of them.  Sometime
it was a car bomb, sometimes betrayal by a confidant or lover, sometimes
a portable telephone would explode in the middle of a conversation.  Some
were shot in their sleep, some were poisoned, some were garroted silently
in the night.  Some were never found, but simply disappeared.

The Israelis never announced or admitted what they were
doing, but everyone knew what was going on. Those who were the last to
go must have felt the invisible footsteps of the Mossad hit squads dogging
their heels for months before they finally caught up with them.

This is the essence of revenge, terror against terror,
but 100% targeted and, when performed professionally, absolutely safe
for innocent bystanders.

Americans today, wrapped in their cloak of righteousness,
are quick to smite the enemy, but prefer to do so from the Olympian safety
of launch platforms at 20,000 feet, like high-tech Zeuses flinging thunderbolts
at moral miscreants below. Laser guided bombs, GPS cruise missiles and
other "smart" weapons are our lightning bolts of choice.

The effects are almost always devastating, but not exactly
in the ways intended by the weapons designers. Often the target is taken
out, but more often than not any other human beings, including minor
officials, wives, children, waiters, servants and passersby who happen to be in the general vicinity are taken
out with them. They may kill one or two very bad men, but in the process
create
a dozen innocent martyrs and leave 50 widows and orphans who will spend
the rest of their lives hating Americans and the day we rained death
from the sky.

A further failure of the intended effects of these terrible
weapons is that the victims, of course, cannot retaliate against the
deadly silver dots streaking across the stratosphere, and so they look
for any accessible manifestation of the power which so suddenly and callously
took their loved ones and destroyed their worlds. Unfortunately, the
grunts, drivers and aide workers bear the brunt of the insane rage and thirst for blood revenge
kindled by these latest intelligent instruments of death.

The sad truth is that almost every person left alive in
the entire country of Iraq at this point has lost a loved one or knows
someone personally who has been killed in the fighting, the majority
by US troops. Effectively, almost everyone over there wants us dead,
or gone, or dead AND gone.

Finally, and in an ultimate irony, in the ultimate analysis the killer cannot divorce
himself from his handiwork simply by inserting a variety of electronic
switches and complicated machinery between himself and his victims. What
kind of emotional and psychological scars are our children going to have
when they come home? Both those doing the long distance killing and those
bearing the up-close consequences, keeping low and trying to survive
the hatred of a nation, are sure to be haunted and tortured by the implications
and memories of what they have seen and done. Do you really think that all the Vietnam
vets became homeless junkies and psychos after the war because that was
what they were before, or do you think that what happened to them over
there turned them into homeless junkies and psychos?

So we believe that it would be much healthier, psychically
and karmicly, to go in and get these Al Qaida scum one by one, with our
bare hands, so to speak, to send them to an early date with Allah and
let them see what HE thinks of their shenanigans. We must have the talent,
on the streets of our cities, within the armed services, or currently
honing their skills in one of our many excellent rehabilitation facilities.

Most importantly, it would save the lives of countless
innocent human beings who just happen to be in the vicinity at the exact
moment that some trigger happy cyber-jockey 20 miles away presses a button
or releases a switch. That kind of indiscriminate death-dealing is positively
un American. Our judicial system would rather let 10 guilty men walk
than send one innocent man up the river – blindly accepting warfare where
we are killing scores of civilians in order to get at a few truly evil
men is unacceptable and is eating away at the American subconscious.

So bring back the assassins. Teach them to shoot, and stab,
and garrote, and poison.  And teach them to be conscious human beings
while they are wielding the wrath of the terrible swift sword; to identify
and isolate their victims, to abort the mission if women or children or
innocents are around, and to look into the eyes of the murderous cowards
they are eliminating and say with their own eyes – this is what happens
to those who kill Americans.

Maybe
marijuana can be hazardous to one’s health -
or at least to the health of those around the addict. Do we detect a
potential election
scandal in the fact that the pot killer, who is still at large, fled
into the Bush? Could the killer weed be responsible for the current
rash of beheading in Iraq as well? We have long heard rumors of killer Iraqui hash, and are sure John Ashcroft will investigate…..

BLANTYRE, Malawi (Reuters) – A Malawian man believed
to be high on marijuana
beheaded
two women
with
an axe
Friday,
police
in
the southern
African
country said.

The man, in his mid-20s, beheaded a 52-year-old woman while she worked
in her garden with her daughter and did the same to a 68-year-old friend
who came to the daughter’s aid, police spokesman Kelvin Maigwa told Reuters.

"The unsuspecting woman greeted the stranger who, instead, threw
the axe at her, aiming at the chest," Maigwa said.

He said police found marijuana, or hemp, when they searched the suspect’s
home.
"The house was full of stench from recently smoked hemp. We believe
he had an overdose of the hemp that made him go berserk," Maigwa
said, adding that the walls of the house bore quotations from famous
reggae
songs.

Police have launched a manhunt for the killer, who fled into the Bush
after the attacks.

from Reuters

Not content with having converted email into
a wasteland and a cruel scavanger hunt (the Dowbrigade somehow list an
entire class’ emails down some junk drain last week), filling up blogs
with bogus comments shilling the same tired scams as spam, and more recently
Spim. unsolicited commercial Instant Messages (the kid who bags our grocery
now has a doctorate from the Sorbonne and looks
like
he stuck
a kielbasa down his pants), these mercenary bastards are moving on to
the latest iteration of out-of-control capitalism – Spit, or Spam over
Internet Telephony.

"our voice-mail boxes could become clogged with salacious
and bogus advertising messages, just like our email inboxes are today.
And denial-of-service attacks launched by armies of automated "spam-bots"
could tie up targeted customers’ phone lines constantly"

from
New Scientist

This funny
and provocative short story by Liz Dubelman
stretches the definition of what a short story is. It is an excellent
use of Macromedia Flash to mix media and create a new kind of literature.
It also raises interesting questions concerning the fine line between
mysticism and mental illness.

Perhaps the single essential cross-discipline characteristic
of genius is the ability to see connections that others cannot. This
is true in art, in literature, in physics, in sociology, in business,
etc. However, the people who are the best at this, the real geniuses,
usually have huge egos, since they are so much smarter than the rest
of us, and often twisted psyches, since they have never really fit into
the regular folks world.

This combination all too often results in the perception
of elaborate webs of connections with the intelligence perceiving them
perceiving itself in their center.  This in turn leads to megalomania,
if the connections are benign, and paranoid psychosis if they are perceived
to be malignant. Examples range from John
Nash, of A Beautiful
Mind fame, to Andy
Ben B, our freshman roommate.

Check
it out and judge for yourself