So, sitting at my computer waiting for dinner to be ready, I started using the “del.icio.us randomizer” and stumbled across a really cool flash animation that tells the history of the Middle East in 90 seconds.
Monthly Archive for February, 2007
I don’t get it. Since when has guerrilla marketing been a terrorist act? I don’t know what caused the happy people of Boston to go totally off the deep end, but it baffles me. Katie sent me this link on Wednesday. Who knew that a few little lighted sheets of metal with a battery could cause mass chaos. Ted Turner certainly didn’t think so, well it was probably the PR people that had no clue. Bruce Schneier has an excellent overview on his blog.
What has really happened is that the Cult of Terror has won. People are now so scared that random, should-be-funny events are taken totally out of context. This is not the America that I grew up in. I mean, I grew up in a not-the-best sort of neighborhood with sirens wailing at any and all hours of the day, and I never thought that it was possible for our society to become comfortable with this level of fear.
I spent a summer in Israel when I was 16. I suppose that this was during a lull in the first Intifada. The Israelis had already become used the climate of terror that had infested Israel. The bomb squad came in and “disposed” of a suspicious package more than once in the time that I was there. Soldiers walked around the streets and took trips on buses with rifles in their hands. In reality, I never felt safer in my life – because this was not an abnormal experience in Israel.
But that was Israel, not the United States of America. It will take many years of living in this climate of fear and terror for us to become used to it. But the question to me is, when that happens how many of our liberties and rights have to be surrendered? Another question would be will the new America resemble the one I grew up in?
Oh yeah, almost forgot about this little blurb over at Techdirt…