Eight years ago I walked into mission control at work just like every other day, stopping by to check if there were any large technical issues that needed resolving. Dave was staring at the bank of televisions above the rows of 20 monitors that kept track of the call centers we actively watch all the time.
Normally one screen would be the weather channel, the other a news feed, and the other an alarm panel with rows and rows of Automated Call Distributor (ACD) switch alarms on them, red, green, yellow. This morning two of the screens were showing the same thing — a smoking tower etched against blue sky with smoke streaming. I asked Dave what was up — he said “Some idiot just flew a plane into a building.” 
“You’re kidding – what kind of plane?” was my response — Dave said he wasn’t sure but it looked like a 737. Then came the replay … Dave said something to the effect that it was one hell of an accident or a dumb pilot, and I replied “that’s not an accident — we are under attack.”
He looked at me strangely — somewhat bemused. David probably had not read any Tom Clancy, but I had. No, I didn’t even know who Osama Bin Laden was but I assumed ill purpose and direction behind the plane’s crash into the World Trade Center tower immediately on seeing the replay.
So I started looking at the screens in the call centers, in between glances at the screen and listening to the commentary. They seemed normal, but the traffic a bit low with short call queues. The switches were all in good shape, so I walked back to my office to make some calls.
At the time I had faith and confidence in the emergency response departments; if it was an attack it was something they could handle I thought. There weren’t large flames out the sides of the building anymore, and I was hoping the sprinklers would put the fire out…
I knew a mass call event had to be underway so I called the Network Operations Control Center to see what was up. Our cells were swamped, and things were just getting worse, they were recovering the switches fast, but they would just go down again within minutes due to the masses of calls hitting them per second as soon as they were capable of answering. I also found out that morning that we had antennas on the World Trade Center – those were out of commission. Network was scrambling some portable switch units to cover.
So I went back up front and pulled up the network bridge where I could keep an eye on things in Mission control. I called the manager in and asked them about emergency messaging & if they thought we needed to get something into the call centers.
Then the second plane struck – and I knew that we would need the messaging. I was stunned, but thinking. It was a crisis, but there would be effects… what to do? What to do? I saw the person jump… tears started… but there was nothing I could do. Nothing for him, nothing at the moment for any of them.
On the network bridge I started asking what services we might have in the area, as well as what IT assets. We pulled up a second IT conference bridge to get our emergency responses going, focusing on what we could do to help. Passing out phones, keeping the switches up, could the stores in the area help? … keeping the technology that people needed working, minimizing the effects where we couldn’t get something back.
Soon there were more than twenty conference bridges going, each with their own efforts, and all techs everywhere had been called to task. As one of the few who have worked across all segments of the company, and being the one who usually gets called when things go badly awry I went into a nightmare of popping from bridge to bridge to bridge, sometimes answering questions, sometimes issuing orders, sometimes demanding silence so the techs could work. I was told later that I had told two VP’s to shut up in a pretty direct manner, but I don’t know who and at the time it didn’t matter.
Some bridges were pandemonium, but most were calm: people actively doing what they could do to keep the network whole, the infrastructure working and the systems going. We got the emergency messaging out to the switches, we put some call gapping into effect, and things were starting to get better.
Then….. the building came down. I watched on the monitor, from the side while fielding some questions on the bridge… then stopped the questions. The cable vaults beneath the building and all the people above them crushed, just so.. just like that, amidst all the dust, a thousand lives stopped, and all the network cables beneath their feet that nobody thinks on that tie us together moment by moment all ripped asunder. The collapse created a massive hole in our hearts and in our networks, it would take long to heal both.
The rest of that day is still a blur and I don’t remember much of it — there were a thousand questions, and hours of directing efforts. In the end we sent all the call centers home. Our payment IVR’s had been in a building near the trade centers, they were cut off. So we put in motion a rebuild and disaster recovery effort in North Carolina. There were redirects in routing to tend to, there were a thousand other things.
Finally hours later they sent us all home, closing all of the call centers, something that had never been done before or since… but really I had been one of the lucky ones that day. I had something to focus upon, something that that had to get done, something besides the horror, the sorrow, and the pain to dwell upon.
It’s eight years later, and I wish that I could tell you that the nightmare is over.
It’s not.
There are still people wishing us harm inspired and encouraged by an evil ideology. They will not stop and neither should we. Defeating evil is never something instant, it’s not as easy as killing one person, or conquering a country or two. This is a long war fought at many levels, and our resolve must be both solid and enduring. It’s important to recognize what the evil is, and where it originates.
Like all evils, it’s really about power – Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut Tahrir, Quds Force, Hamas, and all like organizations are bent on gaining power over the Islamic world. While they paint us as the great satans, we are just one of many ongoing perceived ills to the Islamist extremist worldview. For both the tyrants and the extremists it’s easier to externalize problems than to look at the mirror.
Some of it is fallout and lashback by disillusioned marxist Islamists leftovers after the cold war. Some of it is a neo-luddite movement – people who don’t want their tribal structures to change in a world where they must either change, or accept isolation and non-participation in a manner similar to the Amish in America.
Some of it is centuries old enmity over religions and land, some is sectarian feuding within Islam. The greater bulk of it however is a yearning by people for freedoms they don’t have in most Islamic countries.
No single one of those would be enough — all of those goods and ills are marshalled and tied together by the murder mullahs and death clerics, they are all sores and wounds kept continually open by incessant picking at them. For terrorists and insurgents to survive there must be a base of sympathizers. By marshalling all of those causes, and by putting on masks that mirror the popular local causes the Islamists gain recruits.
We must take all of those causes away, and show the world the true face of evil — how it adopts sometimes even the good causes, like that of democracy and that of freedom, and consumes them to feed their fires of hate.
The record of the past eight years speaks loudly to all now – 2,752 people died on 9/11 — but since that time the terrorists have murdered ten times or more that many Muslims. It’s not about Islam to the terrorists although they wear that mask. It’s all about power, and evil, and personal glory.
If you think terror will help your cause you destroy your cause – because no matter what you see in our glaring media or screeching political theaters the firm core of America lies beyond the lights and beyond that noise. The anger is as pure and as powerful now as it was that morning, but now it’s directed by reason. The heart of America is hardened with unwavering resolve that will not contenance terror, that will not waver, that will not forget, and that will never forgive the evil that September Morn.
Don Exodus probably disagrees with me along a wide spectrum of political views, but he gets science right.
Slow smoked most of the day, that’s corn on the cob in the foil.
Some people estimate that Michael Moore’s worth is 100 million or better, and in his new movie he declares that capitalism is evil. Since capitalism is merely property and the trading thereof, I call on Michael to stop relishing his own evil by giving every penny he has away. Every bit of property, every car, all his clothes, all his stock portfolio all represent evil if he truly believes the theme of his new movie, so he should stop being a hypocrite and give it away, all of it. It’s EEEEVVVVUUUL.
The opposite however is true. For every evil Moore can point at from capitalism, a hundred or a thousand goods can be pointed out as well. Moore, like all socialist/marxist idealists fails to recognize that capitalism is a primal force of human nature that is a pure outgrowth and necessary evolutionary adaptation to our social environment.
While capitalism has flaws that can be exploited by those who are evil it certainly has fewer of those than any possible replacement. The real evil is in denying the reality of human nature which keeps us muddling towards a better outcome for all — even though it’s sometimes by fits and starts. When capitalism is interrupted then there are great wars and grief, and when populist ideologues try to force change to natural order then great evil results. (see “The Last Bloody Century” )
Marxism, socialism, and the associated philosophies are banal, piteous, last century, and more than that they’ve been debunked, defenestrated, and are deceased – killed by time, reality, and dreams of a free future. It’s a new century Michael and communism is dead, so either give over your goods or get real and join us in this century.
Darwin’s tree of life has been much ridiculed by creationist fundamentalists since its conception by the brilliant scientist, but every branch, fork, and dead leaf becomes clearer with passing time. The decoding of genomic branching strengthens the theory of evolution almost every day as new papers are published. The tree is much more complex but at the same time simpler than even Darwin imagined.
In the old days one of the key objections to evolution was the step of the first animals from water to land. The evidence has become so strong that you don’t hear that objection anymore, with proof of the transition of life from water to land and sometimes back again. This has occurred not once or twice but instead many times across many species. (Plants, insects, worms, all started at one point in water as an example.) Here’s a beautifully done video that illustrates the tree in a simple manner.
For more please visit the tree of life site.
Tonight’s moon taken with my cannon xti, with a 70-300 mm lens, click on the thumbnail to see a larger but not full version (wordpress chokes on the full sized file.)
We are a mere four months away from President Obama’s promised date to close Guantanamo Bay prison, and some are expressing worries. There are two real threats to worry about, however I don’t see preparations going on to forestall either at present.
Al Qaeda and their ugly creed are nothing if they are not persistent in their evil. If they stop then the mask falls off, their justifications and rationalizations are undone, and they are revealed as the sociopathic madmen, murderers, and losers that they are. Since the dangerously defective are true rarities in society, Al Qaeda values every member.
If you look at their membership you will find an assortment of followers; generally sociopathic misfits fueled by anger, dangerous criminals looking for an angle, and quite a few mental deficients. You will also find their leaders, sociopaths as well, but sociopaths who are highly competent at one thing: finding other defectives and personalizing Wahhabi jihad and Takfirism to fit the target’s worldview and situation so they can use them as pawns.
Many of these leaders are concentrated in Gitmo right now, and President Obama’s plans to bring them to US prisons puts them among the population in the US most likely to succumb to their message and leadership. As the current conflicts in Somalia, Sudan, Southern Thailand, Gaza, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan demonstrate, AL Qaeda is expert at exploiting tribal, political, and sectarian conflicts to maximum effect.
Prisons tend to be boiling pots of tribal factionalism. AQ will pick at scabs of any and every faction, exploit and exacerbate all conflicts, and target any other strong leaders in the prisons they are put in to subvert and convert new causes and new recruits.
If and when these evil men are moved to US prisons steps must be taken to ensure that doesn’t occur. Everyone will focus on Nation of Islam since they have strong contingents in the prisons, and are already Islamic, but the AQ leaders are as likely to target Aryan Nation as well. (Before you go to thinking that’s ridiculous keep in mind that Neo Nazi groups have dabbled in every religion and subverted teachings themselves – from Asatru to Hinduism, from Christian Identism, to even odd sorts who think the Aryans are the the true Jews, the lost tribe of Israel.)
This is the long term greater danger of holding Al Qaeda, but there is another that most are focused on, which is why it comes second here.
The second thing to worry about is the high probability of prison break attempts. Al Qaeda is known for these, truly dangerous proponents of radical Islam who are willing to act on it are a small minority of a small minority – so they must try to rescue prisoners. They’ve attempted many prison breaks and succeeded in some. These have occurred everywhere from Afghanistan, to Belgium, to Yemen. They come in two flavors: complex attacks involving multiple truck bombs and vans or cars of gunmen, and subversion through bribery and threat from the inside.
Taking hostages of prison guard families has occurred, and complex attacks have occurred. All of these threats are guarded against in normal prisons, but only in a minor way. There aren’t prisons that can stand up to a complex military attack involving 20 or more Al Qaeda members, multiple truckbombs, and possible insiders, so further steps must be taken to harden the external defenses of any prison that AQ members are placed in before they are moved.
Many more articles on the history of AQ prison breaks can be found at this google search.
Here’s a macro close up photo of the barbeque lid, it shows you what heat and weather can do to multiple layers of black paint. The orange and blue tints are interesting, but it’s about time to sand and repaint.
