[ 24th May 2003 ] conspiracy and mirror | leave a comment |

Today I have took a quick look at the texts I wrote recently and suddenly realized that they are mostly dedicated to various activities related to various places I visited. Having in mind that there was a time I used to write almost weekly, and they were just interesting thoughts collected during a week. And I really tried to keep the regularity, in any case. Now I will try to revive the tradition.

It can sound strange, but the frequency of site updates started to lower exactly when I started publishing my first articles in magazines. Usually how it happens, I write something, the editors say "ok" and schedule it for publishing in two months. Meanwhile, there is an impression that something is moving on. By the way, because of such a long process of publication the guys from magazines sometimes have problems with the actuality of their content. For example, my article on blogs was approved and scheduled for publication two months ago, when the Iraqi topic was on the first place everywhere. But now, in May when the article appered in print, Iraq is not on the top anymore, but in PC Magazine Romania there is a proud phrase of mine that "events that attract attention of all the international community take place there" (near a link to dear_raed). When writing for the site, the efficiency is much higher, for the "writing - edition - publication" cycle is reduced to the very minumum, being done by one author in an evening. Of course the quality is affected (not checked as thoughfully as they do for magazines), but noone claims here to provide a super-quality content.

Apart from that, there was a period of problems which usually piss of people for a long time. Now the life is ok again and having a tea with date fruits, listening Okean Elzy from sub-woofer I can quite write something. A very nice song of theirs is Vidpusty (let me go).

I have listened their new "Supersymetria" which I just couldn't help buying during my visit to the musicians' home city. The following tracks are worth attention, in my opinion: "Kishka" (kitty), "Vilnyi" (free), "Dlya tebe" (for you), "Maizhe vesna" (almost spring) and "Holodno" (cold). This means, that in my humble opinion, the half of the album are good stuff, and I don't regret those -teen grivens that I spent on the CD.

Recently looking at the web site usage statistics an interesting domain name stroke my eye - kgb.ro. When I took a look at the main page of the site I saw an interesting logotype. The site itself is someone's homepage with the disclaimer all the material exposed here is considered useful to me, this being the only reason it is posted. Judging from the presence of domain names to countries matchings, ipfw howto, vi command reference, most likely the site owner is a system administrator or something like that. Just a couple of pages, but it's not the matter. The domain name is cool! My respect. And one more thing.. Is the kgb name if YOUR domain zone (dot-country) occupied yet? ;)

Also recently someone sent me a link to an electronic variant of the book Israeli Global Terrorism. The topic is very interesting to me, because in general I take a great interest in the Middle East region. Thus, I decided to take a look. During reading I had some thoughts which I will tell you here. Before I must state that I have got absolutely no complexes regarding the Jewish guys, no matter if their religion is judaism, christian, buddhists or atheists. Thus I have a right to tell as well good or bad things about them just like I would do about the Americans, Bielorussians, Latvians, Swiss, Englishmen, Ukrainians or Romanians. I have experience of communication with people of all the nations listed above, and moreover, I have good friends among them, thus I can write just what I think. Today it will be about Jews and Israel with a small analysis of what the unmasker writer Lev Lunin said in his book. By the way, no matter what my opinion is it's recommended to read. Personally to me the following things looked interesting.

Ariel Sharon's statement in Knesset.

Of course, it's kinda rude of him to say so. In order to check it I decided to use the google, and found 483 mentionings on various sites. So probably it was so. The fact itself it very interesting. I didn't hear he used to say something like that.

By the way, I still cannot get one thing about Sharon. Everybody says that he desecrated the Temple Mount. There is such a hill in Jerusalem. As far as I understand it's a sacred place for Muslims (there is the famous Al-Aqsa mosque on it), as well as for Jews too. The latter had their main temple there a long ago. But I still cannot get what is meant by desecration in this case. As to me, the grandpa behaved well, didn't spit, didn't litter.. But everywhere they write it like an a priori truth - desecrated and that's it. I don't understand.

That's why I say that the book's language is way far from being unprejudiced. It would be better if the author gave just facts with proves, without comments. It would be much wiser this way, because when you start telling something with the words like "desecrated", "demonic" and "slaves", etc, the reader starts to doubt about the author's being unprejudiced. At the other hand, he is not obliged to be so, but in this case you cannot count on the public's confidence.

I quite believe in the description of relations between the Jewish youth from the town of Bobruisk. But if what is said about the Hebrew vs. Yddish is true, then it's a pity. It's a pity that someone wants to destroy a whole cultural layer. As far as I understand, the Yddish was the language of European Jews a long time, and there is some heritage in the form of books, poetry and music collected during that period. The relations description itself reminded me of Isaak Babel's book named "Odessa tales". The same small town ways, with the only difference is that there it was Odessa, and in our case it's Bobruisk.

About the figure of Meir Kahane there are interesting things said in the book. Frankly speaking, exactly about this guy I know nothing. If we take a look at his official biography we can see absolutely other deeds. He looks like quite q radical politician anyway. Actually, it's possible to judge about the popularity of various historical personalities from the names of streets. I don't remember seeing any Kahane street in Israel. Nevertheless, almost in every city there was a Zhabotinsky street (led some defence troops) and Bialik (as far as I know, the first poet who wrote in Hebrew). Also I like the Levinsky street in Tel-Aviv (immediately reminds on the Monica scandal) and I also saw an indicator in Rishon-Lezion saying "Shmotkin street" (sounds funny if you know some Russian slang).

In the first part the fact that the first Russian bolsheviks government had the Jewish majority, but everybody knows it. Anyway, the part sounds reasonable. But the second, titled Israeli Cyber-terrorism, sincerely, cannot stand any critics. Being a programmer, it makes a strange impression on me. One of my eyes starts to tremble, and I also cannot rise my jaw from the table. I still cannot believe that he was refused to host his stuff at yahoo and geocities (though there is a question, why he didn't buy a separate one for himself?), but this.. I'll rather quote it.

The guy sees a conspiracy theory in a usual virus which generates e-mails with From fields taken from the address book. But even someone was doing it manually.. Even the "Hacker" magazine doesn't public such "secrets for the advanced ones" since quite a while, because nowdays every Beavis knows how to send an e-mail so that its From field had someone else's address. Not serios at all. And the book is full of such things. And when I saw the following paragraph, I couldn't help crying..

The conclusions are:

1. Log files are made especially to ease the system hacking process.
2. Firewall must be supported by provider.

Actually, a bunch of computer illiteracy interpreted as a weapon of the conspiracy. One more quote.

Now there are some sinister packets. And downloading of drivers. With viruses. Why not? It depends on where you download them from, huh? In general, rather unconvincing speaker, at least related to the Internet. And the truth.. it's as usual, somewhere in the middle. My personal impressions of Israel were not bad. Nice and clean streets, beautiful buildings, palm trees and sea. Once in the night I tried to find a place which wouldn't be illuminated by street-lamps, and didn't manage to. Quite frequently it's possible to hear people speaking Russian. The swarthy locals are a bit lout. Arabs (those of them how're citizens) you can see in any places near Israelis and at least in my presence noone was beating them with boots in face. The modern civilization with its sky-scrapers and ATMs adjoins old castles and citadels.

Just in case, it's worth mentioning that I am absolutely not person concerned about the topic. I am not a Jew, Ukranian citizen, with Russian face, live in Romania. Communicating with people nationality and religion are the last things to interest me. As to the dissidents, from the contemporary ones I like Noam Chomsky, who offers his vision on the facts that we hear on mass media. Sometimes he writes very nice articles like this one about the role of Turkey in the Gulf war 2. So here is my message to those who like to accuse jewmen, chinks or black asses for their own problems. Just look at yourself in the mirror more often to find the guilty one.

Update: Having read about Kahane I realized why there were no streets in Israel called with his name. The point is that he was oficially considered extremist by the Israeli authorities, and his "Kakh" party was banned as a terrorist organization. The book author can consider an idea to write a book called "Russian Global Terrorism" in which he can describe the ultra-right "RNE" with its leader Barkashov as a proof of evilness of all the Russians, with no exception. Actually, you can write such a book for each country. It may be a good commerical idea :) But again, there was nothing new in the book.