Saturday.....Sit-urday

I bought this chair the other day from Office Depot on Ala Moana Blvd. for $180. Office Depot delivers merchandise over $50 for free, too. Assembly required which turned out to be a lot of fun bonus. The amount of time that I spend at the computer calls for something comfortable to sit on. The old chair, the seat part, was tilted at the front due to metal fatigue, and it was getting to be anti-ergonomical to the extreme on the southern hemisphere. How's the condition of your own computer chair? I also decided it was time to purchase a new chair mat since the wheels of the old chair had worn potholes into the plastic mat at spots. And if you're wondering....no, it's not leather. But then the artificial leather is easier to maintain. I think the old chair lasted some 7-years. Not all that bad.

Remember Obama's speech about withdrawing troops from Afghanistan? If my math is right, Obama is planning to pull out only the troops that was added for the surge. That's not a military pullout in my book. What's keeping US troops in Afghanistan? A 100 al-Qaeda fighters? Possibly, but more likely, the 100,000 military contractors, who would be out of work without a war. While soldiers stationed in Afghanistan make $70,000, a military contractor makes $170,000, a $100,000 more for a phony position. Not all, but many do. Dishwashers obviously don't make much. It's become a money war and there's nothing better that the military contractors would like than for the US to embed themselves in Afghanistan indefinitely so they can roll over their cash windfall like it was a dead cat. Perhaps, Obama should cease listening to the advice of his generals who would be influenced by their friendship with Daddy Warbucks and their pals at the military industrial complex base camp.

IMHO, the resurgence of the Taliban is a bogus excuse for remaining in Afghanistan. Sure, the Taliban harbored al-Qaeda in the days following 9/11. However, that was mainly due to an obligation they were beholden to al-Qaeda for assassinating the leader of the rival tribe, the Northern Alliance, only a few days earlier. I highly doubt that the Taliban would invite al-Qaeda back to Afghanistan to train for executing another 9/11 type mission. From personal experience, the Taliban knows fully well the repercussions on their fiefdom that another terrorist attack on US soil entails. And now that the US has been in Afghanistan for a decade, we know the nooks and crannies of the terrain like the back of your hand.

When al-Qaeda pulls off a suicide attack on US soil, the world feels sorry for the US, but when al-Qaeda terrorists attack another country, the victim country is angry at the US. The US saved Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda's collective ass during Russia's military occupation of Afghanistan. In that sense, al-Qaeda is the evil stepchild of the US parent. Had the US not provided stinger missiles to the Mujahideen, they along with al-Qaeda would have been history. The Russian gunship pilots were afraid to fly since they were losing a helicopter gunship and their crew a day and the Russian roulette took it's toll and devastated the pilots' morale. If the current Afghanistan War was a play, it would be a penned as a tragedy. It would begin with an enemy of your enemy is a friend. Ever heard of the case where a child who murders his parents pleads for mercy from the judge because he's now an orphan? In this hypothetical play, it's the parent who pleads for mercy.