...more recent posts
Counterpunch.org has this short and very interesting 1998 interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, titled How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen. (via the chock full of heavy links Ethel the blog)
DEBKAfile is a news source a lot of people have been pointing to recently. Here's a New York Observer piece on the website. They say, in part:
But in this new battleground, it is natural to assume there will be new sources of inside dope. And in the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and as the U.S. geared up for a military response people have begun passing around a link to Debka.com, a crudely designed, Jerusalem-based Web site that offers Middle Eastern military, diplomatic and intelligence information far more detailed (and frightening) than what is offered by many news organizations. At its best, Debka.com reads like a tip sheet from the desert...Frightening is right. According to debka Putin and Bush have agreed on the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons (in Chechnya and in Afghanistan,) the Chinese (fearful of a new Russian U.S. front) are sending troops to support Bin Laden and the Taliban, a third case of Anthrax in the U.S. is being investigated, Russian and Israeli intelligence both concluded Siberian Airlines 1812 was the vicitim of a terrorist attack and not a stray missle, and that the U.S. is preparing shortly to strike a second country (either Somalia or Iraq.) Scary stories that are moving fast, but are they accurate?
Question and answer with Noam Chomsky.
I'm not scared so much as speechless. If I try to put it into words I get very upset. But if I don't I can go about my day and keep working on my latest web job and not be too paralyzed by what is happening. So I guess that's what I'm going to do.
My hands? What blood?
Still, I won't forget. The bad, but also the good. And I know there are good people out there. New York City is full of them. I saw it. Most people want to help. Yet bad things keep happening. So where I used to suspect we might be under the control of a small cabal bent on evil, I now think it's more likely that we are under the sway of an emergent meta organism which is not exactly human. A sort of human group mind, minus the humanity. I think it emerges through our hierarchical and bureaucratic organizational structures (be they political, military, corporate, religious, or whatever.) It's our worst side and it's fueled by greed and it is devouring lives at this very moment. And the more it feeds the bigger it's appetite grows.
But it is us. And we can turn it. We can make it our best side. I don't know how, but we all do. Keep moving, keep trying, keep being human. Touch someone today. You are love.
A Florida man has died of pulmonary anthrax. Nothing is known yet of how he inhaled the spores. Dr. Sanjay Gupta answered common questions in this CNN interview.
"There have only been 18 confirmed inhalational cases from 1900 to 1976, and not a single case, before yesterday, over the last 25 years. Typically, the way people get it now is through the handling of animals or soil that contain the bacteria and its spores."This is alarming, given the recent talk of possible terrorist antrax attacks, but it's much too early for more rational fear.
Could it be the case that anthrax is really more commonly encountered by humans in nature and merely under or mis-diagnosed? It is reasonable to think that many in the medical community have recently refreshed their knowledge of the symptons and thus the number of reported incidents might rise quickly (if not very far) even without the help of any malevolent human involvement. What if there were suddenly 5 cases in the country? 10? 20? This still might not be any sort of attack. Localization would be the key to deciding how to guess about the terrorist question.
I think it's likely this case has natural causes. But how many will it take before this isn't the gut reaction? Not too many I'll bet, yet we may well get at least one or two more just out of heightened awareness.
MB's grandmother passed away this week. She was 95, and in good health up until the end. I spent most of the last two days on Long Island with the extended family. Lots of great stories remembering the old days in Brooklyn, from the time of the depression up through World War II, and into the early fifties when they moved out to Long Island. That generation lived through some astounding changes. Death, I suppose, is always a sad business, but a long full life lived close with those you love takes most of the heart wrench out of it. Still sad, yes, but an ending that we all think was O.K. with her. She was buried in the last family plot in the Holy Cross Cemetery, which is off Linden Blvd. around 48th street in Brooklyn, not far from where she grew up. Nana - and she was "Nana" to everyone - will be missed. A great woman I am honored to have known.
Sony makes some amazing gadgets, like the DCR-IP7 "Network Handycam IP." I dislike their tendency for proprietary technologies (memorystick especially) but only Apple is in the same design league. They both make really cool stuff that I wish was a lot less expensive and a lot more open to third party additions. (This might be a better picture to show how small this camera is.)
Well, I got a 'success' message back from weblogs.com, and I know they hit my page, and I showed up in changes.xml (you can probably see that if you want by viewing source since it's not an html file - or maybe it will try to download it to your machine and you could open it in a text editor) but then I never showed up in the list at weblogs.com. Possibly this is because I was never on that list in the first place. So either I have to sign up somewhere first, or they confirm changes by comparing your page to the last snapshot of your page, and since that was the first they had heard of me they didn't have a last snapshot to compare it to. If that's the case then I should show up next hour after they get this notification. Let's see.
Test number 3 of the new notification system at weblogs.com
O.K. Seems like that worked. I'm using Edd Dumbill's XMLRPC classes for PHP (see http://phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net) along with Bill Humphries notifyUserland PHP code. Everything worked great except I had to change the first line of function ping() to actually ping rpc.weblogs.com and not rpc.userland.com.
I'll make the appropriate changes to [editpage] so that anyone here can send update notification to the crawler at weblogs.com. It will only notify for new posts, not edits, or comments.
"Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."Can you guess who said this? Click through to the comments for the answer to todays quiz. Brought to you by Ethel.