The Mandelbear's Musings

Today in history: this country suffered a major defeat in the Battle of Brandywine, September 11, 1777.

The battle, which was a decisive victory for the British, left Philadelphia, the revolutionary capital, undefended. The British captured the city on September 26, beginning an occupation that would last until June 1778.

filkertom has a good post on today's significance. I'm going to leave it at that, because I hate to see what ought to be a somber memorial turned into an excuse for hatemongering, fearmongering, and political bombast.

Hope the rest of the week is better.

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.

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.

So, Moussaoui gets life in prison. I have many reasons for opposing the death penalty, including the money, time, and public attention wasted on futile attempts to ensure that it's never applied by mistake. But in this case, I think it would have been particularly unfortunate to kill a man for, in essence, failing to incriminate himself. What in hell was the government thinking?

I will mention only in passing the speculation that people who are arguably even more culpable will never come to trial because the evidence against them was obtained under torture. It was Moussaoui's good fortune in being captured on US territory and in public that got him a fair trial. What this does for the prospects those less fortunate, now that the government has received a well-earned rebuke from Moussaoui's jurors, is anybody's guess.

In other news, thanks to filkerdave, we now know what was really behind the recent LJ outage. It was a DDOS attack, alright, but it was initially directed against a company called Blue Security, whose business model consists of persuading people to install software that mounts a DDOS attack on alleged spammers. When the spammers turned the tables, BS cleverly redirected the attack from their own servers to their blog, which just happens to be located at TypePad. Which, like LJ, just happens to be owned by Six Apart.

update: more info at cbronline.com and discussion at Slashdot

And thanks to technoshaman, we now know where BS's US offices are: 2480 Sand Hill Road, Suite 200 / Menlo Park, CA. Which just happens to be an easy walk from where I work. My feelings about this are really indescribable -- not unlike how I felt when I learned, when my daughter got mugged last year, that there were violent criminals living just a few houses down on the street where I live.

It's a good thing we don't have a supply of torches and pitchforks at the lab.