Kids out of the house

Drove chaoswolf to work -- it's an easy trip getting there (which puts her onsite way too early, but I expect she'll eventually find something to do with her time). Lots of traffic coming back, but I wouldn't have been as late as I was if I hadn't had to drive around a bit looking for the place. Came back and drove super_star_girl to school.

This all requires getting out of bed by about 6:15, but it gets both kids out of the house by 8am. This is, on the whole, a Good Thing.

9/11 on my friends list

I may come back and post something profound later. For now, I offer a few disjointed links:

filkertom asks

1. Do you really feel safer today than you did five years ago?
2. Do you really feel the actions taken by our government with the stated purpose of protecting us have worked?
3. Do you really feel the actions taken by our government with the stated purpose of protecting us have been worth it?

No, no, and no.

technoshaman points to this post by liz_marcs -- longish, but well worth a read. I'll wait.

interdictor points to the Able Danger article on Wikipedia, which is alarming if true. May need to be taken with a grain of salt, but wouldn't be all that surprising.

min0taur has a few thoughts about the future as we once imagined it, and what 9/11 did to that vision.

theferrett points to this post by 5tephe:

Go out today and do something tangible, that makes the world better.

I think I'll just leave it there for now. My own thoughts can wait for this evening.

Where, did you say?

The Fort Myers News-Press: Rare 6.0 earthquake rocks region

MIAMI — No hurricanes. No tornadoes. No sweeping wildfires.

It was a pretty nice weekend in Florida. Except, you know, for the 6.0 magnitude earthquake.

(from technoshaman)

Not your usual musical theatre

Hey, cadhla!

Look at this!

(from asavitzk.)

(no subject)

HP: No Surprise

September 11, 2006 (Computerworld) -- Why was I surprised to hear that Hewlett- Packard spied on its own board members to find the source of a news story? I shouldn't have been. Last year, just after Carly Fiorina walked away with $21 million in severance pay, I ran a letter in my column from a demoralized HP employee. "After all these cost cuts, stealth layoffs, expense and travel reductions, no raises for years, no bonuses, here Carly walks away with all this money after basically running HP into the ground," the anonymous reader wrote. "Oh well, tap me on the shoulder for that workforce reduction -- I'll take the severance, the unemployment, and have a nice rest."

A week later, an HP manager asked me, "Who was your source?"

(from groklaw, which has very good coverage of the HP debacle.)

I must say I'm feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude over the whole sorry mess -- considering what HP did to Compaq and the remains of DEC (after Compaq trashed them), and considering that every piece of HP hardware I've ever owned has died suddenly and mysteriously, with no help from what HP jokingly calls their tech support (sample, to try to fix my dead scanner: try power cycling the computer five times -- no, it didn't work; maybe they forgot to tell me about the dead chicken)... Where was I? Oh, yeah: HP. The real HP is called Agilent, these days. Don't know where these imposters came from.

Why does this seem strangely apropos?

From slothman comes this post pointing us at A Child’s Machiavelli: a Primer on Power by the artist Claudia Hart. It's out of print, but you can download the PDF.

20010911: Scattered memories

I'm afraid this is going to ramble. I'll come back and cut-tag it before I post it, if I have any sense.

( yeah, it rambles. This part is skippable )

I wrote a page of essays and a poem a week or two after 9-11 -- I look back at it five years later and see many places where I was, perhaps, more prescient than I wanted to be. Or maybe it was just stating the obvious. I'll close as I did then, with this little essay entitled

Fear

I do not fear for my country. My country is strong, resilient. It was built by immigrants who bravely journeyed here to wrest a living from an unforgiving land -- and by the natives who fought them off. We waged a bloody civil war that would have blown a lesser nation into smithereens -- our union is the stronger for it. We may seem soft and ineffective, and divided against ourselves, and indeed we are soft, ineffective, and divided as long as we have no common foe on whom to concentrate our fury and our fear.

No, I do not fear for my country. I fear what we can do. I fear that we might lash out, like some huge wounded animal, flailing our claws at anything that comes near. I fear that we might strike blindly, crudely, hastily, at the first plausible target that presents itself. I fear, above all, that we might not be able to stop ourselves -- that the wounded beast might continue raging over the world, trampling innocent victims long after the homes of those who sheltered the guilty have been reduced to rubble. I fear that we might go to such lengths as to sow the seeds of yet another band of warriors fueled by hatred against us.

I do not fear for my fellow citizens. We come together in times of crisis, neighbor helping neighbor, volunteers working to exhaustion; people who in easier times would pass on the street without a glance now greet one another as friends. Perhaps we always were, and never knew it. On my weekly walk by Los Gatos Creek I said ``good morning'' to a man I've walked past perhaps a hundred times. Seeing me on my way back he remarked on the weather; we had a pleasant talk. I like our new-found sense of community, but I fear it a little. The line between a band of brothers and an angry mob is sometimes a little too thin, and our history holds not only search parties and barn raisings but lynch mobs and church bombings.

But most of all, I fear our leaders. Our president calls for a ``crusade'' -- a ``holy war,'' yet! I've heard that rhetoric before, and I fear it no less from Bush than from bin Laden. Our congressmen call for restrictions on encryption, not knowing that only strong encryption stands between the Internet and its total destruction, not caring that the web of terrorist cells communicated by word of mouth and hand-carried notes. They call for us to give up some of our privacy and freedom to assure our safety. But when the danger has passed, I fear that more of our privacy and freedom will have vanished than we would ever have allowed a foreign oppressor to take by force. Among over five hundred politicians in congress, only a single voice was raised to object to the resolution authorizing the use of military force -- in whatever measure our leaders may deem necessary, against an enemy they have yet to identify. And when the CIA comes demanding permission to recruit terrorists as spies, I doubt that even a single voice will be raised to ask who trained our current foes, and who will be training their inevitable replacements.

I do not fear for my country; I fear what my country can become. I fear that in the rest of the world my country will be, not loved or respected, but hated and feared. At home I fear for the freedom, the sense of community, the gloriously chaotic diversity that make this country great, and strong, and resilient. I fear that our country may win its war, and lose its soul.

Permission to quote is hereby granted; just provide a link back here or to http://theStarport.com/2001/0911.html.

I need to get some sleep. I'm not going to wish you all "pleasant dreams", but I'd kind of like for the nightmare to stop. I'd like to wake up some bright, clear morning in the near future and have my country back.