Today I spent most of the day with my wife’s family celebrating my mother-in-law’s birthday. Returning home tonight, I checked my e-mail which contained a one-liner from someone I don’t know. The entire e-mail message was, Shove your Bible up your ass…I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. Which is a bit odd considering I’m an atheist.…
September, 2001
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MSNBC has an article by National Journal writer Michael Kelly ripping on pacifism. Kelly essentially recycles George Orwell’s excellent debunking of the British pacifist movement during World War II. As Kelly notes, since Nazi Germany wanted to conquer Great Britain, pacifists were helping that effort even if it was not their intent. Doc Searls seems…
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Dave Winer wrote something on his web log yesterday which I had been thinking, but hadn’t gotten around to reading — in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Jorn Barger’s RobotWisdom web log has really descended into a rather bizarre mix of anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories involving Israel. Last December I mentioned that I…
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On September 17, Zogby International polled 1,018 people and asked them, among other things, “Would you support or oppose an all-out war against countries which harbor or aid terrorists?” An enormous 75% of respondents said that they would. But just 10 days later, on September 27, that number fell 9 points to only 66%. I…
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After the terrorist attack on the United States, politicians and security experts are emerging from the woodwork to essentially revive the Clipper chip initiative. All cryptographic systems, these folks claim, should have built-in backdoors which government authorities could use to decrypt messages if need be. Aside from the civil liberties issues, the main problem is…
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Among other rumors that spread like wildfire on the Internet after the 9/11 attacks was that CNN’s footage of Palestinians in East Jerusalem celebrating the attacks was actually 10-year old footage of an unrelated event. The footage actually came from Reuters, and CNN has a brief statement debunking the claim that the footage was not…
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Okay, that might be a bit of an overstatement, but there is no way to turn the United States into a terrorist proof zone. Don Larson linked to a Reuters story about proposals to protect nuclear power plants from possible aerial assaults. The problem is that the number of ways to inflict mass murder is…
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Friday’s Salon.Com had an excellent example of its own irrelevance. While web logs, e-zines, and other web sites were producing a lot of often compelling material on the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Salon.Com went with what it knows best — sex. That’s right, Sex in a time of terror is actually a serious attempt to look…
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Wired has a story about broadband providers simply cutting off access to users whose systems become infected with Code Red or Nmida. Wired mentions that Speakeasy and DSL Inc. simply yank access to users whose systems are infected with such viruses/worms. This is a big problem, but an even bigger problem is that most broadband…
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After the 9/11 attack, the United States government began openly and privately courting Pakistan for obvious strategic reasons. Accordingto an MSNBC report, AfghanistanÂ’s neighbor, Pakistan, also has incentives to cooperate. For siding with the U.S. against the Taliban and bin Laden, Islamabad stands to get as much as $3 billion in debt relief, emergency aid…