The mainstream American press isn’t painting a very complete picture Afghanistan. I imagine this is partly because of information overload, and dealing with the events of last week is difficult enough without the convoluted mess that is Afghanistan.

Still, we need to know what we’re getting into. Stratfor’s country profile starts with the line “Afghanistan is a tragic mess.” The Sydney Morning Herald published this map of active factions which illustrates how many groups are active and where their support is coming from. This Times of London article, Where war is a way of life, was written by a journalist who has traveled through the country and interviewed the mountain fighters. The article I linked to yesterday was also published by Salon, Welcome to the death zone. MSNBC posted the last interrview with Ahmed Shah Massoud, who lead the strongest resistance to the Taliban and was assassinated two days before the US attacks.

Why hasn’t Radio Free Afghanistan been discussed before now? Military action breaks bodies but hardens minds, there needs to be a psychological assault as well. The mountains called Hindu Kush literally translate as “Slaughter of the Hindus” and The Khyber Pass is bloodstained throughout history, the first recorded passage was in 326 B.C. by Alexander the Great.

The guardian UK published a vivid description of what a western military force would be facing in these mountains. Their first supposition that Afghanistan had not been conquered since Alexander the Great is an unfortunate falsehood in an otherwise excellent article.

A guy named Sam runs a site called exploding dog. He draws pictures from titles people send him. Yesterday he posted this one, titled I didn’t understand until I got out of the woods. Someday I want to buy him lunch.

The ISP handling our email is getting hammered by the Nimda worm. I haven’t been able to send or receive mail today, supposedly they are working on it. More reason to host on Apache.

For anyone bothered by the Nostradamus hoax that’s been floating around the internet since the World Trade Center attack, I suggest reading this article.

The much-forwarded quatrain is completely bogus. It originated as a fictional example in a Canadian college student’s essay A Critical Analysis of Nostradomus, [sic] the author created the quatrain to illustrate how easy it is to fake prophesy through vague terms. I’d love to hear what he thinks about his theories and fake prophesy being proved completely effective.

Whoever started emailing this didn’t even get the dates right. The quatrain has been credited to Nostradamus in the year 1654. Nostradamus died in 1566. I suppose that could have been a typo, but I prefer to consider it stupidity.

“This prophecy is truly the Mr. Potato Head of predictions.”

The Webdings/Wingdings “NYC” correlation is troubling, but just an unfortunate coincidence.

Among the other troubling but basically absurd things people are freaking out about, two images of smoke which look like a bad cartoon version of the devil. I don’t think people spend enough time looking at clouds anymore. (I’m not linking to any images because I think this is ridiculous.)

Who ya gonna call?

After dinner Horacio took this photo:

click to enlarge

Of all the horror I saw this past week, this is the image which finally got to me. These people, my friends, this family. Breaking bread and sharing wine. Life is beautiful, life goes on.

Amazon’s Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund has slowed down at $5.6 million. Only 149,000 people have contributed so far. This could be much higher.