daytripper, yeah.

My original plan for this weekend was to leave on a three day backpacking trip on Saturday morning.  I'd been wavering back and forth as to whether this would make me feel better, and I ultimately decided that separating myself from everything for three days would, in fact, not make me feel better.

I've cut back my plans to a day trip today.

It's not that I'm afraid, exactly, I just don't want to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Washington is still a big fat target for these kooks, and I think that chances are about even that they have other plans to be executed as soon as we retailiate.  It's possible this was all they had, but I think it's unlikely.

In Mesa, Arizona, a Sikh gas station owner was killed on Saturday.  It always stuns me that people are too stupid to tell who the bad guys really are.  To think that some asshole worked himself up into a self-righteous ferver to kill a non-muslim Indian is astounding.  This indicates, of course, that he didn't know this guy from a hole in the ground since he was completely unaware of his actual ethic and religious background.  This man has apparently shot two other people as well.

It's not even remotely excusable to randomly attack Americans because of their race or religion anyway, but to attack someone blindly merely because they have dark skin and are wearing a turban?  It would be nice if these assholes wouldn't make us look like the barbarians, eh?

Two other significant stories are developing that have received no television coverage that I've seen.  There is extensive flooding in Florida from tropical storm Gabrielle.  If not for this, no one would be talking about anything else!  More amazingly, the brige from Texas proper to South Padre Island has been destroyed, killing at least five people, by ramming several barges into it.  Accident?  At that level of target, it seems like it, but again, this is an enormous story, under usual circumstances.  American's were killed, and now there's no automobile access to part of Texas.  Usually, people take note of things like this.

You know what else no one is mentioning?  Afghanistan has a border with China.  Afghanistan is shaped like a leaf and that border is the stem.  It's a short piece of land to protect, certainly, and it's a very strategic mountain pass, but you can bet it's one corner of Afghanistan that we won't be allowed to monitor or use in any way.

Let's hope the Chinese are feeling good about being admitted to the WTO (that happenned on Tuesday, in case you missed it, and is also a big damn deal), and if these assholes try and escape to China, they'll turn them over.  I doubt the Chinese want to get in a war right now.  This economic freedom is something they've been asking for for years, and now that it's been granted, I'd wager they want to try and be friends.

God, I hope they don't do something stupid like invade Taiwan.