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2001.09.16 : 2001.09.22
Saturday, September 22, 2001
Blab. Thinking our plaintiff cry
for attention was, in fact, directed at him, a boyish reader copies
the following from a history book with a stubby crayon:
No, it wasn't that way when
Pearl Harbor was bombed. (I think. I'm speculating, because
I was born decades later.) But perhaps that's not the right question
to ask.
In December 1941, war had already
been raging in Europe and Asia for over two years. Americans had
been reading and hearing about the overseas war, and suddenly, on the "day
which will live in infamy," it became abundantly clear that the United
States, too, would be involved in the war. It was already clear what
that war would be like.
Perhaps the better analogy is, was
the United States (and even the UK, France, and the Soviet Union) like
that in September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland? I imagine it
was. Much like today, at that point no one knew how large the war
would grow, how long it would last, or how much it would change people's
lives and the world. And so people in the United States, the United
Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union went about their usual activities,
much as they had before the invasion.
We will refer to this as A Theory Which Will Live In Infamy.
Blab. Riffing on mumble, mumble, a reader
writes:
"Toss me a cigarette, I think
there's one in my raincoat"
"We smoked the last one an
hour ago"
So I looked at the scenery,
she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open
field
The Surgeon General has left the building.
Blab. A reader who is actually Ed Snible writes:
Terrorist
bioweapon successfully deployed against US in 1984
Cult releases pathogen in attempt
to swing county election. 750 people hospitalized with food poisoning.
-A Reader
(actually Ed Snible)
Ah, politics at its best in romantic Oregon.
In an effort to overwhelm
the polls at the Wasco County election, the Rajneeshees bused in 4,300
homeless people from across the country, a strategy foiled by then-Secretary
of State Norma Paulus, who set up a committee of 50 lawyers to review all
new voter registrations. The Rajneeshees subsequently dumped most of the
homeless, many of whom claimed they were doped with the tranquilizer Haldol
during their stay on the ranch, on neighboring towns. To keep anti-Rajneesh
voters from reaching the polls, sannyasins sprayed salmonella on the salad
bars at several popular restaurants in The Dalles, sending 750 people to
the hospital with severe food poisoning. It was "the only case of germ
warfare against a whole American city," recalls Frohnmayer.
Such merry pranksters! Nowadays they're probably consultants.
Blab. A reader provides us with a ...
[link].
Hmm. Interesting speculation.
Israel's military intelligence
service, Aman, suspects that Iraq is the state that sponsored the suicide
attacks on the New York Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington.
You know, you could sell the commercial rights to heinous acts of violence.
This
act of terrorism brought to you by ...
And that, Binky, is why we're not in marketing.
Blab. Another curious reader provides us with another curious
...
[link].
An interesting article by Tom Nichols, professor of strategy at the U.S.
Naval War College. He pines for the Good Old Days, when terrorists had
real demands and such, and says that contemporary terrorists Just Don't
Get It.
It's been suggested that
this is exactly what bin Laden wants, a kind of gotterdammerung between
the West and the Islamic world. This realignment of warring coalitions
will then result in…well, what? The destruction of the West? The rallying
of the Islamic faithful? A reckoning in which all Arab states have to choose
sides in a global war with the United States? All of these grandiose hopes
border on hallucinatory, and if this is what bin Laden had in mind, then
years of education and travel have taught him nothing about the West, his
fellow Arabs, or how the international system actually works.
All well and good. Amusingly, he then commits rhetorical suicide with a
blunt metaphor.
Islamic extremists do hate
the West, for the same reason the dinosaurs hated tar pits: They know that
we are the instrument of their extinction.
Oh dear. We do hope they don't allow Dr. Nichols to lecture on psychology,
archeology or evolution.
Blab. A tasteless reader sends us ...
A brilliant
instance of Generic Literature:
We know you will hate us, but we think this
is really funny.
Of course the World Trade
Center bombings are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never
lose sight of the human tragedy involved. However, we must also consider
if this is not also a lesson to us all; a lesson that my political views
are correct. Although what is done can never be undone, the fact remains
that if the world were organised according to my political views, this
tragedy would never have happened.
Thanks to our tasteless reader for that yummy tidbit. We recommend that
you walk around downtown New York in a t-shirt that says, I Told You
So.
Blab. A reader whom we keep telling to get back to normal writes:
"Get back to normal" they tell us.
I can't help but feel very melancholy about this whole "war thing". I look
around at things that I've complained about in the past (ie: my husband
not emptying the dishwasher when asked, my husband EATING in our bedroom
while I'm gone...etc) and I think, "What's the use, we're going to war".
Stupid little things like cookie crumbs in bed seem so small in comparison.
I feel as if I've just given up a little bit inside...Lost a bit of my
spirit. I go on with life (what else is there to do?) but I'm just going
through the motions. We're leaving for the coast on Sunday for our replacement
anniversary trip, due to the Reno cancellation. Three whole days of being
blissfully aware of what's going on in "the real world". I refuse to watch
the NEWS and dwell further on life. OR death, in this instance. I asked
my mother to call us if something major happened. But I can't stand to
hear EVERY DAY about the death toll rising and seeing the same pictures
of the skeletal facade imbedded in the middle of the street. Then I worry
that I need to go on Prozac. Do other people feel this way? Am I taking
things too seriously? I'm afraid...and I don't like that feeling one bit.
I've just passed into stage three. I've moved from numbness to anger and
on into dread. Well it's a start.
As always, we will do our best to answer our reader's questions.
Q: What else is there to do?
A: You might want to consider a hobby, like needlepoint, or
Prozac.
Q: Do other people feel that you need to go on Prozac?
A: We don't know.
Q: Do other people feel that they need to go on Prozac?
A: Yes. Over a quarter million in 1997. And that was just in
Australia.
Q: Are you taking this too seriously?
A: Yes (but then we all are). Bad things happen all the time
and we don't obsess about it. Over 25,000 people in the U.S. died of nephritis
in 1997 and we don't even know what it is. So go hug your husband
and have dinner in bed.
Seriously (and here we're practicing for our next career as a social worker),
disturbing things happen, it's OK to react to them by feeling afraid, we
need to reach out to each other and, yadda yadda yadda.
OK, maybe we should rethink that whole social worker thing.
Blab. A reader kindly attempts to nudge us off the topic on which
we have obsessed for the past week or so.
New topics? Fishcakes.
Ah! Online anime manga. We feel quite
substantially nudged.
Blab. A reader graces us with strangely familiar words.
Did you hear about the object
or activity? Yeah! Have you been following this? The object or activity
is involved in a circumstance that seems odd. No, really! Mundane, everyday
interpretation of object or activity.
Ya know, it took us a couple of seconds to realize that this is our venerable
meme-mixer, hard at work this time on (Generic
+ Broken) Jokes.
That's really good!
Blab. Meanwhile, another reader graces us with a strangely unfamiliar
word.
defsa
Did you mean: defensa
Blab. A reader whose infant children are very advanced writes:
My baby's hooked on short
works of fiction!
It's hard to know what to make of this.
Dave
was even kind enough to play the song from their CD and it's still hard
to know what to make of it. Amazon thinks we'd love the CD,
and still, we have somehow resisted buying it.
I like to go out dancin'
My baby loves a bunch of authors
We've been livin' in hovels
Spendin' all our money on brand new
novels
See?
Blab. An eagle-eyed reader asks:
What have you done to the
blue dog??!
We cannot confirm or deny that we have or have not done anything at all,
anywhere, at any time. Any other questions should be directed to appropriate
channels.
Blab. On a completely different topic, a reader writes:
Where did Blue Dog go?
Is he one of the operatives that have gone off to find the terrorists???
We cannot confirm or deny that we have any knowledge of any such information.
In fact, we were never here.
Yo. Patterns
of Global Terrorism - 2000, and, in particular, Overview
of State-Sponsored Terrorism. An interesting U.S. State Department
study. Oh ... sorry. We're not supposed to talk about that any more.
Yo. With no possible tangential relationship, have you ever wondered
how those military folks come up with names like Operation Infinite Justice?
Well, here's a whole
article on the subject. You need never again wonder why there's no
Operation Bunnyhug. (rebecca)
Plop. And when they do come up with names, how do they know it
won't be offensive in some other culture? Well, they don't, as evidenced
by a report
that Operation Infinite Justice may have to be renamed.
The issue arose at a Pentagon
briefing when a reporter told Rumsfeld that several Islamic scholars had
objected to the name on the grounds that only God, or Allah, can mete out
infinite justice in their view.
Heck, we figured that was exactly the role Bush had in mind.
He probably should have named it Operation Great
Justice, but it's too late for that now. Oh well, maybe he'll just
rename it Operation Last Crusade and be done with it.
Plop. Dunderheads
Swear Off Violence in Computer Games. Yeah, that'll work.
Plurp. And, speaking of dunderheads, we understand that a United
Air Lines pilot instructed
his paying passengers to attack terrorists should they take over his
plane.
"If anybody stands up and
is trying to take over the plane, stand up together, take whatever you
have and throw it at their heads. You have to aim for their faces so they
have to defend themselves."
The pilot also said passengers could
fight hijackers by throwing blankets over their heads, wrestling them to
the ground and holding them until he landed.
Hey - no problem there! Speaking only for our own self, we would be more
than happy to provide security services to UAL on any flight we happen
to take. Our fees are very reasonable, if you think that a trillion dollars
per flight segment is reasonable.
We await similar employment offers from mall owners and the MTA.
Yo. Was it our imagination or was that really Jeff
Bezos, Dot-Dom Darling, on a Taco Bell commercial this week? And why
did it remind us, in such a frightening way, of William Shatner's embarrassing
singing? Sure, we knew things
were tough at Amazon, but do they really need the extra income that
badly?
(Oh geez. Even CNET
has this story now. We are so newly-old media.)
Plurp. Blogging
Now Real, Says Web Writer. And just in time, too.
 Plurp.
The Bezos head
had no way to
hang on to the
Chalupa in
the first place
Friday, September 21, 2001
Plurp. From Matters of Trust and the Public Interest:
It is easy to point an accusing
finger at both the intelligence community and at covert operative teams,
asking, "Why can't you, with all of your tools, tricks and training, simply
stop terrorists before they strike?" As well meant as that question is,
and as poignant as it is in the wake of such incidents as the bombing of
the World Trade Center, the consequences of such activity are far worse
for a society than the few acts of terrorism that actually succeed.
Without a doubt, the state of technology
is such that the intelligence agencies of the world could easily tap into
the homes, lives and secrets of any and every family in the world. Likewise,
the [counter-terrorist / hostage rescue units] of the world could just
as easily capture or kill any and all terrorists - actual or suspected
- before they could have a chance to strike. However, few would be willing
to give up their civil liberties in order to live in a police state such
as that.
[...]
[I]f the State uses all of its power
to completely wipe out all traces of terrorism and seditious thought in
its people, then the State becomes itself a terrorist entity.
Curiously, this is from the training material in Tom Clancy's Covert
Ops, a computer game written last year about U.S. covert military operations,
of all things.
When compared with Dubya's
speech last night we, the Aspiring Operatives of the Homeland, are
very confused about which path to pursue, and we seek
advice from other Aspiring Operatives.
Thursday, September 20, 2001
Blab. A reader nominates several more candidates for
our Domestic Terrorism Cinema collection.
The Devil's Own - IRA terrorism,
but based in America.
Patriot Games (more IRA) and Clear
and Present Danger (not strictly speaking terrorism, but appropriate, I
feel).
Executive Decision is possibly the
most appropriate.
On a slightly different subject...
While you're revving up for your 'new war' over there, be comforted in
the fact that you won't be alone. Tony Blair's currently off in Berlin,
heading for Paris - revving up all of Europe to join you.
--kar
Thanks for the suggestions!
On your slightly different subject, it's really not our war,
new or old. Or, rather, we realize we will be caught up in it one way or
another (as will much of the world), but we feel no need to claim ownership
of the awful thing. Dubya and Tony seem happy
enough to do that.
Blab. A reader has a suggestion for Dubya, which ends up driving
us to poetry.
Since the Department of Defense
is concerned with the old kind of war, we'll need a new department for
our new kind of war. Since this is "Operation Infinite Justice,"
perhaps we can call it the "Ministry of Justice," or "Minijust" for short.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
On the very first computer that I touched, an ancient PDP-8I, I wrote a
program that generated poetry from random lines. The most poignant was
this one:
War is peace
Slavery is freedom
Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori
Blab. A reader solves the thorny problem of tapping
all the phones a particular person might use, without tapping all the
phones in the country.
"How can Our Benighted Government
have phone taps associated with an individual, rather than a phone number,
and not be monitoring all phone calls by anyone?"
Oh, that's an easy one. All the government
has to do is contact you and say, "We'd like to tap phones associated with
you as an individual. Could you please list all the phone numbers you anticipate
using in the next, say, six months?". Then you, you know. Tell them. Simple.
D'oh! Why didn't we think of that?
Blab. A reader ponders the mathematical mysteries of the universe.
So, is the justice countably
infinite or uncountably infinite? Hmm, a W looks kind of like an
omega. Maybe Bush is uncountably ignorant (not about the math, which
I don't care too much about right now, but about the "Current Situation"
<kottke>) Bleh. At least I am not completely obsessed with
news media anymore, at least for a couple of days. I'd much rather
be working on the Plurp anniversary contest.
Say! That reminds us. Some of you naughty readers still haven't filled
in the little boxes telling us what you like and don't like about Plurp.
Shame!
And an approximately equal number of you haven't submitted your entries
in the First Plurp Scavenger
Hunt. There's still time, so act now!
Blab. A reader who is clearly Helen writes:
Can we talk about something
else?
We would love to. Readers are invited to suggest
new topics. Please!
Plurp. Despite his protests that he has not, friend David just
started
his own weblog, motivated by the Awfulness of Recent Events. We wish
him well. We've certainly found that writing about things - serious things,
silly things - has been very therapeutic for us.
Plurp. Yesterday, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf made a
televised
address to his nation saying that Pakistan faced its most critical
time since its 1971 war with India and that not cooperating with Washington
would threaten the country's nuclear program.
... would threaten the country's nuclear program.
Did your eyes just get as wide as ours did? That's one of the most remarkable
things we've ever seen. We figured Dubya was playing hardball with them,
but we had not expected such blatant intimidation.
If he's willing to do that, folks like Saddam Hussein are surely
in a world of trouble.
Yo. There was the most amazing diagram in the New York Times
yesterday. It showed, floor by floor, what companies occupied the World
Trade Center towers, how many people worked there, and how many people
are missing.
The amazing thing is how many people got out. The typical population
of the WTC is around 50k people. We figured that casualties would easily
be > 10k. Instead, they seem to be < 6k, largely because people got
out of the buildings, and away from the area, in an astonishingly short
time.
Way to go, folks!
Plop. Missing Person posters appeared yesterday in our neighborhood,
taped to light posts and bus stops, hand lettered, with images of smiling,
vibrant people last heard from ... or last seen ... and phone
numbers of people who loved them desperately.
I stopped and read them in detail, if only to try to be a little closer
to the people who are now so very afraid.
Plop. Here we are at the beginning of World War III, with all
that implies, and there are still sappy commercials on TV. Taco Bell is
still thinking up new junk food. Commuters are still honking as soon as
the red light turns green. It's all so weirdly normal.
Was it this way when Pearl Harbor was bombed?
Plurp. Has it just been denial, just the aftermath of the shock
of it all, that has kept it from seeping into my consciousness this past
week?
Until perhaps yesterday, it all seemed so cinematic, so virtual. I watched
the infinitely iterative videos of the World Trade Center towers burning
and collapsing. I watched images of the ashen faced hopeful digging through
the rubble. I surfed Web sites for scraps of news. I tried to make jokes
about it.
But today, for reasons I don't understand, it seems real. Maybe it was
Crosby, Stills and Nash singing America (though how odd that would
be a trigger). Maybe it was the Missing Person posters. Maybe it was Howard
Lutnick (CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald) on Larry King Live last night, breaking
down in tears over the fact that everyone who worked for him who
was in the World Trade Center is missing and most likely dead, horribly
dead. He had the reputation of a Wall Street shark, but I only wanted to
hug him last night, hug him without reason for solace or consolation, hug
him because he cared so much for the people he hired, for the people with
whom he worked. Maybe it was that I thought about the people with whom
I am privileged to work. Maybe it was that I saw myself in him.
And so, perhaps at long last, I saw myself in this horrible event, felt
the fabric of my own life grasped by its machinery of death, felt it grab
me in its clutches.
Maybe I have, in spite of myself, abandoned my defensive veneer and
seen the events of the past week, and the events to come, for the first
time. And I am horrified.
Plop. I hope you don't mind if I am, for reasons I cannot quite
articulate, deeply offended by CNN's marketing campaign about ...
It is as if it's something to be proud of. And, believe me, it is not.
War is a shameful admission of screwing up. Big time. And that is just
what has happened here.
So, as you cheer the bombs going off, the assassin squads murdering
people in distant countries and Congress removing rights we only thought
we had, as you cheer the beginning of World War III, please forgive me
if I am sad, and angry, at it having come to this.
Plurp.
Let us be lovers
We'll marry our fortunes together
I've got some real estate here in
my bag
So we bought a pack of cigarettes
And Mrs. Wagner's pies
And walked off to look for America
"Kathy" I said
As we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
Michigan seems like a dream to me
now
It took me four days to hitchhike
from Saginaw
All come to look for America
All come to look for America
Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the Gabardine
suit
Was a spy
I said "Be careful, his bow tie is
really a camera"
"Kathy, I'm lost" I said
Though I knew she was sleeping
"I'm empty and aching and I don't
know why"
Counting the cars
On the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America
All come to look for America
All come to look for America
All come to look for America
Yow. All Your Base Are Belong
To Us. Watch it again, and imagine Dubya in the role of Cats and Usama
bin Laden in the role of the Captain. It fits.
Yow. Bovine's back.
We were worried.
Yow. The Internet Weather
Report. Packet storms this afternoon, clearing towards evening. (Dave)
 Plurp.
The blue dog
wanted to talk
about the weather
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
Blab. A reader tests our knowledge of current military
strategy and Princess Bride at the same time.
Never get involved in a land
war in Asia.
Yes, but what is the only
slightly less well known classic blunder?
Blab. In an astonishing turn of events, we seem to have stumbled
across a reader who actually agrees with us on certain aspects of
our incoherent rantings.
It's interesting to watch
Attorney General John Ashcroft requestion changes to the wiretapping laws,
etc. You can almost see the glee in his face that he now has the chance
to rein in all those excess freedoms.
As Governor of my home state of Missouri,
Ashcroft was a disaster, virtually destroying the education system, among
other travesties. As a senator, he wasn't much better. I, and many others,
were overjoyed when he was bumped out of his senate seat by an opponent
who had amazingly managed to be dead for several weeks before the election,
and horrified when he was named Attorney General.
Fox and chicken coup, yadda, yadda,
yadda.
I'm not sure that Bin Laden and his
ilk, bad as they are, are really the biggest threats here, myself.
L.
That is disturbing. We can only hope that Dubya has exercised more
discretion in choosing his appointees than the American populace did in
choosing him.
Blab. Carefully separating objects from their referents, a reader
writes:
I was awake in school.
I remember learning about the Crusades. But I can't say I remember
the Crusades themselves.
Yes, well, we went to school a long, long time ago.
Blab. A reader forwards the following cryptic text.
P is for the pup of cerulean,
who graces every entry.
L is for LN, the author’s
beloved.
U is for the Unnameable One, who
keeps Steve and LN as pets.
R is for its readers, who contribute
most of the content.
P is for paying attention, which
you obviously were not, because I already told you what P stood for in
the first line.
Put them all together and they spell ... well, we're not sure what they
spell, but we're sure it's the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation
into the causes of recent events. And rightly so.
Blab. One of our terrorist readers writes:
I was looking for information
on the Bubonic Plague (because of talk about biological warfare) and I
came across this site.
Maybe we should sic Martha on the
Ben Wa ball guy (Bin Laden.) Hey - it's a "good thing".
The site, by the way, recites the warning signs of Martha Stewart disease,
and Helen should definitely not click on the link.
As to information on bubonic plague, we recommend this
chapter from the Textbook
of Military Medicine: Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare.
May as well go right to the source, we always say. (Though note that anthrax
is easier to make and reading about viral
hemorraghic fever will give you much more vivid nightmares.)
Blab. On the topic of doing Bad Things to municipal water supplies,
a reader who must be very busy paying attention to something else writes:
Rat poison doesn't replicate...
Um. True. But the article
we originally cited noted that biological weapons stuff doesn't work
well when diffused in large bodies of water. As we quoted a
few days ago:
[A] terrorist attempt to
contaminate a large-scale water supply in an American city with a biological
weapon is not only highly unlikely to take place, but is highly unlikely
to succeed if it does.
So calm down.
Blab. On our puzzlement about recent proposals to expand wiretapping
powers in the U.S., a trusting reader writes:
>>How can Our Benighted Government
have phone taps associated with an individual, rather than a phone number,
and not be monitoring all phone calls by anyone? <<
Well... They could find out
the set of likely phones the person might be using by some other means,
and then be able to monitor any/all of those without having to get a brand-new
wiretap order for each one. That, I expect, is the procedure that
they're claiming they'll use when asking for this new power. Don't
you trust them?
Now there's an interesting bit of speculation. It will be amusing to see
what actually happens.
As to your other question, of course we trust the government.
We trust all governments.
Blab. A reader enchants us with something completely different.
misthos
... a Greek word meaning wage
earner. The Web does make us appear so very educated.
Plurp. I was, finally, reduced to tears this morning as Crosby,
Stills and Nash (or some approximation thereof - I can never keep track)
sang America quietly and slowly, worshipfully, as a yearning hymn.
Land where our fathers died
Land of the pilgrim's pride
From every mountain side
Let freedom ring
It always had a distant, historical feeling to me, a song about events
long past.
Not any more.
Yo. You already know that Red
Rock Eater's Digest has a veritable flood of great links on terrorism
and recent events.
Yo. Astonishing
aerial photos of the wreckage at the World Trade Center.
Plop. There were two military vehicles blocking an entrance to
Manhattan last night. Camo humvees, low and menacing. They were the first
military vehicles we've seen in New York. It was not good.
Plop. America's New War now has a new name: Operation
Infinite Justice. Makes you feel better already, doesn't it?
(But does that mean they'll be using up all the justice in the world?)
Yo. Did a Port Authority officer survive the collapse of the
World Trade Center by riding the debris all the way down? Was the face
of Satan in the smoke? Did Nostradamus know about all it?
No.
Where do you people come from, anyway?
Plurp. We heard back from Red Storm or, rather, the company that
does their technical support. (How odd - one company produces the software
and another one is expected somehow to fix problems.) They expressed deep
regret that they don't support Covert Ops on Windows 2000. (The
file formats are different, said the clueless tech support droid.)
Needless to say, we were unwilling to let that stop us from becoming
an amoral minion of the State! Improvise, adapt, overcome! We ran the stupid
game anyway, hangs and all.
Now, mind you, calling it a "game" is, so far, a bit of a stretch. The
entire first CD (of two) consists entirely of training, and training consists
of reading a bunch of stuff, watching some very short video clips of Real
Retired Minions, and taking tests. It reminds us a great deal of Junior
High School, except there's more talk of dispassionate murder.
So far, we've learned that the difference between police SWAT teams
and Special Forces teams is that the latter doesn't bother arresting suspects.
They just kill them at the outset. Much simpler. Oh, and we've learned
some excellent tactics for killing a houseful of people in a big hurry.
We'll let you know how it goes.
Plurp. More additions to our growing collection of Domestic
Terrorism Cinema.
Readers are encouraged to tell us
more.
Plurp. Oh look - a site that collects the little poems from Burma
Shave signs. Sometimes such trivialities are comforting.
Plurp. Our first girlfriend, from a site about the Fifties.
As if you care.
Plurp.
Man passes
Dog house
Dog sees chin
Dog gets out
Man gets in
Tuesday, September 18, 2001
Blab. A reader, perhaps the one complaining that she
hadn't
gotten any X-rated spam since the disaster last week, writes:
Ah, the spam is back.......................
And so, it seems, are our readers, or at least those readers who feel moved
to Blab at us. Welcome
back.
Blab. Referencing, we think, the learned
discussion of the implausibility of terrorist contamination of urban
aquifers, a reader asks:
So, I can make that fresh
pot of iced tea now??
Would you please? We prefer jasmine.
Blab. Seeking to frighten us unnecessarily, a reader writes:
Just saw the "Biological
Warfare Agents as Threats to Potable Water" ref from earlier today...
I don't understand why people fixate
on biological agents in particular, especially with regards to water supplies.
I mean, isn't it much easier to acquire and use a chemical poison, than
to acquire and use exotically delicate disease microbes?
Ever since Oklahoma City, garden centers
are supposedly on the lookout for people who buy lots of fertilizer, because
they might be making bombs. Are they also looking out for people who buy
lots of say, weedkiller and rat poison?
P.S.: I am not a terrorist.
P.P.S.: Since this might give fencepostable
people ideas, I wouldn't blame you for keeping this blab to yourselves.
But I still had to say it. Don't ask why.
Well aren't you a dear for trying to make us feel ever so much more comfortable
living, as you know we do, in New York? Fortunately, the article
we cited referred to the implausibility of both chemical and
biological contamination of urban aquifers. The conclusion was that neither
represents a likely threat. In particular, you (the terrorist, despite
your denials) would need several mountains of rat poison to do anything
detectable in a typical reservoir.
Now go have some iced tea.
Blab. A reader sends us a link to the reprise of a New Yorker
tribute to the World Trade Center, written in 1972 as it was being built.
FYI: What
came before...
- DWL
We suppose we must say at this juncture that, as architecture, we never
liked the World Trade Center towers. They were big, ugly, boring boxes
with nothing at all to recommend them esthetically. Even the view of incredible
New York from their summit paled in comparison with the view from the Empire
State Building which, coincidentally, is a much more beautiful building
both inside and out.
We do hope a new structure is erected on the site, if only to prove
that we can. We hope it is not constructed as an obvious target. And it
would be particularly nice if it was a great piece of architecture.
Blab. A reader with a certain affinity for camels writes:
Fineman, drawing a comparison
with Winston Churchill's defiance during World War II, quoted the president
as telling the senators: "When I take action," he said, "I'm not going
to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the
butt. It's going to be decisive."
So he's going to miss the camel's butt?
Blab. For those of you keeping track, this is a surprisingly
average year on the Rapture Index.
http://www.raptureme.com/rap2.html
So don't pack your bags just yet!
Blab. Wondering what happened while we were all looking the other
way, a reader asks:
What about the nun?
She's still
with BATMAN.
Yow. Nice pics,
Allura!
Yow. Caterina is on a
rhetorical
roll lately on the obvious topic, and has some great links to meaty
information on terrorism, Islam and so on. In particular, she has a lovely
piece, written last Monday, on her hopes and fears in this mess.
And she points us (indirectly) at a very interesting analysis
of how the U.S. will conduct the war and what will happen as a result.
(It is entitled The Die is Cast - But It Will Be a Long Haul, 15
September.) This is definitely worth reading.
Afghanistan is not the only
target. Washington is planning a three-stage offensive against Iraq [...].
Airlifted infantry and armor, as well as missiles and tanks, will be used
in an effort to destroy the Iraqi infrastructure and topple Saddam Hussein's
regime.
The source of the article, DEBKAfile,
looks to be another meaty source of public intelligence on terrorism and
recent events. Several things there are worth reading.
Yo. No, Nostradamus didn't predict any of this. Even so you,
like we, may have received something like the following in your email in
the past week.
In the city of York there
will be a great collapse,
two twin brothers, torn apart by
chaos,
while the fortress falls, the great
leader will succumb,
the third big war will begin when
the big city is burning.
- Nostrodamus
For those of you too lazy to do your own fact-checking, the site No-No
Nostradamus (sounds like Beach Blanket Bingo with Medieval psychotics,
doesn't it?) will debunk it for you.
Snopes.com
points out that the core of the "prediction" being circulating wasn't even
the work of Nostradamus. It was written by a Canadian college student to
"illustrate how easily an important-sounding prophecy can be crafted through
the use of abstract imagery."
You can also discover from Google that none
of this is attributed to Nostradamus anywhere on the Web, a sure tip-off
that it's bogus.
Plop. We have now seen the following example of branding in a
number of places, but it seems to have been created by CNN.
It's so nice to have a new one, isn't it? We were getting pretty tired
of that old, dusty one in the corner. This one's all shiny and patriotic
and such, which is a very good thing when you're looking for a war.
Plop. New war, old plot line. U.S. Senator Judd Gregg (Republican
from freedom loving New Hampshire, of all places!) thinks this is a good
time to ban
strong encryption technology (again). Civil liberties group Electronic
Freedom Australia thinks that would be a bad
idea (again).
Hey guys - it's a new war; think up something new to rant about.
Plop. Not to be outdone, freedom loving Republican Senators Jon
Kyl and Orrin Hatch are out to make sure they
know what's going on.
On Thursday the Senate passed
by voice vote an anti-terrorism bill that includes an amendment allowing
the government greater liberty to use surveillance technology, including
Internet wiretaps, to combat terrorism. The amendment, authored by Sens.
Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, broadens emergency powers for
wiretaps, allowing any U.S. attorney to authorize the installation of "trap
and trace" equipment for up to 48 hours.
Note that this was already possible with a court order. Obviously,
that was way too restrictive and, thanks to the infinite foresight of Your
Leaders, it is no longer necessary. So pick up the phone and say Hi
to your new friends Jon and Orrin.
Yo. Attorney General John Ashcroft also wants some quick
changes to the wiretapping laws.
Ashcroft said wiretap authorization
should be focused on the person rather than the phone they use because
with the advent of "disposable telephones...it simply doesn't make sense
to have the surveillance authority associated with the hardware."
What could be more reasonable than that? But, just for fun, let's think
through how this will actually work.
To listen in on a particular phone number, you just tell the monitoring
computers what the phone number is, and there you are. Listening in on
a particular individual is a little trickier. If the target is using a
bunch of different phones, and if you don't know the numbers in advance,
how do you even find the calls?
One way to do it would be to tell the computers to listen to all
of the calls, from anyone, to anyone, 24 hours a day, then use voice recognition
technology to pick out the voice of your target, and listen especially
carefully to that call.
In case you missed it, a minor side effect of this is that the government
would need to listen to all of your calls, from anyone, to anyone,
24 hours a day.
Clearly, they would never do that. So let's think of another way they
could implement this. Let's see. They could ... no, that wouldn't work.
Or they might ... no, that doesn't work either.
We're stumped! How can Our Benighted Government have phone taps associated
with an individual, rather than a phone number, and not be monitoring all
phone calls by anyone? Oh, do tell
us.
Plop. You may recall that Dubya does not have a strong background
in foreign affairs. Heck, we've travel abroad far more than he has.
And he was never a particularly good student.
These attributes hold him in good stead as Command In Chief of the world's
most powerful country. Yesterday, he referred to his campaign against terrorism
as a "crusade."
Those of you who were actually awake in school probably remember the
Crusades,
a series of murderous, suicidal attacks by troops of the Medieval Catholic
church against the Islamic countries that "occupied" the holy lands.
The word crusade has since taken on the broader meaning of, among
other things, any war
against the infidels (e.g. to this way of thinking, the Mohammedans).
The reaction in the Arab-American community, and in the Arab countries
that Bush so desperately needs on his side right now, was predictable and
immediate. No doubt Bush's administration will issue a clarification. But
it's a good bet they won't let Bush write it.
Yo. Amusingly, Bartleby
tells us that infidel means An unbeliever with respect to a particular
religion, especially Christianity or Islam. So it seems that everyone
is an infidel, which is a nice symmetry.
Plop. Obsessed readers will be pleased to know that we finally
completed Thief II. In the process, we fulfilled the role of the
consummate sneak who sneaks into the Cathedral of Ultimate Corruption and
(sneakily) defeats the Evil Overlord who threatened to replace all that
is natural and good with badnasty mechanical whosiwhatsits that did his
bidding.
Anyhow, we have now left all that behind and started up that most topical
Tom
Clancy's Covert Ops. It's a first-person shooter, and you'll love
the premise. You are a covert operative of (we think) the U.S. government,
an assassin on the front lines of the war on terrorism.
Gone are the difficult moral dilemmas. Gone are the complications of
implication and evidence. You are told to go kill people and you do. It's
as simple as that. Doubleplusgood, Winston.
Now we know this seems like nirvana, and it would be just like you,
our gentle readers, to suspect problems. And problems there are. It seems
that we are running Windows 2000 on our laptop and Covert Ops, well,
hangs like crazy. And it doesn't just hang itself. It hangs the whole bloody
operating system, requiring a power-on restart.
We sent a plaintiff note to the folks at Red Storm pleading for help.
But, in the meantime, we have a theory.
 The
theory is that Bin Laden isn't the biggest problem in the world. Rather,
it is the vast conspiracy centered in Redmond, a conspiracy that threatens
the future of the global economy, a conspiracy that conditions our minds
to supplicate to the future machine rulers of the world, to expect human
failure, to expect that the one and only purpose of our miserable little
lives is to feed the machine.
The orbital mind control lasers prevent us from mentioning the name
of this conspiracy's frightening leader.
Plurp. Long time readers will know that we are expert in the
field of Giant Insect Cinema, and we've seen them all (except for
Ticks,
whose premise was below even our admittedly pitiful standard for such movies).
Nevertheless, political correctness now requires us to become expert in
the field of
Domestic Terrorism Cinema. Here is our rather obvious
initial list. Readers are beseeched to tell
us the rest so that our re-education may begin in earnest.
Plurp.
The blue dog
wasn't actually
looking for a war
Monday, September 17, 2001
Blab. A reader suggests that an upcoming U.S. policy
change is a good idea.
Assassination of leaders
has always seemed sort of logical to me; I mean, given that it's the leaders'
fault that the countries hate each other in the first place, why not have
the leaders be the ones at risk? 19-year-old boys are unlikely to cause
international conflicts, so why should they (be the only ones to) die in
them? If presidents, dictators, and five-star generals were the ones
most at risk in war, I'd bet we'd have way fewer wars (ref "a couple of
experienced guys named Victor").
Of course single combat between leaders
would be better; less danger to innocent bystanders, and would make a great
Reality TV Show.
The Victor reference is to a Dave Berry column, which you should go
read right now. On that TV Show thing, the remake
of Rollerball is scheduled for Feb. 2, 2002. In classic Hollywood
style, the entire political content is in
the trailer.
Blab. Perhaps in a fit of self-aggrandizement, a reader writes:
http://instapundit.blogspot.com/
Um. It's a blog ... ?
Plop. There's nothing like the rattling of sabers to excite good
old American ignorance and jingoism. Verbal
and physical assaults on people who look vaguely Arabic have increased
in the U.S., including some bozo in Arizona who shot a guy who's Indian,
and the firebombing of a Hindu temple, for crying out loud.
Didn't we ask you folks to tie yourselves
to fence posts already?
(Note: This is not intended to condone acts of violence against
any religious or ethnic group whatsoever. If you thought it was, please
tie yourself to a fence post. We'll be around to pick you up later.)
Yo. And speaking of people tying themselves to fence posts, our
president must be older than he looks. In a rallying, grammatically
alarming speech today, he said:
[T]here's an old poster out
west, that I recall, that said, "Wanted, Dead or Alive."
There were such posters, of course, but not in our lifetime and, we thought,
not in Dubya's either. Does it make sense? No, but then it doesn't have
to. As Dubya himself said
today:
There's no rules.
Yo. In the wake of the attack last week, some folks were wondering
to what extent our urban water supplies might be at risk of chemical or
biological contamination by terrorists. Thankfully, the answer appears
to be: Not
very.
Biological weapons are clearly
a danger, but thanks to "Biological Warfare Agents as Threats to Potable
Water," there is at least one apocalyptic vision that can be taken off
the list of CBW anxieties. The ultimate message of W. Dickinson Burrows
and Sara E. Renner of the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive
Medicine (Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD) is that a terrorist attempt to contaminate
a large-scale water supply in an American city with a biological weapon
is not only highly unlikely to take place, but is highly unlikely to succeed
if it does. In both cases, of course, highly unlikely is not the same as
impossible. "It's not, at least in a municipal consideration, a cause for
great alarm, but certainly a cause for reasonable vigilance," says Burrows,
an environmental engineer specializing in water. [...]
The practical challenges to such an
attack would be formidable. Some of the 18 replicating agents and 9 biotoxins
known or suspected of having been weaponized are not waterborne threats.
Others would be easily inactivated or removed by the normal chlorination
and filtration processes in municipal water supplies. Finally, Burrows
and Renner state,
"With few exceptions the dose of any
BW [biological warfare] agent required to cause adverse health effects
is of such magnitude as to make essential the targeting of water supplies
closest to the consumer.... Targeting of large bodies of water such as
water supply reservoirs would be impractical...."
Good to know.
Yo. Those fun-loving folks in the UK MoD have compiled a brief
history of biological and chemical weapons. Some excerpts:
7th century BC - Assyrians
used ergot (a fungal disease of rye) to poison water supplies. The fungus
produces a natural hallucinogen related to LSD that also induces a disease
widely known in later times as St Anthony’s Fire.
82-72BC - Romans used ‘toxic
smoke’ against the Charakitanes in Spain causing pulmonary problems and
blindness, leading to their defeat in 2 days.
1346 - Tartar army catapulted
corpses of plague victims over the city walls in siege of Kaffa - supposed
origin of Black Death in Europe.
1346-1710 - Use of plague victims,
as a means of spreading disease, became commonplace.
1980-88 - Iran-Iraq War. Iraqi
chemical weapons attack on Halabja involved the use of mustard and nerve
gas agents against a civilian target.
1999 - A disarmament panel
established by the Security Council reported that Iraq had still not complied
with UNSCR 687.
Plurp.
Plop. Welcome to World War III. Have a nice day.
Plurp.
The blue dog
wasn't having
a nice day
Sunday, September 16, 2001
Blab. Perhaps providing helpful thoughts to the
reader who wanted to fly to Reno for an anniversary, a reader suggests:
Methinks the drive to Reno
would be lovely this year.........
We have such helpful readers!
Blab. The referenced reader writes:
I called the travel agency
today and canceled my much looked-forward-to flight to Reno. It pained
me to do it. I'm sure the flight would have made it to Reno just fine.
Security at airports is "beefed up" as Bush termed it. But, the idea of
getting STUCK down in a city I've never been to with people I've never
met...it leave me cold. Yes, I've succumbed to the "enemy"...I've curtailed
my life because of them. I hate them - again, for my own selfish reasons.
They have made me panicky and paranoid. My husband, on the other hand,
is very stubborn. He'd fly to the moon just to prove that he's unmoved.
We both think that the other is crazy. I think that the different view
in our relationship is good...We both keep each other near center - not
too terribly extreme in either direction.
Sorry - this isn't BLAB - it's BABBLE.
Thanks.
We all do what we can. The nice thing is: we can. It is, after all,
a free country.
Blab. A student of mass brutality writes:
Most of the miseries of the
world are caused by....
Hmm. War
and dictators seem to be neck-and-neck.
An interesting reference. Apparently, getting in the way of governments
is not healthy for children and other living things.
Blab. A reader attempts to lighten the mood with this.
Since the WTC mess I have
gotten NO X-rated spam in my mail box. Can you explain THAT, DR.,
Professor Plurp?
Yes, we can. And that's Herr Doctor Professor Plurp to you, dear
reader.
Plurp. We spent the past few days with dear friends outside The
City. We are so incredibly grateful to them for providing us with a sane
haven for a few days. We just didn't feel comfortable being so close to
Everything, the smell of burning tragedy in the air and the police presence
that seemed foreboding. We did our patriotic duty and bought some things.
We saw friends. We spent quiet times together.
Now we've back in our apartment and everything seems, strangely, back
to normal. Does it seem that way
to you?
Plurp. Bush reportedly wants greater power to monitor telephone
and computer transmissions. Mind you, he already has the power to tap any
phone and any Internet transmission if
he has a court order. What else does he want?
Can we speculate that he wants to ability to intercept communications
even when there is no probable cause to do so? Do you think that's a good
idea? I'll bet that most Americans do, today at least. They're focused
on what their government needs to track down possible terrorists, to prevent
a repetition of Tuesday's horrors. Or something worse.
But - and here's where you need to pay attention - these are the cusps
in civil society when really bad things can happen for apparently good
reasons. In the early 1970s, Nixon and his administration rallied every
agency of the federal government, from the FBI to the IRS, to harass, burgle,
intimidate and discredit every one of their domestic political opponents.
They committed criminal acts to guarantee their reelection, their continuance
in power.
The reasons seemed clear, to them at least, and probably also to their
supporters. The country was beset by dissent against the policies of their
administration. That dissent had, in part, been responsible for the U.S.
defeat in Vietnam, and those against whom it was directed believed that
it would ultimately crumble American society.
These are the cusps in civil society when we decide if we want to be
a free society or not. It is always tempting allow the government to violate
our fundamental freedoms in order to address some immediate problem. Rights,
you see, represent restrictions on what governments can do. And those restrictions
are ... inefficient. It would be so much easier, the argument goes, if
the government didn't have to worry about certain rights. You know, the
rights of the Bad Guys, whoever they are today. Oh don't worry, they croon,
we don't mean you. Not today anyway.
According to a CNN
poll today, 70% of the (self-selected) respondents thought that U.S.
law should be changed to permit the assassination of hostile foreign leaders.
War fever is in the air.
In the past few days, I've heard people say that the time for dissenting
voices is over, that it's time to rally behind our president and do whatever
he says. The problem is, I've never been particularly good at Follow The
Leader. It's been a very long time since I thought that world political
leaders were selected for their wisdom, or intelligence, or morality, or
even for their ability to keep the world a peaceful, safe, hospitable place
us to live.
This is a cusp in civil society - in our civil society. So forgive
me if I maintain a skeptical, if quiet, voice in the days to come.
Plurp.
Simon says, "We're at war
now."
Simon says, "Best repent."
Simon says, "We'll be watching."
Simon says, "No dissent."
Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't dare say
anything
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