Chabad Riots

Chassidut - self-righteous boozin' and brawlin'. And it wasn't a bunch of disaffected yeshivabokkers either, this melee was sanctified by 3000 chabad shlichim.

The Color of Money

The government discriminates against blind people

by printing money that all looks and feels the same, a federal judge said Tuesday in a ruling that could change the face of American currency.
...
'Of the more than 180 countries that issue paper currency, only the United States prints bills that are identical in size and color in all their denominations,' Robertson wrote.

Yes. Colorful notes will really help blind people.

Hitchens on the Right to Speak

Christopher Hitchens take on the Judt non-affair. Judt's position is 'Nation states are passe and distasteful. Israel should be the first country to stop being one'. Why Israel? Because Judt doesn't like Israel. He has the luxury of running his own Institute and basically having a column in the NYR - yet declaims loudly that his freedom of expression is being quenched because Zionists dared protest that he be allowed to rail against Israel at a Polish Consulate function.

Press or Propaganda

I picked up the Epoch Times today, the Falun Gong propaganda newspaper and flicking through it, noticed that unlike most newspapers, most of the International section contained stories written by ET reporters rather than being copied from AP or Reuters. I wondered if perhaps the ET was so keen to spin the news their way, that they insisted on writing everything from scratch (though they do have some Reuters pieces). But after reading today that the AP has been using a fake source for months, its hard to conclude that our own 'news' organizations have less of an agenda than the Epoch Times.

Too Good to be True

A novel Israeli technique to produce synthetic oilwill start production in 3-4 years. Apparently, oil shale becomes an economically viable resource when oil prices fall below $40/barrel. The catch is that because of the investment in infrastructure, nobody is going to invest in this technology unless its clear that the hike in oil prices is permanent. The exciting thing about the Israeli technology, is that it lowers that threshold. At some point, oil shale becomes competitive with regular supplies - preventing OPEC from bankrupting the emerging industry. And oil shale reserves are supposedly enormous, dwarfing currently exploited oil fields.