(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
Control
[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Tuesday, May 28, 2002
HELP WANTED: I have conceived of a project that seems at first through third blushes highly feasible. On reviewing the Web logs maintained by those who are regularly fallen upon Warblogger Watch, my Marxist sympathies were excited and I could not but marvel over the increasing misapplication of human effort. Why there must be several hundred persons now responding in real time to the same articles, linking to one another, and proffering the same point of view. It is redundancy of this very type, I suspect, that has prevented the country from undertaking any of the grand scale public works projects that are so conspicuous abroad but so embarrassingly absent stateside. The purpose of my plan, in the simplest of terms, is to free up labor, returning those presently engaged in Web-based war mongering to the unskilled manual labor which they are better suited to by birth. Here is a moron asking for help with his homework; Here's another, admitting that her underpowered brain finds itself taxed to the point of failure in attempting to apprehend the day's newspaper; Here is a third, this one adhering to the "Cubs are going all the way" mode of prophesy, and telling us we must attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein is going to try to derail our God-granted right to USPS delivery of Christmas presents. Can any man who has given the labor marketplace unbiased study tell me with a straight face that these people wouldn't better serve society by manually transporting cut stone overland?
As for the plan itself, it can be summarized thusly: I require someone versed in computer science to modify the Dada Engine and write a script that would scan the AP wire for items of concern to our political leadership, compare those items against a list of regimes our leadership has previously assured us are some seriously bad mo-fos, and then, finding a concern-worthy item that mentions an unpopular state, recommend sanctions or massive preemptory bombing (weighting heavily toward the latter) against the country mentioned. Like the monomaniacs, the program would be steered solely by the force of circumstance, and as it would yield essentially the same output issued by the above three, it would largely obviate their needs to tire us with their interminable repetition of the same solution to every conceivable problem.
Interested parties are encouraged to contact me via the editor.
