Category: Networks

Citizen Smash – The Indepundit: “The Indepundit is Back”. Check it out.

The angry, protesting mobs are at it again, according to the Associated Press:

Outside the U.S. Embassy in Athens, demonstrators hurled bottles and yoghurt at riot police during a rally to protest the occupation of Iraq and the Palestinian territories.

Greek yoghurt is awfully fine stuff, so maybe the message was really one of love and admiration. Surely the protestors don’t want Iraq returned to Saddam’s control, do they?

In any event, the little scruffies have improved their behavior quite a bit since the Cancun WTO meeting, where they hurled buckets of liquid feces upon the imperialist Mexican police, as it were.

Shark Blog: Salam Pax Interview

9th Circuit to hear case en banc

Mr. Jarvis takes down a pompous and smarmy PBS show blaming 9/11 on globalization in the New York Post today:

No, on that day, 19 fanatics killed 3,000 innocents. That is the story of 9/11, not this PBS version.

I haven’t seen the PBS who yet, but the title- The Center of the World – annoys me. I have the sole copyright to this term outside of Delphi, and PBS didn’t ask for permission to use it.

No remembrance of Sept. 11th is complete without a reread of Dr. Frank’s friend Tristin’s letter. It’s about how the events of that day crystallized her political evolution, among other things.

I was awakened on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, by a phone call from my daughter Katie. She was nervous, barely able to talk, and crying. She said she just wanted to let me know that her sister Grace was OK. Not knowing what had happened in New York — I lived in California and I’m a late riser — I didn’t know why she wouldn’t be. Grace was flying home that morning from New York City, but she’d flown several times half way around the planet and had criss-crossed the country dozens of times shuttling between parents in different states, and I’d long ago concluded that there are few places you can be that are safer than a Jumbo Jet at 28,000 feet above the noise.

But this wasn’t an ordinary flight. Grace had been supposed to fly out the day before, but bad weather and cancelled her flight and she’d been given a choice between a United flight – 93 – and a Delta flight to San Francisco. Having been made to circle Denver for an hour and then having to sit and wait for more hours with no news before boarding a connecting flight to Texas, all by United, she took the Delta flight and saved her life. Never has bad airline service been so important. She never made it to California because her flight was grounded in Omaha, the same city where the President stayed that night, and after a couple of anxious days she was able to get a bus back to Philadelphia, where her cousins took her back to New York where she goes to school. It was a long time before Grace would fly again.

“Turn on the TV, dad,” my daughter said to me, and like millions of other Americans I spent the next several hours transfixed by images of suicide bombers crashing planes full of unsuspecting passengers into office buildings full of unsuspecting workers. When watching TV turned out to be useless, I hit the Internet and gathered news about who’d done what and how much damage they’d caused from live reports posted in Usenet, The Well, and the blogs. I stumbled to work and sat stunned at a computer for the rest of the day amid a great hush interrupted only by the rustling of American flags printed on sheets of paper being pinned to the cubicle walls at 3Com. Small groups of people clustered in the hallways after a while, shaking, breaking out in tears, and trembling with rage.

I’ve seen a lot of the world outside the United States, living in Libya as a child and in India, Singapore, and Malaysia as an adult, and I’ve seen a lot of politics as a former lobbyist in Sacramento, but this was beyond politics. It was also beyond the usual goofy fanaticism of the Muslim religion with its call to prayer five times a day, its strict dietary rules, its fear of women and its maniac fasting month when people sit on the curbs in Malaysia with bags of fruit juice in their hands waiting for the Imam’s call to break their fast at the official sunset. This was insanity and a viciousness that breaks all the human boundaries around conflict and war and aggression. This was a direct attack on perfectly innocent people who had no stake in the governance of the Middle East, no responsibility for the backward condition of Arab states shackled to outmoded values by corrupt mullahs and political leaders mis-educated in Western universities suffering under the burden of fashionable ideas long ago and no interest in oppressing their counterparts halfway around the planet. This was beyond all of that, a new standard of bad behavior that could only be captured in old-fashioned words like “evil”.

We were lucky to have a simple-minded president who didn’t need to pass himself off as a pseudo-intellectual and was therefore able to call it by its name, to rally the country back to consciousness with a set of truly inspired speeches over the next few days and weeks, to build a sense of national unity and determination to strike back with appropriate force without fanning flames of hatred to a fever pitch. His finest moments were at the National Cathedral where he spoke against the background of a choir singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and before a meeting of Congress where he recognized the friendship of Prime Minister Blair. The military performed brilliantly in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, and the sponsors of terrorism got the message that America was not the weakling they thought it was and that we’re not interested in feeling the pain of others when we’re overcome nearly to exhaustion with our own.

Never again. We’re no longer asleep, and no longer so obsessed with our personal issues and our comfort and our 401Ks that we’ll sit quietly as our airplanes are hijacked and our children and fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and neighbors are murdered. We understand the nature of the enemy we’re up against, and we’ve decided to face him, once and for all, with resolve and clarity and determination.

That doesn’t mean that we’ve stopped being the people we were, that we’ve surrendered our civil liberties or that we’ve gone to lynching everyone who looks like an Arab or a Muslim. We’re in the political high season again, and the President’s critics are all over the nation, nine of them assembling to compete with each other to condemn him and his friends and policies in the most crass and venal language they can muster. But that’s OK, they’re allowed to do that without fear of being detained or tortured or murdered, which is still a damn sight better than they’d be treated in the Taliban’s Afghanistan or Saddam’s Iraq or the Iran of the mullahs or the Korea of madman Kim Jong Il. And it’s not remarkable that they’re free to speak and act as they do, this is America and we’re tolerant and self-critical.

And certainly there’s a great deal to hold the President accountable for, a massive federal deficit, a still-sputtering economy just starting to show signs of life and some hard policies to swallow with no-bid contracts in Iraq and all the usual compromises between quality of life and a vibrant economy. So we criticize, and we ask him to do better, and we shake our fists at him, as we always do to the man in the White House, whether he deserves it or not. But we do this inside a perspective that we didn’t have before those planes struck those towers and so many people fell apart emotionally or were killed. We know that when the heat is really on, our President, like the rest of us, can dig deep and find his moral center and emerge to act with clarity. But more than that, we have a sense of our unity as Americans that we’d come close to losing in our squabbles between this idea and that and this group and that and in our general complacency.

This sense of unity is a gift that we gained at a very, very high price, and we’d do well not to squander it again, lest the next time it’s returned to us we find the price is too high. So let’s see if we can’t go about our political business with our rhetoric turned down a notch, the better to focus on what unites us and how we move our country and the rest of the world forward and in the right direction. We don’t have to keep our rage and our fear, but we’d better not move all the way away from them as long as we have so much to do in the way of calming the terror and the fanaticism that still grips so much of the world.

We have so much to do that we need all of best minds engaged in the work, regardless of their party or their religion or the color of their skins. What unites us will always be stronger than what divides us, and we can’t afford to forget that — our very survival is in the balance.

Never forget.

For the record, the late Al Qaeda theorist Yussuf al-Ayyeri explains why they hate us in jihadist book-of-the-month-club selection The Future of Iraq and The Arabian Peninsula After The Fall of Baghdad. It’s pretty simple, really: they don’t want to get comfortable. This article by Amir Taheri in New York Post Online Edition: postopinion explains:

What Al-Ayyeri sees now is a “clean battlefield” in which Islam faces a new form of unbelief. This, he labels “secularist democracy.” This threat is “far more dangerous to Islam” than all its predecessors combined. The reasons, he explains in a whole chapter, must be sought in democracy’s “seductive capacities.”

This form of “unbelief” persuades the people that they are in charge of their destiny and that, using their collective reasoning, they can shape policies and pass laws as they see fit. That leads them into ignoring the “unalterable laws” promulgated by God for the whole of mankind, and codified in the Islamic shariah (jurisprudence) until the end of time.

The goal of democracy, according to Al-Ayyeri, is to “make Muslims love this world, forget the next world and abandon jihad.” If established in any Muslim country for a reasonably long time, democracy could lead to economic prosperity, which, in turn, would make Muslims “reluctant to die in martyrdom” in defense of their faith.

So there you have it: to make ourselves safe from the Jihad, we simply have to turn away from prosperity, secularist democracy, and progress. So John Ashcroft really has been right all along, in his own funky little way.

No hot blog action for a while, as I’m motoring up to the Portland, Oregon area for a fairly extended stay. I’ve got a client in the consumer products business up there, and we need to put our heads together on the future of some of their key technologies and build the next big thing. I’ve talked with some 25 companies in Silicon Valley over the past year on product planning and engineering in the areas I know — protocols, wireless, broadband, audio-video, open source, protocol verification — without finding anyone as sharp as these consumer guys. It’s sad to say this, but there’s precious little innovation in Silicon Valley any more. Sure, there are lots of people burning lots of venture cash making minor enhancements to big ideas hatched a decade or so ago, but precious little in the way of big ideas with the potential to fuel a new new economy, one that’s not based solely on hype, creative bookkeeping, and stock fraud.

The Valley’s really, really stale. It’s always been a sorry place to live, but one I could deal with because the work was so much fun, but lately the work has begun to suck as bad as the rest of it. I’m not ready to say “Silicon Valley is over” but without an infusion of creativity, and a big parade of lemmings over some cliffs, it may as well be.

I’ve never been to Portland before, so I’m also looking forward to exploring some new geography and meeting some new people. This isn’t a permanent move yet, but if it goes as well as I anticipate, in a couple of months I’ll be loading stuff in a truck and committing major finances on real estate. But I get ahead of myself.

Got any things I should know about Portland? Leave a comment, e-mail’s not likely to get answered for a few days.

Tim Hudson pitched one of the best games I’ve ever seen tonight against the Red Sox: a complete game, two hit, one walk shutout, 93 pitches, 28 batters, and only three balls hit out of the infield. Both singles were scratch infield hits, with the runners being immediately wiped out by double plays. A few more like this, and Hudson wins the Cy Young.

The win moved the A’s into a tie with Boston for the Wild Card, but with the addition of Jose Guillen to their lineup, they’re shooting for a division title. Guillen, if you haven’t seen him, has the most amazing arm in all of baseball. In his first game with the As, he threw a strike from semi-deep in right field that caught his catcher off guard three steps in front of the plate. If he’d been in position, a runner scoring from second on a deep single would have been out.

They’re a lot scrappier than the Giants, generally more fun to watch. Barry Bonds is starting to annoy me with his lack of hustle. Standing at the plate to see where his mighty blasts go is fine when they’re in the water, but I’ve seen him lose extra bases that way on Texas Leaguers, one of which cost his team the game when he couldn’t score on the single behind him.

The Giants pitching rotation is also giving me headaches; Reuter’s been hurt, Schmidt missed a game, Foppert’s inconsistent, this new guy Dustin Hermanson hasn’t got anything, and I can see no reason why Jim Brower isn’t a starter. The bright spots are rookie Jerome Williams with the puka shells, Kevin Correia, the new rookie that just came up from Fresno and pitched like he’s been in the bigs all his life, and Sidney Ponson, the vet from the Orioles.

That’s seven starters when Reuter gets better, so good-bye to Hermanson and Foppert and back to the bullpen for Brower. Now if they could just get a closer with an intimidating fastball, there might be hope for them in the post-season. The infield is obscenely strong, and everybody on the team hits.

The Cleveland Indians have a player named Coco Crisp who’s on a hitting streak, but the A’s beat them anyway, right after the Cubs beat the Giants on a 3-run homer by Moizes Alou, son of Giants manager Felipe Alou. While the Giants were 11-1 since the break, they failed to score a run against the Cubs on account of they never play well when Dusty Baker is in the room.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, just like Dusty stuck it to the Giants by blowing the All Star Game and with it, home field advantage in the playoffs.