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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: December 2001 (page 1 of 18)

New York Times: The Legacy of the Taliban Is a Sad and Broken Land.

Fareed Zakaria’s Newsweek piece How to Save the Arab World is just about the best prescription for the woes of the Muslim world that I’ve read, ever. In it he discusses not the need for immediate democracy, but rather the establishment of the precursors of democracy in Arab countries as a first step toward liberalization. He also points out that most hatred of America is just projection — the misery most Muslims feel in the day to day lives is the source of their angst.

The Wall Street Journal bought a couple of computers from a looter that used to belong to Al Qaeda. A review of the contents of the hard drive revealed all sorts of interesting stuff, including a smoking gun that implicates Al Qaeda in the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud. If you ask me, the fact that Al Qaeda assassinated Massoud right before the attacks clearly indicates that Al Qaeda’s leadership knew full well when the attacks would occur and what the attacks would consist of, and that they had been planned far in advance. By assassinating Massoud, they hoped to eliminate the Northern Alliance as a potential ally for the United States when we went after them for the attack that was about to happen.

Newsweek has a story on plans in Afghanistan to rebuild the buddhas at Bamiyan that were destroyed by the Taliban.

This New York Times article on the Pashtun tribal areas on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan makes an interesting point I hadn’t read elsewhere — this is the first time in Pakistan’s history that army troops have ever been deployed to the tribal region.

Pakistani physicist Pervez Amir Ali Hoodbhoy sums it all up in an opinion piece for the Washington Post. He provides a thumbnail sketch of how the Muslim world got into the sad state it’s currently in, and what America and the Muslim world need to do to get back on the right track. I agree with his sentiments 100%.

This month’s Scientific American features four essays criticizing Bjorn Lomborg’s book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. He really, really should have had his book better reviewed before publishing it. He’s definitely not a responsible scientist.

You may not know this, but the national sport of Afghanistan is played on horseback with a headless goat. Think of it as polo for barbarians. Anyway, here’s a picture of an American soldier who joined in the festivities.

If you’ve downloaded Mozilla 0.9.7, open up the Preferences dialog, click on Advanced, click on Scripts & Windows, and then feast your eyes on the options that are available. It looks like the Mozilla gang has done away with popup ads (and popunder ads) once and for all. If you haven’t downloaded Mozilla 0.9.7, you ought to. It’s my default browser now — not out of spite toward Microsoft, but because it’s actually better than Internet Explorer. Now if I can just get those nitwits at Orbitz to fix their site so that it works in Mozilla …

Somehow I missed at the time that Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, died back in February. The New York Times Magazine ran a memorial for him today.

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