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Thu. Oct 11, 2001

QuoteLog, 10/11

QuoteLog, 10/11 – ”Of course it doesn’t seem like only a month ago today. Of course it seems a lifetime ago. But it’s not shocking anymore, of course, at least as far as most of the world’s concerned. It’s a lot more than shocking now. It’s a stamp, a porcelain plate, a commemorative book or CD or magazine, a full-page ad, a talking point, a spam scam, a platitude, a T-shirt, a bumpersticker, an opportunity for opportunists, an excuse for those who want excuses. But it’s no longer shocking. It is and will continue to remain a hollowness, one either to be avoided and ignored or to continue painting over with whatever coats of paint match our particular mental and emotional furniture.”

Noah Grey

”In Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a crew of black and Latino teenage boys say they can no longer think of the police as enemies. Since Sept. 11, the boys say, the officers who patrol their neighborhoods, most of whom are white, no longer eye them with suspicion. Several Haitian-American groups, which had angrily protested police abuse in recent years, have sent a letter to a local police chief in Crown Heights expressing admiration for the officers. [...] Ever so slightly, the attacks on the trade center have tweaked the city’s traditional racial divisions.”

Somini Sengupta, NY Times

” ’I loved what I saw,’ one passenger, JoAnn Rockman of Flossmoor, Ill., said as she disembarked in Chicago. ’The stewardess yelled, ’Get that guy,’ and half the plane got up,” she said. Interviews with passengers aboard a flight here from Seattle, and those headed on to a dozen other destinations, suggest that most people now believe that passengers have the right, indeed the obligation, to act. The advice applies to women as well as men; as Mr. Avery said: ’Any woman can grab a leg and bite pretty hard.’ His wife, Sandra, a social worker, nodded in agreement. ’There’s all kinds of things a woman can do,’ she said. ’I think the ones with children, or who are expecting, should stay in the back with the kids. But everyone else should jump on.’ ”

NY Times

”A statement late on Tuesday from Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda – blamed for the September 11 attacks by suicide aircraft hijackers that killed some 5,600 people – said ’Jihad for God’s purposes is an obligation today for every Muslim on this earth.’ [...] The streets of the Muslim world were comparatively quiet on Wednesday.”

Reuters

”Geography is perhaps the main factor standing in the way of a unified Afghanistan. The country is nearly bisected by the Hindu Kush mountain range, running southwest to northeast through its center. Lowlands surround the mountains in an arc. Military resistance has historically been strong in the mountains, making it extremely difficult to link the northern and southern halves of Afghanistan. Compounding the problem, Afghanistan’s generally poor infrastructure diminishes to almost nothing in the mountains, which are largely inaccessible to motorized vehicles. When the Taliban first entered Afghanistan, they pressed north from Kandahar to Kabul, where their advance was balked north of the capital. There, the eastern plains taper to a mountain-ringed cul de sac. The valuable Bagram air base is located on the plain north of Kabul, and north of that is the mouth of the Salang Tunnel—the main pass from Kabul to northern Afghanistan. This is a perennial killing zone, where Tajik forces emerge from the Panjshir Valley to the northeast, Hazaras occupy the mountains to the northwest and Pushtuns press north from Kabul.”

Stratfor

”Some religious texts, including parts of both the Bible and the Quran, are the hermeneutic equivalent of a Rorschach test—their original meaning is so obscure that any interpretation reveals more about the reader than it does about the author. In the same way that the Book of Revelations has been cited as a warning about any world ruler from Napoleon to Ronald Wilson Reagan (count the letters in his name—666), the Quran can be used to support an almost endless variety of viewpoints and practices.”

Richard Connerney, Salon Premium (found via Bushwhacker)

”Fundamentalism, as a literal and nonhistoric approach to religious scripture, exists in every tradition, but only in Islam does it go hand in hand with widespread violence. Yes, Southern preachers occassionally get carried away, and yes, Hindu fundamentalists cause intermittent communal violence in the Deccan subcontinent. Neither of these two fundamentalisms, however, has produced the same types of problems as Islam. It is not Hindu fundamentalists or Southern Baptists that generally become international terrorists.”

Richard Connerney, Salon Premium (via Bushwhacker)

”Traditional indicators of noncompetitive performance still apply: corruption (the most seductive activity humans can consummate while clothed); the absence of sound, equitably enforced laws; civil strife; or government attempts to overmanage a national economy. As change has internationalized and accelerated, however, new predictive tools have emerged. They are as simple as they are fundamental, and they are rooted in culture. The greater the degree to which a state – or an entire civilization – succumbs to these ’seven deadly sins’ of collective behavior, the more likely that entity is to fail to progress or even to maintain its position in the struggle for a share of the world’s wealth and power. Whether analyzing military capabilities, cultural viability, or economic potential, these seven factors offer a quick study of the likely performance of a state, region, or population group in the coming century. These key ’failure factors’ are:

· Restrictions on the free flow of information.

· The subjugation of women.

· Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.

· The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization.

· Domination by a restrictive religion.

· A low valuation of education.

· Low prestige assigned to work.

Ralph Peters, 1998

”It is hard doing normal things, Mrs. Fontana said. At the beauty shop, they talked about snorkeling in the Caribbean and bottled water and such. The street was filled with the screams of happy children on the playground. The tide of time rolls on, irreversible and unfair. In the neighborhood, the fliers for the missing and dead are already papered over with ads for luxury apartments. The leaves are changing color and falling from the trees. Sean Cummins digs through the rubble, and Marian Fontana plans a funeral.”

Charlie LeDuff, NY Times