I haven’t blogged in a few months, but frankly you haven’t missed much. This term has been by far the most challenging in terms of my workload and it looks like the next two months will probably crank it up another notch. Joy. Also, with the Bomber and Fed Hall closed, there’s even less to do in Waterloo.

So generally, I’ve been pretty studious and school is actually going pretty well so far, but it’s pretty hard to stay totally focused when a lot of stuff is going on in the world around me. The Iraq issue is very troubling. I think war is almost inevitable. The American government is giving every indication that it’s going to war and I don’t think Iraq is willing to do enough to dissuade them. I find all this war rhetoric just plain scary. I actually agree with some of the stuff that Bush is doing, but a lot of George Bush’s comments sound postively Orwellian. He seems to be glossing over a lot of details and hand waving his way through simple explanations that simplify the situation into us = righteous, them = evil. One thing that an engineering education teaches you is that there is a huge difference between having a basic conceptual understanding of a concept and really groking it. When I listen to these leaders of nations talk, I don’t feel like I’m being informed, I feel like I’m being manipulated. It must be deeply troubling for rational Iraqis to hear Saddam say stuff like this: "We will die here. We will die in this country and we will maintain our honor."

Saddam almost always sounds foolish whenever I read anything about him. He seems to be constantly trying to make the issue about religion or oil even though a little bit of thought on the matter shows that both are false. But, doesn’t the other side always sound foolish in your news media? I remember hearing someone say, "Truth is always the first casualty of war." There was an incident today with North Korea intercepting an American spy plane. The story pretty much portrays the North Koreans as unjustifiably engaging an American plane over international air space. The article seems pretty one-sided. I wondered if maybe the American plane had previously ventured into Korean airspace or was suspected of serving a more insidious purpose. As an exercise, I tried to find out what the North Korean media was saying about the incident. Now mind you, my impression of the North Korean media consists entirely of the webpages listed here and I have no idea how their media is affected by their communist government. Still, I was shocked to find that there was absolutely no mention of the spy plane incident. None whatsoever, even though it had already been featured in probably a thousand American publications. There was quite a bit of anti-American rhetoric however. Draw your own conclusions.