(Nor are you the first to have entertained the last thought - were there actual Justice in the world)

Indeed, perception is all - and you are 'there', outside the provincial US, with its usual media focus on us-us-us as seen by.. us. We are today experiencing that adage from Your territory IMhO, crisis = danger + opportunity.

I have long believed that Billy n'Bally represent the palpable prototype for a massive pure-greed based transformation of "business" (which always operated upon at least certain minimal ethical ideas) into the present M$ emulators, some of us call "bizness".

The .commers' basic arrogance and in effect nihilism (what was their product, other than the spawning of more .coms?) were the specimen biznesses of a startling new era of effortless work --> meaningless 'products' --> early retirement: dreamed by those who never actually "worked" a single day in their lives, and have no idea what the rewards of actual work - might be like.

I suspect that That fantasy is partly buried now, but the idea is so attractive to the PHB-mind - doubtless we shall see other forms tried. Will we have the wit to laugh at those?

I feel at least some hope that.. 9/11 just might reignite a recollection of the former American spirit, which always incorporated a degree of honor and selflessness (however obscured by later morphing of the idea of capitalism into a main religion). Is our raison d'etre - to dream of capital 24/7?

My further hope is that a certain revulsion shall occur as.. more and more the, examples set by Billy n'Bally and their now countless clones - will be seen to lie at the heart of what we have recently lost. The parallel of take no prisoners as a shibboleth for.. commerce as war ?? - I take to measure the degree of our lost humanity of recent decades. May we soon be forced to examine that slogan too..

Even the whole idea of 'IT' is so trivial an aspect of genuine Life, compared with the massive problems created by "info worship" to date; perhaps these recent events might even free some mental and genuine *emotional* space for looking at our internal distribution of wealth --- and how the rest of the world addresses such priorities. Most people in the world have a need for meaningful work which is not done within the grand abstraction of, reductio of AllThings to.. 1s and 0s.

There *has* to be some goodness finally resulting from such horrific suffering (by the living, as always) - it is, I believe, a natural law.


Ashton