randomWalks

Can you find Afghanistan on a map?

Christopher Hitchens’s latest. (thanks, J.)

originally posted by xowie

Homeland?

originally posted by xowie

This week’s urban legends.

originally posted by xowie

War, being a dramatic departure from the stream of events that went before it, is an especially fertile occasion for the pursuit of private agendas. World War I, for example, institutionalized the public relations industry. Most of the founding figures of public relations first came to prominence by participating in the propaganda campaign that persuaded Americans, against great odds, to join the war on the side of France despite isolationist sentiments and the large number of German immigrants in the country. As they built the government's propaganda machinery, they also built the professional networks and personal reputations that guaranteed their success, and the success of public relations as a concept, in the post-war world.

What new social structures will be institutionalized in the course of the war that is now getting under way? The answer, I think, can be found in plain sight, in the military doctrine that the Bush people have been articulating. ... One of the great dangers of the coming war is that it will institutionalize this kind of warfare, applying it not simply to dangerous individuals in foreign countries but to the civilian populace of the United States.

Who knows what will happen now? Not me, buster. That's why I live out here in the mountains with a flag on my porch and loud Wagner music blaring out of my speakers. I feel lucky, and I have plenty of ammunition. That is God's will, they say, and that is also why I shoot into the darkness at anything that moves.

originally posted by xowie

Three Arab-Americans from Utah have been kicked off a flight from Minneapolis because the other passengers refused to fly with them.

"After a few minutes," he recalled later, "the pilot came up to me. . . . He told me that he's not safe with me flying to Dallas."
"What do you have against me?" the incredulous passenger asked.
"He just said, 'I'm not going to take you. Myself and my crew are not safe flying with you. They don't feel safe.' "

It’s a fabulous season for apples – “four times the quantity of last year” according to one grower – and one of the greatest memories I have is of spending a cool, sticky, exhaustingly fun day at a pick-your-own orchard up in the Blue Ridge mountains with family and friends one autumn years ago. In all the, well, everything, I almost missed this Washington Post guide to pick-your-own orchards near DC. Considering my son’s newfound appreciation for the fruit (apples and pears are the only solids he’ll countenance) I really hope we can make it to one before all the apples fall.

I’ve heard lots of talk about the forbidding mountainous terrain of Afghanistan. Trying to get a look for myself, I’ve come across this Time photo essay on famine and photojournalist A. Raffaele Ciriello’s photos of Afghanistan. Thanks to Cursor for both links.

Still available: 72virgins.com.

In 1998 alone, literally half the top 10 highest-grossing films involved one form of apocalypse or another: Armageddon, Saving Private Ryan, Deep Impact, Godzilla and the most wildly popular disaster movie of all time, Titanic. James Cameron’s epic is so well-known that a favorite haircut for young men in Kabul is something called the "Titanic." Barbers reportedly get jailed for cutting boys’ hair like Leonardo DiCaprio’s, but their teenage customers love it.

originally posted by xowie

Jonathan is looking for volunteers to help take Life During Wartime to the next level.

Rumsfeld Might Change ‘Infinite Justice’ Name - washingtonpost.com.

Chinese Working Overtime to Sew U.S. Flags - washingtonpost.com.

"This is your receipt for your husband...and this is my receipt for your receipt."

originally posted by xowie

Pakistan’s nukes.

originally posted by xowie

Judith Lewis interviews Mir Tamim Ansary. Also in the Weekly: To Be Muslim and American in L.A. by Celeste Fremon.

originally posted by xowie

ergodraw: Adobe Illustrator tutorials.

Looking again at last Tuesday's darkness, peering deeper into Krishna's mouth, we see not just ourselves but the entire world staring back. It would be comforting to believe the international outpouring of sympathy in the wake of the attacks was simply that, but it was also a global craning of necks. What will happen? The world looks out its windows and wonders how, if, when, and where the full weight of the structure will fall.

During the Gulf War of 1991, I gave a talk to a high school assembly in Massachusetts, a private school where the students came from affluent families and were said to be "95 percent in favor of the war." I spoke my mind, and to my surprise got a great round of applause. But in a classroom afterward, a girl who had been staring at me with hostility throughout the discussion, suddenly spoke up, her voice registering her anger: "Why do you live in this country?"

I tried to explain, that my love was for the country, for the people, not for whatever government happened to be in power. To believe in democracy was to believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence--that government is an artificial creation, established by the people to defend the equal right of everyone to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I interpreted "everyone" to include men, women, children all over the world, who have a right to life, not to be taken away by their own government or by ours. When a government betrays those democratic principles, it is being unpatriotic. Love of democracy would then require opposing your government.

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund has compiled a partial list of the rash of hate crimes and murders committed in the past week.

originally posted by beXn

Patterns of inquiry revealed by the network:

• Amazon sales
• Yahoo "buzz"
• Yahoo most-viewed
• Lycos 50
• Google zeitgeist

You can create any number of scenarios to prove that nonviolence won't work, but meanwhile we rarely question that the violence is clearly failing. In other words, most in the media become very skeptical when they hear about pacifism. They equate it with just letting people walk all over you, which it clearly is not. When you study Gandhi, King, Merton Day, Muste and all the others, you find that it's direct resistance to authority, a direct resistance to Caesar. But it's a very difficult subject to comprehend. Everybody is always, "What if someone breaks into your house with a gun and wants to shoot your family? What do you do then?" So you can create scenarios where clearly it probably won't work, but meanwhile there are 40,000 a people a month who are dying in wars around the world. The U.S. is selling weapons to 142 nations; we're the world's biggest arms dealer. We spend $800 million a day on Pentagon programs, bankrupting our economy, and rarely is this ethic questioned. So I question it.

think peace is a collaborative weblog to which everyone is welcome to post.

Suppose bin Laden is the mastermind of the recent horror. Imagine he had gone before the Afghan population a week earlier and told them of the U.S. government's responsibility for so much tragedy and mayhem around the world, particularly to Arab populations as in Iraq and Palestine. Imagine that he further told them that Americans have different values and that they cheered when bombs were rained on people in Libya and Iraq. Suppose bin Laden had proposed the bombing of U.S. civilians to force their government to change its ways. In that hypothetical event, what would we want the Afghan people to have replied?

We would want them to have told bin Laden that he was demented and possessed. We would want them to have pointed out that the fact that the U.S. government has levied massive violence against Iraq's civilians and others does not warrant attacks on U.S. civilians, and the fact of different values doesn't warrant attacks of any sort at all.

So isn't this what we ought to also want the U.S. public to say to George Bush?