HongPong.com takes a vacation

When I updated to Mac OS X 10.3, it took apart the programs which generated my old website. I could just put them back together, but I decided that it is time to give HongPong.com a break for a while. It turned out not to be too useful, so I am looking at new ideas. One possibility is a new, different site, a sort of collaborative blog kind of thing with an e-mail list-server and public bulletin board. Such things are all the rage these days already, but I think it would be more informative than my sporadic ramblings.

Also I am already putting together a sort of node-type database with some software that I just got. It has a ton of potential for online information, but I'm not sure what will come of it.

One of the more famous blogs, DailyKos, switched from regular blog software to Scoop, the program which ran my site. In this way I was sort of a pioneer for adapting Scoop to bloggery, though of course little came of it.

Besides the technical stuff, things are pretty good at school. It is very different living off campus now. On the one hand, moving out of the tiny Dupre Hall single, only about 7 feet wide, into a nice duplex-apartment with The Norman feels marvelous. But this has to be balanced with all the extra cold between classes and home. Perhaps its a symptom of getting older but this year we focus on classes a lot more. Eh.. Tis worth it...

Also there are several people who I've failed to catch up with on e-mail. Rest assured it is not because I hate you, I've just been too busy to keep up with things.

This semester the most useful thing I've done (for the Mac Weekly) is interview Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia and director of their Middle East Institute. Yet the interview itself is just the thing which rags on me, because he laid out all too clearly how bad things are becoming. These excerpts below are interesting, but be sure to read the whole thing:

• You said in your talk regarding Iraq that "there are much worse days to come." What leads you to this?
  
  ...[Alienation has been] exacerbated by the civil war that [Ahmed] Chalabi is trying to foment between the Shia, to whom he's posing as the champion of, and the Sunnis. The United States is on the point actually, I'm afraid, of incurring hostilities of more than just a lot of disgruntled Sunnis, and former Baathists, former soldiers, and so on, a few jihadis and others who are coming in, but maybe also the largest single group in Iraq, which is the Shiites.
• What do you believe are the central principles of neo-conservativism? Do you believe it carries an outer moral ideology for mass consumption, and an elite truth for the few?
  
  Yeah, Seymour Hersh in his articles in the New Yorker about these people has argued that these are people who studied under Leo Strauss or under disciples of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, people like Wolfowitz himself, [Pentagon policymaker] Abram Shulsky and others, and that they came away with a sort of neo-Platonic view of a higher truth which they themselves had access, as distinguished from whatever it is you tell the masses to get them to go along.
  
  There is a certain element of contempt in their attitude towards people, in the way in which they shamelessly manipulated falsehoods about Iraq, through Chalabi. Chalabi, of course, being part of this group, having studied at the University of Chicago as well, although he was doing his mathematics Ph. D. when they were doing politics degrees.
  
  The other thing I would say is that there is another element in some of them, of a belief in force, which doesn't come just from Strauss and Wohlstetter, who was actually Wolfowitz's dissertation supervisor. It comes from Strauss via Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the head of the Revisionist strand of Zionism, which was an extreme nationalism which very much believed in force. I think that that view is very widely spread among the neo-cons.... They are people for whom reality is probably less important than their ideology, and their moral certitudes.
• Were the neo-cons turning their ideology into intelligence data, and putting that into the government?
  
  I can give you a short answer to that which is yes. Insofar as at least two of the key arguments that they adduced, the one having to do the connection between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, and the one having to do with unconventional weapons programs in Iraq, it is clear that the links or the things they had claimed to have found were non-existent. The wish was fathered to the reality. What they wanted was what they found...
• Is there a connection to be drawn between Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith and the Israeli settler movement?
  
  Feith is a partner of Zell, and Zell is a leading settler. He lives in a settlement; he is an advocate of expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. He and Feith are ardent committed extremist Likud supporters, that is to say they support a policy of Israel's expansion, they support a policy of crushing the Palestinians, they support the expansion of settlements....

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That lays out where we are at today in this grand unpredictable flame of ours. It's just as well, in the sense that we are all learning plenty about human nature, answering otherwise hypothetical questions. To an atheist, religious warfare makes a hell of a problem to understand. Atheists in the foxhole? Even one of the godless can recognize when things have truly gone to Hell.

They just shot down a Chinook outsite Fallujah, fully loaded with soldiers about to cycle home for a break. Unbelievable how the principal lie of the war unfolds into all this tragedy.

There is an Atmosphere lyric I go by these days (from "The Wind").