September 2001 Archives

Fears realized

I was afraid something like this would come out of the events of September 11th. Seems there is always a darker lining to dark clouds. [camworld]

I went camping again this

I went camping again this weekend. It was nice to get away from the city, the news, and other assorted media outlets and just be with my wife for a while. We walked wooded trails along the bluffs of the Mississippi for hours and gazed up at the stars at night.

Getting away from the city and looking at the stars in compete darkness is one thing I have always enjoyed. I could lay on my back and look towards the sky for hours, just imagining what may be out there amongst all those stars and galaxies, and worlds.

The world we live on seems small and unified and peaceful on nights like that - or maybe that is just one more thing I am imagining.

Uncomfortably numb

I am numb and have been since the first word of this tragedy came across my radio on my commute in to work last Tuesday. I feel like I should be angry or filled with sorrow, and I am in my thoughts. I just don't *feel* it like I should. I wish I would have cried - yelled when I heard the news - but I was just sort of startled - but not even surprised. What is wrong with me? Am I afraid now? No. Should I be? Probably so, yes. If not for me then for the U.S. and other countries' soldiers that will be fighting and dying in the coming months/years - for their families - for the Afghani people who have never wished this act on us but now may suffer for it. Sure there is some concern that biological or chemical weapons could be used on the American (or any) population, but that just doesn't seem real. It should, I guess.

Besides numbness there is a feeling of helplessness overcoming me. An idea that I am awash in a tide whose course is predetermined and non-changeable - a tide unleashed by the American public and its allies in a united outcry, parroted back by the politicians and media (or is that the other way around?) and no matter what I may do or say we are all bound to crash into our "destiny" for better or worse - a destiny that could bring us into the most deadly war the world has ever seen. And to think, me, numb to it all.

Surfin' USA

This post now seems far too shallow but it was written before the terrorist acts of earlier this week and I do really like the sites I have listed below. Many of the weblogs and sites featured below have their own personal expressions of their views and so it isn't entirely inappropriate.

blogdex - again I am behind the time somewhat. The MIT Media Lab has been doing some crazy stuff with web logs. (you see I hate the term blog, it makes my teeth hurt) Anyway, in their words blogdex "focuses on the referential information provided by weblogs, or the links that people place on their sites. By amalgamating these pointers, we can get an instantaneous look at internet fashion from democratic means." It's "moving democratic media to the masses" and Alt Text is just one little democrat doing its part.


I have been surfing:

Little. Yellow. Different. - not a link to the Nuprin site
Dancing Bush - not as exciting as it sounds
Suds and Soda - can't read it but I like how it looks
Struck By Lighting - don't wait till it happens to you
Movable Type - especially interesting considering this project I am involved with.
Dollar Short - helps make Movable Type
A Whole Lotta Nothing - sure looks like a lot of something
Jish - apparently my weblogger twin
Swallowing Tacks - too tired to come up with witty comment

Sometimes I wish I was popular. Then sometimes I wish I had more to say. I think if I had more to say and was more popular I wouldn't have any time to tell all you fine people any of it. That said - link to me or just go to bed. That's what I am doing.


Alt Text on the go.

There is a new mobile/text version of the site is available here. It is stripped down from what I had as a text version before and it works on my phone (which is my sole testing environment right now).

What would be enough?

The following is a forwarded letter I recieved yesterday. I think it really resonates with what I have been thinking the last couple days. It was written by Tamim Ansary an Afghani-American writer. Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in.

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country. Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time.

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

Tamim Ansary

What would take more courage - be harder to "belly up" for than not taking the easy way out and bombing and killing the Afghani people? How about changing the way we are viewed in the world by changing our actions and policies so that we are not seen as an imperialistic, oppressive bully the world over?

What to do then? We can't sit idly by you say? No we can't. But we must:

1. Focus on and solve the problem (i.e.. the hatred of the U.S.)
2. Find & punish the perpetrators of terrorism (all of them)
3. Solidify the alliances (and even unify) with the governments of the world

Why are Americans hated? Why can't we see why?


A chart of the World Response to Tuesday's terror. This link is from the World New York site which is a very good site for the continuing events in New York and elsewhere. This site was in turn shown to me by Jason.


It seems to me that whatever action the U.S. and its allies may take, it won't satisfy us. If Afghanistan delivers Osama bin Laden and his henchmen to us, they stand trial, are found guilty, and are executed it will not be enough. If Afghanistan does not give up Osama bin Laden and we bomb them over and over will this be enough? Hardly. No military action can ever be enough. No amount of punishment can be dished out that will allow us to be ok with what happened - to feel vindicated. We, as Americans need to come to a resolution with our feelings long before we start looking for satisfaction with tanks, and bombs, and wars.

My turn to weigh in.

I have to concur with Jason that we should not make these recent terrorists acts a political issue or even a rallying point for our nation. This is a global issue - an issue for all humans. Making this an issue of the U.S. vs. anyone trivializes the event. We need to look at this and ask why this happens. Is this even a political issue? What religions actually say this is alright? What is at the heart of this and let's fix it. No more brokered peace accords between Palestinians and Israelis - this isn't going to work, Why do we keep trying to divide up lands and come to compromises when there is something underlying any talks that will not let them succeed. Figure this out. If it is purely fanaticism then what? How can you reason with unreasonable men?

Here is a nice multimedia explanation of the events. [source: kottke.org]

Lesson One

A while back I made a post about some recent changes in my "world view." These statements were, by design, broad, and vague. They were meant to illicit interest and provoke thinking. Today I am going to delve a little deeper. I am going to tell you that we, as humans, are not fundamentally flawed as many believe. We simply have a flawed way of looking at the world and our place in it.

A while back, nobody knows for sure when, maybe around 8000 B.C. or the time of the beginning of the "agricultural revolution" people of our culture (see definition below) decided that it was better to take charge of their food supply by planting, harvesting, and storing their own food. By doing this they could more easily survive droughts and lean times because of their food reserves. The people of our culture soon began to have far more food than they needed to live and were able to settle down in one place and make a lot of babies as a result. Whenever the population started to get close to the food producing capacity of the farmed land, more land was put under cultivation. For thousands of years we went on like this, grow more food, increase in numbers, repeat. This sounds like a good way to live and we (all of us in our culture) know that it is. In fact, we know that it is not only a good way to live but indeed the right way to live. Whenever we encountered others living in a different way (i.e. herding, hunting/gathering, etc) we told them that they were living the wrong way and taught them how to cultivate the land so that they too can live the way humans are supposed to live and not like the animals live. Most saw that the agriculturalists were well fed and had large numbers so they willingly joined in this "revolution." Those that chose not to were obviously fools or savages incapable of understanding "civilized" ways and so were overrun and destroyed. The thing is, however, that the "agricultural revolution" has not stopped. There are still remote regions with "backward" peoples who have yet to realize that they are living in an non-human, antiquated way. Our culture has strived to show them the right way or has pushed them into extinction in the trying. The result of our culture's insistence that the way we are living is the one right way to live is an ever increasing global population with an ever decreasing level of bio-diversity. More and more of the world is being rendered nothing more than a human life-support system: lands under plow for our consumption, animal herds being raised for our foods and products, and the rest being polluted by our ever-increasing need to consume. As many as 200 species become extinct, every day to support our ways. As any ecologist will tell you, a diverse ecology is a strong ecology while an ecology that consists of only a few organisms (like say, humans, their crops, their herd animals, and the crops used to feed them) is a very fragile one. Diversity then, isn't something that is nice, or something to be strived for because it is more interesting to have. No, diversity is essential to our survival as a species on this planet. The quicker we consume enough species on this planet, the sooner we will destroy ourselves. What is the name for our culture then? The Consumers, and it includes nearly every man, woman, and child on earth.

Much of these ideas came from my reading of Daniel Quinn's books. For those interested in learning more of these types of ideas and views I encourage you to read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. After that, read other books, and keep reading and thinking, and gradually change your actions, and the way you live. Become happier and more content, show others how to live. If reading isn't your bag or if you would simply like to discuss some of the things I have written please write to me. Also, I am by no means done with this rant.

I have gone "up north"

I have gone "up north" this weekend, which, when translated from Minnesotan means up to a lake, river, or other place suitable for camping or staying in a cabin in Minnesota north of the Twin Cities (also called Minneapolis/St. Paul).

Pleased to meat you.

A funny thing: yesterday, I had sort of an awakening. I was thinking about what I may be hungry for and it occurred to me that I had no desire to eat meat; not then or ever again. The thought of eating meat actually repulsed me. Until now I had always desired to be a vegetarian but the thought of BBQ's and steak houses was always present and oh so alluring. This was different now I think I actually have a chance to stick to not eating meat for a while. I will keep everyone posted on my "progress". Incidentally I was standing in line at Taco Bell when I had this breakthrough. I wonder how many other vegetarians Taco Bell has created over the years.
<# of days eating just vegetables = 1>

Asian Bastard returns in style

Asian Bastard returns in style with co-host Alan Thicke to bring us Thicke of the Night. I love this site. Asian Bastard is so god-dammed funny. (also making a return: BitchQuick)


Somewhat related: AllLookSame.com offers a test for you to take to see if you can tell which people are Chinese, Korean, or Japanese based upon their photos. I always thought I could at least tell Japanese from the Koreans/Chinese. My pathetic score of 5 clearly indicated that I cannot.


On a serious note, Pauline Kael whom I hadn't heard of before this week died. She was a movie critic and my new hero in that regard. After reading some of her reviews from past issues of the New Yorker I can say that I love her style and the passion with which she wrote. I am going to try to emulate her in my movie reviewing endeavors from now on. Boy, I can't wait till my writing skills catch up to what I want to say.

Painting and flooring our living

Painting and flooring our living room and dining room today. I didn't know labor day weekend would include so much labor. Nothing much else to report. Go outside!