Moslem Akeda Begins

Every year at Rosh Hashana, Jews remember the 'sacrifice of Isaac' by reading the story in the Torah. This is usually followed by fierce debate in synagogue concerning what sort of heartless deity asks his followers to sacrifice their children as a token of fealty.

Eid began yesterday, the Moslem holiday in which commemorates essentially the same story - with Ishmael rather than Isaac as the sacrificee. Like in Judaism, there's plenty of casuistry.

Can a kangaroo or an ostrich be sacrificed? Can a woman be the butcher? Are children allowed to watch the ritual?

But while we await the Moslem Reformation, bast numbers of animals are sacrificed during this holiday, mostly by incompetant amateur butchers. In the meantime, there does seem to be a nascent moslem vegetarian movement.

RIAA Gag

The RIAA has filed a $1.65 trillion lawsuit against AllofMp3.com. Apparently, they're counting damages at 11 million songs, $150,000 a piece. Now personally, I don't use allofmp3.com - it doesn't take VISA card. But mp3sugar.com is easier to deal with. Thanks to cheap or free music downloads, this last decade I've had enormous pleasure in discovering new artists and listening to a broader range of music from old artists. I've certainly bought more CDs as a result, often to get music that I couldn't find elsewhere, or to give as gifts.

The Tom Waits 'Raindogs' album is a great example. I have a couple of Tom Waits CDs. I'm not likely to walk into Tower Records (especially as the nearby branch just closed... (evil cackle)) and get another. However, after downloading a copy, I have discovered what a gorgeous set of tracks it is and know the perfect person to buy a copy for. In the words of Gary Graff, Tom Waits voice sounds

like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car.

A site that lets me quench my thirst for new sounds is Weirdo Music. Everything is free and (I think) legal. Lots of unavailable old records ripped to digital format and unsigned electronic artists doing unusual things.

James Baker - Subverting Oil for Food

If true, this ought to put an end to James Baker's influence in foreign policy:

Former Secretary of State James Baker was involved in a cover-up of illegal trading by his law firm with the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, according to a former contractor who did work for Mr. Baker’s firm.

Ahh... lets see if the MSM picks up on this...

Luddite with a Hammer

Technology has reached the tipping point of being way too intrusive. So this appeals to me! RFID chips are an invasion of privacy - you can't tell precisely what is encoded on these magical little slivers of silicon, yet you are supposed to carry one embedded in your passport to present to any officious beaurocrat wanting to read your record. It's like having a sealed letter of introduction. You can't but help wonder if engraved onto its diode array is "Warning, bearer is a serious nudnik. Give him the special search". Moreover, anybody close enough and with the right equipment can secretly read the information in your passport.

The greatest evil of technology facing us though is the new Microsoft Vista. This bloated piece of malware appears to have shelved any goal of allowing PCs to be fast and powerful, instead having embraced the goal of implementing Draconian copyright protection. Imagine Darth Vader prowling the New York subway, beheading Chinese women as they desperately gather pirated CD's of 'Happy Feet' from picnic blankets.

So horrified am I at the advent of Microsoft's looming operating system, that I finally took the step of installing Linux on a partition this weekend. Readers of this blog have been encouraging me to take this step, and frankly, having done so I'm not so enthusiastic.

I chose Ubuntu, the open-source, 'free' version of linux that is apparently extremely popular. It took me about 3 hours to achieve an internet connection. Navigating the Ubuntu help site was like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure where every fork lead back to page 1. The instructions for activating my wireless card - a not uncommon Linksys USB device - were so abstruse that at first I thought they wanted me to make a sushi roll. The documentation was replete with helpful tips like

ndiswrapper v1.1, kernel 2.6.11.7 vanilla: kernel-oops! ndiswrapper v1.2-rc1 loads fine (EHCI loaded with modprobe ehci-hcd log2_irq_thresh=4) but oopses when unloading the module and the adapter is still plugged in (Kernel 2.6.11.7 vanilla)

Then, having finally eeked out a connection to the net I found that (1) It was even more sluggish than WinXP and (2) Ubuntu doesn't play mp3s. Or to be more accuate, Ubuntu in its native installation doesn't play mp3s but with a little more hieroglyphic research I should be able to open them. Apparently its my fault, because I should be using 'ogg'. Don't smirk, so should you.

So thats it for now. I'm not uninstalling Ubuntu, but I think of that partition of my hard-drive as an impenetrable African Jungle, with lurking Sudos and prowling Synaptics. Until Windows Vista colonizes my boot sector and forces me out, I'm remaining camped at Windows XP.

New Miniscule UN Role in Sudan

Instead of sending 20,000 troops to Darfur, the UN has agreed to send a few hundred advisors to help out the ineffectual and tiny African Union force currently observing the genocide in Sudan.

Operations of the AU force are restricted to daytime hours - night-time patrols are off due to insufficient manpower and funding. Meanwhile, even refugees in camps across the border in Chad are not safe, with Janjaweed raiders crossing the border to attack civilians.

While US companies are forbidden to trade with Sudan, Canadian (Talisman), Malaysian (Petronas), Chinese (CNPC), Swedish (Lundin) and Austrian (OMV) petroleum companies operate in Sudan and are therefore complicit in supporting the Government's murderous campaign.

Carter's Oily Finances

In considering Carter's book, it's a good idea to consider how his research is funded. According to Carter Center's 2004-2005 report, among donor's with cumulative giving of more than $1 million are:

His Royal Highness Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud Fund
The Sultanate of Oman
His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Bakir M. BinLadin for the Saudi BinLadin Group
The Saudi Fund for Development
Government of the United Arab Emirates

To be sure, there are many innocuous donors - Home Depot and Delta also make the top donor list. And the Institute has genuinely positive goals fighting diseases in the Third World.

Giving a Damn

Peter Singer writes on the ethics of charitable giving. Some of his arguments I like very much. In particular, the idea that in purchasing raw goods from countries ruled by despots and revolutionary cabals, industrialized nations are effectively fencing stolen goods. Thus our affluence in part derives from robbing the poor. This, I would argue - and here I recall that Singer in other writings disagrees - is a good reason for us to refuse to coddle tyrants Jimmy Carter style and instead to spread democracy.

Surprisingly, he supports the U.S. system whereby the government 'contracts-out' a substantial portion of its philanthropy to individuals (tax deductions on philanthropic contributions mean that that ultimately, the government is merely empowering individuals to spend its money). He argues that individuals are less likely to try to make political capital out of aid and thereby direct away from the truely needy. This may be true, but similar arguments could be made against many democratic institutions. Elections encourage the exchange of moral positions for expedient ones. Trial by jury is notoriously inefficient. Democracy does not strive to maximize efficiency. The alternative, allowing wealthy businessmen to set the philanthropic agenda of the nation is wrong. Success in business does not entitle any individual to arrogate the power of deciding which causes a society should support, nor does it guarantee any insight into which causes are most worthy. Rather, private giving should be encouraged for the good that it does to the giver. But society, through its elected institutions, should decide where to channel its giving.

Hoorah...err..

The British Medical Journal reports that vegetarians are smarter. Apparently it's not that eating healthier improves brain power, rather its that smart people choose to be vegetarian. Strangely, 33% of the veggies surveyed ate fish or chicken. Fish I can excuse... but chicken!? Tragically though, it appears that vegans are dumber - though they base this on a sample of just 9 vegans. Apparently the authors eat a bit of meat themselves.

Moreover, veggies aren't just more clever, they are more public spirited too, working for charitable organizations and public serve institutions at a greater rate.

Meaty Emissions

From the Independent

A United Nations report has identified the world's rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife. And they are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs.

No doubt Al Gore's next film will encourage liberals to go veg.

If It Quacks Like a Duck...

From the Journal of Conflict Resolution, an article statistically demonstrating what is intuitively obvious - that anti-Israel views are a cover for more straightforward antisemitism. The authors used data from 5000 citizens across Europe and found that anti-Israel sentiment is an excellent predictor of anti-semitism.

The research in this article shines a different, statistical light on this question: based on a survey of 500 citizens in each of 10 European countries, the authors ask whether those individuals with extreme anti-Israel views are more likely to be anti-Semitic. Even after controlling for numerous potentially confounding factors, they find that anti-Israel sentiment consistently predicts the probability that an individual is anti-Semitic, with the likelihood of measured anti-Semitism increasing with the extent of anti-Israel sentiment observed.

Specifically, they find that 56% of people 'deeply critical of Israel' are actually antisemitic, holding views like "Jews are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want" . Other interesting findings: Anti-semitism seems to have no correlation with degree of contact with real jews, suggesting that it springs from ideological, not personal bases. Muslims were 7.8 times more likely than Christians to be antisemitic. Of the ten countries surveyed, the Spanish and the Swiss were most antisemitic - the Danish and Dutch were least.

Iranian Economy

A good idea from the Back Talk blog

Basically, I'm advocating placing Iran's oil fields at risk (instead of their nuclear facilities). The Iranian economy is rocky and could not withstand a reduction in oil revenues for any appreciable length of time. An announcement by the US that it might be prepared to disrupt Iranian oil export capacity would be taken seriously by countries thinking about signing long-term contracts with Tehran.

Eet Mor Chikkin

USA Today reports:

Eighty-three percent of broiler chickens tested by a leading consumer magazine were infected with either or both campylobacter and salmonella, the leading bacterial causes of food-borne illnesses.

...

The USDA, which tests chickens extensively for salmonella, says the 2005 infection rate was 16.3% and is an average 11.4% in the first three quarters of this year, said Raymond, undersecretary for food safety.

So a minimum of 1 in 6 chickens is writhing with bugs. Makes me want to revert to flesh eating.

Beilin versus Bigots

Even as the crazies at the top of the Israeli religious pole seek to delegitimize converts, Yossi Beilin is proposing amendments to the law of return with quite the opposite effect. Where the Chief Rabbi's suggestion seeks to humiliate and undermine the identity of Diaspora Jews, Reform and Orthodox alike, Beilin's proposal recognizes the value of hundreds of thousands of emigrants to Israel, who contribute considerably more to Israeli society than the Chief Rabbi, including military service.

The Israeli Chief Rabbis have a long and ignoble history of malicious and stupid public comments. We need state-sponsored religious orthodoxy about as much as we need the legions of Chabad shlichim currently corrupting Jewish minds throughout the Diaspora. The narrow-minded bigotry both promote is anathema to the majority of the Jewish people and should be kept at the margins of Jewish life.

Kofi - Quietly Aiding Genocide

Kofi Annan is still soft-pedalling the genocide in Darfur. His latest 'breakthrough'

The secretary-general, Kofi Annan, announced after a meeting in Ethiopia that he and the Sudanese government had agreed “in principle” to a new “hybrid” UN force. This would take command of, and enlarge, the existing 7,000-man African Union (AU) force which has manifestly failed to keep the peace.

Despite his proclamation, it seems the Sudanese have actually rejected this proposal. If the Secretary General was serious, he would have pushed the UN to accept that the murders in Darfur constitute genocide, and named China as the primary patron of the Sudanese government, with special responsibility for its actions. Instead, he engages in these endless and useless discussions that only give the Sudanese government time to continue murdering the African inhabitants of Western Sudan.

Kofi Annan's silence permitted the Rwandan genocide ; his sudden loquacity ensures disaster in Darfur.