Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Good News from Germany!

The wolves of Germany are back! An unusual and unexpected result of the unification of East and West Germany!

Check out this article!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060830/sc_nm/environment_germany_wolves_dc_2




HOOOOWWWWOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Friday, August 25, 2006

Cool Bikes...



You know I love Motorcycles... So here are a couple of great custom jobs! I think that lawn mower is a great idea! And that top one is made out of 2x4's and such! Enjoy!

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Wisdom of the Barbarian

I don't know why I am inspired to write this, other than Conan the Barbarian, a literary character created by Robert E. Howard in the 1920's and 30's, has been one of my long time favorite fantasy characters and many of the Conan stories I read as a kid are still my favorites. Oddly enough, there are some great gems of writing in these pulp fiction stories and some of the quotes are good enough to be given some attention... these are some of my favorites. Enjoy.


“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” – Robert E. Howard

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. All else is learned.” – Robert E. Howard

“All fled--all done, so lift me on the pyre; The feast is over, and the lamps expire”. Suicide note left by Robert E. Howard

--from the movie- CONAN: The Barbarian:

Conan's Father: No one in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not beasts. [Points to sword.] But this... this you can trust.

Khitai General: Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!

King Osric: There comes a time, thief, when the jewels cease to sparkle, when the gold loses its luster, when the throneroom becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father's love for his child.



--from selected CONAN stories written by Robert E. Howard:

"From what hell have you crawled, you nighted dog?" muttered Conan, staring at the man. The Cimmerian involuntarily shivered; he sensed something incredibly ancient, incredibly evil.
Xaltotun lifted his head, as if listening to whispers across the void. He seemed to have forgotten his prisoner. Then he shook his head impatiently, and glanced impersonally at Conan.
"What? Why, if I told you, you would not believe me. But I am wearied of conversation with you; it is less fatiguing to destroy a walled city than it is to frame my thoughts in words a brainless barbarian can understand."

"If my hands were free," opined Conan, "I'd soon make a brainless corpse out of you."
--from The Hour of the Dragon.


“Their chief is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man’s soul. What else shall men ask of the gods?”
“But what of the worlds beyond the river of death?” she (Belit) persisted.
“There is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people,” answered Conan. “In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray misty realm of clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity.”
--from Queen of the Black Coast

“He was a man,” said Conan. “I drink to his shade, and to the shade of the dog, who knew no fear.” He quaffed part of the wine, then emptied the rest upon the floor, with a curious heathen gesture, and smashed the goblet. “The heads of ten Picts shall pay for his, and seven heads for the dog, who was a better warrior than many a man.”
--from Beyond the Black River

Later!

Monday, August 21, 2006

Gunnar Graduation!!



Today (8-21-06), Gunnar graduated from Puppy Elementary Obedience Class! He is just over 6 months old and weighs over 63 pounds and is doing very nicely with training. He is a very well behaved but happy and energetic puppy! He truly loves being a part of our family and we love having him as part of ours. He also loves his doggy buddies, Dakota, Yukon, Maverick (who could be his doppelganger) and Speedy.

We did the training at the Champaign Urbana Dog Training Club for the last 9 weeks. We had a great time. There were about 12 dogs total in the class as you can see from the one photo. The other is of Gunnar and I, and the two trainers, Nichole (right) and Janna (left). Gunnar even got voted to have the best trick. He payed dead when I shot him with a finger gun. It was not really a quick death but more like a slow death from a poison dart gun... It was cool thing to win.

Our next step is the CGC test... the Canine Good Citizen test... a required test for all the other training classes he might get into.

So that is all... Just a quick puppy update!

Later!

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

The best four days of gaming....

GENCON... which for those of you who are not familiar with it, is the biggest gaming convention in the US or at least this side of the Mississippi. At it, you will find all kinds of games and gaming. Anything from Video games to role-playing. Strategy to kid's games. Hundreds of games are planned in the four day event.

I have never been before this year. I have known about it for at least the last 20 years but never attended until this past week (August 11-12) in Indy. It was my virgin year and WOW! was I impressed.

There were close to 30,000 gamers there all with one thing in common. A love of gaming. Yes, they were all, for the most part, gamer geeks. But at least they all were comfortable being a gamer geek. There were gamers of all shapes and sizes, and from all walks of life. I was pleasantly surprised to see a large number of families there, and even more surprised to look around at the role-playing gamers and see that most of them are of an age group of 30-50. Interesting...

And there was so much stuff to look at! It was amazing! I saw literally millions of dollars worth of gaming material! Too much to actually take in, with only a full day and a half to be there.

I was not really expecting the costume show that seemed to go on, all day long. I guess I was being naive, as many of these gamers were big sci-fi/fantasy fans and this was a perfect place to dress up like their favorite characters, or as their own characters from some of the role playing games. (Or they were the LARP folks.. Live action role playing)

Well, it was a blast and I will be attending next year. Certainly for a longer period of time. And I will know better what to sign up for. (No more of this getting my butt kicked at a game in less than a minute!!!)

Hopefully my family can come with me. It would have been better with someone to share it with.

Later! (and game on!!!)

Thursday, August 10, 2006

More news about the best video game ever...

More HALO movie news! Never heard of the selected director, but I have seen the commercials mentioned. And of course, just about everyone has heard of the Ex. Producer, Peter Jackson... (Lord of the Rings, and King Kong)


LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Commercials and music video director Neill Blomkamp will make his feature debut on "Halo," the big-screen adaptation of the video game series.

The games follow Master Chief and his companion Cortana as they try to save the galaxy from alien forces called the Flood. Halo refers to an artificial ringworld that actually is a weapon capable of destroying the galaxy. Alex Garland ("28 Days Later") wrote the screenplay.
The South African native is known for commercials that feature robots and a dose of urban grittiness. His eye-popping commercial for Citroen, which featured a car that transformed into a hip-hop-dancing robot, won three Clio Awards. He also directed "Alive in Joburg," a documentary-style short about space aliens trying to live in the slums of Johannesburg.

The film's executive producer Peter Jackson saw some of Blomkamp's work and flew him to New Zealand for a meeting. Jackson's Weta effects shop is providing creatures, miniatures and visual effects for the production.

Universal will distribute domestically, and Fox will handle foreign territories. The movie is eyeing a 2008 release.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Killing Man's Best Friend

Here is a story that will raise your hackles, especially if you are a friend of dogs.... Warning, the photo included in the story is quite disturbing.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/01/world/main1855386.shtml?source=RSS&attr=HOME_1855386

If this doesn't make you think that China is nothing more than some overpopulated, undereducated, uncivilized, third world country, then maybe you are a better, more open minded person than me.

They did not even consider more humane ways to do this.... Not that they needed to in the first place! Get your stupid dog owners to vaccinate their pets! Get a health care system! Start treating life, all kinds of it as something of value!

A friend of mine once said to me after visiting China, "China is filled with stupid people. All the smart ones have immigrated to the United States." After reading this, I can believe it.

China... A world power... that is a scary thought.

Later.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

GIVE WAR A CHANCE....

Wow! After alot of searching, I finally found this article. I first read it in Harper's magazine when a volunteer at my office brought it to my attention. It was from the July 1999 edition. This was before 9/11 and the Iraq war but after Desert Storm (or the Gulf War). It it certainly speaking more on the war in Bosnia than any other war, but it would have made a good response to the United States' aborted move on Baghdad during this war and a criticism that we did not go far enough. Looking back, I think the critics were right and we should have taken Baghdad and eliminated Saddam Hussein in 1991 rather than in 2003. Now we find ourselves in a long war that is costing American and Iraqi lives. (but foremost, AMERICAN lives) Israel is now involved in a war with Hezboullah. North Korea wants to fight everyone, and Iran has become a Middle Eastern bully and terroist financier. And through it all, we have non-governmental organizations, like the UN and legitimate national governments are doing their best to stop the fighting. And they should. But maybe, just maybe, they should step back and let the fighting play itself out... Read this following article and give it some thought. I am printing this article as it was found on www.ciaonet.org


Give War a Chance By Edward N. Luttwak

Premature Peacemaking
An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace only after passing a culminating phase of violence. Hopes of military success must fade for accommodation to become more attractive than further combat.
Since the establishment of the United Nations and the enshrinement of great–power politics in its Security Council, however, wars among lesser powers have rarely been allowed to run their natural course. Instead, they have typically been interrupted early on, before they could burn themselves out and establish the preconditions for a lasting settlement. Cease–fires and armistices have frequently been imposed under the aegis of the Security Council in order to halt fighting. NATO’s intervention in the Kosovo crisis follows this pattern.
But a cease–fire tends to arrest war–induced exhaustion and lets belligerents reconstitute and rearm their forces. It intensifies and prolongs the struggle once the cease–fire ends—and it does usually end. This was true of the Arab–Israeli war of 1948–49, which might have come to closure in a matter of weeks if two cease–fires ordained by the Security Council had not let the combatants recuperate. It has recently been true in the Balkans. Imposed cease–fires frequently interrupted the fighting between Serbs and Croats in Krajina, between the forces of the rump Yugoslav federation and the Croat army, and between the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Bosnia. Each time, the opponents used the pause to recruit, train, and equip additional forces for further combat, prolonging the war and widening the scope of its killing and destruction. Imposed armistices, meanwhile—again, unless followed by negotiated peace accords—artificially freeze conflict and perpetuate a state of war indefinitely by shielding the weaker side from the consequences of refusing to make concessions for peace.
The Cold War provided compelling justification for such behavior by the two superpowers, which sometimes collaborated in coercing less–powerful belligerents to avoid being drawn into their conflicts and clashing directly. Although imposed cease–fires ultimately did increase the total quantity of warfare among the lesser powers, and armistices did perpetuate states of war, both outcomes were clearly lesser evils (from a global point of view) than the possibility of nuclear war. But today, neither Americans nor Russians are inclined to intervene competitively in the wars of lesser powers, so the unfortunate consequences of interrupting war persist while no greater danger is averted. It might be best for all parties to let minor wars burn themselves out.

The Problems of Peacekeepers
Today cease–fires and armistices are imposed on lesser powers by multilateral agreement—not to avoid great–power competition but for essentially disinterested and indeed frivolous motives, such as television audiences’ revulsion at harrowing scenes of war. But this, perversely, can systematically prevent the transformation of war into peace. The Dayton accords are typical of the genre: they have condemned Bosnia to remain divided into three rival armed camps, with combat suspended momentarily but a state of hostility prolonged indefinitely. Since no side is threatened by defeat and loss, none has a sufficient incentive to negotiate a lasting settlement; because no path to peace is even visible, the dominant priority is to prepare for future war rather than to reconstruct devastated economies and ravaged societies. Uninterrupted war would certainly have caused further suffering and led to an unjust outcome from one perspective or another, but it would also have led to a more stable situation that would have let the postwar era truly begin. Peace takes hold only when war is truly over.
A variety of multilateral organizations now make it their business to intervene in other peoples’ wars. The defining characteristic of these entities is that they insert themselves in war situations while refusing to engage in combat. In the long run this only adds to the damage. If the United Nations helped the strong defeat the weak faster and more decisively, it would actually enhance the peacemaking potential of war. But the first priority of U.N. peacekeeping contingents is to avoid casualties among their own personnel. Unit commanders therefore habitually appease the locally stronger force, accepting its dictates and tolerating its abuses. This appeasement is not strategically purposeful, as siding with the stronger power overall would be; rather, it merely reflects the determination of each U.N. unit to avoid confrontation. The final result is to prevent the emergence of a coherent outcome, which requires an imbalance of strength sufficient to end the fighting.
Peacekeepers chary of violence are also unable to effectively protect civilians who are caught up in the fighting or deliberately attacked. At best, U.N. peacekeeping forces have been passive spectators to outrages and massacres, as in Bosnia and Rwanda; at worst, they collaborate with it, as Dutch U.N. troops did in the fall of Srebenica by helping the Bosnian Serbs separate the men of military age from the rest of the population.
The very presence of U.N. forces, meanwhile, inhibits the normal remedy of endangered civilians, which is to escape from the combat zone. Deluded into thinking that they will be protected, civilians in danger remain in place until it is too late to flee. During the 1992–94 siege of Sarajevo, appeasement interacted with the pretense of protection in an especially perverse manner: U.N. personnel inspected outgoing flights to prevent the escape of Sarajevo civilians in obedience to a cease–fire agreement negotiated with the locally dominant Bosnian Serbs—who habitually violated that deal. The more sensible, realistic response to a raging war would have been for the Muslims to either flee the city or drive the Serbs out.
Institutions such as the European Union, the Western European Union, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe lack even the U.N.’s rudimentary command structure and personnel, yet they too now seek to intervene in warlike situations, with predictable consequences. Bereft of forces even theoretically capable of combat, they satisfy the interventionist urges of member states (or their own institutional ambitions) by sending unarmed or lightly armed “observer” missions, which have the same problems as U.N. peacekeeping missions, only more so.
Military organizations such as NATO or the West African Peacekeeping Force (ECOMOG, recently at work in Sierra Leone) are capable of stopping warfare. Their interventions still have the destructive consequence of prolonging the state of war, but they can at least protect civilians from its consequences. Even that often fails to happen, however, because multinational military commands engaged in disinterested interventions tend to avoid any risk of combat, thereby limiting their effectiveness. U.S. troops in Bosnia, for example, repeatedly failed to arrest known war criminals passing through their checkpoints lest this provoke confrontation.
Multinational commands, moreover, find it difficult to control the quality and conduct of member states’ troops, which can reduce the performance of all forces involved to the lowest common denominator. This was true of otherwise fine British troops in Bosnia and of the Nigerian marines in Sierra Leone. The phenomenon of troop degradation can rarely be detected by external observers, although its consequences are abundantly visible in the litter of dead, mutilated, raped, and tortured victims that attends such interventions. The true state of affairs is illuminated by the rare exception, such as the vigorous Danish tank battalion in Bosnia that replied to any attack on it by firing back in full force, quickly stopping the fighting.

The First “Post–Heroic” War
All prior examples of disinterested warfare and its crippling limitations, however, have been cast into shadow by NATO’s current intervention against Serbia for the sake of Kosovo. The alliance has relied on airpower alone to minimize the risk of NATO casualties, bombing targets in Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo for weeks without losing a single pilot. This seemingly miraculous immunity from Yugoslav anti–aircraft guns and missiles was achieved by multiple layers of precautions. First, for all the noise and imagery suggestive of a massive operation, very few strike sorties were actually flown during the first few weeks. That reduced the risks to pilots and aircraft but of course also limited the scope of the bombing to a mere fraction of NATO’s potential. Second, the air campaign targeted air–defense systems first and foremost, minimizing present and future allied casualties, though at the price of very limited destruction and the loss of any shock effect. Third, NATO avoided most anti–aircraft weapons by releasing munitions not from optimal altitudes but from an ultra–safe 15,000 feet or more. Fourth, the alliance greatly restricted its operations in less–than–perfect weather conditions. NATO officials complained that dense clouds were impeding the bombing campaign, often limiting nightly operations to a few cruise–missile strikes against fixed targets of known location. In truth, what the cloud ceiling prohibited was not all bombing—low–altitude attacks could easily have taken place—but rather perfectly safe bombing.
On the ground far beneath the high–flying planes, small groups of Serb soldiers and police in armored vehicles were terrorizing hundreds of thousands of Albanian Kosovars. NATO has a panoply of aircraft designed for finding and destroying such vehicles. All its major powers have anti–tank helicopters, some equipped to operate without base support. But no country offered to send them into Kosovo when the ethnic cleansing began—after all, they might have been shot down. When U.S. Apache helicopters based in Germany were finally ordered to Albania, in spite of the vast expenditure devoted to their instantaneous “readiness” over the years, they required more than three weeks of “predeployment preparations” to make the journey. Six weeks into the war, the Apaches had yet to fly their first mission, although two had already crashed during training. More than mere bureaucratic foot–dragging was responsible for this inordinate delay: the U.S. Army insisted that the Apaches could not operate on their own, but would need the support of heavy rocket barrages to suppress Serb anti–aircraft weapons. This created a much larger logistical load than the Apaches alone, and an additional, evidently welcome delay.
Even before the Apache saga began, NATO already had aircraft deployed on Italian bases that could have done the job just as well: U.S. a–10 “Warthogs” built around their powerful 30 mm antitank guns and British Royal Air Force Harriers ideal for low–altitude bombing at close range. Neither was employed, again because it could not be done in perfect safety. In the calculus of the NATO democracies, the immediate possibility of saving thousands of Albanians from massacre and hundreds of thousands from deportation was obviously not worth the lives of a few pilots. That may reflect unavoidable political reality, but it demonstrates how even a large–scale disinterested intervention can fail to achieve its ostensibly humanitarian aim. It is worth wondering whether the Kosovars would have been better off had NATO simply done nothing.

Refugee Nations
The most disinterested of all interventions in war—and the most destructive—are humanitarian relief activities. The largest and most protracted is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It was built on the model of its predecessor, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), which operated displaced–persons’ camps in Europe immediately after World War II. The UNRWA was established immediately after the 1948–49 Arab–Israeli war to feed, shelter, educate, and provide health services for Arab refugees who had fled Israeli zones in the former territory of Palestine.
By keeping refugees alive in spartan conditions that encouraged their rapid emigration or local resettlement, the UNRRA’s camps in Europe had assuaged postwar resentments and helped disperse revanchist concentrations of national groups. But UNRWA camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip provided on the whole a higher standard of living than most Arab villagers had previously enjoyed, with a more varied diet, organized schooling, superior medical care, and no backbreaking labor in stony fields. They had, therefore, the opposite effect, becoming desirable homes rather than eagerly abandoned transit camps. With the encouragement of several Arab countries, the UNRWA turned escaping civilians into lifelong refugees who gave birth to refugee children, who have in turn had refugee children of their own.
During its half–century of operation, the UNRWA has thus perpetuated a Palestinian refugee nation, preserving its resentments in as fresh a condition as they were in 1948 and keeping the first bloom of revanchist emotion intact. By its very existence, the UNRWA dissuades integration into local society and inhibits emigration. The concentration of Palestinians in the camps, moreover, has facilitated the voluntary or forced enlistment of refugee youths by armed organizations that fight both Israel and each other. The UNRWA has contributed to a half–century of Arab–Israeli violence and still retards the advent of peace.
If each European war had been attended by its own postwar unRwa, today’s Europe would be filled with giant camps for millions of descendants of uprooted Gallo–Romans, abandoned Vandals, defeated Burgundians, and misplaced Visigoths—not to speak of more recent refugee nations such as post–1945 Sudeten Germans (three million of whom were expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1945). Such a Europe would have remained a mosaic of warring tribes, undigested and unreconciled in their separate feeding camps. It might have assuaged consciences to help each one at each remove, but it would have led to permanent instability and violence.
The UNRWA has counterparts elsewhere, such as the Cambodian camps along the Thai border, which incidentally provided safe havens for the mass–murdering Khmer Rouge. But because the United Nations is limited by stingy national contributions, these camps’ sabotage of peace is at least localized.
That is not true of the proliferating, feverishly competitive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that now aid war refugees. Like any other institution, these NGOs are interested in perpetuating themselves, which means that their first priority is to attract charitable contributions by being seen to be active in high–visibility situations. Only the most dramatic natural disasters attract any significant mass–media attention, and then only briefly; soon after an earthquake or flood, the cameras depart. War refugees, by contrast, can win sustained press coverage if kept concentrated in reasonably accessible camps. Regular warfare among well–developed countries is rare and offers few opportunities for such NGOs, so they focus their efforts on aiding refugees in the poorest parts of the world. This ensures that the food, shelter, and health care offered—although abysmal by Western standards—exceeds what is locally available to non–refugees. The consequences are entirely predictable. Among many examples, the huge refugee camps along the Democratic Republic of Congo’s border with Rwanda stand out. They sustain a Hutu nation that would otherwise have been dispersed, making the consolidation of Rwanda impossible and providing a base for radicals to launch more Tutsi–killing raids across the border. Humanitarian intervention has worsened the chances of a stable, long–term resolution of the tensions in Rwanda.
To keep refugee nations intact and preserve their resentments forever is bad enough, but inserting material aid into ongoing conflicts is even worse. Many NGOs that operate in an odor of sanctity routinely supply active combatants. Defenseless, they cannot exclude armed warriors from their feeding stations, clinics, and shelters. Since refugees are presumptively on the losing side, the warriors among them are usually in retreat. By intervening to help, NGOs systematically impede the progress of their enemies toward a decisive victory that could end the war. Sometimes NGOs, impartial to a fault, even help both sides, thus preventing mutual exhaustion and a resulting settlement. And in some extreme cases, such as Somalia, NGOs even pay protection money to local war bands, which use those funds to buy arms. Those NGOs are therefore helping prolong the warfare whose consequences they ostensibly seek to mitigate.

Make War to Make Peace
Too many wars nowadays become endemic conflicts that never end because the transformative effects of both decisive victory and exhaustion are blocked by outside intervention. Unlike the ancient problem of war, however, the compounding of its evils by disinterested interventions is a new malpractice that could be curtailed. Policy elites should actively resist the emotional impulse to intervene in other peoples’ wars—not because they are indifferent to human suffering but precisely because they care about it and want to facilitate the advent of peace. The United States should dissuade multilateral interventions instead of leading them. New rules should be established for U.N. refugee relief activities to ensure that immediate succor is swiftly followed by repatriation, local absorption, or emigration, ruling out the establishment of permanent refugee camps. And although it may not be possible to constrain interventionist NGOs, they should at least be neither officially encouraged nor funded. Underlying these seemingly perverse measures would be a true appreciation of war’s paradoxical logic and a commitment to let it serve its sole useful function: to bring peace.

Edward N. Luttwak is Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.