PREEMPTIVE?

Many thanks for an LJ friend for posting this:
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Pre-Emptive Strike
– from SF Chronicle 9/5/02

Editor: It seems that our one and only president is proposing that we attack Iraq not for something Iraq has done, but for something we’re afraid Iraq might do.

In addition, I understand that his attorney general is advancing the notion that we should lock up “potential terrorists” and “potential criminals” — i.e. lock up people not for something they have done, but for something we’re afraid they might do.

I humbly suggest that Congress has the right, and the duty, to impeach President Bush. Not for something he has done, but for something we have every reason to fear he is going to do.

DOUG OLSEN
Oakland

Wind and remembrances

It's windy. It's so windy we lost our power for a good part of this afternoon and evening.

The day was bright and sunny and clear -- almost but not quite like Sept 11th of last year. I was glad for the clouds in the sky: it was just enough different a sky that I wasn't as spooked as I would have been otherwise.

Hearing planes today spooked me. We're close enough to an alternate landing path for the Manchester airport that they can come in rather low over the lake.

I didn't get out of bed after the first plane of the day sounded overhead. I pulled the covers up, decided to take the day off, felt for the cat asleep next to my right calf, and went back to sleep. Until 3pm. Elric did try to get me up. He did try. Many times. After the umpteeth try, I finally woke enough to tell him I was unofficially taking the day off, so he'd stop cajolling me. He left me to sleep and returned to his copyediting downstairs.

After the air conditioner went off because of the power outage at 3pm, I got up. The lack of sound is what woke me, I guess.
I puttered, drank cold coffee (leftover from one aborted attempt to wake me), and read past issues of WIRED magazine that I haven't had time to read lately. I haven't had time to read anything for pleasure for almost a year now. Today was a day to take the time for small pleasures, to remind me what is important in life.

Living is what's important.

Someone I knew Sept 10th 2001 was no longer alive by Sept 11th. I didn't know him well -- he was one of the bosses of a friend of mine, and we'd met a couple of times at either trade shows or when he showed up once at a convention with some employees. But Danny is no longer alive. He was on a plane from Boston to LA. Yes, he's one of the ones who had time to call his wife. I don't want to say more on the subject. There's not much else to say, other than wondering what went through Danny's mind during those few minutes he had at the end is not something any of us will ever know. And perhaps dwelling on it will never do any good. I can hope that Danny had peace at the end, knowing the end was literally in sight.

A bunch of someones I knew Sept 10th 2001 are still alive Sept 11th 2002. One worked in the WTC doing radio recordings: he should have been there on 9/11, but had instead worked late the night before and decided upon returning home to Brooklyn to not bother going in that Tuesday, and slept late, instead. One was headed out the subway in the Financial District and was walking towards the WTC area when the first plane hit. She ducked into a nearby building and safely evacuated when able. If she had been "on time," she would have bee directly under the towers when they fell -- instead, she had been early for unexplicable reasons. One was driving over the bridge and saw a plane headed low and fast toward lower Manhattan. She related the day after 9/11/01 that she thought at the time, "Shit! Someone heading into Newark is really messed up."

One, a dear friend and the person who brought me to LiveJournal, lives in an apartment building that used to be in the shadow of the WTC, in Battery Park City. She is a survivor -- one of those who watched it happen above her head, one of those covered in debris from the buildings, one of those who survived by grace. One of those who watched it all in front of her nose.

She lived with us for six weeks (more? I can't even remember anymore -- she was like my sister, living here, fitting in perfectly), with her cats, when she couldn't go back home. She was homeless.

And she brought the events of 9/11, the concentration of what happened that day, into my house. Into my life. It was, is, so vivid to me, because of her presence in my life.

Today I have felt the heightened tremors of her experience in my life all over again. There is no way to explain it other than to emphasize the immediacy of it all.

Now that I'm awake, I'm unable to sleep.

(reposted from my LiveJournal for 9/11/01)
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Go see Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog for 9/10/01, "Coming up on a year."

Farscape cancelled.

But inside information from part of the publishing cadre who works at Sci Fi says the new high-up executives did not love the show or support it, and their reports of it "unable to grow beyond its core fan base" is BS. Apparently the execs basically hated the show, sure that didn't fit the "culture" of the channel, and instead had already slotted a new show in its place, even before announcements had been made of the cancellation. What's the show that the execs say fit its culture better? A series based on Tremors.

Yeah, right. All viewers of the Sci Fi channel also want the return of such stellar scripts as those for The Black Scorpion. Not.

Sci Fi is also apparently refusing to release or sell rights for the past episodes of Farscape, wishing them luck if the production company wants to try to move the show to another channel without the ability to show past episodes.

Apparently Showtime screwing Sci Fi on just such rights for Stargate SG1 has got these execs feeling as if they've got to screw everyone else now. Helllo! Farscape isn't slotted to move to Showtime. Screwing them won't get Showtime screwed back one whit.

Ain't it nice to see that political idiocy reigns at the smaller networks as well as at the big three?

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Weather has broken new records for lack of rainfall and high temperatures. It was over 90 F here all day and will be again tomorrow. Long-range forecasts for the week are bleak: zero percent chance of rain for at least five more days.

This drought has already killed one of our wells: it was dug over 200 years ago, and is dry as a bone now. Our artesian is still running, but I'm terrified it will go dry soon.

We need rain desperately.

Interesting news about the link between inflammation and type II diabetes is at Science News (online) this week. The paper edition is my favorite bathroom reading. This article fascinates me, since I suddenly developed type II diabetes when my C Reaction Protein (inflammation) levels went up two years ago when the Sjogren's Syndrome was more active. And no one then could make a link between them; it was a complete mystery as to why I had developed diabetes. The worst were the recriminations accusing me of overeating and eating "too much sugar," especially when I don't eat much refined sugar as a matter of course. I must have been lying, right? Feh. Doctors refuse to listen to patients, preferring to treat us in an adult-to-child relationship rather than as adults who are responsible and educated. Don't get me started....

Jeffrey Dwight, sys admin of SFF.Net and owner of Greyware, has written yet another brilliant Monthly Maintenance Announcement, this time in the style of Yeats.
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The Day of Maintenance

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The tape drive cannot feel the capstan;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere maintenance is loosed upon the world,
The disk-dimmed spindle's loose, and everywhere
The ceremony of maintaining is drowned;
The best lack all calibration, while the worst
Are full of passionate backups.

Surely some restoration is at hand;
Surely the Day of Maintenance is at hand.
The Day of Maintenance! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Registrus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in files of the drive
A backup with microchip and the logic of gates,
A port blank and pitiless as a Sun,
Is moving its slow tapes, while all about it
Reel DLTs of the indignant SureStore drive.
The registry drops again; but now I know
That these thirty days of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by the passing hours,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards noon on Friday to be born?