DC Trip, part 1
Just got back yesterday from visiting my second oldest sister in Washington D.C. She showed me around, and I got to see a lot. The Library of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Natural History Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Washington, Lincoln, Vietnam, WWI, WWII, and Korean War memorials, and probably one or two other things I can't remember. It was a blast.
The Library of Congress was one of my favorites. I got a research pass so that I could go exploring outside of the tourist areas in the Jefferson and Madison buildings, and had fun browsing in the different reading rooms. The main reading room is incredibly beautiful, and I loved how each research section was in a two-story alcove. Jefferson's personal library was my fav. If I ever manage to assemble a collection half that awesome, I can die a happy man. 4900 books, volume after volume of Tacitus, Cicero, Suetonius, Plutarch, Caesar, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Malebranche, Voltaire, Condorcet, and on and on and on... I was practically drooling, ha.
On Monday I went to see a speaker in one of the dining halls on the sixth floor of the Madison building of the Library of Congress, who was lecturing on suicide bombers. I went expecting to be wowed, or at least intrigued: when I got there, I noticed a sign that said "Sponsored by the Embassy of Israel." Ha. And true to form, the speaker was a former Lieutenant Colonel in the fucking IDF named Anat Berko. It was probably the worst analysis I'd ever seen, too, which didn't help my humor any. Completely and totally ignored the social and economic aspects of the situation, which is absolutely idiotic. When someone chooses death over life, the VERY FIRST question you should be asking is 'under what conditions are they living?' She started the presentation by showing footage from various market bombings of the late 90's/early 2000's in Tel Aviv, spliced together with footage of the impact of the planes on 9/11. I can only assume this was a halfwitted attempt to get the terminally ignorant in the audience to associate Hamas with Al-Qaeda.
From what I could gather, that was the only real goal of the lecture; to attempt to piggyback Israel's conflict with Hamas on top of our conflict with Al-Qaeda, so as to ensure that Americans consider goings-on in Gaza part of the 'War on Terror,' rather than an opportunistic attempt by Israel to force regime change in Gaza, expand their territory, and generally just wave their dicks around before elections. There was a great deal of effort expended to attempt to stress the religious aspects of suicide bombing, which, incidentally, gave me the perfect opening to expose that Israeli hag for the ignorant bitch she really was. When question time came, I simply pointed out that the largest number of suicide bombings in the world to date have been carried out by the Tamil Tigers, who are an avowedly secular Leninist group that is overtly hostile to ANY religion; that there was nothing in her entire analysis that could explain this, given her clumsy overemphasis on Islam as the supposed primary motive of suicide bombers; and since that was the case, of what use was her analysis-- at all? She was clearly unprepared for the question and gave a complete non-answer, after which I just smiled sweetly and left.
What made me madder than anything was being expected to be taken in by such a crap fucking analysis. I'm not exaggerating when I say that her analysis would not have made the cut in any sociology or political science class I have taken.
So yeah. I missed the protest in front of the Israeli Embassy, but basically got to personally stick my foot up the ass of their representative in front of a crowd. So I consider that a fair trade. Ha ha.
More on the rest of the trip later.
The Library of Congress was one of my favorites. I got a research pass so that I could go exploring outside of the tourist areas in the Jefferson and Madison buildings, and had fun browsing in the different reading rooms. The main reading room is incredibly beautiful, and I loved how each research section was in a two-story alcove. Jefferson's personal library was my fav. If I ever manage to assemble a collection half that awesome, I can die a happy man. 4900 books, volume after volume of Tacitus, Cicero, Suetonius, Plutarch, Caesar, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Malebranche, Voltaire, Condorcet, and on and on and on... I was practically drooling, ha.
On Monday I went to see a speaker in one of the dining halls on the sixth floor of the Madison building of the Library of Congress, who was lecturing on suicide bombers. I went expecting to be wowed, or at least intrigued: when I got there, I noticed a sign that said "Sponsored by the Embassy of Israel." Ha. And true to form, the speaker was a former Lieutenant Colonel in the fucking IDF named Anat Berko. It was probably the worst analysis I'd ever seen, too, which didn't help my humor any. Completely and totally ignored the social and economic aspects of the situation, which is absolutely idiotic. When someone chooses death over life, the VERY FIRST question you should be asking is 'under what conditions are they living?' She started the presentation by showing footage from various market bombings of the late 90's/early 2000's in Tel Aviv, spliced together with footage of the impact of the planes on 9/11. I can only assume this was a halfwitted attempt to get the terminally ignorant in the audience to associate Hamas with Al-Qaeda.
From what I could gather, that was the only real goal of the lecture; to attempt to piggyback Israel's conflict with Hamas on top of our conflict with Al-Qaeda, so as to ensure that Americans consider goings-on in Gaza part of the 'War on Terror,' rather than an opportunistic attempt by Israel to force regime change in Gaza, expand their territory, and generally just wave their dicks around before elections. There was a great deal of effort expended to attempt to stress the religious aspects of suicide bombing, which, incidentally, gave me the perfect opening to expose that Israeli hag for the ignorant bitch she really was. When question time came, I simply pointed out that the largest number of suicide bombings in the world to date have been carried out by the Tamil Tigers, who are an avowedly secular Leninist group that is overtly hostile to ANY religion; that there was nothing in her entire analysis that could explain this, given her clumsy overemphasis on Islam as the supposed primary motive of suicide bombers; and since that was the case, of what use was her analysis-- at all? She was clearly unprepared for the question and gave a complete non-answer, after which I just smiled sweetly and left.
What made me madder than anything was being expected to be taken in by such a crap fucking analysis. I'm not exaggerating when I say that her analysis would not have made the cut in any sociology or political science class I have taken.
So yeah. I missed the protest in front of the Israeli Embassy, but basically got to personally stick my foot up the ass of their representative in front of a crowd. So I consider that a fair trade. Ha ha.
More on the rest of the trip later.