9/11 Memory: When We Lost the Narrative

Long ago, a world ago really, I and an employee of Reynolds Aluminum refurbished old computers, mostly pre-iMac Apple product, and gave them to teachers, under-resourced schools, churches, other nonprofits, and individual families. What a perfect morning that Friday of 9/11 promised; the summer heat was gone, the sky a sublime French Blue. I was nearing Virginia Commonwealth University, driving to pick up a system with good performance, when I heard that an airliner struck the World Trade Center. It was deemed an awful accident.

My contact was weeping when she opened her apartment door. I said I could come later, figuring that some personal crisis had made her hysterical. She blurted out something about a second plane, and I knew the awful truth. We loaded the computer, and I arrived at work in time to watch both towers fall. I'd heard on NPR the developing story of the Pentagon attack and an airliner crashing in Pennsylvania. 

The world had gone sideways in 30 minutes. It never got back on track, as far as I am concerned. Briefly I was proud of how our nation came together to destroy the Taliban, who hosted the terrorists. Briefly I hoped that unity might last. Briefly I thought we might return to the narrative of consensus and compromise that I recall as marking my mid-1960s childhood.

In 2001 I was teaching first-year writing, and class met that day. One student's father was home sick; his business partner and all their employees died in one of the Towers. The man was wracked by grief and the belief that he might have saved lives had he been present. In another campus building, the bodyguards of Prince Sultan's son (one of his 32 children) rushed him off campus. He'd been a freshman for a couple of weeks. On September 12, I heard from a Kuwaiti that the Prince's plane was the only civilian airliner to fly, heading back to Saudi Arabia. While NBC news reported on some suspicious activities of another Saudi Prince who left the country that day, presumably on the same aircraft, the Richmond connection seems to have vanished from the Web. 

For a few hopeful years that followed, I taught some Afghan women who had come to the US for an education. I hoped we might rebuild that nation and keep our promises to its people. We had the world on our side for a short while. Needless to say, when the US shifted its attention to Iraq, my students' fates were sealed. They could never return home. I've lost touch with them, but I hope they got their families out.

For that reason and many more, I've never forgiven the Bush Administration for their ill-planned war in Iraq, all based upon the lies of Dick Cheney and others who wrongly connected Hussein's government to Al Qaeda. Yet the neocon right was not the only set of fools in a burning house. On 9/11, I upbraided a fellow UR employee who said, angrily, that I was "jumping to conclusions" when I said Al Qaeda had staged the attacks and we'd soon be at war in Afghanistan. His ignorance of geopolitics that I'd studied for more than a decade enraged me. In the late 80s I first read of Osama bin Laden and his apocalyptic dreams of a Caliphate. That era's Left and Right ignored this reality.

In the heat of the moment, just after the second tower fell, I told my co-worker, more or less, that he was a naive, unread fool. In 2003, I told a right-winger on campus the same about his beliefs that we'd just "clean out" the Middle East.

Yet there I was on 9/11, a Leftist giving one of my own hell. But the Left, so focused on identity politics and denouncing the United States instead of engaging in Realpolitik, lost its way. This wandering from old-school Democratic ideals helped alienate working-class voters who put a would-be tyrant into power in 2016 and 2024.

In retrospect, my moment of tongue-lashing a young liberal and all that followed changed us, including peace marches, wrapping oneself in the flag, abuse of prisoners of war, secret courts, TSA screening, and the chest-thumping patriotism by affluent families who would never let a child serve in the military. Consider the thousands of moments like those of my student who turned on the war after a best friend died in Iraq; before that, she was a naive supporter of all we did.

Such events hardened us and set us on the path to the disaster off Iran's shores now, led (if that is the word for from-the-gut decisions) by a President who makes George W. Bush look temperate, wise, and peace-loving. I'm pleased that Saddam Hussein met his fate, but that's about all that pleases me about the debacle of 2003. I suspect the current war will not have such moments of closure.

It all comes rushing back to me 25 years later. Maybe the course we took began with the contested 2000 election, but we are now living in a damaged nation, perhaps one in a steep decline. I don't know that we'll bounce back soon, as we did after Vietnam and Watergate, or even the 2008 Great Recession.

That said, our recoveries from those shocks may have included acts of willful forgetting. I'd like to forget the global events since 2001, though my personal life has been good. I'd like to return to that clear cool morning when I set out to get a computer to help a family connect to the still-novel Internet. I'd love to hear that an airliner had just missed the towers because of a navigation error. I'd like to have ended my morning right there.

Our new feeds today are full of existential dread about AI, climate change, fools who deny climate change, and a rotten President's foolish actions. Maybe we should instead reflect on how we got to this impasse and lost an earlier narrative of getting along, mostly? What sorts of short-term thinking and other priorities kept us from fixing the damage done after 9/11? 

 

Your New Car is Watching You: Two Weeks in a Rolling Computer

A while back at my Tractorpunk blog, I wrote about why we should choose, if we can, to buy an older vehicle and learn to make our own repairs. I'm more convinced of this now than ever.

We had two lovely weeks in Canada recently, touring Nova Scotia, taking hikes with Anna Hergert, who runs the walking firm Tide Rollers and Mudlarkers. Anna was available off-season for some extended quality time with us. It's our second vacation hiking with her.

When we were not exploring the ocean floor of the Bay of Fundy, we were driving a rented Hyundai Tucson we picked up at the airport in Bangor, Maine. The small SUV was spacious, tastefully minimalist but comfortably appointed inside (I cannot abide busy-looking interiors). The glass dash looked very impressive. But that is where the problems began. 

As we drove along one day, a little chime sounded. An icon of a steaming cup of coffee (or maybe King Cole tea...we were in Canada) appeared on the center screen that had been clocking me in kilometers per hour. It said "Consider taking a break."

Was I driving poorly? We were on back roads, as is our wont. They are curvy and sometimes potholed. We had to move over the center line sometimes, when we could on the relatively empty roads. Yet every 45 minutes or so, I'd get that annoying message. This is part of the what the firm calls a "Driver Attention Warning System." 

Once I had it light up just after leaving a Tim Horton's where, rest assured, I had taken a cappuccino-and-donut break. I never figured out how to turn off this feature, though I did bring the owner's manual into our B&B and read it carefully.

We got the lane-departure buzzer to stop, as well as an auto-steering feature that was more scary than helpful. We never could banish the "take a break" annoyance. After much searching, we reset our speedometer to metric units, but the dizzying array on of-screen choices in the SUV meant we never found out how to turn off the coffee-cup warning. I began to talk back to the car. "Perhaps Hyundai should take a long walk off a short pier" was one bit of advice I can type here. At the very first, I'd liked the new Tucson enough to consider it as a replacement for our 2006 Honda CRV, if it ever (God forbid) bites the dust.

No longer. I will have no car that scolds me. I will also have no car that makes mistakes of the sort the Hyundai made. 

The vehicle has multiple sensors for reading the road, including speed-limit signs. Sadly, the sensors did not know how to translate these properly on the dash. For a brief period we went on the Trans-Canada Highway (speed limit 110 kph) the dash told us we could go 180! It was reading the metric signs as mph and translating them into kilometers. We had a chuckle. Then I thought about the clueless drivers I see in the US daily. I'm certain some would have put the pedal down and then explain to a Mountie "but the car said I could go 180!"

I fear where this trend might go. New vehicles are already watching us. A piece from the BBC noted how carmakers collect data from us constantly in new vehicles. It can be sold to your insurance company without your permission in the United States. When you buy a new car, be sure you know how to disable this. That said, the window for saying "no" may close. The BBC notes that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in a February 2026 report, calls for biometric technology in all new vehicles to monitor eye and head movement for signs of distracted driving. You can read the text of the report here. I do not support this at all for adults, unless they are guilty of a DUI and subject to monitoring when behind the wheel. 

The rest of us should have the right to disable such devices. Besides, the very glass dashboard of the Tucson was designed as to distract drivers. We had to pull over to adjust the AC or heat, as the fan control was tiny and required a touch. My Honda has three large dials, like this. I can find them in the dark without looking down.

On an economic note, cars are now so wired with sensors for lane-departure, automatic braking, and other features that I fear they won't last as long as my old Honda. The HVAC controller? Under $100 to buy. The infotainment console in my wife's 2017 Mini S convertible? $10000. It works great, but we are selling that car soon. My wife's "new" 2008 Volvo XC70 AWD wagon has none of that business in the dash.

The Honda's predecessor, a 2004 model, died in 2020, when a kid rear-ended me. I'd had that 2004 CRV for 14 years. I went right out and bought a 2006, mainly because it had side airbags. I do a lot of the work myself. No advice provided by the car. No screen of any sort. Keeper.

Back to our monitored future. Want to turn this business off in a Hyundai? A simple Web search will tell you how. Or maybe if you have young, easily distracted drivers in your family, you want it on.

Your call. But do one thing: tell those who make cars and laws that you do not want them spying on you. 

 

 

 

Giantism and The Moon Race

The race is on, with the Artemis 2 mission coming as soon at early next month. I'm hoping to see it and future endeavors work well, so humanity begins a long voyage to the stars as a multi-planet species. I know that sounds odd in a blog about minimalist living and self-reliance for rural life, but to me the space program has always been about learning new techniques for doing things here on Earth, about new materials, for instance, that went into cordless tools I use as a DIYer or insulation I use to cut our energy costs. Splitting-maul and Moon rocket? Why not?

I've spoken at length about this with futurist Bryan Alexander, who shares my love for space travel. We are both puzzled by a rejection of human exploration by many on the Left and from the environmental movement. It amounts to a form of neo-Luddism at a time when many nations and companies are pursuing reusable launch vehicles. NASA's big SLS Moon rocket is not, save for the Orion capsule.

What critics ignore is how money is already being made in the heavens and how seemingly silly tourist flights resemble early aviation's first paying passengers. I don't think there's any way to stop this next Space Age, save for a Kessler Event (the film Gravity depicts that) making launches untenable and sends telecom back to the 1960s. 

I'd claim that moving human energy and heavy industry into space would be a godsend for our home planet's ecosystem, especially when cleaner rocket fuels come into play. You'll find a few ideas about that here. As much as I dislike the billionaire associated with SpaceX, he has one thing right: we need to begin moving some of our people and energy off-planet. That does not mean abandoning our world to the slow ecocide currently under way.

At the same time, I've written of his megalomaniacal plans for Starship at my other blog; I suspect the derivative called the Human Landing System (HLS) will prove a disaster the first time it tries to land on an unprepared lunar surface. To me it's as bad an idea as von Braun's Nova rocket of the late 1950s, also marketed to NASA as a Moon rocket when its maker was really trying to build a Mars rocket in disguise and with public monies. Both Nova and HLS would try to land a skyscraper-sized rocket on the Moon.

The current US President, who pays no attention to details save those concerning his enormous ego, is pushing us to land by 2028, the final year (I hope) of his Administration. Doing that would beat China's measured program, which plans to land astronauts by 2030. I suspect the Chinese will make that deadline, and we'll lose an HLS lander or, worse, lives trying to beat that arbitrary date. 

Perhaps Jeff Bezos' Blue Moon, an alternative lander from Blue Origin of less monstrous proportions, can get American (and I hope international partners') boots on the Moon safely and even begin the work of building a permanent settlement there. If we think small about getting there (to stay this time) we might do better than SpaceX's giantism.

By the time we make that next giant leap, we may also have national leadership that is not anti-environmental yet still pro-Space. We may then have both well-funded science and human exploration / settlement happening beyond orbit.

It's one of the things that still gives me hope in a difficult time. 

Ten Arguments Against Hyper Data Centers

 

We lost the vote in Goochland County; 4 of 5 Supervisors voted to approve a Technology Overlay District (TOD) and Technology Zone that could include data centers. We learned that a likely center would be two million square feet, or 3000' x 200' in size. That's three times the length of USS Nimitz supercarrier or twice the square footprint of the Short Pump Town Center, a huge outdoor mall about 20 minutes from where I live. I've always hated Short Pump and that mall in particular; it was once prime farmland where a friend stabled her horse. It's now a suburban asteroid belt.

The proposed data center is worse. And soon it may be utterly obsolete. I commend to you articles by Bryan Alexander and Noah Smith about why this entire industry could soon find itself in deep trouble and why that matters to the larger economy. 

Other localities will be fighting data-center behemoths that use enormous amounts of energy and water. Their parking lots create heat-islands and they lower property values. It's likely we citizens will be taking the county to court, as plans were modified at the final moment to include 900 additional acres without public discussion. The entire process seemed rushed through, perhaps spurred on by money from industry, before a new Governor in January. She has promised to develop a statewide strategy. I hope so, and perhaps it can preempt the sort of hasty decisions made here. My state has more data centers than any other.

So what are arguments that money-hungry county officials will heed? Quality-of-life issues may help, but I think environmental concerns, sadly as usual, fall on deaf ears. Our nation's brand of capitalism, one I despise, values short-term thinking and profiteering. I'm a Distributist, not a Socialist; I want capital held and decisions made by the largest number of citizens possible. I want data centers small and as rare as possible. 

In any case, here are 10 technical and economic arguments to make with your local officials as you organize against this bonanza. They are based on my remarks at our recent county meeting. You can share these in 3 minutes at a meeting, if you practice! 

1.  AI drives this rapid growth in data centers. 
2. The AI industry is not turning a profit and has shown only limited ROI for hundreds of billions in venture capital and now, risky loans. Subscriptions make up a tiny portion of revenue.
3. The current model of AI relies on “brute force” computing to simulate human reasoning. This method requires huge data centers that drive up electric bills for ratepayers, and it uses lots of ground water. The Microprocessors in data centers need to be replaced every few years, meaning short life-spans for their hardware. 
4. Real “Artificial General Intelligence” (aka AGI or “Superintelligence”) is unlikely with silicon-based semiconductor technology, yet AGI is the stated goal of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google.
5. Without more powerful new models, investment may well leave this sector, as 80% of firms that have already deployed current AI models have shown no gains in productivity. 
6. While Meta and Google have varied sources of income, other big AI firms are one-trick ponies. If the gold-rush turns into a bubble that bursts, it will harm the entire economy. What would happen in your locality when a data center goes dark, its owner bankrupt?
7. NVIDIA just announced a new Spark workstation that brings hardware-based AI to developers’ desktops. Coders no longer need to send work to data centers for processing. 
8. Soon consumer devices will have this capacity.  When we have AI-on-a-laptop or phone, which is Apple’s goal for Apple Intelligence, the data-center boom will likely go bust. 
9. Does your locality want to build power-hungry, thirsty data centers that may be obsolete in a few years? 
10. Quality-of-life issues are a form of return on investment. Start with that, not data centers.

Image source: first try with ChatGPT 5 for prompt "Generate an image of a two million square foot hyper data center in ruins." 

The Iraqi Game of Risk, 10 Years On

Location: Salad Bar, 10 Years On

I will never forget the argument beside the salad bar.

A conservative co-worker in our Physical Plant on campus knew I opposed Bush's war of choice, and he confronted me as I got my lettuce. Students, largely disengaged then as now from geopolitics, looked on at the two old people fighting in public.

"It's going to happen! We clean out the nest!" He said, emphatically.

"Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan, not Iraq, and that brute Saddam did not attack us on 9/11." I try to reason.

"You don't get it! This will be easy! We will turn the tanks right when we are done, and get Iran fixed too." He was gloating, and the students, the age of those who'd be dying in Bush's Middle Eastern game of Risk, were rolling their eyes.

"It won't be so easy; Iraq is a modern invention, a bunch of ethnic groups crammed together by the old Colonial powers. They'll turn on each other as soon as the brute at the top gets two in the hat."

"You are just spouting the typical liberal line." He was done. So was I. I reached for the dressing.

Ten  years ago, it was still the Freedom-Fries Era, of  salad-bar "Old Europe" vs. red-meat "Real Americans."

I was getting a salad, then wrote letters and op-ed columns. He got a burger and put a flag decal on his huge pickup truck.

What does it matter that I was right in the end? It was not a Risk game, and 4,500 dead Americans and God knows how many dead Iraqis later, that nation is a powder-keg. If it does not explode again, it will be the will of the Iraqi people and the resilience of their democracy, purchased with so much blood, that see it through.

Bush went back to his ranch and oblivion. We have that consolation at least about a man who set America firmly on a long-term decline with two wars paid for on debt, tax-cuts in the midst of those expensive conflicts, and exhortations not to sacrifice but to go shopping in defense of what he called a "sacred lifestyle."

Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their minions who massaged lies into a war did not see prison.

Afghanistan remains a missed opportunity, after an ADHD President and his war-criminal Svengali of a Vice President decided a bigger opportunity loomed. Then a clownish and finally, small man put on his flight suit to declare not just "mission accomplished" but, essentially, "game over, baby."

Except that it's not, and our tanks have come home. Yet the game goes on. Memories of tortured prisoners, religious civil war, and dead civilians will linger in Iraq.

My adversary over the celery stalks just says hello now. That was my last conversation with him and I don't need to rub my correct assessment in.

How's that for some shock and awe?

Political Post 2012: Party of Disaster

 
Location: Desk, gloating a bit about George Allen's defeat

Image rights (share with attribution) by futureatlas.com


I can sum up my attitude toward today's Republican Party with some comments left in response to a column by David Brooks of the New York Times. Brooks  critiqued the "hyperindividualist" ethos on display at the Tampa GOP convention, but he also critiqued today's Democrats as lacking an agenda. My remarks follow.

My NYT Response

I thought, at one time, that Governor Romney might have offered disenfranchised moderates like me a way back to voting GOP, as I did faithfully for John Warner and other men and women not beholden to the extremists and corporate money.

With the rise of the anti-logic, anti-science, and and anti-everything Tea Party and American Taliban that make up the GOP base today, I suppose it only natural that they'd consume an ambitious man like Romney.

For those like me, who favor both a strong military and strong environmental laws, who consider climate change to be the greatest threat to civilization since the rise of Nazism and the Soviet Bloc, who would confront the Islamists forcefully while fearing any mingling of church and state, what's left?

Certainly not today's GOP. Today's Democrats look, however, more like the GOP I once respected: an agenda to fix our environmental problems, invest in education and research, be forceful but pragmatic in geopolitics.

Where's the lack of agenda there? If Obama has failed--and I fear he has--it has been through the Limbaugh/Rove strategy of blocking everything, even what were once GOP ideas.

The President should have cracked heads, but instead he played the historic role of the nice black man. Pity. We need a head-cracker in such times.

The Way Back to GOP Relevance

So much for what I said in answer to David Brooks. The GOP took a modest pounding, not so much in terms of the popular vote as in their failure to capture increasingly important slices of the voting public: the young, the female, the non-white, the educated, the urban. Today, in USA Today, a disappointed fellow Virginian who is a "prepper" says he plans to stock up on ammunition before Obama outlaws all the guns.

As a fellow firearms owner, I find this laughable. But these same aging white rednecks ran out in 2008 to scoop up so much ammo that stocks ran low.

If the GOP wishes to survive in  a changing America, they need to, in no particular order past point one:

• Recognize the existential threat of human-influenced climate change and propose a response, with lots of free-market focuses, on curbing it. Denial is no longer an option.
• Work to enact a Constitutional amendment to undo the People United decision. I have some bitter, better feelings about that one. If I could, I would amend the Constitution to permit only publicly financed campaigns for all national offices. They would begin in October of an election year. Candidates would either be chosen by party-member votes in a nominating convention or in state primaries with a one-month campaign, again publicly financed, before the vote.
• Apply a Libertarian philosophy to social issues that are matters of individual religious beliefs, such as gay marriage or the nutty idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old.
• Champion government support for R&D in new industries and high technology while fighting for on-shore manufacturing that will empower those without college degrees. Modern manufacturing requires advanced skills such as computer programming, so support for our community colleges and vocational schools becomes essential.
• Recognize that fossil-fuel-based "Energy Independence" is a myth that both parties embrace. Wind and solar will never replace dirty fuels in our lifetime. Investment in energy conservation, building a reliable and speedy, if not high-speed, rail net powered by electricity will be a start. Natural gas, produced by the dubious practice of fracking, may buy us 30 years to make a transition to new sources of energy: both candidates talked about 100 years of gas, but clearly they don't read the geologists who write for The Oil Drum.
• Return to principles of small government that empowers small business, not major corporations who reduce payrolls by outsourcing.
• Ramp down the military-industrial complex by mothballing half of the Nimitz-class carriers to replace those that retire after 2020. Aggressively develop AI for unmanned combat aircraft and reserve military force to protect only our most vital interests. 
• Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, to put a firewall once again between consumer and investment banking.
• Turn away the racists. A tragedy of Virginia politics is that George Allen, the former governor whose racist "Macaca" remark, leading to a revealing YouTube video that cost him his Senate seat in 2006, could once again be nominated to run. He lost, but that Allen would even be considered today shows how bankrupt modern conservative thinking has become.

If Conservatives wish to survive, they should read more David Frum and David Brooks and James Fallows. Leave Limbaugh, Coulter, Donald Trump, and their ilk behind in the cave, and move ahead.  Will they? I doubt it, and as James Howard Kunstler has often noted, the GOP seems destined to join the Whig Party in the dustbin of history. I differ with him only in his prognosis that "[Hurricane] Sandy was a kind of preview of coming attractions for a different sort of wreckage to come." We still have time, and we may end up poorer and humbled from changes to our economy and climate, but Tuesday's results show that a plurality of Americans still want what Obama, and not the GOP, offers.

US Citizens: Time to Act on SOPA and PIPA Legislation

Location: Real State of Concern

If you think the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hurt the Internet as we know it, I urge you to look at what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has to say about two bills currently before Congress: PIPA and SOPA.

Read more and write your legislators through the EFF here. This is sad and serious business: user-generated content, as we all know it, could just vanish.