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Tuesday, September 18, 2001
Thinker's Digest 
| | Eric Norlin summarizes what he (and the rest of us) have been blogging for the last week. |
Webio
| | I've been asked for a better word than 'radio' for broadstreaming on the Web. While we're thinking about that (and rejecting my suggestion, in the headline above), check out Hober. It requires RealPlayer, but it's cool. Thanks to Gordon Coale for the lead. |
The other side
| | Anybody interested in the strategic issues involved in a "war" with terrorism would do well to read Jane's various news services. Jane's is the definitive news source on matters strategic and military, and it is anything but enthusiastic about the prospects. |
| | One fact we must face, Jane's makes clear, is the role the U.S. itself played in starting the "holy war" that has turned against its original sponsor. Some of the clearest background information comes from Rahul Bedi, Jane's correspondent in New Delhi, in Why? An attemt to explain the unexplainable. It all begins, he writes, in "the US-love affair with Islamists in which short-term profit motivated all parties concerned, but the deadly ramifications of which are haunting the world today and the effects of which were brought home starkly to America earlier this week." |
Hold the friendly fire
| | Now that the Taliban and Osama are the prime suspects by the US officials after the criminal attacks, will the US subject Afghanistan to a military attack similar to the one in 1998 and kill thousands of innocent Afghans for the crimes committed by the Taliban and Osama? Does the US think that through such attacks, with thousands of deprived, poor and innocent people of Afghanistan as its victims, will be able to wipe out the root-cause of terrorism, or will it spread terrorism even to a larger scale? |
| | While we once again announce our solidarity and deep sorrow with the people of the US, we also believe that attacking Afghanistan and killing its most ruined and destitute people will not in any way decrease the grief of the American people. We sincerely hope that the great American people could DIFFERENTIATE between the people of Afghanistan and a handful of fundamentalist terrorists. Our hearts go out to the people of the US. |
| | We should bear in mind that these women have been on the front lines in the War Against Terrorism we have only recently joined. Let's not wipe them out in a hail of friendly fire. |
| | And while we're busy thinking that one through, let's take a look at the concrete suggestions these women have already been making for some time. |
| | And look around the site. They hardly mince words. About "the difference between Taliban and jehadi fundamentalists," they say: |
| | All of them have a Klashnikov in one hand and the Quran in the other to kill, intimidate, detain and mutilate our people arbitrarily. All are violently misusing Islam, interpret the Quran according to their own personal whims and political interests, and use religion as a cover to hide their heinous crimes. They are all proud of stoning men and women to death, cutting their limbs, public executions and punishing the people without trial in an authorized court." |
| | The best way to fight against terrorism, friends, is to work toward its opposite, staring in our own hearts. |
Department of Payment Frustration
| | I guess things are getting back to normal because I'm starting to bitch about trivia. |
| | There are few things more annoying to me than trying to purchase something on the Web from a system that forgets everything you already typed when it says you neglected to enter something, forcing you to do the whole damn thing over again. |
| | I was just trying to use PayPal to give a few bucks to Radio Paradise (below). Thanks to a cookie, PayPal notices I'm a "Verified Premier Member," remembers my name, and insists I re-enter everything else, including my 16-digit credit card number, 3-digit card verification number, address, expirartion date and the rest of it, over and over, insisting I haven't filled out some stuff (which in some cases I have), finally telling me "Restricted accounts are not allowed to register credit cards." |
The clearest channels
| | I've been getting emails suddenly from folks who are discovering Radio Paradise. I guess people are scurrying around, looking for the opposite of what Clear Channel is doing to the radio dial by snarfing up and killing off originality and life wherever it might appear to cost something. |
| | Radio Paradise is the hand-hacked creation of Wild Bill Goldsmith, who is one of the biggest reasons why the best commercial radio station on earth is KPIG, which blasts its 128kb stream out of Freedom, California. Like KPIG's best streams, Radio Paradise is MP3, not Real, or Windows Media Player or Quicktime. |
| | Same goes for Laura Ellen Hopper's Cowboy Cultural Society, which also branches off KPIG, appears to come from the Deep Shit Cattle Co. (see photo) near Comanche, TX, and shares roots with the legendary KFAT. |
| | In these hard times, when the radio dial turns from a Main Street to a ugly highway of franchise outlets all pumping out the same manufactured crap, and when on the Net we're starting to crack down on the very freedoms we're trying to protect, it's nice to know that some media remain wild, free and at home on the range. |
Learning history the hard way
| | September 23 isn't here yet, but here's a piece that will appear under that date in next Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Written by Caleb Carr, a military historian. It reminds us that we have had terrorist attacks in the past. In 1814, for example, the British burned the city of Washington to the ground. The reasons at this point in history are more interesting than the deed: |
| | The War of 1812 had little to do with specific political grievances or economic rivalries. It was prosecuted by the British because of a deep anxiety over the spread of American democratic republicanism. Having seen the bloody anarchy that had overtaken France during its revolution and having watched the United States peacefully and dramatically multiply its territory through the Louisiana Purchase, the British Empire ‹ a stratified society still largely controlled by its aristocracy and constitutional monarchy ‹ had grown deeply fearful that the spread of American-style democratic rebellion would mean not only economic competition abroad but also uprisings at home. In short, the British gratuitously destroyed important structures in Washington (and killed many innocent people) because those buildings were obnoxious symbols of American values whose spread and propagation the London government feared would spell the disempowerment of their own. |
| | Yes, this is war, and in all likelihood it will be a vicious and sustained one. What our enemies want is nothing short of an end to our predominance, and they will not forsake terrorism until either they attain that result or we make such behavior prohibitively, horrifyingly expensive. And this worst assault on the United States in its history happened in New York City because it symbolizes all that those same enemies loathe and fear most: diversity, licentiousness, avarice and freedom. Now, as we go about the process of adjusting ourselves to this new world of terrible conflict, we can and must take heart from that one seemingly paradoxical historical observation: both as New Yorkers and as Americans, we have been in this new world before. |
Doing the math
| | Paul Boutin's Wired colleague Patrick Di Justo has done a pile of math involving jet fuel, building mass and other stuff. The bottom line: |
| | Fuel content of planes: 1,500,000,000,000 calories
Kinetic Energy of impacts: 710,000,000 calories
Potential energy of buildings: 400,000,000,000 calories
Total of above: 1,900,710,000,000 calories
Energy released in WTC event : 1.9 kilotons
Energy released by building collapse, on Richter scale: 3.5
Hiroshima bomb: 13 kilotons |
Ignore closely
| | Clear Channel, the heartless broadcasting megalith that is more responsible than any other corporate entity for the soul-free robotics that now constitutes local radio, has issued a long list of banned songs that absurdly includes Fontella Bass' "Rescue Me," Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and James Taylor's "Fire and Rain." |
The new game
| | In the Wall Street Journal a couple days ago, there was a picture of a rescue worker pausing in front of a wall covered with gray dust. Somebody had written what appeared to say "RESCUE ... OVER REVENGE." The worker was standing in front the elipsis (...) in that quote. But the caption clarified matters: the second word was "RECOVER." Very different meaning. Finally, it said, there will be revenge. |
| | But against whom? The perpetrators are dead. |
| | I'm listening to NPR, which is interviewing the editor of The Arab News, which is billed on the Web as Saudi Arabia's First English Language Daily. |
| | He just said "To me Osama bin Laden is Jim Jones and David Koresh multiplied a million times over." He also said that the Koran not only speaks against killing other people, but says that a crime against one persons is committed against all of humanity. |
| | He also said the best way to destabilize the Pakistani goverment, which is barely keeping the Taliban out of power in its own country, is to attack the Afghan population, putting pictures of dead and wounded children on television. |
| | And I'm thinking that Saudi Arabia, America's best friend in the Muslim world, is relatively safe. But is it? |
| | Back in 1998, Mary Anne Weaver wrote a long piece in The New Yorker. The Real bin Laden. About her subject she says: |
| | Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in 1955, the youngest of some twenty surviving sons of one of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest and most prominent families. He is part puritanical Wahhabi, the dominant school of Islam in Saudi Arabia, yet at one time he may have led a very liberated social life. He is part feudal Saudi, an aristocrat who, from time to time, would retreat with his father to the desert and live in a tent. And he is of a Saudi generation that came of age during the rise of OPEC, with the extraordinary wealth that accompanied it: a generation whose religious fervor or political zeal, complemented by government airline tickets, led thousands to fight a war in a distant Muslim land. That Pan-Islamic effort, whose fighters were funded, armed, and trained by the C.I.A., eventually brought some twenty-five thousand Islamic militants, from more than fifty countries, to combat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The United States, intentionally or not, had launched Pan-Islam's first jihad, or holy war, in eight centuries. |
| | After describing much of bin Laden's history, including his intricate past ties to the C.I.A., she concludes with this: |
| | As bin Laden's international image and stature increase‹along with his support, both ideological and financial, among some of the kingdom's élite and the élites of other states in the Persian Gulf‹any Saudi hopes of quietly resolving its bin Laden problem by force become less tenable. And each time the Clinton Administration raises the stakes, and further enhances bin Laden's prominence, more and more disaffected Saudis flock to join the kingdom's militant Islamist underground, of which bin Laden remains a central part. That is one of the most worrisome consequences of America's obsession with one man. |
| | For twenty years, Osama bin Laden has refashioned himself with extraordinary dexterity and skill. Now the House of Saud, ever fearful of the Islamist challenge to its throne, appears intent on a transformation of its own‹to turn what has been an often complex battle of wills between the Saudi royal family and its errant son into a far simpler conflict, one that pits bin Laden and his followers against the United States. |
| | Last night on TV a terrorist expert, C.I.A. veteran — best of his breed, they said — disclosed his admission that what the terrorists we are dealing with here is "a whole new breed." They don't fit the old profile. |
| | The new profile, he said is an ordinary man, sometimes a family man, who goes to bars, movies and shopping centers. He lives a quiet life in a suburb or an apartment. And his whole life is purposed by his intentional death. His will not be an ordinary suicide. It will be sane, stable, intentional. And it will kill as many people as possible in one act. |
| | The social profile is of a small group that is not in touch with anybody other than those who provide them with money, and then only indirectly. They may be acting on orders to hit large American targets (boats, embassies, trade centers, military buildings, government buildings — that's the apparent roster, so far as we know) that were given as far back as 1996, by a chain of intermediaries each poseessing mimimal information about each other. (We may assume that among the many things bin Laden learned from the C.I.A. was that the best way to keep a secret is not to have knowledge in the first place.) |
| | What we are starting to see here is that these are not enemies as we have known them before. They are cruise missles in human form, guided more by programming than by direct manipulation. They are like the replicants in Blade Runner: programmed beings apparently human in every respect other than their terminal purposes. |
| | Watching tape of bin Laden last night I was reminded of another Eastern contribution to civilized life: the game of chess. |
| | Bin Laden's genius is inventing a new form of chess, one where countries are not sides in the contest but squares on the board. As in the game of chess, one must be willing to make unexpected sacrifices, and to know the opponent's possible moves at least as well as you know your own. As for the rest of the rules, we can only guess. Obviously Muslim countries are all over the board, with Saudi Arabia, home of Mecca, at the center. |
| | It is also obvious that bin Laden knows how to play our side at least as well as he plays his own. Why else would his pawns have been able to hijack four large passenger aircraft in one day and turn them into enormous missle bombs against American landmarks — all with horrifying efficiency? |
| | It is finally safe to assume that right now he has a good idea what we'll do next. And even if he doesn't know what his side will do, he does know we won't expect it. |
| | So: if we kill him, will we have checkmate? Or will his side merely have sacrificed its queen? |
| | Perhaps it will help if we give this game a more appropriate and realistic name — one closer to what bin Laden has in mind. |
| | Let's call it World War III. |
Twin Tulips
| | Here is NYC, Day 6, the last of Michael Stern's reports to his friends from what's left of New York's financial district. A sample: |
| | I had not appreciated from photographs that the tall shiny outer shell of the building, where still upright, is typically upside down and inside out. |
| | The shell was blown out like the petals of a tulip — we used to see the outside, but now we see the inside, upside down. |
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