Tannishblog

Even as the Iranian government cracks down on bloggers, its President starts one of his own. There’s nothing like using the tools of the enemy against him. To revile the Great Satan through a new channel of communication created by the evil one himself. Ironic, that. I won’t mention the double standard, that’s an ingrained aspect of Muslim life, it seems. Slick interface, but reading the English version right-justified is different.

I’m confounded that a people, so openly in-your-face religious, are so militant. Isn’t that an oxymoron? It’s not just Muslims, either. modern American Christians are just as apt to arm themselves for an ideal. That’s why we’re in Iraq, isn’t it? Spreading Democracy? …don’t get me started.

Perhaps we’ve earned the moniker Iranians have been throwing at us for decades. Sometimes, as strategy of "tough love" can backfire. We haven’t been - to my limited knowledge, at least - easy on Middle-eastern nations during the past century. I won’t talk about this one. Perhaps they feel themselves recipients of unbalanced policies, ill-conceived or disingenuous attempts at allowing them to fight our battles by promising economic benefits that never materialize.

I’m also amazed that reports of fighting throughout the region often refer to armaments made in America, Russia, and France in the hands of fractious brothers of faith. How can these nations sit back and feign astonishment at a long-standing resentment and hatred toward them, when for the sake of economic growth (read: greed) weapons are sold instead of plowshares?

In this light, I tend to think the "Great Satan," is bigger than one nation, although America is indeed the point man, is instead the lingering vestages of Western colonialism, religious intolerance (not a strictly Muslim issue), and a lopsided reliance on unchecked capitalism.

As much as I would like the Muslims to lay down their Western-made arms, I can’t help wondering if what the world is currently going through is a cleansing period - not for the Middle-east, but for the West - wherein we all learn the fallacy of our policies, and the fragility of civilization. It would be sad if the end game of America’s twentieth century foreign policies is global thermonuclear war. Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to avoid?

My household is experiencing an Internet brownout today. Fully two-thirds of pages we try to load result in a DNS error or, as Firefox translates: "Server not found. Firefox can’t find the server at www…"

Any blogspot address is nil, but Google works. Many advertising banners are void, diminishing the silent shouts of "lookee here!" characteristic of online blurbs (that’s actually nice…). Sometimes I can get to my Earthlink start page, sometimes not - but my games still work. PHEW!

I bet Al Qaida is behind this. No one on the planet has the sophistication, the will, the mastery to pull of such a stunt. I can see them now, sneaking into manholes with power tools to cut through fiber optic lines in geographical coordination, severing the information backbone of our fragile nation.

And what is the Department of Homeboy Scrutiny doing? Nothing. Wait - it just looks like they’re doing nothing because they’re doing it in secret. Yeah, that’s right. Secret. No doubt they’re honing in on the manholes, awaiting just outside with big wooden mallets to bop those evil Al Qaida on the heads as they emerge from their nefarious deeds, like some life-sized gopher game. SHHH! Don’t tell anyone.

It must be working, because I have finally loaded a Blogger page. Could be an anomaly, though.