inkbluesky

view one - central park

Six Years After 9/11, Why We’re Losing the War on Terror

The Iraq War has by virtually all accounts made the United States, the Iraqi people, many of our allies and for that matter much of the world more vulnerable to terrorists. By targeting Iraq, the Bush Administration not only siphoned off much-needed resources from the struggle against Al Qaeda but also created a golden opportunity for Al Qaeda to inspire and recruit others to attack US and allied targets. And our invasion of Iraq has turned it into the world’s premier terrorist training ground.

The preventive paradigm has been no more effective in other aspects of the “war on terror.” According to US figures, international terrorist attacks increased by 300 percent between 2003 and 2004. In 2005 alone, there were 360 suicide bombings, resulting in 3,000 deaths, compared with an annual average of about ninety such attacks over the five preceding years. That hardly constitutes progress.

But on the bright side Cole reminds us that the retarded shoe bomber Richard Reid was convicted. But ever since King George was so rudely interrupted while deeply engrossed in reading My Pet Goat we haven’t been attacked again. We also have not been annihilated by a giant comet so might as well give him credit for that too.

view two - from the terrace

If you haven’t read The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera ( free on Google Books) you should. Metaphors aside our simply being isn’t all that light, we carry around 32,000 kilograms of air, Why the Earth’s air is really an ocean

The next time you’re in Carnegie Hall and the atmosphere seems stuffy, don’t blame the upper crust in their box seats. Blame the building’s air. It weighs almost 32,000 kilograms.

….”We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air,” wrote Renaissance mathematician Evangelista Torricelli, whose experiments discovered atmospheric pressure.

It wasn’t my imagination, we do live in a fish bowl.