the other edge, of the country, I mean. California is living up to its sunny reputation today. I am using someone else's computer just to mention one horrific fact I have discovered.
IE doesn't display my sidebars! (I normally use Mozilla Firefox.) The other kids' sidebars appear on their websites, but mine are invisible. Another reason, if it is needed, to hate Bill Gates.
Every time I go away somewhere, my already pitiful numbers shrink even further; then they come up again, s-l-o-w-l-y.
So, I have to tell you, I will be in sunny California for a week, starting tomorrow. Those few of you who stop by here, come back in a week, maybe ten days.
By the way, are you guys all the strong, silent type. How about some comments? Nothing bad, mind you. Just stop by and say hello.
This is a very, very long post, but every word is important:
I am thinking of a word that keeps popping up whenever the Mohammed cartoons are mentioned.
That word is BUT. A sneaky word. It is used to deny or qualify what one has just said.
How many times lately have we not heard people of power, the Opinion Makers and others say that of course we have freedom of speech, BUT.
They have said it, all of them, from Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, to our own Bendt Bendtsen [a Danish Politician]. Once we had to be sensitive to the easily hurt feelings of the Nazis, then came the Communists, now it is the Islamists. The reason I say ‘Islamists’ is that I do not for a moment believe all the world’s Muslims are pissing on us. I think we are dealing with thugs, fools and misled people. Those are the ones we have to deal with, and then the chickenshit politicians.That is why I say: Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Speech. There is no but....
Initially I was doubtful of the timeliness of publishing the cartoons. Later events have convinced me that it was both just and useful to do so. That they are consistent with Danish law and Danish custom seem to me less important than this: that we now know that remote, primitive countries deem themselves justified in telling us what to do. Unfortunately we must also note that governments close to us are agreeing with them in the name of expedience.
From First Post:
The Quay brothers have called their new film The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes. Big mistake. It may well be a masterpiece but I'm sorry, that title is pretentious and whimsical and goes straight into my sin bin, next to The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean and The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.
The history of cinema is replete with off-putting titles. Painful experience has taught me that the words "hotel" or "circus" should be approached with caution since they're invariably metaphor alerts.
From Dave Nalle:
To Shiite Muslims, this is the holy week of Muharram, when they honor the death of Imam Hussein, the grandson of Mohammed in a battle fought at Karbala in the 7th century. The height of this festival is the day of Ashura, which was Thursday
You may wonder how one celebrates an important holiday like this. Do you have cake and ice cream? Do you exchange presents? Do you solemnly light a candle in memory of these brave soldiers of the faith? Do you go down to the mosque and say a prayer? Or do you, perhaps, parade through the streets beating yourself bloody with a flail made of steel chain, while intermittently whacking your young sons on the head with a sword until their faces run red with blood?
In a sane and civilized culture one of the other modes of celebration would prevail, but among Shia throughout the Muslim world, the bloody parade of penitential violence and ritualistic child abuse is preferred. The practice is particularly important in Iraq where huge parades took place in the major cities and the streets ran with blood. The largest celebrations were in Karbala where 2 million pilgrims crowded the streets.
Under Saddam Hussein the Ashura rituals were banned throughout Iraq, and Iran, effectively ruled by a Shiite theocracy, also bans the festival. In both cases Ashura was banned because of the religious violence and fanatic excesses associated with the holiday. However, under the new government in Iraq, Ashura was openly celebrated last year for the first time in decades and was celebrated again this year. Government troops turned out to protect the marchers, dressed all in black rather than in their official uniforms....
n the West we think we live in a rational world.... But reason and the more extreme forms of Islam have nothing at all in common. We think that we can negotiate anything, that everyone has a price or at least a sensible motivation for what they do. But the more we are exposed to the nature of Islam by direct contact and through worldwide media the more it becomes clear that our rational paradigms just do not apply.
You cannot negotiate with fanatics. You cannot use logic to understand the actions of madmen. You cannot reason with people who are inherently irrational. As a society a large portion of the Islamic world is dangerously, violently psychopathic, and as contact with them continues they will either contaminate the rest of the world or drag us all into bloody conflict. You don't reason with a rabid dog. You either shoot it or it bites you and you get rabies too.
Mr Charm and I went to Staples yesterday. He wanted to buy an office chair, a real bargain, but it was too big to fit in the car assembled. I suggested he purchase it unassembled. He said it cost only $5 to purchase it already assembled. I said it wouldn't fit into the car. He said it was a real bargain. I said...well, you see where this is going?
I went to the courtesy counter to buy stamps, and when I went outside to the car, there was Mr Charm and an assembled chair. Which would not fit into the car. Mr C kept trying to shoehorn it into the car but despite his best efforts the chair refused to shrink and the car refused to expand.
He then tried to take the chair apart. But it was really well assembled. Efforts to take the car apart also failed.
After about 30 minutes of heavy breathing, muttered curses and turning dangerously red in the face, the score stood at: Ford Motor Co 1; Mr Charm 0.
We returned the assembled chair. And bought an unassembled chair. Which fit into the trunk with the greatest of ease.
But Mr C remained huffily silent all the way home.
Well, I suppose it had to happen--the local Jewish federation have found me, after less than six months in Delaware. Or else they put their hand in a hat and drew out my name.
I got a coy letter from them today, suggesting that it would be so much easier for me if they could just have my e-mail address so I could receive their passionate pleas for money without walking to the mailbox.
I will probably do it, if only to save a tree or two.
Why doesn't the CIA contract out the search for Osama bin Laden to the Jewish federation? They can find anyone.
Trouserquand is quitting? I think? It's difficult to be sure:
Tonight, as the weasels ululate to the setting sun, and the few remaining feral hairstylists in the woods below return to their nests to roost, Matilda and I will don our bondage gear and oil the badger for the final time, before making our way up to the very rooftop of Quandary Towers.
Once there we will, in a ceremony that dates back to just after tea-time yesterday, lower the Standard of the Noble Order Of The Trouser Quandaries* for the very last time.
Yes, my little stapling machine, it is true that all good things must come to an end, and the same applies to those things that on rare occasion reach the heights of mediocrity such as this… er… whatever it is.
How to call the police for help
George Phillips of Meridian, Mississippi was going up to bed, when his wife told him that he'd left the light on in the garden shed, which she could see from the bedroom window. George opened the back door to go turn off the light, but saw that there were people in the shed stealing things.
He phoned the police, who asked "Is someone in your house?" and he said "no". Then they said that all patrols were busy, and that he should simply lock his door and an officer would be along when available. George said, "Okay," hung up, counted to 30, and phoned the police again.
"Hello, I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people in my shed. Well, you don't have to worry about them now cause I've just shot them all." Then he hung up.
C
Within five minutes three police cars, an Armed Response unit, and an ambulance showed up at the Phillips residence and caught the burglars red-handed. One of the Policemen said to George: "I thought you said that you'd shot them!" George said, "I thought you said there was nobody available!"
(True Story)
[T]he author and academic Deborah Lipstadt, who Irving unsuccessfully sued for libel in the UK in 2000 over claims that he was a Holocaust denier, said she was dismayed.
"I am not happy when censorship wins, and I don't believe in winning battles via censorship... The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and with truth," she told the BBC News website.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer:
California, known for setting the cultural zeitgeist, deserves equal notoriety for exporting another dubious product: bad policy. A current example is a proposal to replicate California's vehicle emissions rules in Pennsylvania, which includes a provision aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Regardless of any merit in addressing the earth's climate - even Golden State regulators concede it will be scarcely marginal - the biggest effect by far will be an increase in activity for Pennsylvania's trauma doctors, grief counselors and grave diggers.
Here's why: The only way to reduce vehicular greenhouse gas emissions is to reduce fuel consumption. Reducing fuel consumption requires either building vehicles with much more expensive technologies or reducing their size. Contrary to wishful thinking and urban legend, miracle technology to dramatically improve fuel economy without major trade-offs neither exists nor is on the horizon. Larger vehicles - including full-size autos, trucks and SUVs - will be forced to go the way of the dodo bird. Physics and history both inform us that making vehicles smaller will result in significantly more deaths and injuries.
The wonderful-sounding chimera of trade-off-free vehicles that go farther on a gallon of $2.50 gasoline disappears into ugly reality when one understands that such a transaction is quite literally a trade of blood for oil.
That's because the laws of physics are enforced with brutal clarity when vehicles collide. Bigger is safer when all other factors, such as air bags and stability control systems, are held equal. What's more, nearly four in 10 small-vehicle fatalities are single-vehicle events, not collisions with other vehicles. What size vehicle would you rather be driving if you had the misfortune of smashing into a utility pole?
The unhappy reality that small cars are the most dangerous passenger vehicles on the road was just confirmed in a report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The study showed that the compact-car fatality rate is almost 50 percent higher than that for full-size SUVs.
No better summation of the inherent dichotomy of fuel economy and safety exists than was offered in August by the NHTSA's administrator at the time, Jeffrey Runge, himself a trauma doctor: "Every tenth of mile a gallon that we raise [vehicle fuel economy standards] beyond what is technologically feasible, we kill people."
Indeed, we now have decades of real-world experience analyzed by numerous academic, government and insurance studies. Consider:
In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences affirmed that earlier fuel-economy-driven vehicle downsizing resulted in 1,300 to 2,600 additional deaths annually, confirming a previous NHTSA report's conclusions.
Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and the Brookings Institution estimate the initial wave of vehicle downsizing in the 1970s and early 1980s increased occupant deaths by 14 to 27 percent.
A report using government and insurance data found that, by 1999, downsizing had caused the deaths of more than 46,000 Americans. Factoring in ensuing years, deaths now likely eclipse 57,000 - nearly the equivalent a sold-out Eagles game.
From the American Enterprise, an analysis of the religion of peace:
I
t turns out not a single TV network and only two newspapers...have dared publish the dozen Danish cartoons that have set off riots around the world. Even the New York Press, which once ran a whole column in which a writer described removing a boil from his scrotum, has chickened out. Four staff members quit in protest last week after the top brass backed down.
Whence this newfound humility? Well, everybody�s mumbling something about �respect for religion� and �not wanting to offend anybody,� but the real reason is transparent. They�re scared to death. Publishing portraits of rock stars posing as Jesus or putting naked movie stars on the cover of Vanity Fair�that�s all in a day's work. Only a bunch of hillbillies down in Arkansas will be offended. But publishing a cartoon of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban�now that�s serious. Somebody might start throwing rocks or set off a bomb in the office. Best to duck our heads on this one. Trading brickbats with government officials is one thing; doing something risky is quite another.
My question is, what�s the difference? Nothing we say or do will make Muslims like us any better. Islam has been beating down the door of Western Civilization since the time of Charlemagne. They conquered Spain, took Constantinople in 1453, besieged Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683. The Turks blew up the Parthenon in 1687 and fighting between Greeks and Turks continued into this century. The Balkans became the �powder keg of Europe� once the Turks invaded.
And it isn�t just us. Islam is at war with every civilization on its borders. They�re fighting with India, with China, with African tribes in Sudan. Nor do Muslims ever stop fighting among themselves. The whole history of Islam is a story of a group of dissidents going out into the desert, deciding the religion practiced by the elites was not the �true Islam,� and crashing back upon the cities to seize power. The word �assassins� comes from a Persian cult whose members drugged themselves with hashish before carrying out suicide attacks. The Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda are just the latest of a long, long line.
Islam is a culture that has never learned to curb male violence. All it can do is export it.
So what can we poor Americans to do except hold another �Multicultural Appreciation Day?�
show how busy you are:
* I'm swamped
* I'm drowning
* I'm barely able to keep my head above water
* I'm barely able to tread water
* I'm flooded
* I'm in over my head
* I'm sinking
From the New York Times Book Review, in a review of two books about Lincoln>
Yet by the end, while still a religious skeptic, Lincoln, too, seemed to equate the preservation of the Union and the freeing of the slaves with some higher, mystical purpose.
This is the spooky Lincoln, the politician who can send a small chill up the spine. Considering the repulsiveness of the cause he opposed (no, it wasn't "states' rights") and the universal hope offered by American democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is easy to understand such feelings. But one feels a good deal queasier contemplating a president less thoughtful and tempered than Lincoln, who enjoys a special relationship with our armed forces, is willing to play fast and loose with the Constitution and justifies his policies as part of God's great plan.
She is alive and well and living in Alabama.
After To Kill A Mockingbird came out in 1960, winning the Pulitzer Prize a year later, she went back to Monroeville, the little town in Alabama where she and Capote were brought up. She never left, and the woman who once said she wanted to be the Jane Austen of south Alabama has never written another book....
The only clue to her seclusion came in her last personal interview, in 1964. She said of her book: "I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement - public encouragement. I hoped for a little, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected."
So her escape from death was an escape back to her childhood: she still shares a house in Monroeville with her 94-year-old sister, Alice, who, like their father, the role model for Atticus Finch in the book, is a lawyer.
The people of Monroeville regularly hold re-enactments of the To Kill A Mockingbird trial in the old town courtroom, where Harper Lee's father and sister appeared - and, in the case of the latter, appear: Alice is still a practising lawyer. Harper never attends the re-enactments.
From silent running, which got it from ramblestrip,, an explanation of the international cow situation.
Read it yourself.
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