danhou.com

Rather than bore you with more of the same rampant speculation that’s inundating the blogosphere, I thought this might be a great point to step back and send you to a funny assessment of the Apple product life cycle I found a few months back.

I figure we’re right smack in between “Apple’s stock surges” and “The haters offer their assessment.”

It’s pretty common knowledge that Bush’s performance in the polls has slipped dramatically as support for the Iraq war has waned. This is completely understandable given that 2500+ Americans have died in the conflict so far with little to show for their sacrifice.

However, this is the first time I’ve seen different online publications uniformly labeling our President as a war criminal.

Benjamin Ferenccz, one of the chief prosecutors of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg, is accusing George W. Bush of the most heinous of all war crimes - that of commencing a war of aggression. Ferenccz asserts that Bush committed this crime by bringing armed forces to bear against Iraq without the approval of the UN Security Council.

The Village Voice expressed similar sentiments, this time condemning the President for the treatment of suspected terrorist prisoners and the strategy of “extracting information… by any means necessary.” These actions are in direct violation of the Geneva Convention and the US War Crimes Act of 1996.

It would be such a spectacle to see the United States President on trial in The Hague. Here’s to wishful thinking.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with the news as much, this past weekend there was a murdering spree that occured on 21st & E Republican - two blocks from where I lived for the past year.

I used to walk Pogo by that house every other day, often times in the middle of the night, and I never felt the slightest bit unsafe. The ironic thing is, I remember some locals claiming that I lived in a shady area due to its proximity to Deano’s and all the gang violence that implies. My experience has been, with just a little bit of common sense (i.e. don’t walk into Deano’s at 3am on a Friday night), I can live a block away and have nothing to fear.

The thing I found deeply disturbing about Saturday’s tragedy is that nobody has thus far been able to identify a motive. Neither the police, nor the friends and acquaintences of the suspect. This was literally an after-party, just like any other, except that seemingly for no reason at all, a guy decides to blow away everyone in sight.

This brings me to the race issue - Deano’s is a primarily black establishment, while Saturday’s mass murder occured at a white, rave scene. Much of the violence that occurs at Deano’s can be traced back to angry words and crimes of passion. But what motivated this weekend’s devastation? Witnesses told the police that the gunman had been “quiet and humble” at the party and hadn’t argued with anyone.

While I can’t say I can relate to a rage intense enough to drive a man to shoot someone in the head, at least this emotion makes sense to me on some level. Since I can understand the motivation, I can avoid behavior that would cause someone to react with that kind of violence. I don’t, however, understand the mild mannered white guy who’s secretly bugnuts. And we tend to fear that which we don’t understand.

The media has a field day building up this fearsome image of the angry black man and the crimes that he’s capable of committing. I say fuck that shit. The angry black man is the devil you know, and can therefore avoid, making it the lesser of two evils. The States should be far more concerned with the psychotic white guy. He’s the Columbines, the Unabombers and the Green River Killers - he’s the devil you don’t know. By the time you see him coming, its already too late.