Monday, September 30

Containment won't work with Saddam

From an article in the Los Angeles Times. [Registration required.]

But the Sept. 11 attacks have severely undercut containment as a way to handle Hussein, for many reasons. The terrorist attacks on America highlighted dangerous new realities. Geography no longer protects the United States. Individuals and groups are prepared to carry out mass murder against us without the slightest moral scruple; some are willing to sacrifice their own lives in doing so. Even more ominously, there is little reason to believe that the Sept. 11 attackers would not have used weapons of mass destruction had they possessed them.

Sunday, September 29

Gore's Glass House (washingtonpost.com).

A pudding with no theme but much poison. Such was the foreign policy speech Al Gore delivered in San Francisco on Monday. It was a disgrace -- a series of cheap shots strung together without logic or coherence. Most of all, it was brazen. It was delivered as if there had been no Clinton-Gore administration, no 1990s.

The tone of the speech is best reflected in Gore's contemptuous dismissal of the U.S. victory in Afghanistan as "defeating a fifth-rate military power." If the Taliban were a fifth-rate military power, why didn't the Clinton-Gore administration destroy it and spare us Sept. 11?....

The New York Times reports that Gore wrote the speech "after consulting a fairly far-flung group of advisers that included Rob Reiner." Current U.S. foreign policy is the combined product of Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz and the president. Meanwhile, the pretender is huddling with Meathead.

Had it not been for a few little old ladies baffled by the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach, Fla., American foreign policy today would be made by Gore-Reiner instead of the Bush brain trust. Who says God doesn't smile upon the United States of America?

Saturday, September 28

11 megapixel cameras are coming.

Canon's new digital camera EOS-1 Ds is demonstrated in Tokyo Thursday, Sept. 26, 2002. The newest model of EOS-1 single-lens reflex digital camera series can take 11.1 mega pixel high resolution images. Canon EOS-1 Ds will be available in the Japanese market in late November.
Sufi Teaching

Past the seeker as he prayed came the crippled and the beggar and the beaten. And seeing them...he cried, "Great God, how is it that a loving creator can see such things and yet do nothing about them?"...God said, "I did do something. I made you."
Refuse to fall down.

"Refuse to fall down.
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled,
and it will be filled.
You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you
from lifting your heart
toward heaven..."

Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Author of Women Who Run With The Wolves

Monday, September 23

A chicken in every pot? No, pot with every chicken!

A Mill Valley KFC restaurant employee was arrested after a customer received a little something extra with his chicken dinner.

This customer received two bags of marijuana Friday, instead of the extra biscuits he had requested.

The customer gave the marijuana back to the employee, got his extra biscuits and called police.

Police arrested Carlos Ayala, 26, of Vallejo, shortly after the customer complained about the pot.

Marin County Sheriff's deputies said they found Ayala with a small amount of marijuana, a handgun and about $500 in his possession.

Ayala often worked the drive-up window at the restaurant and authorities say he may have been selling the marijuana to customers who used the right secret word as a code.

Saturday, September 21

Physicists create antimatter.

Physicists working in Europe have passed through nature's looking glass and have created atoms made of antimatter, or antiatoms, opening up the possibility of experiments in a realm once reserved for science fiction writers.
Digital Web Magazine’s Introduction to XML

If you've been producing sites for any length of time you probably hear about XML, and wonder exactly why so many people are excited about it. XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. Let's take a closer look at the parts of the acronym, and then we'll show you how it all fits together.
I thought hard disks were cheap these days.

Daypop.com error message: “Sorry for the inconvenience. Daypop has been out of service for the past two weeks. It turns out Daypop is out of disk space. Check back here for further updates.”

Thursday, September 19

Evidence found of ancient world war

A bitter war between rival Maya city-states may have set the stage for the collapse of that once-great civilization, say scientists who translated recently found hieroglyphics on stone stairs in an ancient pyramid in Guatemala.

Monday, September 9

Tape of alleged hijackers surfaces

Uhh...so where are all those who claimed that bin Laden's and al-Qaida's involvement was fabricated?


Arabic Al-Jazeera satellite television station said on Monday it had received a videotape that contained Osama bin Laden’s voice and apparently showed some of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers studying flight manuals. News of the tape came a day after another Al-Jazeera reporter made public an interview with two plotters, who said that attacks on U.S. nuclear facilities were considered by al-Qaida.

Saturday, September 7

Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero

I finally took the time to view my recording of PBS Frontline’s poignant documentary about the spiritual questions raised in the shadow of the September 11 attacks. In typical fashion, the companion website is excellent. Its producer, director, and co-writer Helen Whitney, a self-described agnostic, acknowledges the complexity of issues she faced in approaching the issue:


The contentiousness of the debate among intellectuals and policy-makers made me apprehensive as well. Every day there seemed to be a new theory put forward by a swelling number of "experts." Some of these voices were learned and informative. But others were part of what one of our consultants, Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, describes as the "Yes, but" Brigade. Yes, it is terrible, but ... this is due to American foreign policy; this is due to the Middle East tensions between Palestinians and Jews; this is due to the globalization drama; this is due to the envy of poor nations; these are the famous cultural wars; this is due to American imperialism, et cetera. Or if you are part of the Noam Chomsky or the Jerry Falwell brigades (which are remarkably similar in their analyses), it is because America itself is evil. And on and on.

For Monsignor Albacete, the search for political, economic, and diplomatic "explanations" was understandable but limited, and in some ways an escape that violated the complex reality of Sept. 11. "The terrorists' attack was all these things, but it was also something new: a hatred for humanity, an attack on humanity itself. The question is not only, Why do they hate us so much? But, more important, Why do they hate so much?"

About Me

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Microsoft web guy who used to drive the Calico Mine Train at Knott's Berry Farm in the late '70s.