Local Impact of the Iraqi Elections

You don't get much more stark honesty than this guy's description of his trip to talk to Iraqis voting in Washington:
Like Millions Of Iraqis, I Made A Long Journey To The Nearest Polling Place Today

You may think that you have felt dumb before, but let me tell you something: until you have stood in front of a man who knows real pain and told him that you are against your country's alleviation of his country's state-sponsored murderous suffering, you have not felt truly, deeply, like a total fucking moron.

The New Symbol of Democracy?

The ink stained finger as a symbol of freedom.

Nothing was illuminated

I just finished reading Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Foer. Of course, its pleasant enough to read for the fantasy, but in a book dealing with shtetl life and the holocaust, I think its reasonable to expect a bit of 'illumination' too. Instead, it dishes up a series of stereotypes, starting with a crazy but poetic youngster from the Ukraine and it depicts shtetl life through an unfeeling checklist of Jewish cultural icons.

Worst of all is the description of the fate of a Ukrainian village in 1942. Magical realism blends actual atrocities into the twisted fabric of the whole book so that they become unexceptional. It is hardly more disturbing to read of a Nazi massacre than to learn about the hero's great great great grandfather whose skull was pierced by a metal blade following a mill accident.

In fairness, the first 100 pages were amusing. But after the same jokes were milked to death, I started to developed the same boredom that sets in with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Both the style and even the story are derivative of Marquez. It's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' with a phoney yiddush accent.

For me, fiction only succeeds if I can sympathise with one or another of the protagonists. But it's hard to empathise with caricatures. The single authentic voice is developed by the Ukrainian character, as he gradually discards his comic strip personality and is revealed to be the real 'hero' of the book. But even there, the problems he deals with are too mundane and the situations too morally stark to care about.

I may have been spoilt by reading A Jewish Life Under the Tsars by Chaim Aronson which depicts 18th century Lithuanian life in vivid gritty detail. It's autobiographical, so the comparison is not really fair. Still works of pure creativity can beautifully transmit the genuine voice of a culture. A few weeks ago Victoria Hanna performed at The Kitchen in NY. Her piece drew out the mystical understanding of the connection between hebrew alphabet and nature of reality. In it, there was more illumination in the way she pronounced a 'pey' than in 50 pages of JSF's prose.

The Genetics of Fitness

A review article in this week's edition of Nature discusses research showing that genetics strongly influences how one's body reacts to physical exercise.

Apparently around 5% of people showed no improvement in oxygen absorption following a twenty week fitness program, and 'good cholesterol' levels declined in a third of participants. Reductions in heart rates and blood pressure varied widely, with a few people (out of 740 studied) actually demonstrating decreased performance after the program. However, the researchers rather cheerfully pointed out that none of the participants fared worse on all of the factors studied.

About half the variability between people could be explained by genetics - fairly typical for behavioural traits. This is not irrelevant to me right now, having discovered today that two weeks into my fitness program, my weight is unchanged. I blame genetics, although in my case olive oil may be a contributing factor.

This kind of genetic trait is fascinating, in that it underlies the ability of the body to adapt itself to the environment. In this way, fitness is rather like the mental capacity for learning. In 1895 James Baldwin published 'Mental Development in the Child and the Race' in which he pointed out that the capacity for learning can contribute to the process of Evolution, by facilitating the evolution of complex traits. Individuals able to modify their instinctive behaviour to take advantage of partially evolved traits will derive advantage from those traits and tend to fix the genetic variants responsible in the population.

However, the 'Baldwin effect', is not limited to mental learning. In principle, many systems where there is 'wriggle' room between the hard-wired genetic information, and the physiological outcome, can and do display a Baldwin effect. There are some beautiful examples in bacteriology.

I wonder whether the variability between people in ability to adapt to physical fitness requirements, might not be a snapshot of a process of Baldwin evolution in action.

Oil for Kickbacks Saga Continues

Times Online - Kofi Annan’s son admits oil dealing
It's outrageous that Dick Cheney's former firm, Halliburton, received no-bid contracts in Iraq. It's appalling that he goes duck hunting with a supreme court Justice who is hearing cases against him. And its equally appalling that Kofi Annan's son participated in the oil for food fiasco. Are we really supposed to believe that his father knew nothing of his involvement?

Great Turnout in Iraq

Wow! This from Reuters of all places:

Even in Falluja, the Sunni city west of Baghdad that was a militant stronghold until a U.S. assault in November, a steady stream of people turned out, confounding expectations. Lines of veiled women clutching their papers waited to vote.

These are brave women.

Anne Bayefsky's Response to the UN Special Session

The U.N. gets a p.r. boost.

Widening the lens, we notice that last month the U.N. adopted 22 resolutions condemning the state of Israel, and four country-specific resolutions criticizing the human-rights records of the other 190 U.N. member states.

And more...

On exactly the same day that the secretary-general announced the holding of the commemorative session, January 11, 2005, he also pushed forward the U.N. plan to create a register of the Palestinian victims of Israel's non-violent security fence. (There are no plans to create a register of Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism.)

Victims of the fence!? Monty Python would have a field day. Over 97% of its length, the fence is chain link and looks something like this:

source: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Richard Lewontin - Fraud in Science

Richard Lewontin's November 2004 article in the NYR, discussing fraud in science provoked two letters disputing the facts of the examples he presented. He replies defending his interpretation of the facts of the cases. At the time, I also noted a couple of oddities, and thought someone might write in about those. They didn't, so I may as well pop them up here.

First, he recounted the talmudic story about a divine voice intervening in a dispute between sages. As recounted in Baba Meziah, Rabbi Joshua proclaims that legal disputes are the purview of the Rabbis and that no attention will be paid to heavenly voices. In the Lewontin version, it became "well that just makes it two against three" - a conclusion more relevant to his discussion of the role of privileged knowledge in democracy, but not faithful to the source he cites.

Secondly, he discloses that a clever acquaintance of his once cunningly cultivated a vector from an envelope sent by a rival lab. This old chestnut is known to every graduate student in molecular biology. It's an urban legend going back to at least the early 70s in multiple versions with many different alleged protagonists.

So its a nice paradox... in an article about fraud, Lewontin managed to 'sex-up' one story and mischaracterize an infamous anecdote as personal insight.

Well - I guess there's nothing like teaching by example!

Why Tanning Hurts Your Hide (in the long run)

Apart from ethical considerations, raising animals for food production is resource intensive and environmentally destructive. An interesting discussion of the environmental impact of leather production - Grist Magazine - Ask Umbra.

A Faster Firefox

How To Speed Up Firefox - this really works!

Jewish Community Politics in Kabul

Scotsman.com- Afghanistan's Jewish Feud Is Over

The caretaker of Afghanistan’s only functioning synagogue – and the country’s second-to-last Jew – has died after years of bitter feuding with the only other survivor of a once-thriving community.

The United Nations on the Rocks

Yesterday the UN held a special session commemorating the liberation of the Nazi death camps - the first event of its kind in 60 years. Haaretz reports that

An impressive 156 of the 191 member nations voted in favor of holding the session, and UN officials were pleased to point out that countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Jordan and Egypt were among those in favor.

A sea change for the UN? Hardly. Curious to discover the identities of the 35 nations not supporting the event, I searched a little in UN press releases and General Assembly resolutions.

It seems that the event did not result from a popular vote by the General Assembly at all. Rather, it was inspired by letters sent to Kofi Annan in December from member nations (primarily the US and European nations) resulting in a Press Release on January 11 in which "The Secretary-General is pleased to announce that a majority of Member States have now agreed to the request ...". Moreover, The New York Times points out that the full roster of supporters is confidential. Why? Is it so very shameful to publicly condemn the mass murder of Jews?

Sadly, in parts of the world, the answer is yes.

The real story is that this Special Session came about because Annan pushed for it. The US invasion of Iraq made the UN look powerless and irrelevant. Now with scandals rocking the UN, from the Oil for Food fiasco, to the behaviour of peacekeepers in the Congo, to the behaviour of Annan's senior administrators, the Secretary General sees the writing on the wall. Yesterday's event, and the recent replacement of anti-US bureaucrats, are desperate attempts to build some moral authority.

Space Exploration and the Human Spirit

It's appealling that today the twin frontiers of knowledge are at the polar ends of our vision. Work proceeds apace to unravel the material basis of consciousness ; astonomers probe ever further back into the ancient realms of the universe. The images beamed back from Titan by the Huygens probe were both exciting and frustrating. If only a human had been there - to scan the horizon, take a few steps towards intruiging objects, throw a rock into a pool of liquid gas... in short, to perform the sort of intelligent exploration that robots can only approximate.

The tragic loss of the crew of the Columbia space shuttle closed down shuttle flights indefinately. That was a mistake. Regular shuttle flights were a more inspiring and scientifically productive venture than the space station, in which a pair of astronauts huddle eating rationed food and wasting time confronting emergencies. By its very nature, space exploration is dangerous, but as long as the risk is one that sane individuals are willing to personally accept, we as a society should accept it too.

In A Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell wrote

... why should physical strength survive in a world where there was never the need for physical labour? As for such qualities as loyalty, generosity, etc., in a world where nothing went wrong, they would be not only irrelevant but probably unimaginable. The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain or pdifficulty ; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain and difficulty.

Now NASA is about to resume human space exploration after many years. First a moonbase, then Mars. The risks will be enormous and loss of human life inevitable. But at least in space exploration, Orwells' fears can be set aside. As we strive for more distant and magnficent goals, technology doesn't crush the human spirit, it allows it to soar.

The Kinetic Elite and the Pacifist Left

The elections in Iraq are only a week away and the Kinetic Elite (a lovely term for the globetrotting set of UN administrators, International Relations 'experts' and Foreign Service Diplomats) are panicing. Why do I say this? Well, you may remember that as recently as December, senior UN diplomats were saying that it would be impossible to hold elections in January. Now that the elections are going ahead, and polls suggest a turnout of upto 80%, the posture has changed. The new line is that no matter how good the turnout and regardless of any mandate given to a popularly elected government, the elections will be a failure. Why? Because a lack of international monitoring will render them open to question.

This argument would lead us to question the usefulness of the vast majority of elections ever held in the Western world. Was George Washington's inauguration legitimate? However even if we accept that today, elections can only be held pending the Kinetic Elite's stamp of approval, the position is still absurd. No doubt questions will arise regarding aspects of the Iraqi elections - and given the ferocity of the Arab rumour mill, they will receive wide circulation. But these elections mark only the first stage in the road to Iraq's transformation to democracy. As stumbling a step as this might be, its a landmark for a people who lived more than forty years under Baathist tyranny.

Opposition to the invasion also came from the less sophisticated 'pacifist' left. I remember asking a co-worker why he opposed the plan to depose Hussein. 'Because war is bad', came back the answer. Tom Frank of the National Review (thanks Victor!) reports the updated position of the anti-war warriors. At a meeting sponsored by the International Socialist Organization, he writers that

Former soldier Stan Goff (supposedly of the Delta Force, Rangers, and Special Forces) spoke at length about the evils of capitalism and declared, "We ain't never resolved nothing through an election."

Yes, war is bad... elections are useless - what we really need is a nice five year plan.

After Regime Change - Microcredit

I just finished reading The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad - a heartbreaking description of the lives of women in post-Taliban Afghanistan. It was depressing to read how even a relatively liberal and affluent Afghani treated his wives and daughters like chattel. Yet there were also occasional glimpses into the slow spread of freedom after the overthrow of the Taliban. We are often instructed that cultural norms make democracy and a western conception of human rights infeasible and unwelcome in the Islamic world. Yet, only a year after the US invasion, Seierstad chronicles Afghanis beginning to take advantage of their newly acquired liberties.

Microcredit programs, such as that run by Women for Women have proven to be an effective way to both empower women in historically oppressive societies and support developing economies. This story from Asia News is a wonderful illustration of the fruits of just such a project. The Bush Administration should be applauded for its efforts to plant the seeds of liberty in oppressed nations. We wealthy citizens of the west should get behind the next stage of the project and support programs that will encourage those seeds to grow.

Predicting human behaviour

Statistical prediction of mass human behaviour was considered by Asimov in the Foundation Series. Now the BBC is reporting that researchers from Cardiff University have developed a formula that models negative mood during the year. They quantify several factors influencing mood and have determined that January 24th is the most miserable day of the year. Research from another UK university has fingered October 7th as the funniest day of the year. I don't think this kind of thing is complete nonsense. Several years ago, an group from Ohio, demonstrated that the stockmarket is influenced by the quantity of morning sunshine. Moreover, they concluded that incorporating a weather based investment strategy into stock management would result in a modest, but significant improvement in portfolio returns.

Another point of data was suggested to me during the PhD. I discovered that experiments frequently fail on Shabbat. On careful investigation it turned out that this effect was less due to divine retribution, that the absence of technical staff to keep equipment working properly ;-)

The Integrity of Michael Moore

Bowling for Columbine was such a willfully dishonest piece of documentary making, that it embarrassed me to be on the same side of the issue as Michael Moore. Now to my relief, I learn that it was all a pose on his part anyway. His film argues that gun violence is more down to a pervasive culture of fear nurtured by the media than because of the prevalence of guns themselves. So it might be better if media celebrities like Moore didn't legitimize guns by personal example. It would be a cause for fear indeed, if his myrmidons on the left started toting instruments of murder.

Monsanto, GM Crops and Bribery

Our ability to model and predict ecological interactions is rudimentary at best. It's impossible to assess with certainty the potential environmental impact of widespread cultivation of genetically modified crops. Studies have validated the concern that genetic elements introduced into agricultural plants may spread through cross pollination to nearby wild species. It is entirely plausible that weeds will acquire the very traits - rapid growth or herbicide resistance - that make GM crops so attractive to farmers. The result could easily be an environmental disaster.

Agrocorporations like Monsanto have worked hard to persuade the public otherwise, that this sort of scenario could only be painted by rabid luddites. But it doesn't do much for their credibility to learn that they're bribing their way to GM crop approval (Greenpeace).

The Old Liberalism

Today, jet-set liberals bike to work, but flit across the country racking up frequent flyer miles, leaving plumes of carbon dioxide in their wake. They solemnly form candlelight vigils against the war in Iraq, then retire for a hunk of steak cooked by an underpayed immigrant worker. The Old Liberalism is more about indignancy than idealism.

Roger L Simon expresses the problem with todays 'progressives' beautifully:

Neither Boxer Barbara of the Senate or Sarah of The New York Times (part time anyway) are capable of processing the world around them. Times have changed but they have not. Senator Boxer goes on and on about missing WMDs as if democracy in the Middle East was an inconsequential side issue. Writer Boxer opines blithely about Iraqi bloggers as if they didn't exist as real people. Both these women have been reified. Their brand of liberalism is no longer a political or moral view, but simply an object of opinion, a stance of no more moment than sports fandom and equally substantial. Other human lives are beside the point. How they appear to themselves and their supporters is everything.

Today I received a forward urging me to not spend a 'dime' on January 20, as a means 'civil disobedience' against the war. Apparently Bill Moyers has declared that not supporting Walmart, Kmart and the big corporations on January 20 will send an appropriate anti-war message.

Pretty sad that today's progressive thinkers don't have a problem supporting the corporate behemoths 364/365 days a year. Pretty mean that they stand against the attempt to bring liberty to the oppressed. And pretty absurd that they regard 'not giving a dime' as a form of civil 'disobedience'.

It's therefore refreshing and a cause for hope to see the emergence of a new political attitude, embodied by people like Roger Simon. It's a perspective which isn't crippled by cynicism, which tries to live its ideals and which considers liberty and prosperity to be global, not local aspirations.

Pay to say

It was pretty outrageous to learn that Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator had been on the Education department payroll to promote Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' policies. Williams offered a lame apology, but so far no government officials have been held accountable for bribing the Press.

Today, the Jerusalem Post points out that journalists working for Associated Press, Israeli TV Channel 1 and Agence France-Presse have been simultaneously on the Palestinian Authority payroll.

It's becoming standard practice for authors of scientific publications to disclose potential conflicts of interest. This doesn't imply that scientists are all a bunch of manipulative liars. But it does suggest that we no longer live in a world where ethical violations are so rare as to be irrelevant. Its time for reporters to be held to a similar standard.

Outsourcing and tears.

It might have been a convenient bogeyman for the Democrats to seize upon during the elections, but the reading I've done suggests that outsourcing is not a signficant net source of job loss in America. In fact, in his recent Foreign Affairs piece, Daniel Drezner writes:

As for the jobs that can be sent offshore, even if the most dire-sounding forecasts come true, the impact on the economy will be negligible. The Forrester prediction of 3.3 million lost jobs, for example, is spread across 15 years. That would mean 220,000 jobs displaced per year by offshore outsourcing -- a number that sounds impressive until one considers that total employment in the United States is roughly 130 million, and that about 22 million new jobs are expected to be added between now and 2010.

Elsewhere he points out that in the last 20 years, 'insourcing' has at least kept apace with outsourcing.

Sadly, the consequences of whipping up public anxiety about sending jobs overseas are all too foreseeable - it panders to xenophobes and racists. A recent Times of India story reports that call centers there are increasingly harassed by callers using abusive and racist language.

2004 Elections Maps

Almost immediately the 2004 election was concluded, there was a proliferation of maps of the United States, color coded into Republican and Democrat supporting states. Conservatives pointed to the swathes of red to trimphantly declare the right's hold on political power. Disappointed lefties have produced 'comparison' maps to graphically demonstrate the similarity of 'red areas' to regions containing stupid and/or evil people.

However the red/blue map has two obvious flaws. First, Democrat and Republican voters are interspersed everywhere such that no state is even close to pure red or blue. Second, the maps emphasize land area over population. Maps from Mark Newman and colleagues at the University of Michigan are instructive - America is really purple.

10% Gecko, 7% Dear Penis

The Funky Drummer

Financial Disclosure

As a story is breaking today about bloggers being paid to push political agendas, I want to be up front about my own financial interests. My blog is being sponsored by Mccain's Microwave Dinners to promote their fried fish fingers. This may come as a surprise to my many readers, who have possibly been oblivious to the insidious endorsements in my posts. It's all about hints and suggestions. A gentle nudge here, an subtle prod there. I warned the company not to expect instant gratification and they were cool with that. Just so long as I didn't keep them on ice past August 2009.

Chewing the fat for peace

A French friend visiting Israel once said to me that he thought the Middle East would be a happier place if people had a little more sauce on their food. I think he meant that comfortably rotund folk are possibly more inclined to chew the fat with each other.

Philadelphia has once again weighed in as the second fattest city in the United States, thereby doing its bit for global harmony. Looking at these photoes from the fair city of San Francisco, I'm inclined to think that people there should be encouraged drip a little more gravy on their seitan grinders.

Musing Anon

Spengler's columns are always a ripping read - he pushes a clear thesis with reams of historical and geopolitical context. That he writes under a pseudonym and is disparaging of ideologies both left and right, also gives him a certain immunity from polemical attack. He neither seeks the false sympathy of readers who might be inclined to offer it on the grounds of national, religious or political affiliation, nor can be rebutted by being pigeonholed as an 'uber-lib', or a 'neocon'. Anonymity makes us take him more seriously.

Having said that, I'm of course, very curious as to his identity anyway ;-) People have variously suggested he is Henry Kissinger, author Robert Greene, spy novelist Trevanian, and VS Naipaul.
Spengler's whimsical musings on these suggestions

The Importance of Being Earnest ... in the Iraqi Elections!

Actually, the TV commercials produced by candidates for the Iraqi elections, described in this piece from the LA Times, sound much more respectable than the muckraking hyperbolic fare that has become standard in the West. Polls suggest that the turnout for the elections will be substantial, despite ongoing violence. News like this underscores the vigour of electioneering in Iraq and demonstrates the emptiness of protests about 'foisting democracy on people unprepared for it'. Unsurprisingly, yearning for fairness and freedom are not perogatives of an 'enlightened west'.

Solar Energy and Your Waistcoat

A very promising invention from U of T permits highly efficient solar energy cells to be formed into a polymer. This may permit solar cells to be incorporated into clothing: CTV - New plastic can better convert solar energy

"The discovery could lead to shirts and sweaters capable of recharging our cellphones and other wireless devices, said Ted Sargent, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the university."

Given the disappointingly meagre use of solar technology in power generation, this strikes me as promising. It should appeal to consumers and in doing so give the solar meme a boost. It's already possible for consumers in many places in the US to select 'green' electricity at a cost not much more than electricity generated by regular means. Yet somehow, despite the popularity of 'The Environment', this hasn't translated into vast numbers of people actually buying green energy. Perhaps the next generation of hipster T-shirts will be 'solar-enabled'. Everybody loves a T-shirt!

PETA Investigation - Cruelty at Kosher Slaughterhouse

So much for kosher supervision guaranteeing quick and humane killing. As a neuroscientist, I don't believe that kosher killing is more humane, as PETA claims. The lack of body movement does not indicate a fast death, it merely means the brain is no longer able to act as a motor command center. It certainly doesn't imply an instant loss of consciousness in the animal - its reasonable to believe the animal remains sentient for minutes, aware of the pain of the incision and the horror of its circumstances.
Investigation reveals slaughter horrors at Agriprocessors

Hitchens and the Jews

Slate: Two Elections - Why Iraq's vote is not like Palestine's. By Christopher Hitchens

There is a Grand English Tradition of belittling Jewish claims to peoplehood. Arnold Toynbee's classic twelve volume 'A Study of History', relegates the Jews to the status of a fossilized fragment of a defunct Syriac civilization. Maurice Samuel, in 'The Professor and the Fossil', suggests that the appropriate description of this strategy is 'floccinaucinihilipilification' - every high school Latin students favorite word, so rarely encountered in real writing - eheu! Hitchens, though justly acclaimed for his uncompromising independence of thought, is in this regard no better than the English intellectual tradition he is a member of.

In his latest piece on Slate, he reiterates his position that the Jewish claim to self-determination in Israel is based on religious mania - resting on the irrational belief that "the land was awarded by God to the Jews." He then goes on to obliquely justify Palestinian terrorism, in contrast to the Iraqi insurgency where "No attempt was made to claim that violence was an inescapable option after a long denial of legitimate protest" and which doesn't "have a tithe of the historic justification for the resistance in Palestine."

The argument that Zionism is a movement inspired by the hallucinated commandments of a non-existant god is as comfortable for the British intellectual as it is wrong. The early Zionist leaders were almost entirely secular, and expressed the desire of the Jewish people to once again be constituted as a Nation. Archaeological evidence solidly confirms a national presence of Jews in Israel from ancient times. In his recent book, 'Love, Poverty and War', Hitchens recognizes that this makes it difficult to dismiss Zionism as a crazed religious ideology and gets dirty with some old fashioned floccinaucinihilipilification, citing opinions that the first Jewish State was "at most a small tribal kingdom". Modern Israel of course, isn't so very large itself - on an international scale, it might be considered to have reconstituted itself appropriately ;-)

But what flabbergasts me (and I should note that I do admire much of Hitchens writing - his book on Orwell, for example, is excellent), is that Hitchens, having sallied forth to undermine twin aspects of Jewish self-identity, as a religion and as a nation in exile, then writes in his recent book 'Love, War and Poverty', that "Nonetheless, I like to think that I would be despised or hated by any movement defining itself as anti-Semitic".

Originally I thought that was perhaps a naive statement of solidarity against violence. But after the piece on Slate, I think it is at best disingenuous. He clearly rejects violence directed against "indiscriminate attacks on the citizens of other nations" and seems to regard suicide bombing as a peculiarly odious form of murder. But it's hard to not to conclude that, sophisticated distinctions between varieties of murder aside, Hitchens is sympathetic toward Palestinian terrorism.

So, sad to say, it's unlikely that Hitchens will succeed in attracting the ire of anti-Semites everywhere. He might even have to snub friendly overtures from the gun-toting wing of the Palestinian resistance. I'ts a mad crazy world, when even our best enemies can't be friends.

Peanut butter and nutrition

"Specifically, the diets of peanut and peanut butter eaters were higher in vitamins A and E, folic acid, calcium, magnesium, zinc, iron, and fiber. Nuts are also loaded with monounsaturated fats, which have been linked to lower cholesterol."
Peanut Butter Packs a Healthy Punch

UN 'Peacekeepers' in the Congo

Peacekeepers' sexual abuse of local girls continuing in DR of Congo, UN finds
Speaking about UN troops in the Congo, British MP A. R. Wise commented that "the UN troops showed that they were incapable of battle and incapable of discipline... their most heroic episodes seem to have been confined to slapping women's faces."

That was in September 1961 (from Boyd, "United Nations, Piety Myth and Truth", Penguin 1962). Belgium had given Congo its independence, under circumstances guaranteed to cause the country to slide into anarchy. The first Prime Minister of Congo, Lumumba was captured by separatist forces supported by Western powers keen to retain control of the country's mining resources. His appeal to the UN for protection was rejected by UN Headquarters and he was quickly murdered.

A disaster waiting to happen...

No doubt there is a perfectly innocent explanation for Egyptian passenger planes entering Israeli airspace unannounced, but it will only take one too extravagant an error for Israel to be forced to shoot down a plane rather than risk it decend upon Eilat. Moreover, given the likelihood that flight 990 was deliberately crashed by its pilot, there is at least valid cause for concern that the incursions into Israeli airspace are not entirely accidental either.
Jerusalem Post - Egypt violating airspace

Giant Lizards

An advisory from the International Jewish Conspiracy to all members - ask your doctor if you are actually a reptile in humanoid form...
International Jewish Conspiracy

Afghanistan

This kind of thing warms the heart....
Afghanistan to send doctors to disaster zone

Appeasement fails again.

Abbas' recent staunchly anti-zionist comments sounded like blatant electioneering and don't seem to have placated hamas.
Tension mounts between Hamas and PA

Journalistic integrity

Not convinced by McBrides initial premise - that high moral standards promote objective reporting. However her discussion of factors influencing the tone of reporting and the Kohlberg morality scale is great!
Poynter Online - Journalists: More Ethical than People Realize?

Judt and Juditism

Erudite, dispassionate and optimistic: by Ed Remler