Stones Cry Out

When that little boy was (supposedly) shot and killed in 2000 by Israeli security forces, the NY Times reported, and continued to return to, the issues as a seminal event in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This week, however, a judge in France (the footage belonged to France TV 2) has agreed that claims that the footage is a fraud are legitimate.  It’s not the same thing as saying the footage is a fraud, but the defendant had to overcome a huge hurdle.

This is a stunning victory because Mr. [Philippe] Karsenty had to prove to the French court that his claims that the film is a fraud are legitimate claims. Karsenty presented enough evidence for the French court to rule against a state operated entity and this is a big upset in France because this does not typically happen. The state almost never loses.

Karsenty had several experts come to his aid as technical witnesses that the whole thing did not add up but the French court also at last had a look at some more of the film that France 2 TV had steadfastly refused to show up until this point. It clearly showed Palestinian operatives staging a faux fight between themselves and the far off Israeli security forces. It revealed fake rescues of unharmed people, fake casualties and staged injuries. What the court saw was the creation of Palestinian propaganda. In other words, the "death" of Muhammad al-Dura was a staged lie, invented as theater by Palestinian operatives to use as anti-Jewish propaganda.

But the kicker is that this major discrediting of a lynchpin in the Palestinian’s reason for the Intifada has been dealt a serious blow.  Newsworthy, right?  But now, the Time seems to have forgotten the whole story.

Read the rest of this entry

If America falls into recession, Democrats will blame Bush, no doubt.  But does Dubya’s influence on the economy cover the entire continent of Europe?  Retroactively?

A mood of fear and pessimism is starting to descend on Europe. It now seems the region could head into recession even before the United States.

Many EU nations are in real trouble. In Spain, economy minister Pedro Solbes declared that the country was facing its "most complex crisis ever" following a collapse of the property market.

A leading Spanish property group, Martinsa-Fadesa, filed for bankruptcy earlier this week.

Like Spain, Ireland has suffered a housing market collapse and many people have run up huge personal debts. The Irish economy shrank earlier in the year and economists say that if it continues to contract, the nation will fall into recession by the end of 2008.

Despite this, the Irish Prime Minister or Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, has insisted his country is still doing remarkably well, despite the global economic downturn, and has rejected claims that he is personally responsible for the downturn.

Denmark is already in recession and shows no sign of emerging from it in the near future. The government there stepped in to rescue a failing bank, Roskilde, in early July.

Unlike the US economy, which still grew (albeit very weakly) in the first quarter, European countries are already in different degrees of economic retreat.  And the emphasis above (mine) notes that this is a global economic problem which we are weathering better than the countries Democrats keep holding up as examples we should follow.

Is Bush that all-powerful?  (Hint: No.)  But it’s just too good a glop of mud to sling at him for Democrats.  They just can’t pass up the chance, and they hope their followers aren’t paying attention. 

[tags]economics,recession,Spain,Ireland,Denmark[/tags]

• The story you don’t hear, coming soon to a bookseller near you, the plight of Christians in Iraq.
• Really good criticism of European remarks on Heller.
• Links from Siris.
• How will the mainstream press, or even blogs take this news. Ignore it?
• Of skin and ink.
• Drilling offshore.
• Media bias. Do you think? It’s hard to imagine how they might be more biased.

The conventional wisdom is that this upcoming election will be Obama’s in a walk-away.  Could be.  But on the chance he loses, Democrats are already writing the narrative they will use to explain it.

In a speech at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s annual convention in Cincinnati, [NY governor David] Paterson also suggested that the defeat of Senator Obama by Senator McCain in the presidential contest would be a victory for racism.

And he knows this because everything can be blames on racism.  The preceding paragraph notes:

Governor Paterson, who became New York’s first black governor following the resignation of Eliot Spitzer, is lashing out at the press for describing him as an "accidental governor," implying in a speech that the term’s frequent usage was motivated by racial bias.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names are racist! 

The article actually goes on to note, contrary to Paterson’s contention that only he, as a black governor, has been termed "accidental", 3 other people (including President Bush) and 6 separate examples of politicians being referred to as "accidental".  The man has got a serious chip on his shoulder.

[tags]New York,Governor David Paterson,racism,Barack Obama,NAACP[/tags]

Not content to send mere reporters with Obama when he visits Iraq, all the Big Three network news organizations are going to send their anchors.  Which, of course, they also did for McCain.  Or not.

While Thursday’s New York Times reported that the anchors from all three network newscasts will be joining Barack Obama on his trip to Iraq, they showed no such interest in following John McCain during his visit to Iraq in March. During the week of March 16, McCain’s trip received only four full-length stories during the combined ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news program coverage. Three of those stories were on NBC’s "Nightly News," one of which focused on McCain’s mistaken comment about Iran funding Al Qaeda in Iraq. ABC’s "World News" did only one full-length story on McCain’s Iraq trip, which mentioned the gaffe. The CBS "Evening News" was by far the worst, devoting only 31 words to the Republican nominee’s Iraq visit during the entire week of evening news coverage.

(Emphasis in original.)  This is pointing out yet another disparity from the media regarding news coverage that the Times is now having to grudgingly recognize.

Even the Times article acknowledged that McCain’s Iraq trip received little coverage: "Senator John McCain’s trip to Iraq last March was a low-key affair: With a small retinue of reporters chasing him abroad…But the coverage also feeds into concerns in Mr. McCain’s campaign, and among Republicans in general, that the news media are imbalanced in their coverage of the candidates."

Oh, but it’s not actually true that the media are ignoring McCain, it’s just that the fact "feeds into concerns" that there is a problem.  Like I said, grudgingly.

And by the way, how much better must the security situation be in Iraq that the Big Three feel comfortable sending their top dogs to the field? 

[tags]Barack Obama,John McCain,liberal media bias[/tags]

• Further demonstrations of those things which elected government can’t do.
• Evolution … a conversation.
• St. Basil on free will.
• Sanity tries to surface in Saudi Arabia … but fails?
• Failing miserably but still garnering full support.
• Intel and the mythical HCF instruction.There’s an old joke there. HCF apocrophally was an machine instruction hidden deep in a IBM manual for one of their early mainframes. A programmer was wondering what it did, so he wrote a short program which executed it. And the machine locked up. Hard. He couldn’t bootstrap or get anything to work. Finally he opened the case, and found the processing core smoking. HCF becamde clear. It stood for: Halt and Catch Fire. Heh.

In the early 80s the hottest book to read, discuss, and ponder in the circles I traveled was the (then) recently published Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. One of the topics this popularized was the famous zen koan:

Has a dog, Buddha nature or not?

A Western perhaps mistranslation of “Buddha” nature might be “a soul”. The answer is not, “yes” or “no” but the retort by the master was “mu”? Mr Hofstadter’s intellectual answer to that puzzle is that “mu” is in essence, unasking that question. That is, a way of emphatically insisting that the very asking of the question implies horrible structural defects in your conceptual framework that leads to this question being askable at all.

This leads us to the question:

Has a fetus a soul or not?

One proposal to consider is not, the emphatic “no” by the pro-abortion rights crowd (or to be fair, the insistent “yes/maybe” by the pro-life crowd) but instead to assume that we’ve made a critical mistake in our structural worldview and conception of reality for which this question is being relevant is a sign of error, not a point to ponder. Read the rest of this entry

• La Shawn on the Black vote, civil rights and the GOP.
• Cool tech, especially for the industrial controls crowd, which I’m sure is a big plurality in my readership … not (but it’s not unrelated to my day job). 🙂
• On oil prices and speculation.
• On Julian Schwinger, and his body of work.
• Hijinks between plants and animals.
• On moral order and nature.
• Immutable. Mutable. Hmm.
• A weekend suggestion.
• God and the slugger.
• A neat gadget.
• Every car should install one.
• An interesting take on the Myers kerfuffle.
• East and West.
• Africa. A map. I suppose it would be less impressive to drop Russia + Antartica in there, which also equal Africa in square footage.
• Two speeches. Two takes. Left. Right.

I’m short on time today, so y’all get the whole kaboodle cross posted from my blogs “Morning Highlights” feature. Question. Should I make that my normal practice? or not?

Often on the Shire Network News podcast, we’ll satirize extremist Islam by reading a new story and replacing the word “Muslim” with the word “Christian”. Upon hearing this, the listener (it is hoped) understands how really extreme extremist Muslims are because, for all the similar and worse treatment Christians are accustomed to, you never hear about mass groups of extremist Christians beheading someone who drew an unflattering cartoon of Jesus.

Indeed we have our Eric Robert Rudolphs, our lone gunmen outside abortion clinics, but the very fact that we know the first, middle and last names of these guys says there aren’t nearly as many of them as there are mobs of extremist Muslims killing teachers, killing anyone over cartoons, and burning churches.

But the BBC, not content to sticking to the “art imitating life” method of fiction, decided to try to paint a little non-existent moral equivalence on their TV canvas.

A recent episode of the series Bonekickers displayed a graphic scene depicting a moderate Muslim being beheaded by a supposed “extremist Christian”.

It’s being reported that BBC1 has received several telephone complaints from it’s viewers over the episode and earlier this week the corporation stated they ‘regret’ viewers had found the scene ‘inappropriate’, but defended their decision to show it.

Viewers were apparently shocked when actor Paul Nichollswas was seen using a sword to hack off a moderate Muslim’s head in an unprovoked attack.

Nichollswas plays a member of the fictional group called the White Wings Alliance. The fictitious group is far-Right evangelical group of Christians inspired by the Crusades.

Instead of being “ripped from the headlines”, as some TV episodes like to advertise, this seems to be the result of a late-night session of “Mad Libs”, mixing what’s really happening with nouns and adjectives describing Christians. “Give me an angelic adverb.”

The BBC, responding to criticism, insists that the story, in and of itself, is internally consistent, because…well…this sort of thing is believable.

We regret that some viewers felt the beheading scene was inappropriate. It appeared half way through episode one of Bonekickers, by which time the character’s ‘extreme fundamental belief’ had been revealed, providing the audience with a good build up to the scene in question.

This storyline looked at religious fundamentalism within a fictional Christian group, and one character in particular who took his beliefs to an extreme. His ignorance and misguided behaviour lead to the beheading of a peaceful Asian Muslim character in the drama. His actions are clearly condemned by leading Muslim and Christian clerics. The drama also has the balance of a Christian character that has a deep faith which she uses humbly and only for good.

In a media world where folks are falling all over themselves to not portray Muslims as the bad guys (as they did in the movie version of “The Sum of All Fears”, for example), the BBC goes out of its way to concoct a truly unbelievable scenario. Might some extreme group identifying itself with Christians someday behead somebody? It’s not out of the realm of possibility, but right now beheadings are pretty much a signature of extremist Islam. Even revealing a character’s “extreme fundamental beliefs” is not nearly enough to explain this, as there are plenty of extremist Christians, and yet no Muslims have lost their head over it.

Read the rest of this entry

• Looking closer, critically, at Mr Obama’s choices for foreign policy advice. I wonder what their take is on this.
• The Tina Turner song, “What’s Love Got to Do With It”, answered in that it’s all about the love.
• Someone pumped to see an Aussie in yellow … and might I mention a fellow from the town in which I live in 3rd. Some analysis of the tactics of the last stage here. Plus, an interesting take on the French and the king-of-the-mountain.
• 10 points-to-ponder on marriage from Kim Fabricus. Family life and the joys therein.
• If I were a proponent of the anthropogenic origins of global warming … I’d be embarrassed.
• The actual withdrawal plan.

What does it mean, “He’s smart” or “He’s very intelligent?” Largely on the left, we see citations of “that candidate” is very smart or the other one is not so much (typically oddly enough the “smart” ones lean left in the view of the left leaning commentators. Whether that is an attempt at validating their own left leaning predilections or explaining reasons why they admire that particular candidate I will not guess.) What I fail to understand is how they come up with their estimation that a given candidate is smart. I know how I figure that a programmer, physicist, or mathmetician is smart. By looking at their work and asking is it clean? Is it beautiful?

If one was to ask whether an artist was talented. One would ask another performer (or artist in the same field) or perhaps a critic (to be distinguished from a “reviewer”).  However, talent at art is not exactly the same as smart.

Currently, Mr Obama is the politician most often touted as “smart” by the left. Some months ago, blog neighbor David Schraub declaimed that both Mr Obama and Ms Clinton were both “very smart.” What I fail to understand is on what basis he might make such a claim. For the two examples above, one has to look at some sort of body of work to estimate whether a person is smart. There is, of course, another time honored means of deciding if a person is smart, which is to interact personally with that person for an extended period of time. That method of determination by the average citizen with respect to a national candidate is unlikely or impossible so as to be discounted. That pretty much leaves, their corpus of work, which in the case of lawyers like Mr Obama and Ms Clinton would be their body of written opinions.

Rhetoric is of course another key people use to decide whether a person is intelligent. However, in this age of the teleprompter and speechwriters the facility at oration is a actors skill.  However, it is a stretch to thing that those claiming these people are intelligent is based on facility at reading from a teleprompter and calling it oration.

Yet strangely it seems such offerings are absent in the case of these individuals. There are no publicly available opinions written by either of these candidates. Odd that, no? Mr Obama was, for a time, an academic lawyer. To be an academic in the publish or perish environment, yet not to publish seems more than a little strange. If this is a case of lawyers who have read his and her work, deciding that it is good, but that it is to “technical” or abstract or otherwise unfit for general consumption … that seems elitest and very likely to be concealing of a lie.

I would guess that the likeliest reason that these people think, in this case, that Mr Obama is highly intelligent is because they’ve heard it second hand. It is a “meme” if you will, spread by his supporters (and the press) that Mr Obama is very bright. But the question is, why is this to be given credence?
So, if you think, the candidate of the hour, Mr Obama is smart. Why do you think that? On what do you base your appraisal? How does that compare with how you decide or would decide if a candidate is smart?
(disclaimer: I should note, I have no opinion at all on the matter of whether Mr Obama is “smart” or not. I feel I’m not qualified (I’ve read nothing he’s written (or had ghost written)) nor do I have the contact with him. Furthermore, I’m a little disinclined to think “smartness” is a qualification for President. Of our the 19th century Presidents the smartest arguably was John Quincy Adams. Was he the “best” President? Obviously not. Woodrow Wilson was alleged to be very bright … consider the League of Nations and the stellar treaty of Versailles. Clearly intelligence is not what it is cracked up to be in the political arena)

I’m sure you’ve all heard by now the uproar in the blogosphere and the reaction from the Obama campaign about this cover of the "New Yorker" magazine.

Oh, sorry, wrong one.  The one in question that is drawing so much ire depicts presidential candidate Barack Obama.  This particular cover of Bush and Cheney, as well as a couple of others targeting Republicans (highlighted by Don Surber) didn’t elicit complaints from their targets.  It’s just one of those things that a President or politician has to learn to deal with. 

The "New Yorker" is certainly no card-carrying member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.  If Obama can’t handle this sort of treatment from a media source on his side (a source trying to indeed dispel the myths the cover is intended to satirize), he’s got a rough road ahead of him.

[tags]Barack Obama,George Bush,liberal media,satire,humor,The New Yorker[/tags]

• I wonder if this ecumenical statement could be transferred to other (political or social) division as well? The phrase “distinctions stiffened into contradictions” is one to remember.
• Attempting to be charitable on the theological statements of Mr Obama.
• Odierno and Petraeus … or cream rises.
• Music and the evangelical?
• On Mr Obama’s plan to withdraw 2 brigades each month from Iraq for 16 months after taking office.
• Parental rights.

So John McCain is left to address Phil Gramm’s remarks that we have become a nation of whiners who are merely in a mental recession?

What exactly is a mental recession? Well, let’s do a little comparison of a mental recession with an economic depression.

Below is a photo (courtesy Yahoo!News) in which we see people queued up… waiting.

Now take a look at a photo (courtesy National Park Service) in which we see another group of people queued up… waiting.

The difference?

In the first photo, the people are waiting to buy the latest iPhone (circa 2008), while in the second photo, the people are waiting to be given something to eat (circa 1930s).

First photo = mental recession.
Second photo = economic depression.

First photo = nation of whiners.
Second photo = nation of those eager, but unable, to provide for their families.

[tag]phil gramm, nation of whiners, mental recession, obama, john mccain[/tag]

• One view of Christianity, and CS Lews “acid wit”.
• Hooky stories.
• Agora links.
• Personal Jesus (not the song).
• On Theocracy.
• Laptops in the near future. Cool.
• I can’t guess what gas prices will make such vending machines will be a common sight. Can you? And why I’m a road biker.