PlasticBoy

eXile: “Terrorists do not have to be strong to win. All they have to do is keep at it. Ask the Russians, the Israelis, the British and the French. Despite vastly superior resources, they can’t defeat the Chechens, the Palestinians, the Irish, and the Algerians… The war will never end; it only escalates. And the more you counterattack, the more you inspire new generations of enemies to strike back.”

Current Obsession: Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. I think I’ve been playing some form of Civilization on and off for the last ten years and I’ve never gotten tired of it.

0xdeadbeef: “Forget threatening to bomb Afghanistan and the Taliban if they fail to turn over Bin Laden to us. Instead, let’s threaten to gather up all of their women and send them to college. In fact, why don’t we do that anyway?”

The Monitor previews “Enterprise”. Lots of bad Star Trek puns.

I took this on top of Mount Moosilauke on Sunday.

Martin Amis makes some of the same points as Kelly, and some that are harder to hear: “Various national characteristics - self-reliance, a fiercer patriotism than any in western Europe, an assiduous geographical incuriosity - have created a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away. Most crucially, and again most painfully, being right and being good support the American self to an almost tautologous degree: Americans are good and right by virtue of being American.”

Kevin Kelly on Osama bin Laden: “He is not second rate, and he may not even be a terrorist. This is a new kind of war. There has been no demands made, like in most terrorism. There is nothing we have that they want. Their intent is not to terrorize. This is only a side product. Their intent is to destroy the prevailing mono-system. But they are not a state government, but a pan-national network that is growing. We’ve done little to eradicate them in 20 years. They are stronger now then ever before.” [via rc3]

Richard Dawkins: “As luck would have it, we have just the thing to hand: a ready-made system of mind-control which has been honed over centuries, handed down through generations. Millions of people have been brought up in it. It is called religion and, for reasons which one day we may understand, most people fall for it (nowhere more so than America itself, though the irony passes unnoticed). Now all we need is to round up a few of these faith-heads and give them flying lessons.”

Today’s EGR on the Current Situation is well worth reading.

NTK: “So: do you have some minority you’d like to haphazardly blame? Some half-arsed genocidal theory you’d like to insist become global policy? Some simplistic demonisation of a country’s recent history that needs to be waved in the faces of everyone you know? Mail it to our hotline on devnull@spesh.com, and we’ll pass it on to those who must fill the useless silence which would otherwise be wasted on slow, methodical grief.”

John Perry Barlow: “Within a few hours, we will see beginning the most vigorous efforts to end what remains of freedom in America. Those of who are willing to sacrifice a little - largely illusory - safety in order to maintain our faith in the original ideals of America will have to fight for those ideals just as vigorously.”

My project manager was in NYC this week along with some other coworkers. Their hotel was about 200 feet from the World Trade Center. Luckily they were a little further away (55 Water Street) when the planes hit. They were on the streets about 12 blocks away when the second tower collapsed. The scene was pretty much as you would expect: a wall of smoke and dust rushing down the streets, a rain of office paper, panicking people. Everybody in that group is OK but I have one coworker in the city who is still unaccounted for. [Update: She's fine.]

Rafe and Dave have lucid coverage of the attacks. Local media is more accessible than the national sites, try Boston.com and WBUR.

The Onion A.V. Club interviews Joss Whedon.
“I designed the show to create that strong reaction. I designed Buffy to be an icon, to be an emotional experience, to be loved in a way that other shows can’t be loved… I wanted people to embrace it in a way that exists beyond, ‘Oh, that was a wonderful show about lawyers, let’s have dinner.’”