Osama Bin Laden is Dead

So what?

Here are a few early thoughts on what it might mean that the "world's most wanted man" has finally been tracked down and executed.

1. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. Bin Laden was waging war. Sometimes wars don't go the way you'd like them to and, even when you're a big-shot general, sitting safely in your stronghold, well away from the fighting, sometimes the enemy gets to you and kills you. Them's the breaks. Bin Laden dropped a plane on the Pentagon. The Pentagon dropped a Navy Seals team on Abbottabad.

2. It's made many Americans very happy. Let's face it, Americans went nuts after 9/11. They thrashed about in a frenzy of outrage, fear and frustration. They invaded Iraq for Pete's sake! How crazy was that? Yet the fear was the worst bit of it. Americans became obsessed with the idea that their enemies could reach out and get them and it terrified them. It was shocking and horrible. It went against everything they believed about their superiority and invulnerability. And much of that fear was focused on Osama Bin Laden. He was the one who had hurt them. He was the one who, for ten whole years, dodged their best efforts to wreak their vengeance. So, of course, now he's dead, some of that sense of dread and impotence has been lifted. No wonder they're dancing in the streets.

3. With any luck, President Obama will enjoy a 'halo effect' from being the president in office when Bin Laden was shot. Yes, many American's think he's a Muslim, and a socialist, and a foreigner, but now they also know he's the guy who brought down the Boogey Man. American conservatives probably have a much lower chance now of winning the election next year. This is a very good thing, especially considering the absolute clowns who have been suggested as GOP candidates - like Palin and Trump. If killing Bin Laden gets Obama a second term, at least some genuine good will have come of it.

4. Stock markets - especially the American ones - rose for a short while there. They've fallen back again, of course, but hopefully that little blip will show everyone how ludicrous the whole stock trading system has become. When our global economy depends on idiots who spend higher on stocks because some terrorist fly has been swatted, we really need to take a long hard look at what is going on in the free market economy.

It's All About The Guns, Stupid

Another damned mass murder, this time in Winnenden in Germany.

The boy who did it was described by Heribert Rech, interior minister of Baden-Wuerttemberg state as "completely unremarkable, there was nothing in his background to suggest this could have happened." Except the boy was a trained marksman! Except he had access to firearms! Except that he was an isolated loner who played computer games all day!

For God's sake, wake up! If you give weapons and training to disturbed children, some of them are going to go nuts and shoot people.

Here's a simple way to stop young men from shooting their classmates: don't let them anywhere near guns! It isn't hard. It isn't rocket science. If you give kids guns, they will shoot people. Incidentally, the same goes for grown-ups.

And while I'm ranting on the subject, how is it we can, as a society, spend billions setting up evesdropping services like the famous Eschelon, that listen to everybody's phone calls and read everybody's emails, trying to protect us from the extremely minor 'threat' of terrorism, but we can't use the same technology to monitor the Web for kids who openly brag that they are going to shoot their classmates? Like the German killer-nutcase did seven hours before he went on the rampage in Winnenden- and as so many others do. If we're going to lose all our privacy to the NSA and MI5 anyway, why can't they at least do something useful with their supercomputers like stopping assholes shooting children.

End of rant. Thank you for your patience.

Pentagon Wastes Fortune Establishing The Bleedin' Obvious

Surprise, surprise! There was no link between the former government of Iraq and Al Qaeda. The Pentagon has just released a report after studying 600,000 official Iraqi documents and thousands of hours of interrogations of Saddam Hussein's co-workers that concludes the Iraqis really weren't collaborating with Al Qaeda after all.

Instead of spending millions and millions of dollars on this, the US government could simply have asked any intelligent person anywhere in the world and got the same answer for free. So, it turns out that Bush, Cheney and all their cronies were lying. Well that's shocking. Who would ever have guessed? And they seem like such upright, honest people.

Just one thing though. If we didn't all get together and bomb the crap out of Iraq, invade it and then occupy it for five years because they were planning terrorist attrocities against us with their Al Qaeda friends, just why did we do it?