Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Hostage Killed. The "Green Brigade" has murdered Italian hostage Fabrizio Quattrochi, apparently with a shot in the back of the neck. Al Jazeera, showing uncharacteristic reticence, declines to air footage of the killing. Quattrochi was a former baker working as a security guard. How could anybody kill a baker? Like most of the hostage-taking organizations, the Green Brigade is a group nobody had heard of before. Stupid question of the day: Who are all these hostage takers and where are they coming from? [Hit & Run] If he was really a baker, or some other civilian, I'd feel bad for him. But he wasn't a baker, he was a mercenary. Being executed if captured is a normal danger of being a mercenary. The stories do raise an interesting question, though: how many other "hostages" are actually captured mercenaries? Speaking of "stupid," all those hostage-takers must be incredibly stupid to think that taking hostages will get various countries to withdraw from the occupation. Surely they're not so foolish as to believe that any government cares at all about the lives of their citizens? 7:51:59 PM    comment () Blogging from Fallujah. I don't know much about this site — it might be disinformation, it might be polemic. The author is certainly bitter. But it appears to be a detailed account to daily life in Baghdad and Fallujah. Empire Notes. [Mark Bernstein] The information in it does match what we know from other well-known Iraqi weblogs, and from bits and pieces of information that slip into the mainstream media's reports. 12:33:26 PM    comment () Slashdot | RFID for Automobile Tracking. mindless4210 writes "The U.S. Department of Transportation‰s Federal Highway Administration has called on four of the largest RFID manufacturers to jointly develop dedicated short-range communications technology systems for a trial as part of the agency‰s efforts to cut road fatalities in the U.S. by 50% within 10 years. The DSRC prototype initiative is a prerequisite for introducing new roadway applications such as issuing alerts to drivers about impending intersection collisions, rollovers, weather-related road hazards, or warning a driver that his vehicle is going too fast to safely negotiate an upcoming curve. The FCC allocated the entire 5.9 GHz band to DSRC applications some time ago, making the development much more feasible. Any DRSC system would require DRSC technology to be built into new vehicles." [Privacy Digest] Despite the transparent rhetoric about "safety," it's obvious that the goal here is to make it possible for the government to track every car at all times. 12:31:37 PM    comment () Symantec discontinues Mac Norton Utilities, SystemWorks. Symantec Inc. confirmed for MacCentral plans to discontinue the Macintosh versions of its Norton Utilities and SystemWorks packages. The company said in a statement provided to MacCentral that it will focus its efforts on developing its Internet security software instead. "Symantec made the strategic decision to discontinue development of Norton Utilities for Macintosh and Norton SystemWorks for Macintosh," said the company. [MacCentral] I've been aware of this since last month. Now that it's been made public, I can say that I think it's a very foolish decision. R.I.P. (Peter) Norton Utilities for Macintosh (NUM) April 1990-March 2004 12:01:45 PM    comment () Robert Fisk: At least 80 foreign mercenaries - security guards recruited from the United States, Europe and South Africa and working for American companies - have been killed in the past eight days in Iraq. [John Robb's Weblog] Given Fisk's lack of credibility the number is meaningless, but he does at least call attention to the question of just how many mercenaries actually have been killed. Perhaps an organization like Soldiers For the Truth ought to investigate. 10:22:14 AM    comment () Libertarians and the Left's wartime betrayal. During the 1960s Murray Rothbard argued that libertarianism had its roots in the Left, and ever since September 11 many of us libertarians have found ourselves in the somewhat awkward position of defending the modern Left. Some of us still consider the modern Right to be closer, however fractionally, to libertarian in its ideology. We would all probably agree that any romance between libertarians and conservatives has been particularly dysfunctional in the last couple years. The most outspoken [Rational Review] 10:12:32 AM    comment ()

© Copyright 2006 Ken Hagler. Last update: 2/15/2006; 2:00:49 PM.