something's happening in kabul, the capitol of afghanistan, but apparently it is not related to the terror attacks in the states.
this might be hard to swallow, but those who planned and executed the attacks were insanely clever and frightingly successful. america experiences another trauma, probably bigger than vietnam (which was the most recent one as far as i know). don't mention the wtc...
but this is not intended to be mischievous. it just sketches the estimated extent of an insomuch enacted nation's possible reactions. this tuesday has hit a hypersensitive nerve of "god's own country" and the damage will remain.
although i definitely won't accept terror as a measure of political action, there are certainly parallels between a non-declared war of nato invading kosovo and the surprising "alien" attack of the u.s.a. both parties believe they have the right to take these steps, both believe they are right and justified.
actually, i do not expect the worst (ie. an increasing battlefield), but a heavy renaissance of conservative security trends in the way that throughout western countries exorbitant steps will be taken to monitor and control the people at the expense of their privacy.
anti-defamation league: terrorism.
kai hirschmann: "veränderung des weltweiten terrorismus".
issue 1/2001 of "die friedenswarte", the "journal of international peace and organization", has some articles about terrorism (unfortunately, there are just some abstracts online).
recommended readings are the publications by walter laqueur, his books and articles on terrorism, postmodern terrorism and "the new terrorism".
dudley knox library: terrorist group profiles.
the new east-west conflict: east coast – west bank.
viva and mtv (europe) interrupted their show programs due to the incidents in the u.s.
horrifying pictures at sueddeutsche.de.
grant barrett: "my story is not one of death and drama, not yet".
the register: "u.s. terrorist attacks knock news sites off internet". or let them look like in 1996.
screenshots of news sites on 11 september 2001, 17:33 cest.
btw. this september is the 23rd anniversary of the camp david accords.
cnn: "terror attacks hit u.s." – and probably the whole world... i think i'll take a walk.
the guardian: "chronology of terror" and "bush weighs off his options".
will the u.s. ever again train another ethnic or political group to get support for their fight against america's most wanted? reminder: bin laden and his fellows were trained by the u.s. in the eighties just to fulfill the same duty...
planes crashing into world trade center towers: the roof is on fire, the news sites are jammed...
it is currently reported that also the pentagon is burning... bill seitz has more information.
the guardian server is responding quite reliably (at least from vienna), so is the one of skynews.
one of the wtc towers has collapsed. the server of der standard couldn't handle the load and collapsed, too.
the second tower is told to be collapsed.
mike donellan: "the shit has hit the fan".
screenshot of the new york times home page, 7am pacific time.
john robb: "the teams i used to work with in special ops are going to be very busy. there will be a very high body count on the other side. we are going to look a lot like israel after this gets through". sigh.
the ministry of foreign affairs in washington is burning, another plane is reported to be crashed in pennsylvania, the pentagon was wrecked by a second blast.
everything you probably never wanted to know about web-caching. coming along with the very nice show http headers tool.
nikolai bezroukov: portraits of open source pioneers. with a bunch of controversial references (e.g. "the circus midget and the fossilized dinosaur turd" or "a second look at the cathedral and the bazaar").
funny that these portraits start with donald e. knuth. he should be mentioned more often. knuth's books probably taught me more about layout and typography than those of jan tschichold. nevertheless, tschichold is essential knowledge. and a humble dadaist, btw.
april 1998: microsoft buys tex! knuth sells out!
there was a time i was so much "into tex" that i created most of my papers with it. and certainly some pages of the book "an exploration of chaos" when being a trainee at the institute for computer applications at the university of stuttgart. i can hardly believe that i once really did this...
and that reminds me of shaking hands with the author, a person who holds more titles than i could imagine in my wildest parodies: prof. em. dr. dr. h. c. mult. john argyris, f.eng., frs (just to name a few). he also got the golden prince philip medal "in recognition of [...] outstanding contribution to engineering design through the formulation and development of the finite element method of analysis".
as always, i introduced myself with my first name only which was honoured with taunting remarks by the colleagues who planned their careers from the cradle. unfortunately, this did not help them to fulfill their dreams of becoming popular musicians, tv entertainers or creative directors either.
"der standard: "virgin erwägt rückzug aus österreich". good times for the small record stores? bad times for domain grabbers? i remember quite well, how happy somebody was after successfully registering it...
