Warped Tour

I haven't posted anything in a while.

I'll just talk about today at the Warped Tour.

Anti-Flag
The Casualties
Less Than Jake
Bouncing Souls
NOFX
Against Me!

Underoath SUCKS. Thursday SUCKS. AFI SUCKS. Rise Against, whatever.

I lost my EFFING wallet during the Casualties cuz I tripped over all these people who tripped over this thing that was covering the cables that run from the stage to the sound booth. It never turned up at the lost-and-found places. Didn't lose a whole lot of cash though and my mom cancelled the debit card and gas card that were up in there. Guess I need a new drivers license. Damn Casualties.

Official: 7 arrested in Sears Tower plot

From the AP via Yahoo! News:

Seven people were arrested Thursday in connection with the early stages of a plot to attack Chicago's Sears Tower and other buildings in the U.S., including the FBI office here, a federal law enforcement official said.

As part of the raids tied to the arrests, FBI agents swarmed a warehouse in Miami's Liberty City area, using a blowtorch to take off a metal door. One neighbor said the suspects had been sleeping in the warehouse while running what seemed to be a "military boot camp."

The official told The Associated Press the alleged plotters were mainly Americans with no apparent ties to al-Qaida or other foreign terrorist organizations. He spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to pre-empt news conferences planned for Friday in Washington and Miami.

[...]

Security at the 110-floor Sears Tower, a Chicago landmark, was ramped up after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the 103rd-floor skydeck was closed for about a month and a half.

A spokesman for Gov. Rod Blagojevich said Illinois officials had been in contact with the FBI about the arrests. He would not comment further, referring additional questions to the FBI.

The FBI's headquarters in Miami sits near a residential neighborhood just east of Interstate 95.

clickhereforallofit

Those last three lines are how I think we should be defensively fighting terrorism. Bombing countries is offensive and does virtually nothing to solve the problem, if not actually make it worse, which is something I've asserted many times before.

So there are still Muslim fanatics living in the States. Bombing Afghanistan didn't drive terrorists away from our soil, and the civilian deaths over there and in Iraq are tailor made to ignite even more hatred of us with even more people who originally could have been ushered on our side had we left them alone. My point: the overseas "War on Terrorism" doesn't make us safe from terrorist attacks. I've lost count of how many times I've written about this!

Blogging from Louisiana

I'm sitting here at my brother's girlfriend's laptop at her house with the aroma of taco pie being cooked. I've just completed my first day of "new student orientation" at the University of New Orleans. It was mostly pretty boring but I'm glad they're doing this. Tommorrow we learn more things and set up our schedule and get our student IDs and whatnot.

I just went to this vintage guitar shop downtown, it was freaking awesome! It was like they took a typical guitar shop and took out all the guitars you don't give a shit about and kept the really freaking sweet ones, and more stuff that you don't always see, like authentic Gibson jazz boxes from like the 30s with one pickup in the neck position, or sometimes no pickup. I wish I could afford one of those guitars, maybe I'll get to use one at UNO.

I slept on this air mattress last night, I ended up having to use the couch next to it as a prop for my head so my spine wouldn't be straind. And the ceiling fan above me was nice and loud, good white noise for sleeping nice and not very much.

New Orleans is cool and I'm glad its about to be my home.

Pre-9/11 US-Iraq Relations

I was just now looking through the White Houses's website for any articles about Mexico's president, Vicente Fox Quesada. I was originally trying to see if I could get a status of our president's relationship with that of Mexico's (and I did find what I expected regarding that), but I found out something regarding Iraq that I wasn't aware of until now.

This is from a press conference in Mexico with Vicente Fox and George W. Bush from February 16, 2001:

Q What is the message that you want to send right now, what does the United States want to send to the world as a message with the new bombing of Iraq? [...] Is this a beginning of a new war?

[...]

PRESIDENT BUSH: [...] the United States is engaged in the Middle East and Persian Gulf. We will remain so. Since 1991, our country has been enforcing what's called a no-fly zone. A routine mission was conducted to enforce the no-fly zone. And it is a mission about which I was informed and I authorized. But, I repeat, it is a routine mission, and we will continue to enforce the no-fly zone until the world is told otherwise.

[...]

Q Sir, as you say, this is the first military action you've taken as President of the United States. I'm wondering whether it signals a hardening of the U.S. position towards Iraq. And specifically, is it your goal to drive Saddam Hussein from power? And, secondly, are you putting Saddam on notice today that American military action will be more frequent or more forceful than it was before you became President?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Mr. Fournier, Saddam Hussein has got to understand that we expect him to conform to the agreement that he signed after Desert Storm. We will enforce the no-fly zone, both south and north. Our intention is to make sure that the world is as peaceful as possible. And we're going to watch very carefully as to whether or not he develops weapons of mass destruction, and if we catch him doing so we'll take the appropriate action.

clickhereforallofit

Bush's statements from this press conference should be extremely noted, simply for the fact that they are pre-9/11. Here we are reminded (or informed, in my case) that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction began before the September 11th attacks. But Washington wasn't out for Saddam just because of the potential WMDs, they were apparently pissed off about the "no-fly zone" too. There was NO MENTION WHATSOEVER about Saddam's tyranny over Iraq and certainly nothing about promoting democracy there.

This should serve as a reminder that we did not invade Iraq because of 9/11, and that the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq were originally two different things. The war in Iraq may have started regardless of the 9/11 attacks, but because of the attacks, the public was much easier to dupe into backing the president in his John Wayne style efforts to control the middle east, and it made it possible for Washington to completely change the original mission in Iraq! 9/11 sucked for more than one reason.

However, regarding 9/11, it should also be known (as the American media didn't cover this at all) that the U.S. was planning to invade Afghanistan before 9/11, also. According to The Guardian via Jello Biafra, it was publicly known in Europe that U.S. diplomats met in the summer of 2001 with some diplomats from other countries in an informal meeting about a potential invasion of Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden. Biafra concludes that the representatives from Pakistan could have taken that information back to the Afghani Taliban, "which The Guardian suggests it did" (Biafra). Knowing that information made 9/11 look a lot less random and unprovoked to Europeans; the U.S. public was unfortunately kept completely in the dark and became conveniently vulnerable to manipulation. The rest is fresh, unfinished history.

Iraq al-Qaida names Zarqawi successor

From the AP via Yahoo! News:

Al-Qaida in Iraq said in a Web statement posted Monday that a militant named Abu Hamza al-Muhajer was the group's new leader. Al-Muhajer succeeds Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed Wednesday by a U.S. airstrike on his hideout northeast of Baghdad, Iraq.

The successor's name — a pseudonym, as most militants are known by — was not immediately known and did not appear to be on any U.S. lists of terrorists with rewards on their heads. The name al-Muhajer, Arabic for "immigrant," suggested he was not Iraqi.

The choice of a non-Iraqi "emir," or leader, would be significant, signaling that the group was maintaining a foreign Arab command.

clickhereforallofit

This is what I was getting at yesterday. Does it really take outstanding leadership to control a terrorist organization? They just blow shit up, so what if we took out one of their bosses? How long will it take to realize that this is not the way to win a war on terrorism?

As Jello Biafra says, "Israel has been fighting a war on terrorism since the minute of their birth, have they won yet?...If killing people stops terrorism, why hasn't it stopped?"

Is Zarqawi's Death Really Such a Victory?

I thought this was a war on terrorism in general (as stupid of a term as that is).Do people really need some big leader like that to show them how to blow shit up? What I'm saying is: Zarqawi may be dead, but do we expect the threat of terrorism to diminish as a result?

No one ever said terrorism will diminish because of Zarqui's death.
-"Fuzzy Muzzy"

Well if his death is seen as a victory in the War on Terrorism, I think that point of view implies an assumption of less or diminished terrorism. I mean, we kill people every day. Just because this guy was a leader, why does it matter if its some sort of moral booster or phychological blow to the enemy? I mean, bin Laden didn't fly the planes himself on 9/11; even if the leaders go down, this kind of enemy isn't going to weaken just because there's one less person to tell them what to blow up and when.