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2001-10-29

Yesterday I surfed around a bit in the first few entries of Moira's blog and I came across a link to the website of A.E. Stallings, poetess extraordinaire. Stallings in turn links to the website of Dana Gioia, one of my favorite living poets. Both Archaic Smile and Interrogations at Noon are on my wish list, you can be sure!

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is arguing for national ID cards tied to huge government databases (all running his company's software, naturally). The tireless Declan McCullagh takes him to task.

In my continuing efforts to broaden my mind and question my assumptions, I paid a brief visit to Antiwar.com. Rep. Ron Paul has a good essay there on defending the U.S. only, not maintaining a far-flung empire of military installations. The folks at Antiwar.com seem to be what I would call left-libertarians, a direction in which I've tended myself. The recent attack on American soil has generally made people more conservative, I think, so it's good to see that some people are remaining consistent (even though I'm not sure I can agree with those who oppose military action against Osama and the Taliban).

Today's quote from Victor Hugo: "Navigation is education. The sea is a hard school. Cohabitation with these unmanageable phenomena produces a rough race of men who deserve to be cherished: the mariners. There are no other conquerors but them. Ulysses the voyager accomplishes more than Achilles the fighter." (The Toilers of the Sea, III.1.iii)

And another: "What is the invasion of kingdoms compared to the opening up of intellects?" (William Shakespeare, III.3.iv)

Posted on 2001-10-29 at 21:03. File under personal.

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2001-10-28

OK, I finished the revisions to my Abelard paper. Now I can watch the Yankees tonight with a clear conscience (well, semi-clear -- I just can't let myself think about all the Jabber stuff on my to-do list...).

Posted on 2001-10-28 at 16:44. File under personal.

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Hmph. My e-pal Moira has been holding out on me. How could it be that the one and only Cobalt Poetry Goddess has been keeping a weblog for all these months, yet has neglected to inform me? I'd go off and sulk in a corner if I didn't like her so much. :)

I finished reading Ibsen's play The Master Builder the other night. There's a magical element in this play that I found intriguing, especially in the interactions (and immediate depth of understanding) between the characters of Halvard Solness and Hilde Wangel. Here again we meet with Ibsen's opposition to conformity and to the notion of duty (Hilde says: "I can't stand that nasty, beastly word.... It sounds so cold and sharp, like a knife."), and his advocacy of personal fulfillment (Hilde again: "If only one had a brash and hearty conscience, so that one dared to do what one wanted!"). There is a quicksilver quality to this play, a feeling of almost grasping ideals and experiences but seeing them slip away -- just as Solness does in the end. Next up on my Ibsen list: Little Eyolf.

Now playing: the twenty-four preludes for piano of Sergei Rachmaninoff. I'm not a huge Rachmaninoff fan, but I do like his preludes a great deal.

Through the wonders of inter-library loan, several books on Peter Abelard arrived for me yesterday at the Eugene Field branch of the Denver Public Library. I'm endeavoring to finish up my paper comparing Abelard and Rand in epistemology, so I need to once again consult some books on Abelard's philosophy in order to address several of the finer points in my argument. I also received several books related to the poetic aspect of Abelard's genius, since I would like to translate the six laments (in Latin, planctus) he wrote. I also want to translate some of the likely suspects for his lost secular songs, which may be scattered about in collections such as that found at the monastery of Benedictbeuern (a.k.a., the Carmina Burana) as well as the Ripoll collection. Scholars have suggested that Carmina Burana numbers 97, 117, and 169, along with Ripoll 22, might well be the work of Abelard (though we'll likely never know), but I'm always hunting for more!

And back in the messy reality of the present day....

The Observer on the making of Osama bin Laden.

Dave Winer on power (and freedom) in the Islamic world

Jonah Goldberg on the culture underlying Islam. I hear echoes here of Robert Tracinski's call for cultural imperialism.

Today's quote from Victor Hugo, this time about the Middle Ages: "In those days, they saw everything thus, without metaphysics, without exaggeration, without a magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet been invented, either for material things or for the things of the spirit." (Notre-Dame de Paris, VI.2)

The Yankees lost 9 to 1 last night. I didn't see the game because we had some friends over to visit. Let's hope the Yanks purged their system of poor play for the rest of the series. Game two is tonight, and this time I'll be watching.

Posted on 2001-10-28 at 14:11. File under personal.

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2001-10-26

Elizabeth Whelan on why we can fight smallpox.

Michael Lynch takes note of the connection between poverty and lack of freedom in the Islamic world. Like other repressive regimes throughout the world (China comes to mind), the rulers of countries like Saudi Arabia are tempted to open up a bit economically in order to keep their subjects from rebelling, but they definitely don't want to grant any political freedoms.

Today's quote from Victor Hugo: "Rights must be whole or they are nothing." (Les Miserables, III.4.iv)

Posted on 2001-10-26 at 19:56. File under society.

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Is Bin Laden Dead? This interview with my old buddy Jim Robbins raises the possibility based on some reports coming out of Afghanistan. On the other hand, it could just be a red herring.

To reduce our dependence on oil from despotic monarchies like Saudi Arabia, maybe it's time to think about drastically increasing our use of the cleanest energy source known to man: nuclear reactors. So says Tom Randall, echoing the persuasive arguments made many years ago by the late Petr Beckmann. Nuclear reactors not only release much less radiation than coal-fired power plants, but they're a heck of a lot less susceptible to terrorist attack than, say, oil refineries. We've got to start thinking outside the box here, and if there's one thing we're discovering, it's that our current system of living contains vulnerabilities that we never considered before, for instance those of our large buildings and postal system.

Speaking of vulnerabilities, the horrific tunnel disaster in Switzerland (notice I don't call it an accident -- the first supposition in these times must be that this is a terrorist attack) has nearly cut off Italy from the mainstream of European commerce. Coincidence? I doubt it.

My wonderful city of Denver has decided they must spend half a billion dollars on a new "justice center", given the chronic shortage of beds in the current jail. The usual threats are being made: the authorities will have to release murderers, burglars, and rapists by the score to comply with federal regulations regarding the treatment of prisoners unless we increase taxes by an ungodly amount to pay for this new facility. So many questions arise. First and foremost, given that more people are arrested for victimless possession of psychoactive substances than for murder, burglary, rape and the other violent crimes, why don't we just end the war on drugs to free up some space in the city jail? After we do that, then let's see if we're still in violation of some federal rules mandating how comfortable accused criminals need to be.

Well, at least Denver's public library system is rated #1 in the country....

Posted on 2001-10-26 at 17:47. File under society.

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2001-10-25

The Uniform Crime Report is out for the year 2000. 1.6 million arrests were made for drug offenses, more than for murder, rape, arson, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, and auto theft combined. 81 percent of drug arrests were for personal possession -- a victimless "crime". Isn't it time to end the war on drugs?

Posted on 2001-10-25 at 21:37. File under politics.

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Washington Post: "This is a biological attack and we have no experience with this." Someone in a State Department mail facility contracted pulmonary anthrax. Either anthrax-filled letters passed through that facility, or letters that passed through that facility just happened to come in contact with contaminated letters. And it turns out that the anthrax delivered to Senator Daschle's office was extremely well-refined, which not only points to state-sponsorship for these anthrax attacks (can you say Iraq?) but implies that the danger is much greater than U.S. government officials have been willing to admit. And oh by the way, one of my sisters works for the State Department.

Posted on 2001-10-25 at 21:29. File under society.

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The Times of London is reporting that Osama has nuclear material, although he probably lacks the ability to create nuclear bombs. Let's not forget that he's friends with Saddam, though. Scary.

Posted on 2001-10-25 at 21:02. File under society.

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Michael Gartner notes the following wisdom from E.B. White: "In a free country, it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone." It seems that White, best known as the author of Charlotte's Web, was a powerful, and free-thinking, essayist. Time for a visit to the Denver Public Library to see what of his they have in stock.

Speaking of books, I just finished my latest Ibsen play, Hedda Gabler. This one was towards the odd side of his output and I found none of the characters sympathetic. I much prefer the last one I read, The Lady from the Sea. Next on the list is The Master Builder. I'm still hoping to finish reading them all by the end of the year.

It seems that in the current atmosphere of war, some controversial websites are being suppressed. When your ISP gets a call from the FBI, I guess your days on the web are numbered. John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace feels like an age and a day ago.

At least dissidents in some Islamic countries are using Internet technology to get around draconian restrictions on free speech. From the descriptions in this article, Saudi Arabia sounds almost as repressive as the People's Republic of China. Why does the U.S. government support these royalist thugs?

Here's a summary of what's in the new anti-terrorism bill. Some scary stuff in there. Is the current hoopla merely an example of sunshine patriotism? Are we giving up our freedoms in the name of freedom?

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Ben Franklin

"To be 'ultra' is to go to the extreme. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne and the mitre in the name of the altar; to abuse the cause one supports; to rush one's fences, outdo the executioner in the grilling of heretics, charge the idol with insufficient idolatry, insult by excessive adulation, find the pope insufficiently papist and the king insufficiently royalist. It is to denigrate the whiteness of alabaster or snow or the swan or the lily in the name of flawless whiteness; to be a partisan of causes to the point of becoming their enemy; to be so vehemently for as to be in fact against." --Victor Hugo

Since I'll probably visit the northeastern U.S. around the end of the year, hopefully I can visit the Philadelphia Museum's Thomas Eakins exhibition, which closes January 6th. Looks wonderful.

Posted on 2001-10-25 at 20:25. File under personal.

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2001-10-24

The Economist has a short article on Leos Janacek as a neutral party in the musical cold war of the 20th century. I wish they'd talk about some living composers, too, such as Bright Sheng (mentioned below) and the like.

Posted on 2001-10-24 at 20:02. File under music.

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Has Islam become its own enemy? So argues Zia Sardar in the Islam and the West section of the The Observer. Lots of other thought-provoking articles there as well.

Posted on 2001-10-24 at 19:48. File under society.

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Dirk Obbink, one of my old classics professors at Columbia (well, actually he was pretty young at the time) has been awarded a MacArthur fellowship. Though I remember him mainly for a seminar on Aristotle's Poetics, he does amazing work on papyri, specifically on the burnt papyrus scrolls found in the ruins of Herculaneum (the lesser-known town destroyed in the same eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried Pompei). Many of these papyri must have come from the library of a wealthy Epicurean, since Dirk and his colleagues have recovered a number of works by the Epicurean philosopher-poet Philodemus. This painstaking work is also extremely valuable, since we have so few original texts from Epicurus himself. (Other MacArthur Fellowship winners this year include pianist Stephen Hough, whom I know mainly for his duets with cellist Steven Isserlis, and composer Bright Sheng.)

Posted on 2001-10-24 at 14:01. File under personal.

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2001-10-23

Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya (now of course living abroad) writes powerfully in this article that the challenge for Muslims today is to throw off the culture of vicitimization and cure themselves of blaming the West for their troubles when they are in fact home-grown. Yes, ideas have consequences, and there are some extraordinarily unhealthy ideas afoot in the Islamic world.

Now playing: Duke Ellington's 1943 Carnegie Hall concert. Also I just finished reading a volume of poems by Anna Akhmatova (much more beautiful in the original Russian, I'm sure) and am almost done with The Third Chimpanzee, the earlier book by Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel). Diamond inexplicably idealizes the hunter-gatherer lifestyle a bit too often for my taste, but his historical and evolutionary insights are strong enough to outweigh that bias, in my opinion.

I'm still puzzled why no one in the U.S. government (or media) seems to be following up strongly on the leads that point to cooperation between Osama and Saddam (especially considering that the original WTC bombing in 1993 was most probably perpetrated by Iraq). Osama and his followers have no experience with hijackings, but the September 11th hijackings are deeply similar to those masterminded in the past by one of Saddam's top security officers. In addition, the anthrax attacks to me indicate state-sponsored terrorism -- and Iraq has probably the most advanced biological warfare capabilities outside the USA and Russia, not to mention the motivation to terrorize the U.S. population.

Yankees 12, Mariners 3 -- Yanks take the series three games to one. Only four more victories needed to secure yet another World Championship.

Posted on 2001-10-23 at 21:05. File under society.

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2001-10-17

Yankees 4, Seattle 2.

Posted on 2001-10-17 at 17:38. File under personal.

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I don't watch CNN nor do I visit cnn.com for my news. But now I know that I definitely will not be doing so, because CNN has submitted questions to be answered by Osama bin Laden. To interview someone is to think that they are open to persuasion and reason, that they are within the sphere of civilized discourse. Bin Laden and his organization have demonstrated (both in their terrorist activities outside Afghanistan and in their subjugation of the Afghan people) that they are outside that sphere, indeed that they seek to destroy it. The people who run CNN have now demonstrated that they have no understanding of the crucial issue of today (and all days): civilization vs. barbarity, which is literally an issue of life vs. death. Will we next see Hanoi Jane morph into Kabul Jane and show her support for the Taliban? Boycott CNN!

Posted on 2001-10-17 at 07:38. File under personal.

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2001-10-16

Call me a hopeless optimist, but I prefer to try to find the highest potential in any system of thought (such as Islam) in order to understand how its most positive lessons might help me develop a true "philosophy for living on earth" (as Ayn Rand once called it). That positive focus doesn't mean I shrink from identifying what is negative about that system, but it does mean I recognize that there are almost always some good insights contained within any long-lasting system of ideas. I hope to find more such insights through my research into Islam. Is not true philosophy the love of wisdom in all its forms?

Posted on 2001-10-16 at 20:41. File under philosophy.

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Some words of wisdom from an Islamic perspective. I like what Mr. Khan says about the emphasis in Islam on moral perfection, which he calls "the superior jihad" (my understanding is that "jihad" means struggle, especially this struggle for moral perfection -- not holy war).

Per my recent musings on civilian militias, here's an article talking about planes as gun-free zones.

And let us not forget baseball: last night's game yielded a score of Yankees 5, Oakland 3. First team in history to lose the first two games at home yet win a five-game series. And did I hear right that Derek Jeter has, at age 27, already broken the all-time record for postseason hits?

Posted on 2001-10-16 at 13:29. File under society.

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2001-10-14

Yankees 9, Oakland 2.

Posted on 2001-10-14 at 19:25. File under personal.

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I'm wondering if it's time to bring back citizen militias. Not the National Guard, but true, grassroots, localized, citizen-led fighting forces all across the nation. And every member of these militias would have not only training in how to use a gun, but the absolute right to carry one wherever and however they please, including concealed weapons on airplanes and in other "gun-free" zones. Now that will put some fear in would-be terrorists.

Posted on 2001-10-14 at 14:41. File under politics.

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I don't think I'm going to be blogging much for the next few weeks, since the RSI in my right wrist is pretty serious -- almost as bad as the bout I had in 1995-1996, which forced me to stop playing guitar for over a year, not to mention making my work life fairly painful. Right now I'm pretty much typing with one hand, which is a lot slower than I'd like. I might put in that order for the Linux version of IBM's ViaVoice product here soon....

At least the Yankees won last night, though I wouldn't have minded a little more offense from the Yankee bats. That play by Derek Jeter to prevent Jeremy Giambi from tying the game in the seventh inning was the most amazing thing I've ever seen on a baseball diamond.

Posted on 2001-10-14 at 13:43. File under personal.

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2001-10-10

Oakland 5, Yankees 3. It's only Game 1.

Posted on 2001-10-10 at 22:17. File under personal.

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Having just read Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and witnessed the recent terror attacks, I must admit to thinking a bit about guns of late. I don't own one (yet), even though I recognize the arguments in favor of self-defense and the fact that, as John Lott points out, more guns mean less crime. Can it be a coincidence that so many atrocities, from school shootings to hijackings, occur in areas that are officially "gun-free"? Could hijackers with knives been any match for a few armed citizens? Disarming the victims is never a solution, and throughout history has been a prelude to all sorts of trouble (firearms confiscation was one of the earliest acts of Hitler's government, for example). I noticed a rash of stories in the major media (NY Times, Washington Post, etc.) soon after September 11th about large increases in gun sales, especially to first-time buyers. Perhaps I'll become a first-time buyer myself, before too long. My attitude to the Second Amendment has long been to support the right to bear arms but not exercise it (much as many people support the right to free speech but don't speak out). Now I'm thinking I need to apply consistently my adage that your rights, like your body, need to be exercised.

Speaking of the body, my wrists are killing me (the old RSI injury coming back). Now looking into IBM's ViaVoice for Linux.

Posted on 2001-10-10 at 19:54. File under personal.

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Jane's on anthrax. Stratfor on what happens after the Taliban fall. Michael Ledeen on war and the America character. And some scary information about how the Taliban leader makes decisions.

Posted on 2001-10-10 at 13:15. File under politics.

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Microsoft invests in Groove. What does it mean for Jabber?

Posted on 2001-10-10 at 12:35. File under jabber.

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Cal Thomas writes about radical Islam. Plus here's a link to the article by Paul Johnson that I mentioned a few days ago (it's also mentioned by Thomas).

Posted on 2001-10-10 at 09:34. File under politics.

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2001-10-09

Went ego-surfing and discovered that I'm now the #1 (and #2) stpeter on Google. I don't even show up in the Peter list, though. ;-)

Posted on 2001-10-09 at 21:31. File under personal.

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Can America fight two wars at once? The war on terrorism has been likened to the war on drugs. I doubt we can fight both at once. Indeed, I would argue that it is immoral to fight the war on drugs now. Well, it's been immoral all along, but the harsh reality of terrorism makes that fact obvious now. Some 6,000 people died in one day as a result of terrorism. I doubt that 6,000 people have died in the last 100 years as a result of taking drugs (as opposed to fighting over drug territories or stealing in order to feed a habit that is grossly overpriced precisely because of the war on drugs). The intent of terrorism is to maim and kill innocent people and strike fear into the survivors. The intent of taking drugs is to get high. Can we afford -- economically, politically, ethically -- to continue to persecute those who for whatever reason want to smoke a joint or snort some coke or shoot up now and then (or even regularly)? I think not. Let's put those DEA agents to work protecting Americans from violence, not terrorizing South American farmers and North Americans who have a health problem called dependency on drugs. Not only is ceasing the drug war the right thing to do, but doing so would immediately bring drug prices crashing down, thus deflating the profits of organized crime outfits, guerilla armies, and, yes, even terrorists all over the world (supposedly the Taliban control 90% of the world trade in heroin). As Bob Marley said, legalize it!

Posted on 2001-10-09 at 19:44. File under politics.

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Just joined the Weblogger User Group started by Scoble -- somehow this feels like webloggers anonymous and I swear I'm not an addict yet! See, I go days without blogging, honest! I also signed up for the weblogger mailing list. Any Colorado bloggers want to start a support, er, user group? :)

Posted on 2001-10-09 at 16:07. File under personal.

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I've heard a number of people (from far-left peaceniks to prominent libertarians -- though those two groups are not as far apart as you might think) say that America brought these terrorist attacks on itself. Many reasons are cited, from discomfort over Hollywood "culture" (I use the term advisedly) to frustration over the foreign policies of the U.S. government. Now I'm no fan of the major industries in Hollywood or Washington D.C. (neither of which is to be confused with the people living in America), but the simple fact is that culpability for these attacks lies squarely with the perpetrators. The U.S. government has meddled (wrongly, IMHO) in the affairs of nations across the globe, and has supported unfree governments in nations as diverse as Chile, Thailand, Mexico, Korea, and South Africa (to name just a few), not just in the Middle East. Do we see terrorists from these nations making war on America and Western civilization? Why is it that U.S. government foreign policy or Hollywood culture incites to acts of violence only groups (I'm tempted to call them tribes) on the radical fringe of Islam, and not also Buddhists and Taoists and Catholics and many other religions and cultures? I think I need to do some research on Islam....

On a related note, I must say it irks me when people talk about the "tragic events" of September 11th. This was not a tragedy, in the Aristotelian sense or any other. This was an atrocity.

Posted on 2001-10-09 at 14:20. File under society.

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2001-10-08

Following links from the peripatetic Dave Winer, I stumbled on the ptypes weblog and associated ptypes website devoted to elucidation of personality types. A few years ago I took the Keirsey test and came out ENFP, which the types site categorizes as vigilant. About the time I tested ENFP I joined a mailing list for other NFP folks, which was quite interesting for while (though I didn't have time to participate fully). Seems to me there's quite a bit of wisdom and insight to be found in personality types research.

As always I find art (especially music) to be a soothing influence in difficult times. In the days after the terrorist attacks I listened to just about all the keyboard music of Bach, which always helps to clear my mind. Last week and this evening I listened to the complete string quartets of Shostakovich -- beautiful in an angst-ridden way, and peculiarly in tune with these times. Now I've moved on to the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven.

Speaking of the arts, on Saturday night Elisa and I attended a performance of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. I'd seen a performance of this play (one of my favorites) a number of years ago at the Monmouth Theatre near my hometown in Maine. It's a great play -- high Romanticism that verges on over-the-top but never goes over the line, held together by the character of Cyrano. Saturday's performance used a new and quite fine translation by director Nagle Jackson; I hope his translation will be published, since it holds up well against the classic but now aging translation by Brian Hooker.

Posted on 2001-10-08 at 21:19. File under personal.

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Dave Winer says that "journalism is a person writing a journal". I like that. I guess that makes any blogger into a journalist -- and often the amateurs (in the original sense of the word, of course) are more worth reading than the so-called professionals. Blogito ergo sum -- I blog, therefore I am. :)

Posted on 2001-10-08 at 12:17. File under society.

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War is here. Though it really arrived on September 11th. Peace is not an option when you're under attack. So much to think about of late -- I'm still sorting it out. I hope to post some reflections about all this soon at my journal.

One thing I've been thinking about of late is the meaning of Islam both as a word and as a religion. A friend of mine who was raised Muslim tells me that the word Islam does not mean "peace", it means "submission". If that's true, it certainly puts the religion in a different light. A recent article by historian Paul Johnson (I need to find the link) argued that this current conflict is merely part of a centuries-long struggle between Christendom and the Islamic world. I've never liked Johnson's Christian bias but some of his arguments made sense historically. I'm not sure where that leaves the Hindus, Buddhists, animists, and other religions, though. And Islamic culture was much more advanced than Christian Europe for many centuries -- they preserved and extended the knowledge of the ancient Greeks through the European "dark ages" (though I suspect that in some ways those ages were not quite as dark as some argue, since the Middle Ages in Europe saw the invention of things like watermills, windmills, horse-drawn plows, crop rotation, eye glasses, and other practical advancements). Since I'm a non-believer, I guess it's hard for me to see this conflict through the lenses of religion.

Here's an interesting article by Michael Bliss on "the end of Canadian nationalism". I suppose coming from a border state (Maine) and having a number of relatives in Canada (they emigrated there from Holland -- my Quebec relations are long-lost), I'm more attuned to events and attitudes north of the border than most all Americans. Bliss argues that "Since 1776, the essential Canadian question has always been what kind of Americans we would become." Perhaps it's simple geography which raises this question: the main axis of the Americas is north-south (not east-west as in Eurasia), so the long stripe of Canadian population just north of the U.S.-Canadian border is quite probably unsustainable in the long run. Climatological and cultural commonalities are much greater between (let's say) Vancouver and Seattle, Calgary and Denver, Winnipeg and Minneapolis, Toronto and Cleveland, Portland and Halifax than they are between the regions of Canada. And that's not even to delve into the ever-vexatious Quebec question.

Good news on the Debian front: Mozilla works again. But now KDM is broken. Life is always interesting when you run unstable distributions.

No big Jabber news this morning, though I still have a number of JEPs to process.

The Yankees are in the playoffs. Here's hoping they win it all -- New York City certainly deserves some positive news. Though a parade through the canyon of heroes just won't be the same again for a long time.

Posted on 2001-10-08 at 10:30. File under society.

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2001-10-04

I just switched to the America theme for this page. I'm not a big flag-waving, America-love-it-or-leave-it kind of American (after all I'm half Dutch :), but we've definitely had the flag flying at our house of late -- although ours is of the thirteen-stars variety. I've always liked that Betsy Ross flag, I guess it's my libertarian leanings and respect for the ideals of the American Revolution. (Coincidentally, right now I'm listening to Paul Simon's song "America", though in a live version by Yes. Their version is much more celebratory than S&G's, and of course it clocks in at over ten minutes -- gotta love progressive rock!)

I sure would love a better interface between Jabber and weblogs. My friend Dizzy has been working on an XML-RPC component that would enable people to post blog updates from their Jabber clients (such as my favorite, Gabber). But he's so busy that he hasn't had time to polish it up for general consumption. Maybe if I cook him some extra-special Thai food he'll be motivated to finish it off. :)

Posted on 2001-10-04 at 21:30. File under personal.

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The other night I posted some new content to the Monadnock Review -- this time a series of fifteen sonnets by Tom Radcliffe entitled My Daughter's Face.

My friend Vivian asked me today why I haven't yet written anything about the recent terrorist attacks. Well, for the first two weeks I was in shock. Now I'm just coming to grips with the enormity of the events. Someday soon I'll post some reflections - perhaps even tonight (I'm a bit tired of Jabber work this evening and need to work on something else).

I'm reading this fascinating book entitled "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond -- browsing in the Tattered Cover I found myself intrigued by the book's subtitle: "The Fates of Human Societies". That's a topic I'd been thinking about recently (I'm also in the middle of re-reading Bronowski's book "The Ascent of Man"). The terrorist attacks spurred me to wonder about some big questions -- e.g., how is it that some areas of the world are so primitive in so many ways (technologically, intellectually, ethically) while others are so advanced? Diamond's book is providing quite a few insights for me, so I hope to write about that soon as well.

And here's something else I'm wondering about: why is Mozilla dead in the latest builds of Debian unstable? I must say that my computing life is happier than ever now that I'm running Debian. It's a big improvement even over other versions of Linux.

The attacks certainly dragged me back into the world. For the past few years I've pretty much ignored the news and been much happier because of it. But you can't ignore events this huge. I've been getting most of my news lately from weblogs such as those of Dave Winer as well as more focused news sources like Jane's and Stratfor. The major media are missing a great deal of the story here, but then again the herd mentality has always been strong in journalism.

Posted on 2001-10-04 at 19:58. File under personal.

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