Section 35 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 March 29 Saturday
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Today I woke up early, at 0300, and found I had no wish to sleep more - at least not for the moment. I decided to take my mind off the war by digging into the SARS topic a little - nothing like a good global plague to make you realize that there's no point in sweating the small stuff!

I decided to put together some SARS links, and while I was putting together the links file, about the first thing I discovered was a headline reading "70 Japanese stayed at SARS hotel in HK," which wasn't exactly reassuring, but which, yes, most definitely helped take my mind off the war.

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Section 35 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 March 29 Saturday.
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A couple of days back, late in March 2003, the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV channel launched an English-language site. Initially this site did not work - news sources said it was under a denial-of-service attack. The link is english.aljazeera.net.

I kept trying this site, and today, 2003 March 29 (Japan time), I finally managed to access a page using the link above, but the page I saw was in Arabic.

I really don't understand why there's a problem. Setting up a website is no big deal. I've just been to Google news to look for "aljazeera website" to try to get some kind of handle on what's going on.

I found a story about the problem on the star-techcentral.com site. The link to the article is here. Apparently at one point Aljazeera's Arabic-language site was being diverted to a porn site. The article says, in part:-

Hackers impersonating an Al-Jazeera employee tricked one of the Internet's most popular web addressing companies, Network Solutions Inc, into making technical changes Thursday that effectively turned over temporary control of the network's Arabic and English websites.

The old social engineering strategy.

Aljazeera's main site (if you can read Arabic) is:-

www.aljazeera.net Right now (2003 March 29th at 1228 Japan time) this is showing a page that looks (to my uneducated eye) exactly the same as the page that appears (eventually) when you click english.aljazeera.net.

(Irrelevant thought: Hey, neat calligraphy!)

It's obvious what is and what is not a link, so you can click your way around the site, but it's not much fun because everything loads so slowly. Even so, it's not a totally useless exercise. I'm looking right now at a page which is basically in Arabic, but it's peppered with words in English, and it says (the link to this page is here):-

Paradox ... Linear ... Limited ... Total ... Micro-Wars ... NSS ... Shock and Awe ... Asymmetric Warfare ... Overstretched.

Assuming you know the context (current affairs in Iraq) this makes a certain kind of sense, in that you can make an educated guess as to what might be going through the writer's mind. My guess is that the gist of it is something like this:-

"The George Bush war in Iraq is proving to be not quite the happy adventure that everyone was expecting, and right now the Americans are a little overstretched in the face of the asymmetric warfare being practiced by the Iraqis."

Even so, that's just a guess, and since less than one percent of the text is in the English language it's a pretty murky guess. It would be nice to have something in English.

Faisal Bodi, a British journalist who currently works for the internet arm of the Al-Jazeera TV station in Doha (the capital of Qatar, something I didn't know two minutes ago) has a piece on Al-Jazeera on the site of the British newspaper The Guardian. The link to his piece is here.

This piece indicates that the recent Basra "uprising" which was reported in the Western media did not in fact happen. It goes on to say this:-

By reporting propaganda as fact, the mainstream media had simply mirrored the Blair/Bush fantasy that the people who have been starved by UN sanctions and deformed by depleted uranium since 1991 will greet them as saviours.

Only hours before the Basra non-event, one of Iraq's most esteemed Shia authorities, Ayatollah Sistani, had dented coalition hopes of a southern uprising by reiterating a fatwa calling on all Muslims to resist the US-led forces. This real, and highly significant, event went unreported in the west.

Here we have to remember that the Shi'a are the Islamic people concentrated in the south of Iraq who have been dominated by (and, to an extent, persecuted by) the Sunni majority. Before the war got underway, it was widely anticipated that the Shi'a would welcome the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

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Shi'a / Sunni: The New York Times Almanac for 2002 gives the religious breakdown in Iraq as being three percent Christian and ninety-seven percent Muslim, with the breakdown of the Muslim component being "60-65% Shi'a, 32-37% Sunni".

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NSS: I don't have a clue what this is. Options include the National Speleological Society, which somehow doesn't seem to fit. If you punch "NSS" into Google then you get "about 488,000" results, and I'm damned if I'm going to sit here and look through them all. Nodal Switching System? New Storage System? Namespace Specific String? Nodal Switching Subsystem? Take your pick.

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Linux comment: when you're faced with a really slow site like the Al-Jazeera site, it's really nice to be running Linux, because of the ability of this OS to reliably run multiple processes. When I'm surfing the Internet, I typically have two browsers open, Mozilla and Galeon, and if something is loading really slowly on one browser I can switch to the other and get something done while I wait.

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Section 35 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 March 30 Sunday.
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Saint George and Ibrahim

        Ibrahim was on the subway, straphanging, riding to work. He didn't realize he was standing right next door to Big Guy. As usual, Ibrahim was wearing sandals, and that was a big mistake.
        At Vangoose Station, the door sprorked open, and in jumped Saint George, meat cleaver in hand.
        "For God and country!" yelled Saint George.
        And - shloop! - the cleaver sliced through the air.
        Big Guy scuttled, skittling Ibrahim in the process, and the cleaver came zlooping down - flisk! Right through Ibrahim's foot. Cutting his big toe in half.
        "You - you virga!" said Ibrahim in horror, looking at his mutilated foot.
        "That was Big Guy," said Saint George. "Sorry about the collateral and all that, but he's the guy who killed your father. Don't you realize that?"
        From Ibrahim, no response. Why? Because he had passed out. A pity. It would have been interesting to hear what he might have had to stay. Not that George would have stayed to listen. George was already pushing his way through the crowded subway car, meat cleaver by hand, closing with Big Guy, who by this time was holding a baby girl as hostage.
        "Man's gotta do," said Saint George.
        And completed the thought with the cleaver.

The End

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Section 35 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 March 30 Sunday
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A bit fanciful at this stage - speculation that someone in America's power elite might be at least daydreaming about the possibility of expanding the present war in Iraq to take in Syria and Iran. I have mixed feelings about this line of speculation. On the one hand, I know that I have a lively (maybe overlively) imagination. I am, after all, a fiction writer - a fabulist. On the other hand, the behavior of the Bush regime has taken the world into territory that I never imagined, never predicted, never expected. These guys are not bounded by sanity or reason, so it doesn't seem sensible to dismiss any possibility just because "Oh, but only Doctor Strangelove would be nuts enough to do that!"

With that preamble, here is today's speculative e-mail to X who shall be nameless:-

2003 March 30 Sunday (Japan time)

Dear X

I think the gameplan for North Korea is:-

(a) withdraw US forces;
(b) bomb.

Therefore troop casualties, mountains and so forth don't come into the picture.

The difference between North Korea and Iraq is that Perle, Rumsfeld and company probably figure that if they drop enough bombs in North Korea then the North Korean regime will crumble and the South Koreans will pick up the pieces. There's no need to move in and occupy the territory.

Switching back to the question of developments in Iraq, what I wonder about is what on earth this business about warning Syria means. Is the gameplan to extend the war to encompass Syria as well?

From the point of view of world conquest, that has a kind of logic, since Syria has a nice long border with Iraq, so (if the war does drag on for months, which is starting to look possible) why not?

Financially it probably makes sense - if you have to conquer three different countries in the Middle East, there's no point in unnecessarily sending the troops all the way from America twice more when they're already there right now.

My guess is that someone in the American power elite is, at the very least, starting to daydream along the following lines:-

If the war drags on and casualties mount, then the American public may not buy into the next war. Congress may not vote for it. The international community would not stand for it. So why not just expand the war we've already got and take out Syria and Iran as well?

This scenario - the extension of the present war in Iraq into Iran and Syria - seems a little fanciful to me, at the present moment. However, a lot of stone cold sober people here in east Asia really do think that there is a very, very serious risk that the Bush administration is indeed planning to go to war with North Korea.

Best regards
Hugh

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Background: in the last 24 hours or so, American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been threatening both Syria and Iran with unspecified consequences if they interfere with the George Bush war against Iraq. Rumsfeld:-

"We have information that shipments of military supplies have been crossing the border from Syria into Iraq, including night-vision goggles. These deliveries pose a direct threat to the lives of coalition forces. We consider such trafficking as hostile acts and will hold the Syrian government accountable for such shipments."

Given that America, after years of trying, has not managed to absolutely seal off the fairly porous border between Mexico and the United States, it seems unreasonable to hold Syria to a one hundred percent success standard when it comes to policing the border between Syria and Iraq, but that, to take Rumsfeld's words at face value, seems to be what Rumsfeld is thinking of doing.

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Section 35 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 March 30 Sunday.
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I've had CNN running today, and there are about a million and one war things I feel urged to comment on, but I have to remind myself that I'm a writer, and that the main purpose of this website is to showcase my fiction and poetry, not to go to war with the Bush regime.

The really, really fascinating thing I've just seen on CNN is that apparently in some prewar wargames, a retired Marine Corps general played the bad guy, and used suicide bombers and so forth - predicted Iraqi tactics, in fact. But his tactics kept getting disqualified by the umpires, so in the end he quit in disgust, not willing to help validate an unrealistic outcome.

As far as the "It will be a short war" question goes, count me as one of those who was totally snowed. Before the war got underway, I was sure that by now Saddam Hussein would be dead meat, and by now we would be into Phase Two (Shi'a Muslims and Sunni Muslims slaughter each other, Kurdistan fights Turkey etc. etc.)

Well, anyway - back to the writing.

March is almost at an end, and I have a pretty busy week ahead at work, so today, Sunday, I put together the second short story e-mail newsletter.

The second newsletter contains two short stories:-

(a) "Heroes of the Third Millennium", first published in Fantasy and Science Fiction Vol. 95 No. 6 December 1998 (ed. Gordon Van Gelder) (New York, United States, ISSN 1095-8258) (pp 99-113; 5,017 words) (science fiction).

(b) "Cherry Normal", a complete self-contained fantasy story set in the Oolong Morblock milieu. Want an introduction to the Oolong Morblock milieu? Go to details of the projected OOLONG MORBLOCK series.

Interested in getting the free e-mail newsletter? Go to free fiction newsletter - details - this link goes to a page which will let you view or download (as HTML, plain text or PDF) a copy of the first newsletter (which was sent out between August 2002 through March 2003).

The first newsletter, which you can download on this page contains the text of the science fiction story "Locked Out" published in Black Petals Vol. III, #3, Spring 2000 (ed. Kenneth James Crist & John Gollihar) (Wichita, United States) (pp 37-40; 1,841 words) (science fiction).

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Technical details: I made the plain text and HTML versions of the second newsletter with UltraEdit-32, a shareware text editor (I paid for my copy) running under Windows 98.

To make the PDF version, I switched to Red Hat Linux 8.0 and fired up OpenOffice Writer. I am not a fan of the OpenOffice suite - it reminds me too much of Microsoft Office. But it's handy for making Postscript files.

First I used OpenOffice Writer to open up the plain text copy of the second newsletter and to save it in OpenOffice format. Then I printed the document, but instead of printing to a printer I printed to a file, giving the file the name "n2.ps," the "ps" specifying that this was a postscript file.

Then I opened a terminal and used the following command:-

ps2pdf n2.ps

That converted the n2.ps Postscript file to a PDF file, creating a file n2.pdf.

The next step (which I haven't done yet, but will shortly) will be to check that the n2.pdf file can be opened under Windows. (It opens under Linux just fine.)

Up until today, I've been sending out newsletters one at a time, as people have e-mailed me asking for them. Now, however, I have to organize a bulk e-mailing.

I may have some Linux software (somewhere) which is capable of doing this, but this time I'm going to use a piece of software which runs under Windows. It is the Vallen e-mailer, a piece of use-for-free software (no spam, please!) available from Vallen-Systeme GmbH, a company which does something dreadfully complicated which I don't pretend to understand - their website is www.vallen.de.

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The Vallen freeware area is at:-

www.vallen.de/freeware/index.html.

As of 2003 March 30, items on offer include a free image viewer (JPEG etc), a free zipper (to make *.zip), the Vallen e-Mailer, "the newsletter free e-mail client," and Vallen FileComp, "the free file compare utility for CD-ROMS".

Vallen-Systeme GmbH specializes in developing and manufacturing instrumentation for acoustic emission, and if you think you might be in the market for a high-speed AMSY-5 with up to 254 fully synchronized channels, then please bear them in mind.

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Using the Vallen e-Mailer, you can import "any number of e-mail addresses from an ASCII list" and then copy and paste your message into the message box and send it to everyone with one click.

Apparently you make a *.txt file containing one e-mail address per line, for example:-

hughcook@zenvirus.com
webmaster@zenvirus.com


.... and so forth.

.... okay, I'm going to test this ... I've made a list containing five of my own e-mail addresses ... now I click on the "Recipient" button ... navigate to the list .. click on the list ... the five e-mail addresses pop into the box on the left ... and I'm going to send this ...

Uh-oh ....

Okay, idiot error number one ... this is too embarrassing, I'm not going to describe this - there is a limit!

Try again ... the Vallen e-mailer pops up a "Please confirm" box giving details of what I am going to send "to 5 adresses" ... and, having sent these things, an "emailer.log" pops up, showing me what I have sent ... and now, did the e-mails arrive? ... yes, they did ... and each e-mail address seems to have got its own unique e-mail ....

Vallen swings okay.

Note: to use the Vallen e-Mailer, you download it, unpack it, navigate to wherever you have unpacked it, read the "Readme.txt" file then click on the executable file, and then click on the "help" button and read the documentation. And then (if you're like me) you'll run a test using a few e-mail addresses which belong to you, and see how it works in practice. (If you only have one e-mail address, make a few more.)

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