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Monday, September 24, 2001
They can sleep in a coffin, work at night, but suck no blood 
Any bets?
Entertainment strikes back
Even if it only kills your files
Military wisdom
| | Col. Kern's letter is, like most of what I'm hearing from career military folks, very objective, knowing and sober: |
| | Perhaps the perfect metaphor for the coming battle was introduced by the terrorists themselves aboard the hijacked aircraft -- this will be a knife fight, and it will be won or lost by the ingenuity and will of citizens and soldiers, not by software or smart bombs. We must also be patient with our military leaders. |
| | My sister (Cmdr, USN, ret) adds this: |
| | The guy nails it. As I was reading it, I was squirming. He has put into words our worst nightmare, exposed the truth we are trying to cover with flags and songs, candles and donations. More of us — everyday folks going about their everyday lives in America — are going to die. |
| | But this is different from Vietnam. We went into that fight (for whatever reasons) and when we lost the will to win, we left the fight. We could get on a ship or plane and leave it behind. We can't do that this time. Whether we want to fight or not, some of us will be killed because the fight has been brought to us. It is here. The enemy is here. They have placed the battlefield in America and we either have to defeat them or die, because we cannot leave this time. |
| | That is beyond scary. It is beyond nightmare. It is real. |
| | May God Bless and keep us all. |
| | [Later... Thanks to several kind readers, Col. Kern's original letter at Jerry Pournelle's site has been found here.] |
More intelligence
| | In Hama Rules, a Foreign Affairs editorial in the New York Times on September 21, Thomas Friedman points out that some of the nastiest scorched-earth approaches to Islamic extrmism come from secular Islamic governments like Hafez al-Assad's Syria, which reduced that country's fourth-largest city, Hama, to rubble in 1982, killing up to 25,000 of its own citizens — just to wipe out a few guys who threatened his government. Friedman continues: |
| | ... while the Arab states have crushed their Islamic terrorists, they have never confronted them ideologically and delegitimized their behavior as un-Islamic. Arab and Muslim Americans are not part of this problem. But they could be an important part of the solution by engaging in the debate back in the Arab world, and presenting another vision of America. |
| | He goes on to make a positive suggestion: |
| | We need the moderate Arab states as our partners ‹ but we don't need only their intelligence. We need them to be intelligent. I don't expect them to order their press to say nice things about America or Israel. They are entitled to their views on both, and both at times deserve criticism. But what they have never encouraged at all is for anyone to consistently present an alternative, positive view of America — even though they were sending their kids here to be educated. Anyone who did would be immediately branded a C.I.A. agent. |
| | I'd like to be hopeful about that. |
Ground Zero through Seven
| | This map, which appeared in the Sunday New York Times, profiles the rubble that remains of the World Trade Center and its immediate surroundings. It's painful to recall that the WTC consisted of more than its two most familiar buildings. Its clear here that the whole thing is ruined. Incredible. |
| | Note that each of the numbers on the map are live, and details appear in the white window at the top |
Squaring the errors
| | The press makes mistakes. Constantly. Stuff gets mis-heard, mis-noted and mis-quoted, over and over. Writing gets shortened, lengthened and twisted to fit available space, prevailing politics or both. This is true even for the best journals. |
| | Case in point. Heres a line from today's Slashdot under the headline Interviews: Philip Zimmerman and 'Guilt' over PGP: "Philip R. Zimmermann, creator of PGP, was quoted in a recent Washington Post article as saying he has been 'overwhelmed with feelings of guilt' about the use of PGP by suspected terrorists." |
| | When I read that, I thought, Oh no. The terrorists used PGP. But when I followed the link to the interview with Phil (whose old company by the same name — Pretty Good Privacy — I consulted a few years ago), and then to the Washington Post piece, I found that Phil was busy trying to correct what the Post said about his feelings of guilt — and that the Post only reported that "the government is investigating whether Zimmermann's technology or another scramber was used by hijackers to coordinate last week's attacks." |
| | In other words, two misunderstandings were being perpetrated at once here: Phil feeling guilty and PGP being used by terrorists. Phil denies the first and the second hasn't been estalished. |
| | My understanding, anyway. |
The Marks Plan
| | Scott Marks weighs in with this proposal: |
| | I have not yet heard proposed a workable solution for attacking a loosely connected network of small terrorist cells, with members who live at home with their families in 60 different countries. |
| | The hardest part of this nut is that, by-and-large, these people come from cultures with nothing to lose. "Bombing them up to the stone age" one more time will do nothing but reinforce the support for attacks on America. |
| | Yet we have in our recent history a hugely successful example of changing our most bitter enemies to our close allies. After World War II, when we had reduced Germany and Japan to a level of devastation almost as low as Afghanistan lives with today, we created the Marshall plan, and with that plan created modern industrial democracies with economies so closely integrated with ours that to attack us would be to attack themselves. |
| | Afghanistan already lives its daily existence at that level, and with no trust of outsiders. When British Special Forces tried to pay Afghans for intelligence on the whereabouts of terrorists, "they took our money and lied." Simple grants, acts of humanitarian kindness will likely be received as laughable signs of weakness. |
| | Instead, we must build Afghanistan. We must create infrastructure, industry, paying jobs, and consumer items that make life in a frozen desert wasteland more tolerable. And we must do these things without succumbing to the temptation to "branding". The current generation of Afghans will not buy KFC or MacDonald's. But once they have bought Afghan concrete, Afghan steel, Afghan cars and Afghan cell phones, I believe they will discover that they don't want to give these up. |
| | The Marshall Plan as used after WWII does have a flaw, in that it was largely based on building a banking system, and then providing funding for reconstruction. |
| | Taliban doesn't believe in banks? Fine. We'll drop in some Army guys, establish a perimeter near a village, build a concrete plant, churn out zillions of mortar, cinder blocks and some irrigation ditches, abandon it, move to another village, and repeat. Taliban might not like infrastructure either, but I bet that at home, with chadors off, Mom and Wives will let it be known that they do not favor destroying useful infrastructure. |
| | It is far easier to build schools or mosques or houses or factories with a concrete plant than it is to make concrete guns or concrete bullets. |
| | The factories could make guns, but no plan is proof against determined evil. I just believe that if the gun-toters are well-fed enough, and their families comfortable enough, that they will find better things to do. |
| | This is the only way I see to "attack" the terrorists -- deprive them of the poverty and hatred on which they feed. |
| | If you agree, please forward these ideas to those you think might be able to implement them. If you can correct them, enhance them, critique them in any constructive way, please do so. But please act somehow to move us all toward life and away from an endless cycle of death and retribution. |
Bazaar Living
| | Since both Cluetrain and No Logo came out, there has been a stepped-up effort by Business as Usual to job out its affections for customers to marketing agencies and departments. Naomi nails them for it: |
| | ...it's one of the ironies of our branded age that, as corporations become more remote by cutting lasting ties with us as their employees, they are increasingly sidling up to us as consumers, whispering sweet nothings about friendship and community. |
| | It's not just Shoppers: Wal-Mart ads tell stories about clerks who, in a pinch, lend customers their own personal wedding gowns and Saturn's ads are populated by car dealers who offer counselling when customers lose their jobs. You see, according to the new marketing book, Values Added, modern marketers have to "make your brand a cause and your cause a brand". |
| | Maybe I still have a bad attitude, but this collective corporate hug feels about as empty today as it did when I was an about-to-be-unemployed sweater folder. Particularly when you stop to consider the cause of all this mass-produced warmth. |
| | ...nothing will change until corporations realise that they don't have a communications problem. They have a reality problem. |
| | The NoLogo site also features a link to a Noam Chomsky interview that has received a lot of attention. Chomsky's is a voice we should be listening to, because the scope of his concern is humanity rather than to (forgive me) the America brand. Here's some of what he says: |
| | The horrendous terrorist attacks on Tuesday are something quite new in world affairs, not in their scale and character, but in the target. For the US, this is the first time since the War of 1812 that its national territory has been under attack, even threat. Its colonies have been attacked, but not the national territory itself. During these years the US virtually exterminated the indigenous population, conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. The same is true, even more dramatically, of Europe. Europe has suffered murderous destruction, but from internal wars, meanwhile conquering much of the world with extreme brutality. It has not been under attack by its victims outside, with rare exceptions (the IRA in England, for example). It is therefore natural that NATO should rally to the support of the US; hundreds of years of imperial violence have an enormous impact on the intellectual and moral culture. |
| | It is correct to say that this is a novel event in world history, not because of the scale of the atrocity -- regrettably -- but because of the target. How the West chooses to react is a matter of supreme importance. If the rich and powerful choose to keep to their traditions of hundreds of years and resort to extreme violence, they will contribute to the escalation of a cycle of violence, in a familiar dynamic, with long-term consequences that could be awesome. Of course, that is by no means inevitable. An aroused public within the more free and democratic societies can direct policies towards a much more humane and honorable course. |
Concrete roots
| | TBTF has excellent coverage of post-collapse WTC tenant lists and links. Scroll down to the table of tenants for a living picture, on the Web, of how each company is coping with loss, escape and survival. |
| | "Sadly, Alliance has yet to locate or hear from the seven employees who were believed to be in the New York office at the time of the tragedy. Employees continue to search, hope and pray for our seven missing comrades." |
| | ABS confirms that all employees of its New York Executive Office, located on the 91st floor of One World Trade Center, evacuated safely from the building. |
| | The office normally staffs 22 people. At the time of tragedy 16 employees were either in the office or in transit to the office. All 16 employees are accounted for. Physical injuries were limited to minor cuts and abrasions. |
| | "It is miraculous given the point of impact of the aircraft was immediately above the ABS offices," said ABS Chairman and CEO Frank J. Iarossi. "Saddened as we are by the tragedy, we are greatly relieved that every one of the ABS family survived." |
| | Many of these ABS employees, like so many other workers who survived the impact and the fire that followed, must have walked down while passing untold numbers of firefighters and police officers running upstairs toward those still in trouble. |
| | Perhaps the most touching and reasuring of the Tower One survivor Web sites is Cantor Fitzgerald, which occupied the prime real estate upwards of the 104th floor of the building. Cantor is reported to have lost more than 700 employees. Their Web site is about as helpful as can be under the circumstances. |
| | In the marketplace of ideas, Chomsky's have always been considered fringe. But lately I see them moving more to the mainstream. |
| | That's stream's name is the Web. |
No doubt Al Qaeda considered the WTC a landmark, too
| | Many theories have been offered regarding why Western culture has spread so successfully across the world, with arguments ranging from genetics to superior technology to the creation of enlightened economic, moral, and political systems. In Carnage and Culture, military historian Victor Hanson takes all of these factors into account in making a bold, and sure to be controversial, argument: Westerners are more effective killers. Focusing specifically on military power rather than the nature of Western civilization in general, Hanson views war as the ultimate reflection of a society's character: "There isŠa cultural crystallization in battle, in which the insidious and more subtle institutions that heretofore are murky and undefined became stark and unforgiving in the finality of organized killing." |
| | Published reviews are all positive, but the only reader review is negative: 2 stars out of 5. An excerpt: |
| | Hanson counts the Tet Offensive as an American victory. So it was tactically, but our side lost the war nonetheless, because we didn't want to win it as much as the North Vietnamese did. Hanson says that the West usually wins by smacking the enemy in the teeth until he is destroyed (George Marshall's strategy for the war in Europe)and gives less credit to "indirect warfare", striking around flanks and in unexpected places. That's what the Japanese did, and in Hanson's view, this is un-Western. Fact is, of course, that both strategies have worked at one time or another. |
Hairy mail
| | I have already received over 100 emails this morning, and it isn't even 9AM. |
| | I would also estimate that 1/5 of them are spam. The shit's getting worse. A huge number of them come from "Linda Brown," always arrive with encoding errors and have attachments related to real estate. Subjects like "Contract Renewal Memo," "Brokerage Relationship Disclosure," "Quotes," "REMAX Fees." There are always attachments. None appear to be of any known file type. They have names like "REMAX FEES.doc.Ink." Sometimes the second suffix is .pif. |
| | I assume they're crap, of course, and have thrown them away. But .... |
| | Just got an email from a friend saying these items all have the sircam virus. Ooookay. Glad they're gone. |
Backage
| | Our connection to the Net went down sometime last night and just came up again. |
| | In the meantime, I have to say once again that service from Cox@Home has been exemplary. Calls to tech support go straight to human beings. No recorded voice telling you to check the FAQ on the Web site, to press 3 for a promotional message, or that the current heel-cooling estimate is seventeen minutes. |
| | This morning's human told me the problem appeared to be a physical one outside our home, and that a service guy would be out between two and four this afternoon — but a high priority would be put on the case so action might come earlier. |
| | Then I got a call from a guy who said he wanted us to know there was an outage in the whole neighborhood and it should be fixed within two hours. So Joyce and I walked Jeffrey to school. When we got back. so was the service. |
| | Of course it would be nice if there weren't outages like this. I think this is about the third one since we moved in. But still, the price is right, the speed is high and except for turning off Port 80 for everybody, service is about as good as one would hope. |
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