Category: Personal

Some people are sick, others just wacky (2)

Salon reports on a Russian teen with Something up his sleeve. A new penis, to be precise, since the kid burned the original off peeing on a Russian fence. Doctors grew skin on his arm and then grafted that along with surgically rebuilt plumbing back in place. In a bad sign for the future of the human race, he is likely to get back sexual functionality and let’s just hope that doesn’t include reproductive capability. Has anyone called the Darwin Awards people yet?

Little things

Sometimes little things get to me. I’m watching the Notre Dame-Michigan State football game, of course rooting against Notre Dame, and NBC showed the ND and MSU marching bands performing Amazing Grace together. Of course they kept shifting to people in the stands, holding flags, whispering in their little children’s ears, just being Americans. And I cried again.

Some go to the deep end

Andrea Peyser writes in the tabloid NY Post that the AMERICA-BASHING U.N. SHOULD GET LOST, that “the once-shiny beacon of peace has devolved into a cancer, where all manner of anti-American lunacy is hatched. The U.N. functions as an international megaphone through which every Third World dictatorship vents its fury at our way of life.” Peyser minces no words, calling CNN international correspondent a “war slut.”

I’m not familiar with this woman’s writing but the other piece by her currently on the Post’s website is similar in attitude:

My community

Last night I went to a neighborhood meeting sponsored by the Mountain View City Council Neighborhoods Committee. I’m not sure why I went; after all I’ve lived here for four and a half years and this was my first time attending any city function. At the meeting, City Manager Kevin Duggan mentioned that a huge historical American flag was hanging in the rotunda of City Hall and today I took my digital camera over to see it. I took some nice photos and put them up here: In and around Mountain View City Hall, Sep. 21, 2001. Since this is the third set of photos, I added a new section to the site navigation as well entitled Photo Galleries.

Mountain View has a lot of public art spread over much of the town, some of it quite good. You can see a gallery of the works, with location noted for in person viewing, on the town website.

Winning the story war

Thomas Friedman, in another excellent NY Times column, explains the Hama Rules that apply in many of the Arab nations. Hama is a town in Syria that, nearly 20 years ago, was home to an Islamic fundamentalist rebellion against the Assad dictatorship. Please note that an Assad still runs Syria and the city of Hamas literally no longer exists.

TopFive today: Beer

Today’s list is The Top 16 Marketing Slogans for Dung-Flavored Beer. It was inspired by the news that a new beverage on sale in the Orkney islands off northern Scotland is a “Stone Age” beer flavored with animal dung, recovered from a 5,000-year-old pub and brewery. I rarely log these even though the daily lists are usually pretty good but this one is too much. Sample:

14. It’s *Still* Better Than Budweiser

7. Tastes Like John Travolta’s Acting

There are others funnier but also more scatalogical. Go see for yourself! Geez, I laughed more at the runner up and honorable mention lists than the top choices.

Economy: down for the long haul

Christopher Byron, writing in the New York Observer, forsees a long tough road ahead for the American and global economies in the aftermath of 9/11. Even without the tragic events, he posits, the stock markets had been heading south and would probably have reached the same levels. Now billions of dollars have vanished from the economy, in the form of business not done last week and cancelled plans going forward. The American consumer has been the hoped-for saviour in any turnaround but “Many Americans have doubtless concluded already that simply going to the store is to put oneself in harm’s way.”

What are the next targets?

Matt Bivens, writing in The Nation, asks if we’ve considered, really considered Nuclear Safety and the prospect of a nuclear power plant being the next terrorist target. “And if we can clean up and rebuild after the World Trade Center bombing, a radiological attack would force us to write off huge swathes of land as national sacrifice areas.”

The only good news here is that terrorists are much less likely to successfully hijack another commercial airliner any time soon, because these plants are wide open targets and crashing anything from a 727 to a 767 into one would have devastating results. And some terrorists are already thinking about them as targets.

Nuclear power plants provide around 20% of our national power supply but Bivens questions if we really need them. This article touches on the possibility only briefly but does say that we could eliminate them by reducing the demand for energy. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a prominent think-tank on energy matters, argues that “up to 75 percent of the electricity used in the United States today could be saved with energy efficiency measures that cost less than the electricity itself.”

Religion’s misguided missiles

Richard Dawkins is professor of the public understanding of science, University of Oxford, and author of The Selfish Gene, wrote this Guardian Unlimited article that slices right to the heart of the suicide pilots last week:

“If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place, just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At the other extreme, if a significant number of people convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr’s death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place.”

Looking at how we may fight

Barton Gellman writes in the Washington Post that Images of Past Wars May Not Fit Present Foe. This article is one of the most insightful I’ve seen yet that explores the details of responding with force to last Tuesday’s events. The ending is ominous: there will be more attacks on US soil and no matter how much we stiffen up, not all will be caught and stopped. This will be a long, long campaign.

Key quote: “Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist, said the Bush administration appears to regard this conflict as the defining feature of the present international environment. ‘Like the Cold War, this is a realigning war, by which I mean that the United States is dividing the world into us versus them,’ he said.”

Saturday night’s movie: Space Cowboys

Looking for a distraction and maybe a few laughs, tuned in this Clint Eastwood-directed flick. Very few laughs indeed in Space Cowboys, where Eastwood and three buddies try to get into space 40 years after they blew their chance to be among the first astronauts. The main problem is this movie doesn’t know what it wants to be, so it isn’t very good at being anything. Is it a comedy about the four old farts trying to prove they can still hack it? A melodrama about love and death, heroes and villains? A spy/action story about saving the world from a nefarious Russian plot? Eastwood has made some great films as a director but you have to figure he’s getting just a little too old to play the hero. Donald Sutherland is wack as the geriatric lothario, Tommy Lee Jones is all over the place and probably suffers the most from lack of a center for his character, and James Garner is just along for a ride with his buddies with nothing much to do except smile weakly when called on.

The Last War

For the first part of Humankind’s existence, war was a simple matter: we want what you have, be it territory, goods (luxuries or basics), or productivity (that is, we win the war and now your people are our slaves). But as in most things Human, war evolved and so the desired thing was the other side’s mind. In What are we fighting for?, Steven Denbeste posits that this week’s events mark the opening bell of the last stage of the last war, a war which began in the Renaissance, a war between the forces of freedom and authoritarianism. The face of the side opposed to freedom has morphed over time, from Monarchy to Slavery to naked Authoritarianism and now what seems to be the last opponent, Theocracy. Freedom, regardless of the opponent, has never lost and though the road will be long and hard (the Cold War lasted 43 years, after all) Freedom will win again.

Denbeste makes some important points in this essay and I highly recommend you read it for yourself. He previously published several related essays, which I recommend as well: There is no such thing as a “civilian”, The mark of a fanatic, and Theory and Practice of Terrorism.

Some people are sick, others just wacky

A laugh is a good thing almost anytime but especially so this week, so I was glad to run across this Raelian press release. The Raelians are a way-out-there religious group who are pressing ahead with human cloning plans. Their tie in with the tragedy? In this press release they explain that “cloning technology … will make terrorist attacks inefficient in the future” by allowing complete replacement of adults including reasonably up todate memories. Ok, well, yeah, ya see.. [Call the guys with the funny white jackets.]

Why do I say the Raelians are out there? Here’s a snip from the quick summary (their name) of their religon: Life on Earth is not the result of random evolution or a supernatural ‘God’ but rather was planted here by extraterrestrial scientists (the word Elohim in Genesis, generally translated as God, actually means “those who came from the sky”) and now these aliens are going to return. To prepare the way, the aliens asked French journalist Rael to establish an embassy here on Earth for them. The embassy is to serve the same function as other earthly embassies, giving the aliens a safe haven to safely land at and from which they can treat on a neutral, non-discriminatory basis with all governments and peoples. Need more detail? You can purchase the books Rael has written, The Message given by Extra-Terrestrials, Let’s Welcome Our Fathers From Space, and Sensual Meditation.

Attitudes towards NYC are changing

For many years many people from the American heartland looked at New York City as, literally, a den of iniquity and almost life on another planet. Growing up in its shadow, I never felt that way or particularly understood the attitude except that I felt those who held it were ignorant hicks (which is probably just as bad). But in the aftermath of 9/11, seeing not only the tragedy but the response to it as well, the ‘hicks’ are reconsidering their opinion. So maybe we’ll be more of a ‘one people’ than before, I can only hope.

Timing

September 11, 1922: British mandate for Palestine declared

September 11, 1978: Camp David summit underway

September 11, 1993: Rabin and Arafat announce Oslo accords

September 11, 2001: Terrorists strike WTC, Pentagon

Martyrdom: perversion of Islam or mainstream view?

Many commentators, Islamic and otherwise, have said that suicide bombers are a perversion of the Koran. If that’s true, then why is so prominent and presumably mainstream a cleric as the Chief Mufti of the Palestinean Authority extoll the glories of the bomber? Aluma Solnick in her paper The Joy of the Mothers of Palestinian ‘Martyrs’ explores some historical background that clearly establishes martyrdom as a longstanding heroic role in Islam.

Today’s book: Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters

Adam Barr spent ten years as a programmer at Microsoft before cashing out his options and writing this book. At MS he worked on Windows NT, an early interactive TV set-top box project, SoftImage Digital Studio, and, as best I can tell, NT/Win2K again at the end. This isn’t a bad book although I think you really want to know about the new hire interview process at the company to really enjoy it; there’s also a long involved portion on Barr’s travails at the SoftImage group which he holds up as reasonably typical of MS. A long interlude in which he describes his early teenage efforts at running a BBS and college internships follows, although I think either he or his editor lost interest/steam here. Finally he looks at the antitrust case and sides with his former employer but for good reasons and he gives his opinion on the company’s chance at continued world dominion (he says they’re spreading themselves too thin and forgetting what made the place great).

I read this book based on an interesting article he wrote for called Dr. Selfpub, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Amazon.Com detailing his experience in getting the book published. The ‘selfpub’ he refers to is that the book is published through iUniverse, which means you can read the book online at no cost but only one page at a time, no downloading it in one fell swoop in, say, Acrobat format.

More on what our response should be

I used to work near the WTC, two blocks away on Maiden Lane across from the Fed. I can only guess that the building is covered with ash and debris. I had to pass through the WTC complex every morning and afternoon as I commuted on PATH from NJ and I remember the day in ’93 when the first attempt was made; people wondered if the buildings would have fallen over into the river.

As far as response, I think we need to be clear that justice, per American standards, should be served. Associated parties who provided planning, financial, and other support, need to pay for their actions. Does this mean a series of trials if we could arrest them? I don’t think so. I think trials would only serve these people by giving them a platform from which they could spew further hate and inspire further destruction. Many people have said this was an act of war and I agree. And one doesn’t conduct a war by arresting the other side.

Longer term, I think we need to look very closely at the living circumstances of other peoples and see why globalization is keeping them down and lifting us up. This difference is not true across the board–some developing countries are get lifted and we should try and understand why. Thomas Friedman has an excellent book on the topic, The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

Prevention of future events must be considered. We also, therefore, need to create an international apparatus that is dedicated to eradicating terrorist organizations globally, through reasonable and aboveboard means. This apparatus should have legal, financial, and political analysts and a military/police arm and work in conjunction with local authorities where possible. I may be cynical but I think this organization needs to be controlled and operated by Western governments and not by, say, the U.N. or it could never be effective. Of course there are also severe limits to how effective such an organization could be in any case and of course there is the not so little question of who guards the guards, to prevent abuse or misuse. War in this century is clearly different and we need to respond differently and develop tools that will prove effective.

Photos that show in piercing clarity what happened at the WTC

Grace Suh (link is to her page) shows the before and after:

Before, when we were young and innocent:
From Grace Suh's website		 After, the towers are gone:
From Grace Suh's website