Dean's World

So, what did you think of the President's speech?

Ronald Bailey has some excellent suggestions.

Neo has a thoughtful essay.

Voltaire said, "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it".

The concept of vigorously defending free speech has faded to nothingness in Western society, a fact that was made clear during the Salman Rushdie "controversy".

Muslim author Salman Rushdie wrote a book, published in Britain, called the Satanic Verses. Apparently something in the text violated Islamic Shariah laws. Political Islam, in the form of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, declared its right to condemn Rushdie, a Westerner living in Britain, and every person associated with the book in any way, or any person who happened to be standing near the book, to to death in accordance with Sharia.

On February 14, 1989, a fatwa promising his execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran, calling his book "blasphemous against Islam." Furthermore, Khomeini condemned Rushdie for the crime of "apostasy"—attempting to abandon the Islamic faith— which according to the Hadith is punishable by death. This was due to Rushdie's communication through the novel that he no longer believes in Islam. Khomeini called on all "zealous Muslims" to execute the writer, as well as those of the publishers of the book who knew about the concepts of the book.

"I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the Satanic Verses book which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death."

This fatwa was (and is) a form of collective punishment.

Collective punishment is a term describing the punishment of a group of people for the crime of few. It is contradictory to the modern concept of due process, where each individual receives separate treatment based on their individual circumstances — as they relate to the crime in question.

This type of Fatwa is also a form of terrorism, defined by Amnesty International as a crime against humanity.

Terrorism, collective punishment and suppression of free speech are a violation of everything Western society is supposed to stand for. So, how did the Western world punish the Ayatollah for these crimes?

We didn't. We didn't even give him a ticket. Jaywalkers are punished more severely.

Rushdie chose to hide after this fatwa was issued. He lived to write more books and he's currently married to a model. Others weren't so lucky.

At the University of California at Berkeley, bookstores carrying the book were firebombed. On February 24 in Bombay, 5 people in a protest at the British Embassy died from police gunfire. Several other people died in Egypt and elsewhere. Muslim communities throughout the world held public rallies in which copies of the book were burned. In 1991, Rushdie's Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarishi, was stabbed and killed in Tokyo, and his Italian translator was beaten and stabbed in Milan. In 1993, Rushdie's Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot and severely injured in an attack outside his house in Oslo. Thirty-seven guests died when their hotel in Sivas, Turkey was burnt down by locals protesting against Aziz Nesin, Rushdie's Turkish translator.

That oppression is what inspired the latest controversial issue, the Jyllands Posten cartoons. [cartoons and commentary posted here]. These cartoons were created to bring attention the allegation that no artist was willing to illustrate a children's book about Muhammad by the Danish writer Kåre Bluitgen without remaining anonymous, out of fear of revenge from extremist Muslims.

The result was protests, with weapons and without them. These peaceful and non-peaceful protesters are only reinforcing Jyllands Posten's point. They aren't just asking for an apology, they're insisting that the West should respect the apartheid Sharia laws that violate everything we stand for.

Well, used to stand for...

[More about Jyllands Posten cartoons here and here at Exit Zero]

Gerard notes some creepy Iranian pilgrims to Mecca.

You know there are plenty of Christians who are front and center when Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell says something horrifically stupid. Well this is even more horrific and more stupid--it's an ongoing source of anguish to some of us that we don't see more muslims out front and vocal about this kind of crap. Although they certainly do exist, and deserve more press.

I'm a little late to the party, but Emily has a great rant on elitist eurosnobbery. Warning: much delicious four-letter verbage!

(Via Sean, who has more to say.)

Nah...

American Book Review

Perhaps it’s a bit conventional for me to prefer “8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”, but can you name the author and book?

Also, is it just me, or is #1 a book one whose pages ought never again see either light of either day or florescence?

Which have you read?

(First posted on Punning Pundit, a blog you ought read more often...)

Dude!

Ain't it a great word?

Welcome to the Carnival of the Liberated, a sampler of some of the best posts of the week from Iraqi and Afghani bloggers. This week we've got Saddam Hussein's trial, the prospects for democracy in Iraq, the “Baghdad Sniper”, and much, much more.

Saddam Hussein's trial has resumed in Iraq and Ibn Al-Rafidain comments on it and suggests that the purpose of trials of this scale in Iraq has been to shield the accused from summary justice. He's probably right.

Iraq the Model has a post on the viability of democracy in the Middle East the gist of which is you build a society with the institutions you have, not the institutions you might want. After the removal of Saddam's government the institutions that were in place in Iraq were religious ones, not liberal ones so it's not too surprising that the religious parties have asserted themselves. Will liberal democracy spring from that soil? ITM is optimistic and we'll have to wait and see.

Salam Pax is thinking about the viability of democracy in Iraq, too. He writes:

Today we celebrate a new holiday in Iraq. It’s Democracy day. On this day last year we voted for the first time after the war.

Now give me a moment to do my Happy Dance to celebrate the fact that we have a couple of religious extremists sitting in parliament and deciding what my future will look like. I guess the only consolation is the fact that this is happening wherever the much-celebrated march towards democracy does a parade in the Middle East. The newest addition to the proud We-Choose-Islam club is Palestine.

Miriam of Pearls of Iraq posts another installment in her series on Islamic peace-building.

Treasure of Baghdad has a very interesting post on someone called “the Baghdad Sniper” who apparently has become something of a folk hero in some quarters and who, allegedly, only goes after American targets.

Dave Schuler posts regularly to his own weblog, The Glittering Eye. The Carnival was originally conceived by Ryan Boots.

The controversy over Danish caricatures of Prophet Muhammad escalated Monday as gunmen seized an EU office in Gaza and Muslims appealed for a trade boycott of Danish products. Denmark called for its citizens in the Middle East to exercise vigilance.

The latest Carnival of Recipes is being hosted by Triticale, the Wheat/Rye Guy.

The latest Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Phosita, an Intellectual Property Law Blog.

Dean's World hero of the week: Helena Houdova.

"The Cuban police confiscated the roll of film that was in the Czech women's camera. However, Houdova managed to conceal the memory card of her digital camera inside her brassiere."

More right here. And also right here.

"The revolution's watchmen rose up because I was taking pictures of something they do not like," said the top model.

Awww, yeah. The Freedom Babe of the year!

Dave Schuler has some reasoned temporizing over Google and China, with thoughtful links. Some good points are made by him and his commenters. Dave being a very reasonable guy and his audience being a generally intelligent lot, that is unsurprising. There's lots of thoughtful things there to consider.

I fully admit to being completely uninterested in reasoned discourse here. Indeed, I am being completely unreasonable. Because there is, to me, a difference between doing business under the communist bootheel and putting your own foot in the boot. Freedom made what you do for a living possible, Google, and now you crap all over that? Go to Hell.

I have a simple question:

The apartheid government in South Africa, in 1986 (i.e. 20 years ago today) asks internet search engines operating in South Africa to block any sites regarding anyone named Mandela, the African National Congress, the notion of democracy, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or even the Declaration of Independence. Google rolls over like a cheap whore and says "Yes master! You're in charge!" and then tells the rest of us "hey, we're only complying with local laws and customs."

Yes it is the same thing!

Here's my reaction: Screw you Larry. Screw you Serge. Screw you Google. I am completely uninterested in doing business with you. You're damned right I'm unreasonable: Guilty as charged!

Here's what I say to my fellow internet users and my fellow bloggers: Use Scroogle. Use Gigablast. Have nothing to do with those cheap whores who work for The Google Entity. It may be a little inconvenient, but you won't wake up in the morning feeling dirty.

Eugene Volokh does a little obvious math.

Gee, it's almost like the press and women's groups have a bias toward man-bashing or something.

A UK group recently forecast that we might see driverless cars on the road by 2056.

Ray Kurzweil thinks that's pretty funny. So do I. We've already got driverless, self-guided cars doing things that were impossible even five years ago.

The latest Storyblogging carnival is up at Back of the Envelope.

Via the Energy Bulletin:

Word just came out that Kuwait, long regarded as home to some of the world's largest reserves of petroleum, may possess only half the amount of oil reserves that it officially has been stating for many years.

According to a restricted report issued by the authoritative industry newsletter Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (PIW), internal Kuwaiti records reveal that the nation's oil reserves are far below the officially stated amount of about 99 billion barrels....The PIW report is based upon data circulating within the top echelons of the Kuwait Oil Co....The PIW report claims that Kuwait's remaining proven and nonproven oil reserves total about 48 billion barrels, or 51 billion fewer barrels than previously advertised.>

..Yet another way of stating the matter, and in a macro sense, the amount of estimated world oil reserves just fell by 5%. This 5% drop in reserves is the equivalent of almost 20 months worth of total cumulative worldwide oil production and consumption, based on the current world oil use of about 84 million barrels per day. From the standpoint of the world reaching the absolute Peak Oil point, we now live in August 2007, not January 2006. And as the Mogambo Guru would say, "Thanks a hell of a lot, guys."

For my money, though, you can forget the technical discussion. Instead, take a look at the second graph in Stuart's post, which shows that virtually every OPEC country abruptly increased their reserve estimates in 1986. Although this was partly legitimate (the American companies that had provided the earlier reserve estimates had been systematically too conservative for reasons of their own), the increases were mostly nothing more than a response to OPEC politics. Export quotas are based on reserve estimates, and in the mid-80s every country raised their reserve estimates in order to get a bigger quota. They hadn't suddenly discovered a whole bunch of new oil they never knew was there before.

My rough rule of thumb is that OPEC's real reserves are about halfway between the 1980 estimate and the 1990 estimate — or maybe a bit under that. Eventually it will be impossible to pretend otherwise, and we'll start hearing rumblings from other countries similar to those we're hearing from Kuwait. Buy a hybrid now and be prepared.

The single best data we get on OPEC oil production comes from a fabulous firm called Petro-Logistics in Geneva, Switzerland, and in case none of you have ever been to the offices of Petro-Logistics (I haven’t, I’ve just heard a lot about it), it’s a one-man show over a grocery store in Geneva, run by Conrad Gerber. I think it’s basically a scam. He’s front running for somebody, because there’s no way on earth that somebody could be over a grocery store in Geneva and say what Saudi Arabia is now producing. But the fact that everyone has been so clammed up about their own information has left the world held hostage to Conrad Gerber’s Miltsonian eye, ah, you know, which is itself alarming.

The only proof we have that Saudi Arabia has the outlook that the world is counting on is what I would call ‘trust me.’

I gave up role-playing games many years ago, but Andrew Phelps has a hilarious piece on fatherhood and RPGs.

Do you know my wife actually says that if she'd known I'd played RPGs when I was young, she would never have married me? Bwahahahaha... fooled her! (That's okay dear. I'd have never married you if I'd known you secretly wanted to take classes in Klingon, you geekette you.)

"We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting. Republicans are supported by whites with prejudice against blacks."

Our friend Liam Scheff has an extensive interview with National Institutes of Health whistleblower Jonathan Fishbein.

The real question is whether anything's going to change as a result of all this.

Jay over at The Radical Centrist asks, when did it become 'liberal' to care about the environment? It's a very good question, and he (rightly) takes some Republicans to task for being reflexively anti-environmentalist.

However, there is a flip side to that coin which has to be addressed: this probably started to happen around the same time that certain environmentalist groups became shills for the Democratic Party, or worse, simply became more obsessed with scaremongering and fundraising than actually doing anything to help the environment.

Tom Knudson's 2001 series on the environmentalist movement, and how much it's become corrupted and irrational, remains as timely as ever from what I can see. I recommend reading all five pieces in their entirety:

Part 1: Fat of the Land

Part 2: Mission adrift in a frenzy of fundraising

Part 3: Lawsuit Raises Questions About Motives

Part 4: Spin On Science Puts National Treasure at Risk

Part 5: Solutions Sprouting from Grassroots Efforts.

The entire series is good. You can't just blame conservatives here. There is a deep need for reform among environmentalist groups. If environmentalist groups want to make headway, they need to get rational, and they need to start talking to some Republicans.

(Click the image to see full size version.)

Hiawatha Bray notes that criticism of Google for becoming a tool of Communist oppressors is both fierce and growing. Good. Because so far Google has not gotten even half the kicking around that it deserves.

I don't buy for one second the "well having a crippled version of Google in China is better than no Google in China at all" excuse. That's a false dichotomy. The Chinese government can block Google's main web site, but Google has countless ways of making its service reachable by anyone in China. Indeed, they could have made themselves the search engine that everyone in China learned would not kowtow to the terror masters of Beijing. Finding ways to get to a Google search could have become one of the best ways to be subversive in China.

More to the point, some things are too dirty to justify making money on. Child pornography would be one such thing. Helping communists oppress people would be another.

I've been fairly well pleased by Gigablast as my new main search engine. But I've also been pleased with Scroogle. Indeed, so pleased with it you'll notice it's now over there on the right as a third search choice for Dean's World. They use Google, but strip out all the Google ads and tracking data that Google normally uses. And it works great!

In some circles, the endless Andrew Sullivan-bashing gets old. (If you haven't seen it, just take my word for it. It gets ridiculos at times among certain bloggers.) However, that doesn't mean Andrew Sullivan doesn't go off the rails on occasion. Here is his latest example: he mocks Fred Barnes for claiming that young George W. Bush volunteered for a unit that might have gotten him sent to Vietnam.

Far be it from me to come to Fred Barnes' defense. Fred's okay, but he's certainly annoying at times. But Sully can be just as annoying--and in this case, Barnes is correct. It was in fact widely reported that Bush volunteered for duty that could have gotten him sent to Vietnam.

The first mention of this that I can recall was in this 1999 Washington Post interview. You may also want to look at this report by Bill Hobbs.

Sully has been far too quick to endorse any anti-Bush story ever since Bush came out againt gay marriage. It's okay to disagree with Bush on that--I do too--but for goodness sakes, that's no excuse to just uncritically accept every negative report on Bush, or to put a snotty spin on anything remotely positive about the man. Yes, Bush did indeed volunteer to serve in a unit that was known to be semi-regularly deployed to Vietnam. He never wound up so deployed, and he never made a big deal out of it. Indeed, any time he was pressed on it (again, see the 1999 interview) he went out of his way to brush it off as a minor, meaningless thing.

But it's the simple truth. It may not play well with the "he was a draft dodger!" crowd, but it's still the truth.

Here's the big hit raging in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and among Al Qaeda sympathizers everywhere: It's In The Koran!

(Via Michael.)

I meant to link this on Saturday, but that's okay, more people will see it if I link it today: the blogger known as Dr. Sanity was, 20 years ago, the flight surgeon for the doomed Challenger shuttle mission. You can, and should, read her story here.

I've been a big Firefox supporter for a long while, and I still am. But, I've been wondering how it is that the Mozilla Foundation is making money enough to hire people full-time and keep those high-capacity servers going. Well it appears that they've made big money from Google, and tried to keep it under the table.

It's not that they shouldn't do this, but shouldn't they be more forthcoming with their users and contributors and volunteer programmers, and shouldn't they be paying their taxes?

Instapundit recently pointed to an Arnold Kling piece wherein Kling concluded that blogging is probably not a fad. But Kling ran off the rails for me when he said this:

One way to distinguish a fad from a trend is to ask what would happen if you reversed the order in which technologies were invented. For example, suppose that we had all of the highly-touted electronic technologies for distance learning, and then someone came along and invented the book. My guess is that the book would be greeted as a technological marvel--easy to hold, convenient to carry, outstanding resolution, and so forth. This thought experiment leads me to suspect that electronic distance learning is a fad.

Huh? First off, what the heck does the popularity of books have to do with online distance learning? As someone who just finished his degree through online classes, I can assure Arnold that we used textbooks. They were mailed to us a week before every class.

Furthermore, fads come out of nowhere, flash bright, and disappear. Something that's not a fad, on the other hand, tends to grow steadily in popularity over a period of many years. And distance learning has been increasing steadily since the 1990s. It's not new, it's been growing over a long stretch. In 2001, online higher education for adults (not counting the millions of K-12 students) was a $4.5 billion market. In 2005, it grew to $11 billion. And that's just in the United States. On top of that the e-learning market for government and corporate training is now at $18 billion in the U.S. And the growth trend shows no sign of slowing down. Source: U.S. Distance Learning Association.

Sorry man, this ain't no hula-hoop.

As a working adult, online education is the best thing to happen to me in years. I tried brick-and-mortar classes for about two years while working full time. The stress of the added commute time, the need to attend at a specific time even if work or family conflicted, and the stultifying, stuffy classroom environment all added massively to my stress levels. Attending class in person did not in any way enhance my learning. Indeed, all it did was contribute to an almost complete nervous collapse I suffered a couple of years ago.

The only thing that saved me was switching to online classes, which dropped my stress levels immeasurably. I also learned far more once I did that.

I have always, ever since I was a kid, absolutely loathed being in a classroom. I do not learn in that environment--and there are a whole lot of people out there just like me in that regard.

By the way, when I say that to some people, they smirk and say that those of us who hate sitting in a classroom are just lazy or undisciplined. To which my simple response is, "go to hell, you know-it-all jackass." Lazy people do not hold down a full-time job while carrying a full-time college class load, all while having a family, writing a novel, and writing a popular weblog. If I tell you I don't learn well in a traditional classroom, it's because I don't learn well in a traditional classroom.

I am seriously considering going to grad school now that I have my bachelor's. I'm even toying with the idea of a PhD. But I have made a pledge: As God is my witness, I will never set foot in another classroom. Not as a student, anyway. I want to learn, dammit!

Please, do not tout the so-called "benefits" of classroom discussion. Not only do I find most classroom discussion pointless--sorry, but I do--but to the extent that I need discussion, I can get it through the online experience.

For my graduate degree, I'm currently looking at Eastern Michigan University, one of Michigan's best schools. They offer courses in either online or traditional classroom format. While I find it baffling that any student would agree to attend the tedious, dreary, monotonous, regimented jibber-jabber of the traditional classroom, more power to them. If those students enjoy such an inconvenient and distracting environment, it's their business. But I will definitely not be among them. I mean, honestly now, how can anyone expect to learn in a classroom? I sure as hell never did. Not even as a child.

Here's my prediction for Arnold Kling: by the end of this decade, more returning adults will be pursuing degrees with at least some online classes than returning adults who take -no- online classes.

Anyone want to wager with me?

Well, shows what I know, doesn't it?

(Thanks Peter.)

Chuck Simmins noted problems with World Health Organization numbers on SARS. And problems with their numbers on the marburg outbreak in Angola. And with their latest wild numbers on Bird Flu. I won't even get into their numbers on HIV.

A first response on something like this would be, "hey, they're doing the best with what they have." But are they? How much of what they do is really politics, as opposed to sound science?

Dan Riehl is skeptical of retinal scans in public schools.

I haven't decided what I think.

Joe Gandelman, guesting over at CBS News' weblog, has some thoughts on the future of network news.

I think he's mostly right.

I'll bet that most Americans don't know that the biggest dispute between the U.S. and Canada at the moment is Canada's claim to sovereignty over the arctic northwest passage.

What's the Northwest Passage? Here's a good article.

It's good to see Michael Yon getting some mainstream press. Although his dispatches should have been front page news months ago....

(Thanks Robert.)

Chuck Simmons notes the passing of a great American hero.

Hmmmm.

I'm going with photoshop on this one, but only because the dog doesn't look right. In the first shot, his neck is too straight, and when he goes flying he looks exactly like he was just pasted in.

It's not that I don't believe dogs would attack a bull like this--clearly they might--or that a dog might latch on, be hefted in the air, and pitched away like that. That could well happen too. But the angles just look all wrong.

What do you say?

Well, it looks like Janet Reno's running for office in Florida again.

Methinks she wants to be Governor.

Take a gander at this beastie:

Click the image to enlarge.

This is an actual working robot being used by abdominal surgeons. It looks just like that, only much smaller. Its actual size is about 15 millimeters, or roughly 6/10ths of an inch.

That's not quite nanoscale, but it should show you how rapidly we are progressing toward nanoscale devices. These little robots are remotely controlled by surgeons, who can insert them into your abdomen through laparoscopy, then watch their actions through the built-in camera and control them with a joystick, so they can crawl around inside your abdomen, take pictures, and perform biopsies--and even some forms of surgery.

Indeed, check this out: they've been able to have a patient swallow them, then, the robots make a small cut in the stomach, exit the stomach and go into the abdomen, wander around under the control of a surgeon, then leave again after performing procedures, all without requiring any external cuts in the abdominal wall. They've also been able to use it to do things like gall bladder removal laparascopically with half the normal number of incisions.

Ray Kurzweil talks often about how many technologies appear to be on linear growth curves but are actually on exponential growth curves. He also notes that most exponential growth curves have what he calls a "knee," which is the point in the curve where people begin to notice the trend. The growth has been rapid all along, but simply not visible to most everyday people. Then suddenly a point comes where everyday people just barely start to notice... then to their shock, in what seems like a very short time period, the technology seems to be spreading like wildfire. And it starts out as very expensive and not working very well, then moderately expensive and working better, then very cheap and working very well.

We're just hitting the knee of the robotics curve now I'd say. Just wait--within a few years robots like this will be significantly smaller, significantly more advanced, and significantly cheaper. Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if such robots started being standard equipment for outpatient surgeries well before 2020.

Anyway, more on the surgical robots right here.

Hmm. The White House is getting pretty strongly anti-gay, isn't it?

(Via Michael.)

Our friends at Pundit Review will be interviewing Smoking Gun editor Andrew Goldberg tomorrow.

This entire interview is worth devouring. Although sadly, most of it will be lost on a lot of people here in the West.

The New Republic--one of the best liberal publications in America--has a great piece by Judge Richard Posner:

The revelation by The New York Times that the National Security Agency (NSA) is conducting a secret program of electronic surveillance outside the framework of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (fisa) has sparked a hot debate in the press and in the blogosphere. But there is something odd about the debate: It is aridly legal. Civil libertarians contend that the program is illegal, even unconstitutional; some want President Bush impeached for breaking the law. The administration and its defenders have responded that the program is perfectly legal; if it does violate fisa (the administration denies that it does), then, to that extent, the law is unconstitutional. This legal debate is complex, even esoteric. But, apart from a handful of not very impressive anecdotes (did the NSA program really prevent the Brooklyn Bridge from being destroyed by blowtorches?), there has been little discussion of the program's concrete value as a counterterrorism measure or of the inroads it has or has not made on liberty or privacy.

The whole thing deserves a thorough reading.

Woohoo!

Take that Al-Qaeda!

The terrorist militat group Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament this week. There is a good deal of handwringing (and some gloating) over this, none of which strike me as all that justified.

There is no question that this was a legitimate democratic election. Does that make Palestine a democracy now? No, no, no. Political scientists have a number of tests for what counts as either an electoral or a liberal democracy, and at this point Palestine qualifies as neither. They have done, however, had their first legitimate democratic election. Now it must be seen what the newly-elected, Hamas-dominated parliament actually does with their power, and to what extent the exercise of political power changes them. It will also remain to be seen whether they will allow future elections, and step down if they are defeated in same. The moment that happens, we will be able to say without doubt they are a democracy, by the way, and not really until then; a peaceful transfer of power from one elected political party to another elected political party is one of the major reqirements for proving a nation is a democracy.

Still, there can be no doubting that Palestine has taken a step--a big one--toward democracy, and if they continue taking more steps in the same direction they will eventually become a true democracy. As history shows, quite definitively, that democracies do not make war on each other, this bodes very well indeed for the prospect of peace in the Middle East within the next generation or so. Regardless of what we might think of the victors in this particular election in Palestine in 2005.

By the way, political scientist Rudy Rummel dispels some important myths about the Hamas victory in Palestine.

The space shuttle Challenger blew up midair 20 years ago today.

I well remember where I was, in the office of a small special ed school I was working at as a Teacher's Aide (my first full-time regular job). I and a coworker had the TV on specifically to watch the launch.

The speech the President gave that evening from the Oval Office was one of the finest speeches by any President that I have ever heard:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.

"Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But, we've never lost an astronaut in flight; we've never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.

"For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy.' They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.

"We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.

"And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

"I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute. We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue. I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA or who worked on this mission and tell them: 'Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it.'

"There's a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, 'He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.' Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete.

"The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honoured us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'

"Thank you."

Now here's a tradition in origami (Japanese paper-folding) I'd never heard of until recently:

One of the most famous origami designs is the Japanese crane. The crane is auspicious in Japanese culture. Japan has launched a satellite named tsuru (crane). Legend says that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes will have their heart's desire come true. The origami crane (折鶴 orizuru in Japanese) has become a symbol of peace because of this legend, and because of a young Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki. Sadako was exposed to the radiation of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as an infant, and it took its inevitable toll on her health. She was then, a hibakusha — an atom bomb survivor. By the time she was twelve in 1955, she was dying of leukemia. Hearing the legend, she decided to fold 1,000 cranes so that she could live. However, it was not just for herself that she wished healing. It is said that what made the girl truly special in her effort was her additional wish to end all such suffering, to bring peace and healing to the victims of the world.

Sadako folded 644 cranes before she died. Her classmates continued folding cranes in honor of their friend. Sadako was buried with a wreath of 1,000 cranes. While her effort could not extend her life, it moved her friends to make a granite statue of Sadako in the Hiroshima Peace Park: a young girl standing with her hand outstretched, a paper crane flying from her fingertips. Every year the statue is adorned with thousands of wreaths of a thousand origami cranes. A group of one thousand paper cranes is called senbazuru in Japanese.

Source: Wikipedia.

Well that's a lovely image. Some may question the point, but art doesn't always have a point does it?

Anyway, it turns out I now know someone who has in fact created his own senbazuru: Cosmic Conservative.

Lovely color groupings by the way, Sean.

Click on image to enlarge to full size

Courtesy of: Tibet Will Be Free

Update: Oh would you just look at that!

I made some tweaks to the new Gigablast search tool over in the sidebar at right. It should turn up more reliable searches now. Just FYI.

So, what did you think of this week's episode?

Warning: spoilers *are* allowed. So read at your own risk. And, have at it!

So what are you up to?

Neo has a new edition of a mind is a difficult thing to change.

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

(Er, should I actually be laughing? I'm not so sure.)

Tired of smoking? Wanna quit? Then put out your cigarette and throw your pack away. Now. Don't think about it: Just do it. It works.

I know because I smoked 1-2 packs a day for 17 years. One evening, 10 years ago as of tomorrow, I was in a restaurant with the wife. She was nagging my about my smoking. I finally got tired of her nagging, stubbed out my Mild Seven and said, "Fine. I quit."

It was the 12th or 15th time I tried quitting, but guess what? It worked. Now research shows that quitting suddenly works better than planning.

So if you want to quit, don't think about it. Just do it. Now.

Take control of your life. Kicking cigarettes is the first step, and once you take it, there is absolutely nothing that you can't do. Seriously.

Tell me something you believe that other people think is odd.

Oh cool... here are some free public lectures by Stephen Hawking.

As is usually the case with Hawking, his stuff requires careful reading and re-reading and pondering at length 'lest he be misunderstood. Hawking often surprises me and baffles me until I read him more closely and really think about what he's saying. I always feel immeasurably smarter after I feel I've grasped Hawking (which, come to think of it, is a blindingly obvious sentiment).

For example, in the main lecture linked above, he makes the following observation on the Anthropic Principle:

For the Strong Anthropic Principle, one supposes that there are many different universes, each with different values of the physical constants.

I found myself utterly baffled by this at first, since there's nothing in the Anthropic Principle, weak or strong, which states such a thing. Just for the record, here's how I understand the strong and weak anthropic principles:

Strong anthropic principle: the universe is ordered in such a way that the development of intelligent life is inevitable, in much the same way that the development of molecules or stars are inevitable. It simply will happen. Thus the laws of the cosmos must (by deduction) be ordered in such a way that the odds of intelligent life developing sooner or later approach, or are equal to, 1.

Weak anthropic principle the universe is ordered in such a way that intelligent life is something that might possibly happen, with no great likelihood. Odds of sentience developing in the universe approach, but do not reach, 0. (They can't equal 0 or we wouldn't be here to observe ourselves.)

That's how I understand it anyway; anyone who knows better can correct me. However, I find these head-scratchers a lot in cosmology, especially reading guys like Hawking or Einstein, because they're often several jumps ahead of their audience--and certainly several jumps ahead of me. As I grasp it, Hawking isn't mis-stating the Strong Anthropic Principle, he's stating that if the Strong Anthropic Principle is true it probably requires many other universes to exist in which life doesn't or can't exist, and he finds that unsatisfying. Thus he prefers the Weak principle. Which is fascinating, and I'm re-reading the essay now to make sure I understand what leads him to that level of assumption.

That's how I'm reading it anyway. Maybe someone will contradict me and tell me if I'm off-base...?

Anyway, look at this amazing treasure: FREE STEPHEN HAWKING LECTURES! Oh the wonders of the Internet. Thank you, Al Gore. (And you know, some time I'll have to write about why that's not as big a joke as some people think it is.)

So I notice a lot of the 20-somethings at work wear t-shirts featuring the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, and Jimmy Page.

Since I love that music should this make me feel very good, or very old?

I think I'll go with "very good." :-)

Chris Short had an eloquent response to Joel Stein.

Joel Stein sent him a terse, polite response.

More armor is not always a good idea.

Remember people, good intentions aren't enough. You have to think!

My lovely wife is calling for massive boycotts of "Hardball" host Chris Matthews and Republican attack dog Katie Couric.

Heh.

Via the New York Sun

Iraq's WMD Secreted in Syria, Sada Says

Mr. Sada, 65, told the Sun that the pilots of the two airliners that transported the weapons of mass destruction to Syria from Iraq approached him in the middle of 2004, after Saddam was captured by American troops.

"I know them very well. They are very good friends of mine. We trust each other. We are friends as pilots," Mr. Sada said of the two pilots. He declined to disclose their names, saying they are concerned for their safety. But he said they are now employed by other airlines outside Iraq.

The pilots told Mr. Sada that two Iraqi Airways Boeings were converted to cargo planes by removing the seats, Mr. Sada said. Then Special Republican Guard brigades loaded materials onto the planes, he said, including "yellow barrels with skull and crossbones on each barrel." The pilots said there was also a ground convoy of trucks.

The flights - 56 in total, Mr. Sada said - attracted little notice because they were thought to be civilian flights providing relief from Iraq to Syria, which had suffered a flood after a dam collapse in June of 2002.

"Saddam realized, this time, the Americans are coming," Mr. Sada said. "They handed over the weapons of mass destruction to the Syrians."..

...The Syrian ruling party and Saddam Hussein had in common the ideology of Baathism, a mixture of Nazism and Marxism.

In related news, Syria is backing Iran's nuclear plans. The Palestinians have chosen Islamist/terrorist rule by voting for Hamas. Hamas, which is often called a "charitable organization" is supported by Islamist Iran and Saudi Arabia.

As President Bush said, "Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them".

[link thanks to Atlas Shruggs]

Okay, now this looks promising. In more ways than one.

Imagine you woke up one day and discovered that al-Qaeda had won elections in Mexico. That's kind of what happened to Israelis this morning when they learned that Hamas had pretty much shut-out Fatah to take control of the Palestinian government. Now consider that Israel's Prime Minister is in a coma, and Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.

Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse in what P.J. O'Rourke called "God's Monkey House", thing are indeed getting worse in the Middle East. Scary worse.

However, things getting worse in the Middle East may just be what the region needs in order to reach a peaceful future.

Don't kid yourself: Hamas will not tone down its rhetoric. It's no DNC, nor even Tubby Reifenstahl & Crew: It's a terror group that has machine gunned children in their beds, blown up a restaurant filled with mothers and toddlers, and blown up families sitting down for a meal at Seder. They call these military operations done by martyrs. And guess what? They now have a state to call their own.

But it's a state that is fully funded by your tax dollars, along with the tax dollars of our European allies. If you are so inclined, you might want to make a quick call to your elected representative and ask him/her to put a stop payment on the next check we send the Palestinian Authority - since some of that money will go to the murdering of innocents.

The Palestinian people have used the power of Democracy to elect a terror group as their leadership. Since Hitler was democratically elected, it isn't unheard of for a people to choose their doom in the same way a suicide chooses his method of death. The Palestinians people have spoken. They and they alone should be held accountable for the actions of their leaders.

I am a big believer in cause and effect. The Palestinians have been protected from the effects of their actions - namely support of Hamas' "military actions" - by the fiction of Fatah's control of the Palestinian Authority. They received money from the US and EU for peace with the Israelis but they never had to give any in return. The only reason Israel is safer today is because it has cut itself off from the PA controlled territories with a wall. US & EU danegeld had nothing to do with it.

As of today it will be much harder for the US and even the Palestinian-leaning EU to continue funding this dysfunctional relationship. The money will be cut off and the Palestinians will be forced to be on their own - just with a government that makes the Taliban look like the Green Party.

The greatest stumbling block to peace in the Middle East is the refusal of Palestinians to accept the existence of the state of Israel. A Hamas lead government might be just the thing to realize that coexistence with Israel isn't so bad after all.

That's my hope anyway. As noted anti-Semite HL Mencken once remarked, "People get the government they deserve - and they deserve to get it good and hard."

Sandi and I discuss it here.

So, Cindy Sheehan thinks Bill Clinton was a bigger mass-murderer than George W. Bush.

I'm sorry, Cindy who?

Carol has more to say here and here, but I'm still thinking:

Cindy who?

I did find the interview with Ronan Sheehan pretty interesting though. Especially because if you spelled the guy's name "Ronin Shihan" you'd probably have a pretty butt-kicking Japanese martial artist...

Hey, check it out. My new favorite search engine, Gigablast, can be added as a search plugin to Firefox. Or if you use Internet Explorer, you can get this cool free toolbar

It's also now the default Dean's World search tool. You'll find it conveniently and from now on at the upper right hand side of the page.

By the way, I must say that Jerry Kindall is the mightiest of mighty men who, in the course of helping me fix a formatting glitch brought on by Google Search (now no longer used on this site), also fixed some formatting issues that have been plaguing Dean's World for months. Everything should look much better now in most browsers! (There's still some weirdness in the top left column in Opera for mysterious reasons known only to the great guru in the sky.)