Last night I was once again pulled into the comic tragedy that is Dateline’s new series, “To Catch A Predator.” You’ve no doubt seen or heard of this show, where they have a group of concerned citizens, who’ve christened themselves “Perverted Justice” (clever, no?), hang out in online chat rooms pretending to be teenage girls, trying to lure stupidly-unsuspecting older men into coming to a house for sex. The show’s a real laugh; last night some guy even got tasered as he ran wild-eyed away from that paradigm of serious journalism, Chris Hanson. The older, and often times rather sad, men invariably claim they weren’t actually coming over to have sex with the girl, at which point Hanson reads them off a few choice lines from their explicit chat log, they recoil in shame, the cameramen pop out, and then the police make an arrest; all in all, a pretty solid TV formula.

But there are quite a few things that rub me the wrong way about this show (disregarding the obviously high levels of schadenfreude involved). First and foremost: Perverted Justice? Are you kidding me? Whenever they cut to clips of these people “at work,” we see that they’re a bunch of overweight, ugly, pitiful looking human beings sitting side-by-side in what appears to be a dark basement at one of their parent’s house. They spend their day (or night?) typing away on the computer, pretending to be pre-pubescent girls or boys, having cybersex, downloading pictures of genitals men to send to them, impersonating little girls on the phone, and on and on. Am I the only one who is nearly as put-off by people who engage in that night after night as I am by the older men looking for sex?

Next we have the fact that the men who show up at the houses are arrested. I’m certainly no lawyer and, since some of these guys are going to jail, I guess the laws are in place, but every time I watch this show I get the feeling a halfway decent defender could rip the police’s case apart:

1. This police base their arrest of the predators, when they show up at the house, off of the chat transcripts provided by the Perverted Justice weirdoes. But is the Perverted Justice League of America a reliable sources of incriminating evidence? These people aren’t law enforcement. They’ve obviously got an axe to grind, as they volunteer their free time to do the, erm, sexy chatting. It’s of course laughably easy to alter a chat log– is it beyond the realm of possibility that one of these people could chat up a man online, the man could stop just short of talkin’-the-sexy-talk it takes to reach the level of a crime, and then a Perverted Justice Hero In Our Midst would add in a few extra-raunchy lines text so as to ensure the conviction of a man they know is no good, but who hasn’t yet gone far enough to commit a crime? Sounds downright likely to me. Who watches the watchmen? (OK, I’ll drop the superhero metaphors now)
2. Uh, entrapment?
3. The most troubling aspect of this whole procedure to me is the fact that, try as the might, these bumbling predatory men haven’t actually committed a crime. They’re usually charged with something along the lines of “Attempting to obtain sex from a minor online,” laws vary from state to state. But here’s the thing: when they were chatting online, these men weren’t actually talking to a minor; they were talking to adults pretending to be minors. A small distinction, perhaps, but I think it’s an important one. Did they intend to commit a crime? Surely. But they didn’t actually commit one, because they weren’t actually propositioning a minor for sex, they were talking with an adult. One could compare police tactics to John’s who try to get sex from a police officer undercover as a hooker; they arrest the man before he actually has sex with the hooker, i.e., before he commits the crime. But again, that’s different: that law states it is illegal to offer money for sex. So that’s the law they’re breaking, the actual sex act doesn’t need to occur, and the police officer doesn’t need to be an actual hooker (it’s not illegal to offer a hooker money for sex, it’s illegal to offer money for sex, period). But the men online never broke the law of trying to get sex from a minor, because they never even talked to a minor; they were chatting with an adult pretending to be a minor.

This reminds me a bit of a misguided law passed (and, I believe, repealed) a few years back that made it illegal to possess child porn, or to posses “simulated child porn.” I guess the simulated part was intended to make it illegal to posses pictures or video labeled as underage smut, even if the individuals in the video were actually over 18. But it had some (probably) unintended repercussions: bizarrely, this made it illegal to possess any artwork (think 3D-images) of naked children, which of course threw the Libertarians up in arms because the sole-purpose of outlawing child porn (aside from the fact that it’s quite creepy) is to prevent the child from being traumatized. In the case of 3D simulated child porn, no child was being harmed, and so why should it be illegal? Another side affect of the “no simulated naked minors” law, with much larger ramifications, was that it made it illegal to own any movie in which an actress playing a character under the age of 18 is naked or engaged in a sex act. So, uh, that copy of American Pie in your DVD collection, or Academy Award winner American Beauty? That’s right, bub, your ass is going to jail (correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the law was eventually changed so that it was only illegal to possess a movie if the actress in the movie actually was under the age of 18, but then people began producing hundreds of examples of classic movies already on the market with bare-chested 16-and-17-year old girls acting in them, thus making the law essentially un-enforceable). The reason I bring up this ill-fated law (aside from the fact that it’s hilarious) is that it seems to me very similar to the situation of the guys getting arrested on Dateline: the “simulated minor” law made it illegal for people to look at nude of-age girls if the perpetrator thought the girl was underage. That never sat right with me.

4. There are other monkey wrenches thrown into this equation that hurts a prosecutor’s case. When these men chat with adults pretending to be children, they often ask the “child” to send a picture. What Perverted Justice usually does is send a picture of the 19-year-old young-looking actress who will be at the house when the Dateline cameras are rolling. This way, the guy will see the girl he expects to see when he shows up at the house. But is it fair that the picture sent to entice the guy into coming to the house isn’t some 14-year-old with braces, but rather a sexy 19-year-old that one could reasonably expect any man to be attracted to? They’re arresting him for trying to shack up with a 14-year-old girl, but the girl he was attracted to is actually 19-years-old; of-age. If the guy went all the way and had sex with 19-year-old actress, would police still be able to charge him? With what? Having sex with a 19-year-old he thought was 14? Can you say “thought-crime?”

My belabored point is this: people should be charged with actual crimes they commit, not with crimes they may have thought they were committing. Don’t get me wrong, I surely symphonize with the intent of the law (not so much with the intent of Dateline, who I can be fairly certain are only in it for the ratings): why not get these sick guys before they can hurt a child. But, unfortunately, to live in a just society, I believe that’s a price that must be paid: a crime has to be committed (yes, someone has to be hurt) before you can punish someone for “doing” it. Nobody wants to stick up for these harmful guys, and so unjust tactics/laws such as these wiggle their way into our system. Well, I don’t want to stick up for these guys either, but I’ll certainly give a hand to our system of justice when it’s under attack by sloppy solutions such as this.

iTunes doesn’t work. There, I said. In this era of planned-obsolescence, iTunes is doing things your local refrigerator manufacturer can only dream of.

I have a handful of iTunes-bought music littering my mostly-illegal iTunes music library. About ten or so were downloaded via Pepsi’s free song promotions, and, it seems, I even downloaded a few $10 albums over the past 3-years. I’m aware of this not because I ever listen to the songs, oh no, but rather because I get an annoying error message every time I synch my iPod: “iTunes could not sync certain songs because they are not authorized to play on this computer.” Ah, yes, those damn iTunes-bought songs. Since I inevitably sync my iPod as I run out the door, these days more to grab the latest podcasts than to update my song collection, I simply cancel the message, pop out the podicle, and race to my car. And thus the cycle continues.

I couldn’t tell you what email address(es) the said iTunes songs were bought under. Since, I would guess, I bought and downloaded the songs shortly after iTunes began selling music, probably for sheer novelty factor, they’re most likely under my old college email address, an account I, of course, have no access to now that I’ve graduated. I’m sure iTunes has some kind of system set up whereas I can go in, answer “safety” questions, fill out a new account, put in a new credit card number (since I’ve switched banks, I’m sure they’ve got an old debit card on file as well), etc., etc., etc… Haven’t done that yet, pretty sure I won’t be doing it later, not when I could have the whole album downloaded illegally and without DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions in less time than it would take to reauthorize my songs for my new iPod and computer (heck, since I already paid for the songs, I won’t even feel guilty about it).

This post could go in many directions at this point: I could ponder the logic in using temporary-by-their-very-nature email addresses as user account names with something you supposedly “own” forever (10-years ago I had an AOL email address, for chrissake), or how the heck my grandmother is supposed to figure out how to re-authorize her latest Frank Sinatra tracks when she moves to a new iMac. But let’s just keep it simple: iTunes (more specifically, DRM) doesn’t work for the following reason: I’m not at all confident that 10-years from now, on whatever flying-spaceship computer I happen to be using, I’ll be able to play the iTunes songs I bought in 2006. I think the format will either be totally discontinued, or at some point over in the decade, I will have failed to have jumped through one of the maddening hoops Apple and the music labels erected, and I will have lost my chance to “update” the song status to play on my new computer(s). Because I’m not confident I’ll be able to use the songs I bought 10-years hence, I simply don’t buy them. To me, that means iTunes and DRM is broken.

Yahoo! is now trying to start its own music download service. The service will sell MP3’s without any restrictions, just like you used to be able to download on old illegal Napster. Since they have no restrictions, they’ll never expire or need to be re-authorized. They’ll be able to play on any portable music player that can play MP3’s (virtually all of them). They’ll just be the music you bought, nothing more. But, you guessed it, music co.’s aren’t too keen on giving consumers this much freedom. Fine. Keep putting up false walls, music industry, I’ll keep downloading music for free, and you won’t see a dime.

Go West and build a Web 2.0 company, young man! With the recent offer by Yahoo! to buy Facebook for a reported $900,000,000, the web has been in a tizzy (seems to be a lot of “tizzy’s” going around these days, eh?) over who will be the next to sell. Here’s my take on the Big 3:

Facebook

I’ve ranted about this company’s questionable practices before, but the truth is I love the Facebook, and personally consider it to be the most potentially valuable company of all I’ll list here today. In fact, I had fallen off a bit with my Facebook use (since I, you know, graduated) until they instituted the News Feed feature that got me so riled up. In my checking out how pervasive the feature was, I got dragged into the Facebook web all over again, and now find myself checking friend’s profiles, tagging pictures, and even setting up parties with the service. And yes, I’ll admit it, I even like using the News Feed to spy on others, now that Facebook has giving me the option to opt-out for myself (I’m a big hypocrite).

The exciting thing about the Yahoo! buy is that Yahoo! also owns Flickr, and the potential to tie the two services together is too obvious to miss. Adding Flickr’s photo services to Facebook’s social networking, and vice-versa, is going to be great, especially since Facebook has sub-par photo sharing technology, and Flickr has sub-par social networking technology in place. I love this buy; accept, Facebook, accept!

YouTube

YouTube brings nothing to the table. People think they love YouTube, when in fact they just love the Flash Video Format. You got to YouTube and, miracle of miracles, web based video just works. Never mind the fact that it looks like crap; it works every time.

Consistency is all the site has going for it. Back in November, 2 million people clicked a link provided by friends or blogs that led to an SNL musical parody. The clicker’s were half-expecting an error message when the video loaded, telling them they were in need of this or that plugin. Instead, they were amazed to find an admittedly cruddy looking video load quickly and without fail. The YouTube boom had begun, and it hasn’t stopped expanding since. But their method of automatically converting user-uploaded video of nearly any format into FLV for display on their site is not patentable and, indeed, not even based on their own technology.

YouTube should sell now, sell while the gettin’s good. They don’t present anything innovative, which means they’re in constant danger of losing their audience to a site that hosts user-submitted video just a little bit better. Just a little bit is all it takes, ask Friendster…

digg

I have a soft spot for digg.com, and for its founder, Kevin Rose, who I listen to every week on his podcast Diggnation. I applauded its move beyond tech news into sports, politics, celebrity gossip, etc. But, well, the fact is that the digg.com user base is still made up of tech geeks, and tech geeks posting about sports, politics, celebrity gossip, etc. turns out to be a bit narrow-sighted. Contrary to what we may have wanted to believe, digg is not going to replace the New York Times any time soon. In fact, as a news source, digg is a joke. It’s a bunch of geeks posting geeky stories that 90% of the public couldn’t care less about, no matter what news category the stories fall under.

For this reason, and I really hate to say this, I can actually see the new digg-ripoff Netscape.com, with its more diverse, less geek-prone user base, really being the site that changes the news biz. Oh well. Digg is still a great, daily read, but a serious news source it certainly is not…

Senator and presidential contender John McCain scored some major points with your humble space correspondent over the past week by finally standing up to Bush on a meaningful issue.

McCain and a couple other Republican Senators have rejected the Bush administration’s plan to “clarify” Article 3 of the Geneva Convention (which the Supreme Court has ruled the US Government must follow when interrogating terror suspects).

In a style we have come expect from the past couple of Presidents, Bush has taken an “it can mean whatever we want it to mean” attitude towards the language of International Law. Clinton quibbled over “what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” and now the Bush administration tries to find some wiggle-room in a statute that prohibits nations from engaging in, “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Basically, Bush wants the CIA to be able to use some harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists. Given Bush’s penchant for secret prisons and disdain for fair trials (to, you know, actually prove the prisoners he wants to (what some call) torture really are terrorists), I’m not inclined to give our government that leeway. Neither is McCain, a former POW himself, and so, for the first time in recent memory, he has stood up to the President on an issue that will probably lose him considerable support among the GOP base. McCain has blocked the President’s bill.

It’s about time. I’ve lost a lot of respect for old man McCain over the past few years. He’s been doing little more than toeing the Republican line on a host of issues I find repellant, NSA wiretapping being one of them. Many have made the argument that the U.S. endorsing the harsh treatment of prisoners will virtually ensure that our troops will be likewise handled harshly when they are captured. Well, I say that’s bull. We’re fighting terrorists here, not an organized state; our troops will be treated harshly no matter what we do. But that misses the important point: we’re the Unite States of America. We’re a bastion of liberty. We’re the good guys. Well, at least that’s what Bush has been shouting from the rooftops for the last few years, offering it as justification for our country crumbling foreign dictatorships and instilling democracy where we see fit. Well, we need to keep on being the good guys. I know terrorists want to kill us. I know we could probably stop a few terrorist attacks by torturing information out of captured terrorists. But that’s not something the United States should engage in. We need to be above torture, morally, as a country. Always.

Last night on his show, Bill O’Reilly said something along the lines of, “What good is having the moral high ground if you’re dead?” You are a coward, Bill O’Reilly. You put saving your own pathetic skin above your eternal, moral soul. You make a mockery of the ideas our country was founded upon. Instead of “give me liberty of give me death,” your mantra is: save my life no matter what. No matter who has to be tortured, no matter how it affects my general human dignity. I don’t care what has to be done to them, keep me alive! You’re a pathetic coward. And so is everyone who wishes to advance the cause of state-sponsored torture.

Nice work, McCain. Way to stick up for our country’s soul.

Spotted today on the CNN.com front page: “UFO, weather, delay shuttle landing.” Haha. Some editor’s been waiting his whole life to write that.

So it seems, once again, there’s something screwy going on up there in space: one of the American astronauts on the orbiting Space Shuttle Atlantis (which just yesterday had a nasty leakage of some smelly gas) spotted a piece of their shuttle floating by the shuttle’s window (a-ha! Travel back in time with me to a great scene from the superb 1983 film “The Right Stuff,” when the astronauts demanded the rocket scientists build a porthole into their space capsule. If they didn’t convince the engineers to put in a window back then, our boy never would have spotted that space debris today! Whatever…).

OK, beating up on astronauts is never going to be a popular endeavor, but I can’t hold my tounge any longer: get over it! I mean geez, ever since the tragic explosion of the Columbia, every space flight is seemingly wrought with catastrophes. News networks, being fed their information by NASA, go into a tizzy every time an astronaut has a tummy ache. It’s space travel, guys, we get it: it’s dangerous. We’ll wish the flyboys luck when blast off, and let us know when they land. Please stop blowing every minor problem up into an earth-shattering disaster. I don’t know who is really to blame here, the news networks breathlessly covering every space shuttle annoyance, or NASA, who are obviously so freaked out by the possibility of losing another shuttle crew that it’s a wonder they ever manage to get the things blasted off.

Being an astronaut is incredibly dangerous, but so are a hundred and one other jobs, none of which have the added the pride and cachet of being a United States Astronaut. To harp back to “The Right Stuff” again, recall all the test pilots killed trying to break the sound barrier, and nobody even knew what they were up to. Look at how many soldiers are killed every day in Iraq. Look at NASCAR, which averaged about a death per year from 1989-2002. And (gotta work this stat in), look at the NASCAR fan fatality rate: on average, 6 fans die at every race!

Moving on from such morbidity, let’s just remember that astronauts certainly know what they’re getting into when they sign up for the space program. While they certainly want every reasonable precaution taken before they head into the final frontier, I have to believe these guys are explorers at heart, and don’t want endless second-guessing hamstringing their efforts to go farther, faster, better.

To Mars!

Pope Benedict XVI stirred up some cartoon-of-the-prophet-Muhammad-esq controversy last week when, during a speech, he quoted an ancient Byzantine emperor who classified the teachings of Islam as “inhuman” and “evil” and claimed that the religion had been originally “spread by the sword.”

Muslim’s are up in arms about this, once again taking to the streets all over the world and demanding the Pope’s apology (don’t these people have jobs? Oh, right, no, they don’t). The pope engaged in some double-speak, saying he was sad that his remarks caused Muslim outrage, but not apologizing for his comments explicitly.

In a classically moronic response, Islamic terrorist groups have latched onto the widespread Muslim outrage over the pope calling their religion violent and threatened to respond with, what else, violence:

The group said Muslims would be victorious and addressed the pope as “the worshipper of the cross” saying “you and the West are doomed as you can see from the defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and elsewhere. … We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose head tax, then the only thing acceptable is a conversion (to Islam) or (killed by) the sword.”

For the love of God, somebody get these guys a publicist.

A few Muslim leaders, those who bothered to think through their proclamations, replied to the pope with the valid ascertain that Christianity (and Catholicism in particular) was certainly no stranger to violently imposing its beliefs upon non-believers.

All in all, a laughable bit a business on all fronts.

Switching back to a Mac after a decade of Windows use changed a lot of things about my computing. Probably the biggest change was that I could once again “trust” my operating system to do things right. When I used Windows I would, as a rule, immediately disable any kind of “automated” task Windows, or a specific program, may try to impose on me. For instance, whenever you installed drivers for a new digital camera on Windows (err, don’t have to do that crap anymore now that I’m using a Mac) the camera maker would always bundle into that install some lame photo organizing software that would look like crap, be slow as crap, and work like crap. So, I’d always have to delve into the new program’s preferences and disable the newly set default (a default set without my knowledge, usually) which would otherwise launch that photo program whenever I hooked up my digital camera.

Another example is what would happen in Windows when you inserted a CD into your computer’s CD Drive. By default, Windows would automatically “Launch” the CD’s .exe file, which would, ideally, lead you to the CD’s instillation process. But this automatic launching, for whatever reason, only worked with about 75% of software CD’s I placed in the drive, and so, when I put in a CD belonging to the unlucky 25% bracket, I’d sit there for minutes waiting for an instillation dialog to pop up that was never coming. I’d just sit there waiting like a big jerk!

Because of these annoying inconsistencies, I would always turn off any kind of automatic procedure in Windows; they were simply too unreliable. If I did it manually, at least I would know it would work. I continued this behavior when I switched to a Mac, but slowly learned to I could trust the Mac’s auto-features. My Mac would always recognize my digi-cam, and launch iPhoto. I could double-click a new font I downloaded, and it was automatically be installed as a system font. Like that Mac twerp from the commercials says, “things just kind of work on a Mac.”

That was the biggest change that came with moving to a Mac; I started to trust the system again. The second biggest change was my rekindled love affair with independently developed shareware apps. I didn’t use much shareware on Windows. It was always clunky, ugly, slow, and 90% of the time it was riddled with spyware and viruses. But since spyware and viruses aren’t an issue on a Mac (yet…), and shareware is often the only solution to solve a task you wish to complete on a Mac, I dipped my toes into the shareware stream and downloaded a couple… WOW!

Probably because so many graphic artists use Mac’s, Mac Shareware apps are almost always frickin’ beautiful. They’re usually lightweight, single purpose, well-designed little drops of perfection. There are even sites devoted to the most beautiful Mac downloadable Mac apps…

That rather long and involved introduction finally leads us here, to the topic of today’s post. The same guy who created the most beautiful Mac downloadable apps list, an 18-year-old kid named Phil Ryu, has come up with a great idea for a contest: My Dream App.

It’s “the event where 24 finalists compete for a chance to have their dream app made into reality.” Anybody can submit a written idea for a new piece of Mac shareware software. A group of “A-list Mac Celebrities” (they’ve got Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on board, and also digg.com founder Kevin Rose) will judge the top 24-finalists, and visitors of the site can cast their vote as well, and a thus a winner will be picked. The winning application idea will then be passed off to a group of (again) “A-list” software developers, graphic artists, etc., who will bring the winning app to life and offer it for download/sale. The person who submitted the winning idea will share in the software’s royalties, and the top 3 finalists will all receive cool prizes.

Not bad, eh? They’ve already got 20-or-so finalists listed on the site, and you can check out their software ideas. Couple of my fav’s:

1. Herald

Using carefully selected RSS feeds of world’s best newspapers, websites, comics and its own intelligence, it creates your very own newspaper. Interface similar to Pages and Stationery lets you create a newspaper just by dragging and dropping RSS feeds to right places on beautifully designed pages. And you can drop your own articles, PDFs and e-books too. Update instantly. Print it. Export for PDA or iPod. Move through issues like microfilms. It’s last news reader you’ll ever need.

My Take: I’ve been hoping for this type of thing for a while. I’d set it up with the NY Times’ editorial page, the LA Times local page, Variety for Hollywood news, back to the NY Times for world events, throw in a little Slashdot for technology… And it will all be set up to look like a standard newspaper; I miss that in this brave new web-news world…

2. Blossom

Choose a desktop plant to illustrate achievement of one’s goals. Create criteria that “feed it,” and criteria that “neglect it.” For example, to feed it: Actively use Excel over 20 minutes per hour. To Neglect it: Actively use of Firefox or Safari over 15 minutes per hour. If your plant is healthy and growing/flowering/etc, you know you’re meeting your goals. Consistently failing to meet one’s goals will slowly wilt the plant. Clicking on the plant can display stats of current health and graphs of app usage.

My Take: A decidedly “lite” program, that’s for sure, but a cool idea none-the-less. Let me know when I’m slackin’!

3. Whistler

Whistle while you work. Beat that Drum! App converts your tune to MIDI for use in GarageBand or any other audio application. With optional pitch correction for the out of tune. Records as much dynamics of the performance as possible. Also allows simple real-time playing with built in instruments and layering of recordings for quick fun compositions. Can also listen to your finger drumming. I often tap out drum beats with my fingers. Using objects on my desk that make 2 or 3 distinctive sounds. The hardware in a laptop can detect this in multiple ways. The microphone & the motion sensor. The user could define sounds the software could recognize and transmit any midi notes/velocity. (I have tried this with the earthquake detecting program, it can definitely see the strength)

My Take: Sweet deal! To heck with pounding keys on your synthesizer to figure out what notes you’ve got in your head. Just whistle ‘em and the notes go into GarageBand. You can then pick an instrument you want to play them, and mess around with all their attributes. A great way to get started on a song. Added bonus: this program should have online look-up capability, so you can whistle the tune to a popular song whose name you can’t remember, and it will fetch the song title and artist.

So that’s that. Some people on the tech sites have been complaining that people are stupid to submit their ideas to this contest, as they’ll only receive a fraction of any royalties their software will make if they win. These people are idiots. Ideas don’t mean anything in this world; it’s the execution of an idea, the finished product, that matters.

I’ve got high hopes for this contest. It’s an American Inventor for software. I’ll actually be really disappointed if one of the apps that doesn’t appeal to me gets picked. I better get voting!

It can be very easy to get caught up in the seeming hopelessness of the US’s struggle against radical Islam. We are up against a seemingly illogical enemy, one who places very little value on human life (their own lives included), and who don’t seem all that interested in their waking lives here in this world beneath Heaven. I often wonder why Osama and the rest even want to bother “converting all Americans to Islam” since they hold life on earth is such low regard; after all, young Muslim’s seem to be falling over each other for the chance to blow themselves up and escape this cursed planet.

The reasoned speeches of world leaders (or even the cowboy-threats of our President) all seem in vain when dealing with such suicidal radicals. After all, it was Machivelli who, after writing page after page on how the Prince can avoid and prevent conspiracies, warned that little could be done to stop a lone madman intent on assassination.

But I felt somehow emboldened after reading an article written on the 5^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by a prominent Muslim-American titled, “Kill Us, Too: We Are Also Americans.”

The author of the article, Aslam Abdullah, rails against the Islamic terrorists who, “hide in your caves and behind the faces of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. You don’t show your faces and you have no guts to face Muslims. You thrive on the misery of thousands of Muslim youth and children who are victims of despotism, poverty and ignorance.” The author’s language is tough, and it struck a chord with me in a way speeches by Western politicians no longer do. The Muslim author takes the terrorists to task, reminds us that this really isn’t a Western war against all of Islam, and that, if we hope to win, it would be in our best interest to keep it from becoming one:

You said you “invite you not to drop your weapons, and don’t let your souls or your enemies rest until each one of you kills at least one American within a period that does not exceed 15 days with a sniper’s gunshot or incendiary devices or Molotov cocktail or a suicide car bomb — whatever the battle may require.” I invite you to surrender, to seek forgiveness from God almighty for the senseless killing you and your supporters are involved in and repent for everything you have done.

You say that the word of God is the highest. Yes, it is. But you are not worthy of it. You have abandoned God and you have started worshipping your own satanic egos that rejoice at the killing of innocent people. You don’t represent Muslims or, for that matter, any decent human being who believes in the sanctity of life. Many among us American Muslims have differences with our administration on domestic and foreign issues, just like many other Americans do. But the plurality of opinions does not mean that we deprive ourselves of the civility that God demands from us. America is our home and will always be our home. Its interests are ours, and its people are ours. When you talk of killing of Americans, you first have to kill 6 million or so Muslims who will stand for every American’s right to live and enjoy the life as commanded by God.

The author reminds us that, despite what the radicals claim, Islam’s Allah does see extreme worth in our earthly lives and the terrorist are shaming that Godly worth with their deadly attacks.

This article serves as a reminder that, if we want to make it through this current struggle, we must convince the Muslims of the world that the terrorist do not represent them or their God, and they are amiss to hide or defend them.

Back in July of 2003, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and his boy rescued a couple of guys from drowning in a lake. The guys’ boat had sunk, and the Romney’s, who were fishing in the same lake, steered their boat over and pulled the guys out of the water. Obviously, this was too juicy a story for any Herald writer to pass up, and so the predictable media hub-bub ensued, with many people calling the Governor and his son “heroes.”

In an opinion article some republicans decried as partisan sour grapes, the Boston Globe’s Scott Leigh wrote that he did not think the Romney’s actions amounted to “heroism” (the original article is now behind the Globe Website’s pay wall, but you can see the article quoted extensively here).

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Properly speaking, however, Mitt is not a hero at all but rather a Good Samaritan. Granted, in the loose and liberal definition of modern laurels, the notion of heroism has largely lost its meaning. Thus it is that a precocious tot who dials 911 to secure help for a stricken family member now qualifies as a hero, as does the plucky pooch whose insistent barking alerts a sleeping family to a fire smoldering in the basement.

True heroism, however, comes only at the very real risk of physical harm to the rescuer. Which is why the stories of actual heroes impress themselves indelibly on our imagination.

Let me first say that it is in very bad taste for a liberal columnist to write an article devoted to bitching about the coverage being given to a Governor who actually saved lives. Let me next state that I agree with Leigh.

Scott Leigh puts into succinct wording exactly what I’ve always believed: to be a true hero, one must put his own well-being in peril in order to help others. Red Cross workers going into African war zones to treat the sick? Heroes. Firefighters running into burning buildings? Heroes. The Romney’s paddling over and pulling a couple of guys out of the water? Not so much.

All that said, there is a big group of people that I consider real heroes, and that is everyone who rushed to the Ground Zero site in the wake of 9/11. These people were New Yorkers who, in some sense of the word, had already survived 9/11. While most of us were staring anxiously at the skies above, wondering if and when the attacks would abate, these people rushed forth towards the wobbling buildings and dust filled air of attack site.

Some stayed in the unsafe environment for weeks (some for months), wheezing and coughing up black soot from their lungs all the while. The people who worked in the World Trade Centers did not choose to be part of the attacks of 9/11. They were ruthlessly murdered; they were victims. It was amazing to witness those who rushed to the scene in the aftermath, people who were spared on that Tuesday morning, choose to become part of the events of 9/11, choose, as it turns out, to hurt themselves in the process.

Those heroes are sick now. A few have even died, their lungs simply giving out all these years after they inhaled the toxic dust brew of pulverized asbestos, concrete, glass, lead… that they breathed in that morning and in the days that followed. Many of the worker’s have seen their lung capacity decrease by 40% since before they worked at the pile. Imagine that: you take a breath and only receive 60% of the air you’re used to. 60% of the air you need. They still cough of black sludge. Autopsies of those who die reveal their lung tissue had turned black.

As of right now there is many of the Ground Zero workers aren’t getting any help to pay for thier medical costs. Obviously, that situation needs to be rectified.

I nearly guarantee that ABC’s marketing machine had something to do with getting those early script drafts of their new docu-drama The Path To 9/11 out to various Clinton Administration officials.  I knew nothing of this mini-series prior to the endless complaints of the Clinton staff, but when I started reading the details reporters wrote about the show in between quotes of Clinton officials screaming at ABC, I became intrigued.  $40 million to produce.  Over 350 speaking parts.  On and on.  It sounded like quite the production.

So, I watched the first 2-and-a-half hours of the movie last night in my Las Vegas hotel room, and I was engaged throughout.  I think they’ve done a very, very good job on this movie.  It looks great, and while the director has perhaps watched City of God a few dozen times too many, it is both an aesthetic and educational success.

Yes, I said educational.  All last week we heard ABC harp that its viewers surely understood that the production was a fictionalization of real events.  Clinton officials publicly worried that the words some screenwriter put in their character’s mouths, words the real people never uttered, would become entwined with their personas in the public psyche.  Well, it was all kind of for naught, as most viewers spent their time watching those annoying Manning bros. play catch all night.  But, after watching the film myself (after watching Colts/Giants game (oh, the joys of being on the West Coast)), I began to see things from the former official’s perspectives.

The fact is I did learn from the show last night.  I learned exactly how the bomber of the World Trade Center in ’93 was connected to Bin Laden.  I learned how the US Government hung the Northern Alliance out to dry after the first Bin Laden assassination attempt in the late 90’s.  I learned how badass those CIA field guys really are!  I think ABC’s film does a real public service by putting events in a digestible and entertaining context.

But I can certainly see how, a few weeks or months from now, my memory could blur together factual events the movie depicted (re: Bin Laden’s funding of the original WTC bombing) with speculative scenes from the film (re: George Tenet’s unwillingness to put his neck on the line to get Bin Laden pre-9/11).  So it’s a tricky business, these historical docu-dramas.  But I’m proud of ABC for not caving into the Clinton administration’s badgering.  The exact words spoken in the backrooms of the CIA and FBI can’t be known, but there’s no reason the film’s interpretation of those words should be pro-Clinton administration, just because they happened to complain.  I’ll be watching Part II tonight; here’s hoping many Americans do.