Bruce Schneier has an excellent essay on what the terrorists want. Excerpt: The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer. (I think I got this from goldsquare.)

On a lighter note...

I found myself wondering the other day about wisdom teeth. What's the connection between teeth and mental acuity, and what does it mean that most of us end up having them pulled out at some point? Do wisdom teeth grant wisdom, or consume it?

Tonight Dani and I drove past a (closed) store called "Bird Bath". This seems rather specialized for the amount of real estate involved. I suggested a garden shop that, perhaps to stay in business, also sells fountains and planters. Dani proposed an avian spa. I kind of like that: imagine your songbird or parrot in an itty bitty jaccouzi, maybe with a shampoo and grooming -- maybe even massage and pedicure. Would the bath end with itty bitty blow dryers, do you think? Or would feathers respond better to towels and time?

From the Dilbert blog (lost the actual entry link, sorry): Allow me to explain the business model of a cruise ship. When you set sail, the ship has a billion tons of food and a few thousand humans. The cruise company's objective is to end the cruise with something on the order of one leftover cupcake and a billion tons of feces. I'm fairly certain that if that goal is not met, a busboy from Mozambique is thrown overboard as a warning to the other crew members. We ate our share just to make sure Pooka Muuwa was safe.

Tonight while driving through Squirrel Hill I noticed a large crowd walking up the sidewalk. As I parked the group reached me and I saw that they were protesting the war ("no blood for oil" being the pervasive chant). I walked with them for a block or so, raising the average age a bit, before veering off for groceries. It occurred to me only later that its placement on Veterans' Day was probably not an accident.

Our usually-reliable DSL service has been having random short outages for the last several weeks. (Usually 10-15 minutes, a few times a week.) I'm not sure how to test whether it's the DSL service itself or our 5-year-old modem, though, short of acquiring a test modem. So I sent mail to our provider asking if they had other reports and/or debugging hints. (I noticed in passing that their service hours now end at 8PM. I've had productive conversations with them at midnight in the past. Oh well. 8PM is reasonable; I'd just gotten used to hacker hours.)

Ok, Embla is capable of making normal meowing sounds, as opposed to that quiet chirpy thing she usually does. It just has to be Important. Like, say, being trapped between the window and the screen on a cold evening. For calibration purposes, the time a contractor sealed her into a wall she was silent for a long time, even though I was in the room calling her.

(What was she doing there tonight? Well, our sink was plugged up, so we had initiated chemical warfare, but the chemicals gave off mustard gas or something, and we had to open the windows to help with dispersion. I didn't notice the cat on the windowsill when I pushed the window closed later. Fortunately, she was quick to alert me.)

There is something distasteful about the popular desire to watch a war in "internet time". Wars take time, guys; remember in the past when you made do with daily updates? I'd really rather that CNN, MSNBC, and the other news sites would go back to prominently covering other news. I should be able to find more hints of other doings in the world on the main pages of such sites. Sure, of course the current news from the war should be there, but what else aren't we seeing because it's taken over?

All that said, if you're looking for a summary of war news from varied sources around the world, check out http://www.agonist.org/ . I must conclude that the guy who runs the site has no job. I've been glancing at it about once a day to get the highlights, and I think it's providing better coverage than any of the conventional sources on the net.

The House is currently considering a bill to declare a national day of fasting and prayer to seek help from "Providence" in these times of terror and war.

My representative will certainly be hearing from me about this blatant disregard for the separation of church and state. Much as they would like to make it so, we are not a Christian nation -- just a nation with a Christian majority. This has no place in government.

From the bill:

Whereas all of the various faiths of the people of the United States have recognized, in our religious traditions, the need for fasting and humble supplication before Providence;

"All the various faiths"? I don't think so. For starters, atheism can be a "faith" rather than an absence of faith. And I'm not so sure that all of the eastern religions have this concept.

Whereas humility, fasting, and prayer in times of danger have long been rooted in our essential national convictions and have been a means of producing unity and solidarity among all the diverse people of this Nation as well as procuring the enduring grace and benevolence of God;

Asserting it does not make it so. Show me those roots in our essential national convictions, Mr. Akin (the sponsor).

Thanks to magid for the link.

I've heard a lot of people in the last few days arguing that we're attacking Iraq at Israel's bidding. This is ridiculous for a number of reasons, including the fact that no ally has that much control over US foreign policy, but that's not what I focused on in this letter.

---

Editor,

If the US had really gone to war on Israel's behalf, as some of your letter-writers have suggested, then we would not be bombing Baghdad. We would be bombing Ramallah and Gaza. This war actually works AGAINST Israel's interests, becuase the US is expending all of its resources, military and diplomatic, going after a second-order threat instead of dealing with known terrorists with known supplies of weapons. From Israel's point of view, how smart is that?

Those who would place the blame for initiating this war beyond Washington have not made their case.

(Signature, contact info, etc)

It is extremely rare for me to speak well (extemporaneously) in a public setting. I am much better with the written word than with the spoken word. Tonight at the board meeting, however, I had a rare moment when things seemed to click.

Our meetings always include, along with the business matters of the month, an educational section (usually short). We're a synagogue board of trustees; we should learn some Torah, or discuss theology or philosophy, at least briefly.

This afternoon our rabbi met with some Christian and Muslim leaders to try to work out a joint statement on our country's current hostilities. (I'm not sure what purpose such statements serve, but we didn't go there.) A point of contention for them had been the statement "We pray for [adjective] soldiers". The argument was whether it was necessary/permitted to pray for all soldiers, or just for ours. So he put the question to us.

The predictable arguments were made on both sides, and then I got my turn. I said approximately the following (and I'm trying to preserve words here). The question, as stated, is incomplete; it doesn't specify the prayer. There are certainly many prayers that we ought to say for everyone in the combat zone. However, we might reserve prayers for success for the soldiers on one side.

Judging from the reactions I got, most people in the room hadn't thought of it that way. While I don't think it was particularly clever or insightful, I find myself pleased by the positive responses I got anyway. Maybe it's just that I usually trip over my words when trying to speak in such situations.

A possibly-morbid thought experiment for a Friday afternoon:
( Read more... )

So tomorrow is September 11th. The media has decided to mark the day by showing lots of specials and retrospectives and whatnot. If you watch TV tomorrow, you're going to see the planes hitting the buildings every damn ten minutes.

This is appalling. It's sensationalist crap that is a disservice, not a tribute, to the victims. At least give them the option to end their mourning and move on, for crying out loud. When I die, I want my survivors to remember my life, not the way I died. Especially if it's tragic. Maybe I'm weird, but I don't think I'm completely alone on this one.

9/11/2001 was a tragedy. But it was far from our only tragedy, and certainly far from the world's only tragedy. It was an act of hatred, but there are places in the world where hatred is recurring and systematic. We could, in general, stand to get a lot more perspective.

On the other hand, if we fail to learn from this, if we fail to empathize with those who face terrorism on a weekly or daily basis rather than once, or if we fail to distinguish between evil individuals and their races or religions, that will be a tragedy far more serious than planes flying into buildings.

I pray for a diminishing of hatred. I also pray for justice, that those responsible for terror -- all terror, not just ours -- be brought to account. And I pray that this doesn't take as high a price in liberty here in the US as I fear it already has.

But I will not build a shrine to the dead, and I will not spend the day watching the carnage on infinite loop, I will not attend any of the memorial services being held around the city tomorrow, and I will not change my daily routine out of fear. Living normally is the only response that makes sense to me.

Tomorrow, God willing, I am going to go to work, study talmud with my rabbi, and socialize with friends. Just as if tomorrow were the 10th, or the 12th.

Let me see if I have this right.

Government-sponsored (or at least -protected) terrorists attack civilians in the latters' home country. The militarily-superior victim demands surrender of those responsible, the demands are ignored, and the victim then attacks with a fair bit of restraint to try to minimize civilian casualties.

This is appropriate behavior for the US but a horrible sin for Israel.

Huh?

For the US government to continue to criticize Israel and tell them they should accept terrorists blowing up restaurants and assassinating cabinet members boggles the mind. I mean, we're not exactly leading by example, are we?

Services Friday night were packed. There must have been 500 people there. On a normal Shabbat (when no one's celebrating a bar/bat mitzvah), we get around 100. We also got more than normal Saturday morning, though the contrast wasn't as pronounced. (This is the early-morning informal singing minyan, usually around 30-40 people. I'd guess we had 60 yesterday. I almost never go to the later more-formal service.)

After services yesterday Dani and I went to Coronation (SCA event), which was in Jennserstown, about an hour and a half from here. (If that name sounds familiar, that's where early reports were placing the PA crash. We were about 20 miles away from the site, though.) The event went well, except that we missed the bulk of morning court (including the actual coronation ceremony) because the starting time was changed after the newsletter announcement was published. Oh well. Even if I had known, I'm not sure I would have been happy about skipping Shabbat services this particular week in order to go. Among things, we have people who are in need of help and support for reasons completely unrelated to Tuesday's events, and with everyone focusing on that, people like Jan (who just lost her father) can get short shrift, and that's not right. This may sound weird, but I felt like I needed to be there to hug Jan on this particular week. (Jan's not the only one.)

On the Mark had its first practice since before Pennsic today. Andrea took a one-year teaching job out in the middle of the state (about 4 hours by bus), which makes things challenging. She can come back to Pittsburgh every other weekend, so that's when we'll practice. Our next scheduled performance is Thanksgiving weekend, though we jut talked about trying to perform at an SCA event two weeks earlier because we'll all be there anyway.

Sign seen while approaching the Turnpike toll booths last night: "please use all lanes". Terribly sorry, but Dani and I do not own a vehicle with which we could comply. :-) (Maybe they mean over time -- every time we visit that toll booth we should use a different lane until done.) They could clarify their intent by changing the sign to "please use any lane".

I'm looking forward to meeting Ralph and Lori's kittens tonight.