Let’s talk about Afghanistan. You should easily find it in this map:

Between the 12th and 16th Centuries (1100’s and 1500’s), the Mongols, initially led by Ghengis Kahn, completely invaded, kicked ass and took names. Though they mostly hung out in Ghazni, a central city between Kandahar and Kabul; it was their base of operations for kicking India’s ass. For added timeline context: During most of this time, nobody knew North America existed.

In the early 1500’s, Afghanistan was divided. To the West you had the Persians (now known as Iran), To the north was the Uzbecks, to the East were the Mughals (Persianized/Indianized Mongol descendants. Hell of a gene pool).

In by the year 1700, you had all the occupying armies, but there were still a bunch of Pachtun Tribes (aka invaded Afghanis). Two such tribes were predominant: On one side are the Durranis – most of the settled population, farmers, traders, the professional middle class. On the other are the Ghilzai, traditionally nomadic, fiercely fundamentalist in religion, whose tribal homelands stretch across into Pakistan as far as Kashmir. They hated each other; Afghanistan was in a civil war while they were occupied! Great.

Kandahar was mostly Ghizlai at this time. In 1709, The Afghan people, sick of being occupied by the frickin’ Persian and Mongol armies, say “Fuck this, we have to kick out these Persian invaders from our land.” and decide to kick the Persians out. Led by Mir Wais Hotak (Ghizlai), they did; and took back Kandahar for their own. Hey, it’s a tiny kingdom but it’s a start. The Persians were too rich, fat and lazy to retake Kandahar (literally, actually).

Mir Wais’s son, Mir Mahmud Hotaki, figures his dad was on the right track, and decides to kick more Persian ass…and does he ever. He took their frickin’ capital (Isfahan) within less than 2 years! Mir Mahmud Hotaki, being the sensible man, figures he deserves a go at ruling the people he just invaded. He becomes Shah of Persia. He pretty much abused the shit out of his Persian subjects. He was then murdered by a jealous cousin who wanted power too. Then the Persians said “Fuck this, we have to kick out these Afghan invaders from our land”. They retake Kandahar.

By 1747, Ahmed Shah Durrani kills the Persian ruler of Kandahar and becomes ruler.

The Durranis rule until, oh…about 1979. But don’t worry, the Ghizlai were still around, and still fecking hated the Durranis. The ruling Durranis had to move the capital from Ghizlai populated Kandahar to Kabul a couple of hundred years before. The Durranis were never shy to ask for help in calming down the Ghizlai. Either the Tajiks from the North, or later the British, were happy to help. The Brits, had every interest of protecting its crown jewel, India, from the Ghizlai.

In 1979, The Russians decide they want a piece of Afghanistan. They try to get the Ghizlai to help them overthrow the Durranis. Thing was, The Ghizlai hated the Russians’ socialist and secular agenda so much, they were easily influenced by the USA to attack the Russians. America gave tons of money, guns and training to a Ghizlai guy from Saudi Arabia (They’re everywhere) named Osama Bin Laden so he could fight the Russians (and the Durranis too, the USA didn’t really care, as long as the Russians lost). Heh—It worked.

The Ghizlai, now using God Mode + Infinite ammo cheats, take over Afghanistan, and impose a strict Islamic Sharia law. America leaves under the rule of what is now knows as Taleban, thanking them for their help.

In 2001, The Taleban attack the US. Americans give God Mode+Infinite ammo cheats to Hamid Karzai, a Durrani drug lord.

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I’ll leave final thoughts to Christopher Booker

As so often before, the Ghilzai have seen their country hijacked by a Durrani regime, supported by a largely Tajik army and by hated outsiders from the West. One reason why we find it so hard to win “hearts and minds” in Helmand is that we are up against a sullenly resentful population, fired by a timeless hatred and able to call on unlimited support, in men and materiel, from their Ghilzai brothers across the border in Pakistan.

Only in towns such as Sanguin and Garmsir are there islands of Durrani, willing to support the Durrani government in distant Kabul. No sooner have our forces “secured” a village from the Taleban, than their fighters re-emerge from the surrounding countryside to reclaim it for the Ghilzai cause. Without recognising this, and that what the Ghilzai really want is an independent “Pashtunistan” stretching across the border, we shall never properly understand why, like so many foreigners who have become embroiled in Afghanistan before, we have stumbled into a war we can never hope to win.

Be sure to watch till the end, when it indicates the two major cities that have been the most involved in war. It’s not a surprise.

Photons and electromagnetic waves are hardly topics I choose to think about on a regular basis. Once in a while, I’ll be reminded that it takes 8 minutes for light from the sun to reach the earth, but that’s about it. My father would often say to me when I was a child, looking up to the stars, that I was seeing millions of years into the past. Technically, we see nothing but the past.

Light is both energy and mass at the same time. Light can fall; that’s why black holes are named that way—surrounding light gets sucked inside.

In 2005 it was predicted that there was an attractive and repulsive force component to light. They have since discovered the attractive force, but have only now discovered the repulsive force.

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Physics and science in general have become a passion of mine a long time ago. I now find that as time goes by, I am ever more humbled by what we have found out about nature. I recently spoke about my appreciation for Richard Feynman. Some of his lectures on physics have been made available by audio on box sets, which could be purchased at over $150 US. The first time I heard the audio of the lectures at Caltech, I had never heard of the man. To say I was mesmerized would be an understatement. He was an expert at effectively communicating science and knew how to add humor to the material being taught. It helped me begin to gather what was being taught and appreciate its meaning.

I say all this, hoping I still have your attention. If I do, you may be interested in the other discovery I made today.

In the 1960’s, a young man by the name of Bill Gates stumbled on those same lectures and loved them as much as I. Since then, he has purchased the rights to the video of his lectures and has posted them online for free, in what is called Project Tuva. The catch is that you have to download the video player required to see all that is to be seen on the website of Microsoft Research, Silverlight. It is hardly an inconvenience, as it is a 10 second download, and a quicker install, and very much worth your time, if you are interested.

Now you may watch the lectures, in excellent quality, with great extras that are still unobtrusive. I’m not in marketing, but if there was any trick I knew to get people to at least watch the first of the lectures, then I would do it.

If I got a single person to watch even a single lecture by having posted this, it would be worth far more than my time and effort. It just may lead to someone starting think about light a little bit more.

I wish there was a machine like this:

That way, I could upload in people’s minds whatever it takes to fully appreciate, say, Richard Feynman. Everything from his lectures to when he tells the story about his (hilarious) stint at Los Alamos. Once you get to know how funny, kind and brilliant this man is, then you can fully appreciate chats like these:

But then again, such a machine could just as easily corrupt many people’s minds if false information were purposely forced upon them. I think it would have more of an impact than the Atomic Bomb on our entire race.

Over 60 years ago, Mikhail Kalashnikov, a Russian peasant and inventor, would set into production the final model of the weapon he wanted to make to exact revenge on Nazi invaders. The Avtomatni Kalashnikova model-1947 would eventually be the mainstay weapon of drug traffickers, rebel groups and whole armies even to this day.

From the Wired article:

American soldiers in Vietnam, toting M16s prone to jamming, gained a grudging respect for the AK-47, too, when they began encountering them in large numbers.

[...]

Kalashnikov, now 89, has expressed regret that his AK-47 has become the weapon of choice in the terrorist world, but he suffers no pangs of guilt. “If someone asks me how I can sleep at night knowing that my arms have killed millions of people, I respond that I have no problem sleeping,” he said. “My conscience is clean. I constructed arms to defend my country.”

There are an estimated 100 million Kalashnikovs in circulation, and at the equivalent of $25 apiece overseas, it’s no wonder it’s so widely used, given it’s proven reliability.

(Click on the image to zoom)

Hence why I think education, and knowing our own history is a prerequisite to progress.

I went to the Canadian War Museum the other day and was thoroughly impressed. It was very well laid out, the special exhibit on life in WWI’s trenches was incredible. I’m not a guns&ammo fan – I’m just a history nut, and the museum was really good at telling the tale of the past 400 years of conflict having to do with the area.

One idea that kept ringing in my head : How wars are viewed from home.

• Nobody really wants to go to war, or to need to

• …but people have an enormous potential to band together in the face of a threat to their “world”

The U.S. was invigorated to join in the fight for WWII because they wanted to exact revenge from a single very cruel incident (that was actually foreseen, but that’s another story), same for Afghanistan. But there’s also a critical mass of acceptable casualties, it seems, before a populace shows weariness and wants to back out of war. I believe that in a just war, we need to do whatever it takes to convince people of it’s noble goals, and how they are being achieved. However, there have been unjust wars as well. It may be tough to trust the government in the case of a real need for an effort on the homefront.

When viewing the reaction of Arabs following Afghanistan/Iraq, I can’t say I blame them. How would we react if some foreign power, of some “heathen” religion, invaded and killed a bunch of civilians, claiming that we would greet them as liberators? I can understand why someone would consider strapping a bomb to themselves to exact revenge from having his/her entire family killed by these invaders. Isn’t that was your typical dude from Kansas would do if that happened to his family?

It’s okay if we do it, just not if it’s them.

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

—William Shakespere, The Merchant Of Venice, Act III, scene I