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Monday, August 21, 2006
Tick, tick, tick . . .
As I post this, we are less than one hour away from midnight on August 22 in Tehran. The combination of the Islamic calendar and the recent statements of mullahcrat mouthpiece Mahmoud Ahmedinejad have led many to wonder (Wall Street Journal included) if the 22nd is A-Day, as in Apocalypse (fourth item).
This may lead many to wonder if Communist China is really that supportive of the Khomeinist regime - given Ahmedinejad's possible willingness to start a nuclear war. Lest anyone forget, from the time of Mao, the Communist military has always seen a nuclear conflict as not only survivable, but winnable.
I just thought I'd mention it.
Posted by D.J. McGuire on August 21, 2006 in International Affairs | Permalink
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Comments
Well, that old loonie Bernard Lewis is somewhere having a good laugh at your expense. For all that is good and holy, get some perspective on Iran and stop with the smear campaign.
Posted by: Siroos | 2006-08-22 8:12:52 PM
"tick tick tick...."
The apocalypse didn't happen. So many are disappointed too, it seems.
Posted by: Ian Scott | 2006-08-22 10:18:54 PM
@Ian,
Freddy Mercury already sang it: "Pain is pleasure".
Some people are just too hedonistic for this world.
Posted by: Snowrunner | 2006-08-22 10:22:14 PM
LOL Snowrunner. Hey, do you remember how so many stood still December 31, 1999, at one minute to midnight?
Some people were actually worried.. and likely disappointed when they did.. that their cars wouldn't start on January First.
Many don't know what true hedonism is.
Posted by: Ian Scott | 2006-08-22 10:26:25 PM
Ian,
I remember my then boss filling up buckets of water, he was concerned that the water would stop flowring on the morning of January 1st and he wanted to be prepared.
He also bought about a dozen flashlights and enough batteries to run an army of robots on.
Posted by: Snowrunner | 2006-08-22 10:30:43 PM
I knew people who bought candles a foot in diameter and 3 feet tall. I even heard that some people maxed out their credit cards on dec. 31... I wonder if they returned all they bought?... I kind of doubt anyone really believed something was going to happen today, but a lot of people sure were hoping SOMETHING would happen. This is what it must have been like in 1940-41 in the states... waiting for the inevitable (I know you'll disagree... Ian, Snow)
Posted by: Big Makk | 2006-08-22 10:37:15 PM
"This is what it must have been like in 1940-41 in the states... waiting for the inevitable (I know you'll disagree... Ian, Snow)"
Indeed, I do agree. People are funny and humorous and it's interesting to observe their irrationality when fear takes a hold of them, and what they expect of others, what they demand of others, and what they publish.
For example, take a look at "Duke's" recent post wherein he actually suggests that people should beat and kill someone that happens to have a Hezbollah flag.
Posted by: Ian Scott | 2006-08-22 11:29:58 PM
On December 31, 1999, at 16:00 MST, I was at my desk with a dozen secure shell login windows open to our server monitoring machines, monitoring the behaviour of our global servers, because the EST servers hit 2000-01-01 00:00 GMT at that moment. I continued until after 00:00 MST, as which point my tests on the last of our servers indicated that they had survived the Y2K event, at least without any spectacular misbehaviour.
We had scanned our code carefully before the event, and fortunately we only found one case where we were affected, and it wasn't critical, and we fixed it anyway. But I did have a number of acquaintenances who busted their butts removing legacy dependancies from old software before that moment.
Sure there were lots of marketing and media types who were hyping the situation. Meanwhile, while most of you were out singing a song by the artist formerly known as Prince, those of us who are actually resposible for saving your ass in practice were quietly at work keeping the systems running.
You may find this humorous. At 00:00:03 GMT on 2000-01-01 I refreshed my browser page at the US Naval Observatory Master Clock - http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/anim - and it showed the year as 19100 (I still have the screen snapshot). This is, of course, a classic Perl programming mistake; Perl returns the year minus 1900, not the last two digits of the year. Fortunately, after worrying for a minute or two that the NTP may be fubarred, it turned out that the atomic clock was itself working correctly, it was just a web page display error. We all had a good laugh over that once the tension had passed.
Anyway, I'm just sayin', y'all are damn lucky to have us looking after you, pace the conspiracy theories. Not that I particularly expect better, after all, there is no shortage of people who think the third millenium began at that moment, when in fact it began precisely a year later.
Oh well, hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work I go... You know, prudence would suggest that I'm too damn happy for my own good. The problem is, there's no good evidence to support that hypothesis.
Posted by: Vitruvius | 2006-08-23 12:15:38 AM
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