Saturday, August 31, 2013

Chicago

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I'm ensconced high above street level in Hotel World, peaking over Steve's shoulder.  I'm one of the speakers at Djangocon.

Django, for those who don't know, was a world class musician, and as such, had some things named after him, one of those things being a web framework known as Django.

Web frameworks rule, in the sphere of eCommerce, so there's a community of geeks associated with this free, open source software, that ekes out a living doing that, to a degree that annual conferences are semi-affordable.

This may be a golden era for the Django community; I'm not saying I'm the crystal ball holder here.  Frameworks come and go, as do computer languages.  Django is written in Python.

The people in front of me in the Alamo rental car line at O'Hare were appropriately concerned about the escalation of violence in the Middle East, Washington DC a top committer in that regard.

This is 2013 and we're looking back on "shock & awe" plus a president making fun of himself looking for those never-found weapons.  The pretext for the war was a sham.

CNN is causing wars, by not ever pulling back and giving the big picture.

Has the USA used chemical weapons recently?

Lets start with white phosphorous in Fallujah.  We should also talk about DU and the fine powder people breathe.  A lump of uranium as a door stop is not the same thing.  Packaging matters.

CNN won't zoom out and adjust the focus and is therefore causing war.  You can see it on the serious faces.  The journalists and pundits being interviewed know they're the cause of serious and escalating violence.  How do they live with themselves?

CNN turned out to be a terrible idea and Ted Turner is not a hero for creating it.  CNN caved early, when journalists started telling the story of American warriors on the side of the North Vietnamese and how they were attacked with chemical weapons.  CNN caved when attacked for reporting along these lines.  That's when we knew it was in the tool bag of warmongers.

You'll say I'm not being fair in criticizing CNN and not Fox, but Fox was never about news or objective reporting.  CNN has some pretense in that area.  Fox is a joke (a sick joke, but a joke).  Al Jazeera is way better than Fox, as is Russia Today, and I'm not saying either of those is that great.  Being "better than Fox" takes almost no talent whatsoever.

I'm checking out Chicago.  This is a huge North American city, lots of tourists.  I recommend it as a destination.  Do some homework first.  There's plenty of history to appreciate.