Good Day Sunshine

Yesterday was such a good day. Until about 11:45 p.m. last night, that is. The Wings lost in double-overtime to Edmonton, 4-3. In typical Detroit fashion, the Detroit News asks “Time to Panic?” Well, in a word, no. There is reason to worry, true, but no panic, please. The primary worry is Detroit must win three out of the next four games to win the series. That’s gonna take some doing, especially since the Wings have dropped two of the first three and have been playing from behind in nearly every game. It doesn’t bode well that two of the three games have gone to overtime after dramatic come-backs by the Wings. Come-backs are great, but getting ahead and staying ahead is the way you win Stanley Cups.

And then there’s this: The Captain is hurt. As is the usual practice regarding play-off injuries, the Wings’ management is only saying “it’s an upper body injury.” Mike Babcock said he was “hopeful” Yzerman would be back for game four. From the Detroit Free Press’s account of the game:

The Wings were mum on Yzerman's status. But their recent playoff history without him has not been pretty: The Wings were tied, 2-2, with Calgary in 2004 when Yzerman got hurt in Game 5; the Wings lost the series the next game. In 2001 against Los Angeles, the Wings didn't have Yzerman past the first game, and lost the series.

Yeah, it’s a time to worry.

So, yesterday was quite good in all other respects. First, that new combination RF modem/antenna is working flawlessly. An unexpected benefit is my connection speed has increased by 50%, and appears to be twice the speed of my old connection at times. This, obviously, is a good thing!

Second, the nurse practitioner at the base hospital clinic phoned yesterday with the results of my physical. The results were, in a word, excellent. While I wasn’t all that worried the clinic would find anything amiss, I’m still relieved to know things are going well in the body department. I’m at an age where the corpus is subject to all sorts of malfunctions, and consider myself blessed I’m free of same.

Yesterday’s big news was the posting of a video made by Iraq’s most wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The NYT (and others) gets it right, the video was posted to the internet, it didn’t “surface” or “appear” on the ‘net as other news outlets phrased it, someone put it there.

Why do we allow our enemies to post these videos? This is information warfare, pure and simple. The internet is a highly regulated environment, technically. Every web site, no matter how small or insignificant, has a unique address and identifier. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to resolve a site’s virtual address to its physical location, and we have highly qualified and competent people at NSA that specialize in doing just that. Even if the owners of a jihadi web site take precautions to conceal their identities and locations, we can still finger them.

And we should.

We should also destroy these sites after we locate them. I’m not talking about wasting a million-dollar cruise missile on some jihadi’s pathetic little 486 desktop “server” running Windows 95, I’m talking about ten pounds or so of C4, strategically and covertly placed on the server’s premises. Or perhaps a well-aimed RPG through the basement window. No warning, no credit for the action, no nothing. Just BOOM. No more jihadi web site. A cruise missile would be appropriate if we discover there’s an ISP involved with a fairly large server farm. Once again: no warning, no credit claimed, and the timing of the strike should be such that there is maximum loss of life. It wouldn’t take long for the people who are hosting these videos to figure out that active participation in information warfare is hazardous to their health. As a matter of fact, if I were king I wouldn’t limit action to eliminating sites hosting videos, I’d target and eliminate all jihadi web sites, period. Information is a powerful weapon. To not deny the enemy this weapon is simply incompetent, bordering on gross negligence. We’ve given these people a free pass for way too long.

Take ‘em OUT!