numbersix

Someone speaking sense in all this madness - Please read this commentary from Tamim, a writer and columnist in San Francisco, who comes from Afghanistan. This is something that should be sent to everyone we know.

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done." And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan," think "the Jews in the concentration camps."

It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time.

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand.

What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West. And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

Tamim Ansary

Taken from an article originally published on salon

A password will only become memorable the moment you need to change it.

just what i need, a duct tape wallet! ta Ben.

"The last of the original Beetles will roll off the production line at the Volkswagen factory in Puebla, Mexico, later this summer" reports the BBC.

mod_log_spread is an Apache module for collecting logging from umpteen Apache servers centrally. I've been looking for something like this for a while.

Unblinking.com - an interesting site along the lines of my Surfbot.

Bizarre and sad story of a Japanese girl and the Coen brothers' film Fargo.

Heard the beginning of a news bulitin this morning on the radio - "The American government has today warned of the possibility of more terrorist attacks". I genuinely assumed the report would go on to say something like "After invading Afghanistan and Iraq they are now considering Iran or North Korea".

So yet an other virus wreaks havoc in the Windows community. Linux users are always quick to point out at these times that Linux suffers from none of these problems. But is it a question of flawed versus superior technology, or coverage I wonder? In other words, if Linux were to dominate the market with a 90% share, would we be seeing the reverse? For a virus to have the largest impact, it needs to be written to infect the largest number of machines. If the market share is 90% Windows then maybe it's no wonder that Windows is going to be scrutinised in more detail and exploits found more quickly? And the other OSs in the mean time are taking it easy on the side lines, basking in a false sense of security.

For me the ideal would be a much more balanced distribution of OSs, as this post on Slashdot suggests. This would inevitably foster a more secure environment because a) a lack of a common platform, and b) all (prominant) OSs would be in the same boat as reguards securing themselves.

So yet an other virus wreaks havoc in the Windows community. Linux users are always quick to point out at these times that Linux suffers from none of these problems. But is it a question of flawed versus superior technology, or coverage I wonder? In other words, if Linux were to dominate the market with a 90% share, would we be seeing the reverse? For a virus to have the largest impact, it needs to be written to infect the largest number of machines. If the market share is 90% Windows then maybe it's no wonder that Windows is going to be scrutinised in more detail and exploits found more quickly? And the other OSs in the mean time are taking it easy on the side lines, basking in a false sense of security.

For me the ideal would be a much more balanced distribution of OSs, as this post on Slashdot suggests. This would inevitably foster a more secure environment because a) a lack of a common platform, and b) all (prominant) OSs would be in the same boat as reguards securing themselves.

Chilling article in the Guardian about Wal-Mart and how corporate America is taking over not only small towns but also what people read and listen to. This is sick.

The Guardian has an interesting article on a sport called Parkour, which seems to involve jumping around on roofs, walls, roads, pavements, basically anything you can find. You may have seen an example of this if you saw the recent BBC promotional film. Luc Besson has made a film about it. There is also a US based site with some videos.

A way of adding an element of risk back into life, which these days can seem too safe?

Acocdrnig to an elgnsih unviesitry sutdy the oredr of letetrs in a wrod
dosen't mttaer, the olny thnig thta's iopmrantt is that the frsit and lsat
ltteer of eevry word is in the crcreot ptoision. The rset can be jmbueld
and one is stlil able to raed the txet wiohtut dclftfuiiy.

ta Ben.

The Sun newspaper today launches a fund 'to help people with mental health problems like boxing hero Frank Bruno.' Strange turnaround from their stance yesterday when an early edition of the paper reported 'Bonkers Bruno Locked Up'.

Well I never, the low down on Lorem Ipsum - "Lorem Ipsum, or Lipsum for short, is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.". There's even a Lipsum generator. I've always wondered where it originated. Well, not always, but in the odd spare moment, now and again.

I find it unbelievable that people aren't making a bigger fuss about British Airways' decision to decommission the Concorde. The sole reason they have come to the decision is that the company is not efficient enough to fly it. There is nothing wrong with the plane itself, given or sold to a better company it still has a good few years flight in it. Virgin Airways' boss Richard Branson has already tried to get hold of the planes before they are broken up or given to museums. This beautiful piece of engineering deserves better. A further example of the pathetic measures BA resorts to in an effort to stay in business. Even the BBC appear to be playing dumb.

You know you've been doing too much UNIX when you see the word 'goatherd' and immediately think of it as a daemon for some goather service.

According to Time magazine 19% of Americans think they are in the top 1% of earners.

Interesting article in the Independent the other day about TVR being bought by a 24 year old russian oligarch. I never knew that TVR actually stood for TreVoR, after the original founder of the British car company Trevor Wilkinson. Never again will I be able to oogle a TVR Tuscan and take it quite so seriously.