28 August 2004 00:06
so i finally figured out what my password was to get into this posting thingy. i shall gladly embrace the day when my mouse touchpad will take fingerprints so i can get in that way instead of typing somepassword that i'm supposed to change every fortnight. after all, arn't we to love our big brother?i've been partying too hard, so i can't stay long.. i'm just waiting for disneyland to stop their boisterous booming in the background. thier fireworks show goes off every night at 2135 and always raises my hopes for a good thunderstorm, but alas, it's just gunpowder. (ahh, but it's fancy gunpowder).
back on the flying half of my job today. i was a wee bit sluggish getting in the groove, i'm pretty good at forgetting anything and everything work related during a two week vacation.
copywrited 2000, a report entitled Clusters of Death reporting data on cluster bomb use.
Many people in Iraq and Kuwait have been injured and killed from unexploded submunitions [such as clusterbombs] since the Gulf War ended in 1991. Reports of casualties in 1993 cited 1600 deaths and 2500 injuries to civilians in Iraq and Kuwait. (chap 1, Rockeye II)
Cluster bombs kill indiscriminately in two ways: (1) "geographically," because they are wide area munitions which are difficult to target, they are likely to kill and injure civilian and soldier alike, especially in civilian areas, and (2) "temporally," because their high dud rates guarantee the creation of de facto landmine fields, they go on killing for decades after the battle is over. (chap 5)
The lethality of cluster bombs is so high, that even when used "properly" against combatants, they arguably violate the international prohibition against weapons that cause "superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering." War is hell, we are told. But there are limits, even in war.
As Mennonites committed to peace and opposed to the execution of war in any form, we have been loathe to walk into these discussions of the law of war, with its gruesome calculus between "military necessity" and "collateral damage." We enter those discussions not because we have abandoned our commitment to peace, but because we have seen and heard too many stories like the one of the family from Nong Oh. (chap 5)
that was on a rather dark note, especially since i was just looking inoccently around the mcc site to see if they accepted car donations. i'm interested in getting rid of mine, anybody have any experience with this? i'm thinking i'll just pick a 'donate a car' charity at random and go for it. so far, the Family Care Foundation is leading the race. i had to look some what deeply to find any reference to Christ, but at least he's on there somewhere, which is better than most of the other big donate a car scams. i just want to get rid of my car. it's costing me $2.10 a day in insurance, just sitting there. not that i've bothere'd to cancel my insurance yet :).
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