Sensible of Sensuousness

Anybody with access to Comcast On Demand movies, Netflix, or to a really good video store, should consider the Emma Thompson-Kate Winslett-Hugh Grant version of 'Sense and Sensibility'. Hugh Grant is a good technical actor. When his Mr. Ferrars is supposed to be covered with embarrassment and confusion, Mr. Grant credibly appears covered with embarrassment and confusion. Kate Winslett, as Marianne, is also. But she is so luminously beautiful, especially in the opening sequences, that one doesn't care what she does so long as they leave the camera on her. Emma Thompson however is more than just technically good. She gives us an Eleanor Dashwood who is both credible and moving. She is superlative. Even her being seemingly a little too old (36 when the movie was made in 1995) is perfect because it emphasizes that she has, as her in-laws privately say of her, become a spinster. Losing Ferrars is losing not just her love, but her last chance for a decent life.

Everything about the cinematography is lush and beautiful, from Winslett's face to the grounds and interiors of the aristocratic estates. I don't know who is responsible for getting horses that are big, beautiful, and high-stepping, but even details like that were splendid.

There are so many fine performances by lesser-known and unknown actors that one has to attribute them to the director, Ang Lee. I confess that I supposed at the time that Ang Lee was a fad, ballyhooed because he was an exotic, Hollywood affirmative action. But this film proves otherwise. The movie moves along at just the right pace. Having read the book long ago, and only dimly remembered it, it was so much better to see the whole thing done in two hours on the screen.

It is paradoxical that Jane Austen's novels, arguably the best written in English, are also Chick-Lit up the wazoo. Which suggests that excellence matters more than form or audience. The notion that only literature about black people can be meaningful to African Americans, or about Hispanics meaningful to Hispanics, is belied by the persuasiveness and freshness of 'Sense and Sensibility' to non-19th century English gentry spinsters.

Afternote -- It turns out that this movie is not some hidden gem which I alone had the taste and luck to discover. It won a 1996 Oscar for best screenplay adapted from another medium, and was nominated for 6 others - best actress, best supporting actress, best cinematography, best costumes, best music, and best picture. The adaptation of Jane Austen was done by Emma Thompson.

This was as good a way to kill two hours as I have seen in a while.

Impossible

According to articles in both the 'New Yorker' and the 'Manchester Guardian', we ought not to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities because it wouldn't work. Both publications stated unequivocally that there was no way to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. The American article said that only negotiation would work. Nothing was mentioned about the fact that the present talk of bombing arises precisely from the failure of negotiations. The British article, writing with even less sense of the possible skepticism of readers, went on to say the United States should, "accept defeat".

The Israeli government, perhaps not having access to Hebrew translations of these august publications, apparently did not get the message.



Satellite imagery of a suspected nuclear facility in Syria collected on August 10, 2007, left, and October 24.

Amnesty International

has published a report condemning the arbitrary arrests and disappearances by Hamas and Fatah of hundreds of their opponents in Gaza and the West Bank. Apparently Amnesty International's concern stems from the fact that the victims of these Palestinian murders weren't Jews.

New Vocabulary Project - Restoration of Words

If everytime one heard the word "diversity", it registered as "fragmentation", would it still be a good thing?

New Vocabulary Project

We need a new vocabulary for our new era. In 1984 George Orwell gave us the word and concept of 'Newspeak', the language in which one could only speak in praise of Big Brother and in which there was no vocabulary in which to form thoughts of resistance or rebellion. Various dialects of 'Newspeak' are spreading continually through the media and the population in general.

My contribution is a word for the mental process corresponding to Newspeak. It is crapthink. I have the copyright to it but it is available as a free download.

I call on my thousands of readers to contribute their own new words for the new millennium to this blog.

Movie Stars

Well actually moving stars. NASA has a java software online that shows where and when to look for the International Space Station and a bunch of other stuff. http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/SSapplications/Post/JavaSSOP/JavaSSOP.html

Movie

All the News That's Fit to Print

Today the big news is that Joe Torre has rejected the Yankees' offer of $5 million to manage the team in 2008. Google's profit was up 54%. Deborah Kerr died at 86. Judge Mukasey was questioned by a Senate committee during his confirmation hearings as Attorney-General. John McCain campaigned in South Carolina.

Did anything else happen? Oh yeah, 108 people were killed in Pakistan in bombings which were an attempt to assassinate Benazir Bhutto. As if that mattered.

A Global Marshall Plan?

One of the ideas that has been floating around lately, particularly on the left, is that of a Global Marshall Plan, a pouring out of money to redeem the poor countries from their crushing poverty.

The US has been running huge federal budget deficits. Our balance of payments is in even larger deficit. Which means vastly more dollars are going overseas than are coming back through trade. The dollar has declined from the Euro being 88 cents to it being $1.43 today. Sterling has risen from $1.38 a few years ago to $2.05. The Canadian dollar has risen from 68 cents to $1.03. It is generally acknowledged that the reason things are not much, much worse than they already are is that Japan and China are subsidizing us by buying huge amounts of dollar-denominated debt. If there comes a time when the Chinese and Japanese governments decide that it is just too costly to keep acquiring more and more rapidly-depreciating dollars, the plunge could become rapid and dramatic.

If the dollar collapsed to its true value against foreign currencies, the effects in the US would be disastrous. Inflation and interest rates would soar. Government spending would be slashed to minimize the inflationary effects of the deficit. State budgets, which do not have the option of running deficits, would be slashed even more.

I hardly need say on whose shoulders the resulting economic distress and dislocation would fall most heavily. The social effects from government spending cuts alone would be greatly reduced education budgets, health care spending would be cut, income transfer programs like AFDC would be gutted, government hiring would shrink to a trickle. The private economy effects would be even worse. Unemployment (which is already much higher than officially acknowledged) would soar. Mortgage lending, already reduced, would stop. Any remaining hope that working people could buy their own homes would vanish. With ever larger numbers of people unemployed, again I hardly need say which segments of the working people would suffer most severely.

With greatly increased unemployment would come all the social vices that beset the poorest among us. Drug dependency, prostitution, wife-beating, crime, dropping out of school, mental illness, preventable illnesses, infant mortality, homelessness, violence, would all increase sharply. At the same time government programs to address these problems would shrivel for lack of funding. White perceptions of the ghetto and barrio would lead to a hardening of racial attitudes. The gains of two generations of social amelioration could be reversed and wiped out within a few years. With rising unemployment and social distress, the pressure on Congress and the Administration for mass deportations would grow until it became irresistible.

Paradoxically there would be winners. Those of us with large fixed rate mortgages would make out handsomely. Another winner would be the Defense Department. For all the flag-waving about what heroes the soldiers are, one of the main reasons for enlisting is unemployment. Part of the reason the army cannot now realistically plan on invading Iran is that they can't get the manpower for it because the unemployment rate is relatively low. If the dollar were to collapse and interest rates and unemployment to rise relentlessly, the services would be able to enlist all the man- and womanpower they wanted. Even worse, faced with the alternative of deportation to a progressively impoverished Mexico, many illegals would seek citizenship by enlisting. Our armies would become in effect mercenaries. Once the public came to realize that a large fraction of our soldiers were foreign mercenaries, public sensitivity to the army taking casualties would diminish. With more boots on the ground and less concern about casualties, the military options open to Washington would multiply.

The post-World War II Marshall Plan was financed out of the vast balance of payments surpluses the United States, with the only large industrial economy not devastated by wartime bombing and invasion, enjoyed. As people our age may recall, the dollar was huge when we went to Europe until the early 1970's.

None of that is any longer the case. A global Marshall Plan is indeed a wonderful and even necessary idea. But it is US-centric thinking to suppose that we should lead it. We would be risking economic collapse to attempt it. The countries which should do it are those which are in the economic position the United States was in after World War II, those with strong currencies and large balance of payments surpluses. The countries in that situation are the European Union, Japan, China, Britain, and Canada. I was in Canada all this past summer and saw that the subject is already being discussed with some seriousness in influential magazines like McLean's.

What I want to be when I grow up

A moment's excitement here in this dullest of all suburbs. I smelled a kind of nasty electrical smell and thought about opening a window when I heard the sirens. When I went outside, the street was full of fire engines and firefighters and long canvas hoses. It was the next house but one to mine. Close enough to be exciting, not close enough to be dangerous. I saw a short muscular-looking man put an oxygen tank on his back, a huge axe on his waist, and a classic fireman's helmet on his head. He then walked determinedly into the building. I was stunned. It was one of those moments when you see something that you have always known about but never actually seen before, and in seeing it one understands it in a whole new way. Except for the oxygen tank the scene was a cliche seen in one form or another since pictures in first grade readers. The only thing missing was the Dalmatian dog.

But in seeing it, I realized the man was walking into a burning building when the only sane thing to do is to run out. Surely the man is well-paid but I am not sure that is all there was to it. I think that a lot of his purpose was to maintain his status among his comrades, but another large part was that he was doing his social duty. I suppose if I had stopped him and asked why he was walking into the building, he would have said something like, "It's my job." and, "We can't just let people's houses burn down, can we?" Which would translate as, "It's my duty." and, "It's my social duty." I may have been idealizing, but the combination of cojones and rectitude was impressive.



Bob White rejoins:

That fireman could walk into tht building with confidence that he would come out, not because he was brave, which he may have been, or idealistic, which he also may have been, but because he was well trained. He knew what to expect, he knew how to handle the situation. When I was in the Navy I worked at a firefighting school on treasure island. We would set fires in steel structures simulating a fire in a ship at sea. At first the students would freak out at the raging flames and me and another lowlife worker would have to go in and put out the fire. We became pretty good at it and eventually so did the students.

True, unexpected things happen and firemen do get killed, but for the most part they do a well-trained job with confidence in their training

How Noble is the Nobel Prize?

Wouldn't we all think better of Al Gore getting the Nobel Peace Prize if Yasser Arafat hadn't won it too? Which is not to take anything away from Gore, just from the Nobel Prize committee. They are no more able to see beyond journalism and political fashion than anyone else. I once made it a project to read all the works which had won Nobel Prizes for literature. I was forced to give it up because so many were worthless and unreadable.

This year's runaway best seller which critics agree is the greatest thing since movable type, a generation later is a waste of binding and paper. One cannot even fault the Nobel Prize committee for not being able to know which books will still be read a century later and which will be forgotten. Nobody else can do it either. F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the best American writer of the 20th Century, won nothing, possibly because he died so young. Neither did Aldous Huxley, or George Orwell. Possibly they were omitted because the committee was busy honoring Gao Xingjian, Jose Saramago, Elfriede Jelinek, Imre Kertesz, Dario Fo, Wislawa Szymborska, and a variety of other writers no one had heard of before and no one has heard of since.

Orwell is a more interesting omission. A writer who criticized Communism and Communists from the perspective of a veteran of the Spanish Civil War was not likely to be acceptable in then-socialist and still-politically correct Sweden.

Freaks in Underwear

When is the last time you saw someone 7 feet tall? Have you ever seen anyone 7 feet tall? They are vanishingly rare. Yet the the NBA rests on the premise that that minuscule minority just happen to be the best and most watchable athletes in the world. Curiously no 7 footers are able to get into professional baseball, professional football, professional tennis, professional soccer, nor any Olympic sport.

Simple statistics suggests that athletes recruited from a tiny group cannot be very good. If it were a requirement that every professional baseball player could only be recruited from the population of one small town, how good those teams be? Is there a reason why a team recruited only from Chico will never beat the Yankees? The only conclusion one can draw is that the NBA is a bush league.

An intrinsically mediocre winter sport is made even duller by interminable playoffs that stretch into June.

What can be done? One step that would change everything for the better would be to put the fences 700 feet from home plate. Whoops! Wrong rant. If the basket were two or three feet higher so that nobody could dunk, it would favor faster players who have the eye-hand coordination to throw the ball through the hoop while running. To avoid the game becoming even duller by reducing everybody's shooting percentage, the hoop, while higher, would also be larger. The angular width of the target would remain the same from most of the court.

There would still be advantages for big men. There is no getting away from the advantages of being tall and having long arms when guarding another player. But the advantages of height would be only on defense. Offense would require athletic ability.

The advantage of speed and eye-hand coordination, i.e. athletic ability, over height would be enhanced by changing the 3 point shot into a 5 point shot. The game would no longer be about shooting from as close to the basket as possible for a layup or tip-in. It would become about getting as close to the 5 point line as possible. One big advantage, aside from favoring normal-sized human beings, would be to expand the shooting area to a large circumference around the court. With a large shooting area, it might become a possible strategy to pass the ball other than just getting it to the Big Man under the basket. This would again favor fast coordinated players over freakishly tall ones.

Another change that would improve the game would be to penalize players who consistently miss free throws by taking them out and shooting them. This is equivalent to baseball players being able to successfully run to first base unopposed only 50 percent of the time.

These reforms would vastly improve basketball. It would however remain a boring stupid game with nothing to recommend it except requiring less real estate than other team sports. The solution to this problem would be to reverse the system of selecting extraordinarily large players in favor of breeding extraordinarily small players only a few inches tall who would be able to play tackle football on grassed-over basketball courts.

Stayed tuned for future issues in which Jack reforms miniature golf and pingpong....

A Modest Proposal

In the midst of the playoffs and upcoming World Series, is it too topical to suggest a reform of the National Pastime?

To come to the point - home runs are bush league. Home runs are boring. When the ball goes over the fence it goes out of play. Baseball is about throwing, catching, fielding, baserunning, and hitting. None of that happens after the ball goes over the fence. Even the hitting stops because there is no one on base afterwards.

They are also inflated in value. A run composed of beating out an infield hit, stealing second, getting to third on a sacrifice bunt, and coming home on a fly ball counts no more than one composed of some steroid junkie swinging once. A ball hit over the fence is even valued the same as an inside-the-park home run, the greatest feat in baseball. But which one is more like a competitive sport? After a home run, the moron who hits it actually trots rather than runs around the bases. Everybody else just stands around. What could be a more explicit demonstration of how dull a home run is? Home runs are not play, they are a stop in play. Home runs enable big strong guys to beat good baseball players at baseball.

I once thought that ballparks should be made so big that nobody could hit home runs. Push the fences out to 500 or 600 feet. But that would put the bleacher fans too far way to see the game. Worse, it would have required rebuilding or replacing all the ballparks. There would have been a transition while some of the parks had been converted and some had not. No possible way for that to happen.

A spiffier and more accessible way to do it would be to change the rules. The rule now is that if a ball lands fair and bounces over the fence it is what used to be called a 'ground rule double'. I heard an announcer recently refer to one as a 'rulebook double'. I don't know the reason for the change but it might be that nobody could think of what a ground rule is. The reason for the rule is clear enough. To hit the ball that far and have it fall in fair means that one got a substantial hit. That it went over the fence means that the fielder cannot reach it to throw it back to keep the runner from advancing any further. Since it would be unfair and disproportionate to let the runner advance unlimitedly all the way to home just because the ball is inaccessible, the runner is held to a double. It is hard to think of any part of that logic that does not apply to a ball hit over the fence as well as one that bounces over it.

A ball hit over the fence could be treated as an out or as a foul ball but that would be to go from over-valuing it to under-valuing it. Hitting the ball as hard and far as possible is an integral part of baseball, it just isn't all of baseball.

If a ball hit over the outfield fence were a rulebook double it would advance a runner on first base to third, and one on second or third would score. A triple would be a more valuable hit than a ball hit over the fence because it is harder to do. A slow runner cannot hit a triple. A beer barrel can hit a ball over the fence. A bases-loaded triple could drive in three runs, rulebook double a maximum of two.

This rule change would end the current scandal of some 240 pound putz with a beer belly batting fourth and commanding tens of millions of dollars while some medium-sized fast kid who can field, throw, and hit, bats eighth or never comes up from the minors at all.

Even with exactly the same players, if batters were not swinging for the fences there would be fewer strikeouts, more hits, and more men on base. There would be more playing of baseball. If pitchers were not constantly having to deal with the possibility of home runs they could throw more strikes so there would be fewer walks and more hits. With fewer bad pitches, at-bats would be shorter and games would move along more briskly. Instead of the three-and-a-half or four hour "is the paint dry yet?" marathons we get now, games would be over in two or two and half hours. Which would make possible the revival of the now old-fashioned doubleheader, two games the same day.

It would also end the over-valuing of a handful of players, the home run hitters, and level the playing field as it were. It would also get rid of the game played for the single grandiose gesture. Instead of one batter hitting a home run off one pitcher to decide the game, there would be more emphasis on playing cooperatively as a team. Getting rid of the home run would therefore make an end to prima donna stars. We would never have to endure a schmuck like Barry Bonds again.

A Step Too Far

According to the news bite on Yahoo, the Olmert cabinet is considering conceding part of Jerusalem to the Arabs. It has long been my custom to never express opinions other than privately on questions of Israeli politics. As Americans we have a duty to support Israel as a friendly country. As citizens of a world power we also have a concomitant duty not to interfere in the internal politics of a smaller ally.

But my 'hands off' commitment is overwhelmed by the concession of any part of Jerusalem.

Has conceding Gaza worked? Is there not some part of the process where the world can consider not only what the Arabs want but what the Jews want? How many times do they have to be shown that mollifying Arab demands brings more demands, not peace? How many Arab declarations of intent to destroy Israel will it take for the Israelis to understand that they mean it? How many times does the galut mentality "If we're nice to them they'll like us" fantasy have to be proven wrong for Jews to stop trying it? If they keep winning, why do they keep surrendering? Will the package include dropping "v'Yerushalaim" from HaTikvah? Olmert has to go.

Torture and Family Values

One of the interrogation techniques that has come under scrutiny as a possible form of torture is head-slapping. If head-slapping is torture we will have to imprison pretty much every Italian, Black, Eastern European, and Hispanic father in the country.

A head-slap usually accompanied by,"Stupido!", is considered almost affectionate. It IS chauvinist though. I have never seen a girl get her head slapped. Mothers, when provoked, will face-slap just about anyone.

I'm Back

I don't know who if anyone reads these maunderings but they are about to resume after a three month hiatus. I returned home Sunday from my summer wanderings in the North. I will be again filling these pages with my carryings on. Stay tuned.

NOW they tell me....

A little tiny ENORMOUS fact about the war that seems to have gone unmentioned until now is that, while Iraq is lousy with oil, none of it is in the Sunni areas.

Which means that a postwar partitioned Iraq, or even a loosely federal Iraq, will leave the Shi'ites and Kurds with the prospect of becoming rich, and the Sunnis with an economy of which the main export will be poverty.

So the only acceptable scenario for the Sunnis is a strong centralized government. The Iraqi experience of strong centralized governments has been that they divide society into the Ins and the Outs, where being an Out is both impoverishing and dangerous. So the Sunni objective is for a strong centralized government - which they control.

The Sunnis are fighting for a future in which they have oil and power, as in the past. The alternative is that they will have neither. In practice, if the Sunnis have the power, they will have the oil revenues too.

If there were oil in every part of Iraq, there might still be fighting over allocation of more or less. Because there is no oil in the Sunni areas, the fight is all or nothing.

This is compounded by the fact that the Shi'ites have historically been a subject class to the Sunnis, so a democracy dominated by the majority Shi'ites has overtones of a servile revolt, of the unwashed servant class taking over.

Since there is no politically acceptable discourse except Islam which openly denies the desirability of democracy, that is what the Sunni claim to be fighting for.

After all this time, we find out that it really is all about oil, just as the naysayers said at the very beginning. But that was before the war degenerated from an invasion, which was not about Iraqi oil, into a civil war, which is. It may now be degenerating still further into a generalized melee without clear sides or issues. If it does, the next stage should be a form of warlordism as emerged in Afghanistan after the war against the Soviets degenerated into melee.

As Gilda used to say -- "Never Mind"

I.I.T.S. or 'It Isn't That Simple' is the rule which dominates and informs one's attempts to understand the world.

The problem with human-induced global warming is that it is fast, all but instantaneous in geological, and more importantly in evolutionary timescales. If it came into effect over a period of several tens of millions of years during which new species could evolve to replace and more than replace old ones as they became extinct, then I would have been right. As the tropical forests expanded, the new species in them would outnumber the temperate and arctic species becoming extinct because of the same climatic change.

But extinction can be quick. Evolution cannot. The timescale of human-induced climate change is in decades, not eons.

Few things that happen on earth are of any lasting effect. Mountain ranges comes and go, seas cover the land and then recede, dams block rivers for a geological instant and are then swept away, glaciers cover the land then melt.

Extinctions are an exception. Once the last condor, red-legged tree frog, smokey leopard, or blue whale bites the big one, it stays that way permanently. Extinctions are the natural course of things and are not to be feared nor even complained of -- IF and only IF they are balanced by an equal or greater rate of speciation, of the creation of new species.

That is not happening with current human-caused extinctions and it surely won't happen with global warming induced extinctions. So global warming, by my reasoning and values, actually is the catastrophe everyone says it is.

Further thoughts on Global Warming

As much to be a pain in the ass as for any other reason, I am beginning to wonder, just wonder mind you - not conclude, whether global warming might not be a good thing.

During most of the time since the Cambrian (the past 545 million years) the earth has been both much warmer than it is now and has had much higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. For the past 60 million years the temperature has been declining and the climate getting drier. (According to a graph I saw at the Denver Museum of Science and a botany textbook I just finished.) The only time in the past half-billion years that has been colder was a brief episode in the Permian period, at the end of the Palaeozoic. Shortly (if a few million years can be called "shortly") after the Permian cold period, 70 percent of aquatic species and 95 to 97 percent of land species became extinct. The Permian Event dwarfed the K-T Event 66 million years ago that extinguished the dinosaurs but did away with far fewer species.

The actual operation, I posit, is that declining temperatures progressively shrank the tropical forests until they vanished. Most of the temperate areas shrank too. I think that is how the Permian Event came about.

Most of the species on the planet right now are in the tropical forests. Continuing cooling could easily lead to the continued shrinkage of the tropical climate areas and their eventual disappearance. With the disappearance of the tropical forests would come the extinction of all of the tropical species, just as in the Permian.

Anthropogenic global warming can reverse that. Global warming will reverse the shrinking of the tropics. It means the tropics may eventually become larger, the arctic smaller. I figured out in driving south the past couple of days that the main difference between the green productive fields of Alberta and the taiga wastelands of the Northwest Territories is only a few degrees. The reason the few degrees matter so much is that it is enough that Alberta has normal soil in which crops grow, and the NWT has permafrost in which only stunted trees grow.

Global warming would make the NWT, Yukon, Alaska, Greenland, Siberia, Lappland, and Iceland as habitable as the Midwest is today. It could give humanity a whole new continent to live on when the ice in Antarctica melts. The alternative might be to slide into another Permian Event mass extinction.

It could be the reason the human race is here, our purpose, to cause global warming. Also it is an excuse to continue to drive an RV that gets 10 miles to the gallon..... :o)

Global Warming

Global warming is an amazingly difficult subject to figure out on one's own. There is a long term warming as the Ice Age (ignorantly said to have ended 15,000 years ago) continues to end. There are also shorter term periods of warming and cooling, such as the Little Ice Age which was a period of unusually cool weather between 1500 and 1900. There are also shorter terms trends of a few years or decades. The trick is, among all that signal noise, to ascertain if there is a new effect caused by human activity. No small thing to figure out. But there seems to be a consensus among scientists that there is an effect.

My own opinion (which I would remind you is worthless because I do not actually know squat about it) is that the world was slowly warming anyway, and that all our exhaust pipes and smokestacks have greatly accelerated it.

What is less clear is the basis for the assumption that global warming is automatically a bad thing. The warning that it will cause coastal flooding because of higher sea levels does not persuade me as much as it does others. Most buildings are replaced by newer ones within a generation or two anyway. Rising sea levels means that they will just have to be built further inland. I do not think that is such a disaster. Other places can be protected with dikes as the Netherlands is. Many of California's Delta islands are surrounded by levees and are lower than the water that surrounds them.

Some areas now temperate will become desert, but some deserts will become arable. As with any big change there will be winners and losers. Cold countries like Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, Russia, and Siberia will be winners. What are now vast subarctic barrenlands will become pleasant temperate countryside. Humanity might gain a whole new continent to live on as the Antarctic ice sheet melts.

My own reason for not wanting global warming has nothing to do with all these arguments which I lump under the heading of "bitching about change". The real downside of global warming is that too-rapid climatic change causes widespread extinctions of species which cannot adapt quickly enough. New species to replace them evolve slowly, far slower than human affairs can consider. So many species are already under so much pressure from other human activities which restrict their habitats, that the extinctions could be on a very wide scale. Being myself a plant and/or animal, I prefer that there be as many kinds of plants and animals in the world as possible. Maybe just because so many of them are beautiful.

Narrowing Ground

First there was no connection between terrorism and Islam because the terrorists were occupied by Israel. Then it became clearer that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, Spain, England, India, and the United States were also targets. So that wasn't it.

Then there was no connection between terrorism and Islam because the terrorists were grindingly poor and oppressed and had no hope in this world. Then it emerged that the 9-11 terrorists were mainly from wealthy families. So that wasn't it.

There was no connection between terrorism and Islam because the terrorists were from corrupt undemocratic countries where the Western countries had been demonized. Then it emerged that the London subway bombers were born and raised in Britain. So that wasn't it.

Then there was no connection between terrorism and Islam because the terrorists, even though they were fully exposed to Western society, were marginalized, did not feel included. Now it emerges that several of the conspirators in the Scottish airport bombings are doctors practicing in the UK and Australia. So that isn't it.

When does it become time to admit that there is no connection between terrorism and Islam only because it is an article of faith that there isn't?

Paradigm Shift in Evolutionary Theory?

In Paris Rue Lamarck is a considerable street while Darwin is a short dead end alley. It is conventional to consider Lamarck's theory outmoded and wrong, and Darwin's theory all-correct and the exclusive description of reality. However recent research done in France is just beginning to cast doubt on this proposition. A seminal new study has shown Lamarck was French and Darwin wasn't.

Fair's fair

times today

The explosion was the latest in a series of attacks on mosques that began last week when insurgents destroyed the two remaining minarets of a Shiite shrine in Samarra. Several Sunni mosques in southern Iraq were destroyed in retaliation.

I hope they get even with us by destroying our mosques too.

Class War

When a democracy elects only aristocrats and the wealthy to office, it isn't much of a democracy. Here is a list of the candidates and what their parents did for a living. (For Giuliani I have pasted a paragraph from Wikipedia lest you think I am making this up):

Aristocrats:
Gore - US Senator
Dodd - US Senator
Romney - Governor of Michigan, US Senator, Chairman of American Motors, Secretary of HUD
McCain - four star admiral

Rich kids:
Clinton - business owner
Obama - Muslim businessman
Richardson - Banker

Commoners:
Edwards - mill worker
Biden - car salesman
Kucinich - truck driver
Duncan Hunter - Hunter worked his way through college.
Ron Paul - father had an 8th grade education, mother owned a dairy farm.
Fred Thompson - used car salesman
Tommy Thompson - ran a gas station & country grocery store

Mafiosi:
Giuliani -

Wikipedia - Early life and education

Giuliani was born in Brooklyn, New York to working-class parents Harold Angel Giuliani and Helen C. D'Avanzo, both children of Italian immigrants. The family was Roman Catholic and its extended members included police officers, firefighters, and criminals.[12] Harold Giuliani had trouble holding a job and had been convicted of felony assault and robbery and served time in Sing Sing prison; [13] after his release he served as a mafia enforcer for his brother-in-law Leo D'Avanzo, who ran an organized criminal loan sharking and gambling operation out of a restaurant in Brooklyn. [14]

from your mouth to His ears...

Times today

The Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and the Fatah-controlled West Bank have effectively become separate political entities, endangering the Palestinian dream of forming an independent state in the two territories.

Limitations of Human Society, part 2

Times today,

“I will explain it to you,” said one looter, Mazen Qasas, 34, a vendor. “I am 34. I am married. I have six children. I am looking for a lamp, anything I can sell or use for my poor house. We are very poor.

And if he rubs the lamp....

Mazen Qasas is right. That IS the problem. Gaza has among the highest fertility rates in the world - 5.64 children per woman. Afghanistan is higher still - 6.64 children. If most of them survive, the population of each place will triple every generation. It might be coincidence that two of the places with the highest population growth rates are also the most chaotic. Or it might not.

One might also consider that in the context of the whole world. World population has been growing steadily for two hundred years and is not expected to peak until 2050. It may be that all the causes we assign to world problems are wrong, and all the shootings and oppressings that go on are really expressions of a larger problem.

One can certainly suspect a connection in China. China was appallingly poor and lost in the chaos of war, revolution, and the Cultural Revolution until strict population control was introduced. Since then China has prospered.

It might be, as Pogo once observed, that, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Limitations of Democracy, Part 6

Times today, about the now-disgraced prosecutor in the Duke Lacrosse case-

Mr. Nifong brought the rape charges while he was in an election contest against a better known former assistant district attorney. The bar accused him of pressing the rape case for political reasons.

Why There is a Security Fence, Part 14

Recently there were primary elections within the Labour Party. The incumbent, Amir Peretz, lost to Ehud Barak. Since the government is a coalition, under the compromise understanding with Kadima and the other coalition partners, the head of Labour would become defense minister. Prime Minister Olmert accordingly nominated Barak to the position. The nomination will be debated and voted on by the Knesset next Monday.

In other news President Mahmoud Abbas summarily dismissed Prime Minister Haniyah after Hamas forces overran the main Fatah stronghold and publicly executed the surviving defenders. Sources close to Haniyah denounced the dismissal as illegal and without substance.

The Inconvenience of an Inconvenient Truth

As so often in life, it isn’t as simple as I thought. Seedlings are living creatures, not products that can be bought and shipped on demand. They can only survive transplantation when they are in their winter dormancy. CDF Reforestation begins taking orders in November and ships from mid-December until March. Saving the world will have to wait.

Welcome

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Unclear on the Concept

Chanting “Stop the killing,” some 1,000 Palestinians marched through Gaza City today, only to draw gunfire that killed two of the demonstrators and wounded four, according to Reuters.

When Fans Attack

New York Times 12 June 2007

Fatah forces also attacked the headquarters of Hamas’s television station, Al Aksa TV, and began to broadcast Fatah songs, but Hamas said later that it had repelled the attack.

Later the building was seized by forces of the Israel Philharmonic who began to broadcast Schubert lieder.

Falasha units of the Israeli Army took the building over the next morning and began broadcasting rhythm and blues.

Elements of the US 101st Airborne parachuted in and took the building that afternoon and began broadcasting hip hop.

French elements of the UN forces entered through an unguarded entrance and began playing Maurice Chevalier records.

A joint British-Polish force was landed by the Royal Navy and took over. They began broadcasting bagpipe and accordion polka music.

Whereupon all the other armies shelled the building simultaneously destroying it utterly.

The Arabs blamed Israel for the debacle.

'An Inconvenient Truth' and what to do about it

There are two things one can do when one finds oneself in a hole. One is to stop digging and the other is to start filling in the hole. Conservation really amounts only to digging more slowly. The solution to global warming is not just to put less CO2 into the air, but also to start taking some out. Trees do that.

The bigger and longer-lived the species the more CO2 it will take out of the atmosphere during its lifetime. Here is a link to the California Department of Forestry's seedling order form.

http://www.fire.ca.gov/rsrc-mgt_content/downloads/Orderformandpricelist06_07.pdf

Vacant lots, roadsides, fields, hiking trails, private property, public property, anywhere is good. When Jews do this it is called Tikkun Olam. When non-Jews do it, it is called repairing the world.

So what's the deal with...

Religion and beards? Very religious Muslims wear beards. Very religious Jews wear beards. Very religious Eastern Orthodox wear beards. Very religious Mormons, Mennonites, and Amish wear beards. Sikhs same thing. The most religious Wiccans generally have some chin whiskers. Same for sexual repression and fear of exposed skin. Do beards cause religiosity?

The Democrats

It is going to be a long hard road to 2008. New Yorker is a magazine by and for the rich East Coast liberal elite. Until recently they were 100% behind their own Senator Clinton. But in their current issue they ran an article purporting to review some of the various books about Clinton now in bookstores. In fact it was a serious hatchet job of character assassination. Very surprising to see that in the New Yorker. Which suggests to me that there are some bitter divisions within the liberal wing of the party, probably about the war, that go well beyond the usual personalities-and-money issues. Politics, for all the publicity, is nevertheless largely done in semi-secret. One knows that something is going on but not what. It is like seeing two little boys wrestling inside a bag.

I was in Barnes & Noble last night and I saw a "book" which was a puff piece biography by the Obama campaign. It was short and mainly pictures so I skimmed through the whole thing right there in the store. It seems Obama as a young man rejected Martin Luther King and even W.E.B. DuBois as not assertive enough. His hero was Malcolm X. He does NOT go on to say how he later saw the light and rejected Malcolm X.

That is trebly disturbing. If you listen to old videos of Malcolm X speaking, he sounds pretty reasonable about the problems Black people suffer, until you get to the core of his message about who and what he thinks the problem is. Malcolm was an explicit antisemite and a racist demagogue. He popularized the expression "blue-eyed devils". The usual crap response when this is brought up is that he mellowed at the end of his life and became more tolerant. I, for one, do not find that a satisfactory answer. (If he advocated rape and murder most of his life but stopped advocating them at the end, does that make it alright?) He was the leader of the Black Muslims. For Obama to have EVER been of the same mind as Malcolm X makes him completely unacceptable. This is not some hit piece. This is his own campaign literature.

Homes of the Free

There are two kinds of nickbnames for towns, those made up by their Chamber of Commerce, and what the locals call the place.

Oakland is Oak Town. Placerville is Hangtown. Compton is the 'hood. Berkeley is Bezerkeley and People's Republic of Berkeley. West Hollywood is Boys Town. The city is "the city".

Chico is the City of Roses, but so is Pasadena. It is also the City of Trees but so is Sacramento. Gotta do better. The Ellensburg of California? Flatland?

El Cerrito has no nickname at all. Dullsville? Not Richmond?

Baghdad by the Bay

Maybe it is time for a new nickname for Fogtown.

Boy Genius

Two different shops were unable to get the Pachyderm's battery compartment door to latch properly. The catch was either not high enough or not in the right position. Or something. The last place literally told me it could not be fixed because it was "broken".

I decided to get heavy-handed and jury-rig something myself. In fiddling with it I discovered that the latch was loose in its mounting and free to move around, i.e. away from the catch. I tightened the bolt that secures the latch, et voila! No longer "broken".

I really shouldn't be so pleased with myself for being smarter than somebody who became an RV mechanic because he got passed over for assistant manager at McDonalds, but I am. Also the battery compartment door latches now.

High Plains Drifters

New York Times Saturday June 9

The story is that the US released these guys from Guantanamo. No one but Albania would take them.

Most of the five Uighurs in Tirana said they had left their homes in China’s far-western Xinjiang Province, an area the Uighurs call East Turkestan, to earn more money for their families and escape government harassment. They said they drifted into Afghanistan after travels through other Central Asian countries, and heard that the Uighur hamlet was a place where they could get free food and shelter while trying to figure out where to go next.

Assuming it's true, how stupid does one have to be to "drift" into Afghanistan?

from the same article:

One prospect was the west African republic of Gabon, which has a small Muslim minority. Gabon’s long-ruling president, Omar Bongo, said he was open to accepting the Uighurs. But according to two officials, he wanted not only compensation for resettling the refugees, but support for international loans to his government and a meeting with President Bush at the White House. He had already had one such meeting just months earlier, on May 26, 2004.

A small corrupt African country led by President Bongo?

Mocked in the Media

Nuclear Confrontation

New York Times Thursday 7 June 2007

“Dialogue is better than mutual silence,” a spokesman for Mr. Putin, Dmitri Peskov, told reporters.

Let us hope that diplomacy will succeed in reducing tensions.

A Pea in the Sky

I figured out a strange thing about green. There are red stars, orange stars, yellow stars, white stars, and blue ones. A graph showing how much light is emitted at each frequency/color explains the variety. The temperature determines the peak frequency/color. Cooler stars have their brightness peak in the red, hotter ones in orange and yellow, and very hot ones in blue. Our sun is brightest in green. Our eyes and brains have evolved to see a mix of colors dominated by green as white. But it is actually mainly green light.

Plants use light to produce food and to grow. The more light they gather the better they can compete and flourish. Which is why they are green - because the sun is brightest in green. The true color of the sun is the color of the leaves outside your window.

Too Much Merlot and the Tube

'I, Robot' is silly, fun, terrific graphics, and Will Smith is endlessly likeable, and is given great one-liners. 'The Shield' is stupid and obnoxious but Catherine Dent makes me very happy.

How Tough is Men's Tennis?

Thierry Ascione is a talented 25 year-old newcomer from Provence who is an up and coming new star. In the second round of the French Open he played the established old pro, the defending two-time French Open champion Rafael Nadal. Nadal is 20.

Iraq Again

Headline in New York Times, June 1

"Sunni Fighters Battle Al Qaeda in Baghdad Neighborhood"

What? I thought.... Could somebody explain this to me again? Hey, this scorecard is in Arabic....

Spring

Alfonse is back. He is as a sleek, fluffy-tailed, quick, and energetic as ever. If one can free oneself from a concern with individuals, it is clear, especially in springtime, that life is eternal and death an illusion. Of course, being oneself a dying individual makes that harder to hold on to than when considering the fate of squirrels.

Ennobled by Poverty

The New York Times May 20

"SRE LEAV, Cambodia — Researchers are examining a long-unknown killing field in Cambodia with the graves of thousands of victims of the Khmer Rouge from the 1970s.

But local villagers found it first. By the time the researchers arrived in early May, some 200 graves had been dug up and the bones scattered through the woods by hundreds of people hunting for jewelry.

“Everyone was running up there to dig for gold, so I went too,” said Srey Net, 50, describing what seems to have been a communal frenzy that seized this poor and isolated village. “If they can dig for gold, why can’t I?”

The Religion of Peace

New York Times May 20

"What began as a raid on several homes in Tripoli early today in pursuit of suspected bank robbers tied to the militant group Fatah al-Islam quickly escalated into an open confrontation with members of the group, which has claimed loyalty to Al Qaeda’s principles, at their stronghold in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Tripoli.

Three soldiers and four militants were killed in that fight, officials said.

Hours later, militants tied to the group attacked an army patrol in the Koura region of northern Lebanon, Lebanese officials said, killing four other soldiers.

The Lebanese Army said this afternoon that Fatah al-Islam had also attacked army posts around the refugee camp as well as in northern Tripoli.

The fighting continued this afternoon as the Lebanese Army called in reinforcements, including tanks and heavy armor, and began shelling parts of the camp where the militants were believed to be hiding. Gunfire continued well into the afternoon, as Palestinians inside the camp called for a cease-fire in order to evacuate civilians from the area. It was not immediately clear whether any civilians inside the camp had been injured in the fighting.

Under an agreement with the Palestinian leadership, the Lebanese Army is not allowed to enter Palestinian refugee camps.

Last month Lebanese authorities arrested four members of Fatah al-Islam charging them with a bombing of two commuter buses carrying Lebanese Christians in February."

Laughing at the Mirror

I finally got the GMC Truck Center on the phone. As is usual for such places they promised three days and then took two weeks. As is usual they came in at just about three times the initial estimate. As is usual it sounds like they accomplished nothing at all except replacing things that did not need replacing.

I was working at being polite while the schmuck on the phone totalled up the made-up numbers to come out to the largest amount they thought they could get away with. Then I made the connection between the belated tax return I had just completed, and the other schmuck on the phone....

Sin at CERN

New York Times May 17, 2007

"The culprit is quantum weirdness, one principle of which is that anything that is not forbidden will happen. That means the Higgs calculation must include the effects of its interactions with all other known particles, including so-called virtual particles that can wink in and out of existence, which shift its mass off the scale."

Unlike Saturday night in San Francisco where anything that IS forbidden will happen.

Barely Worth Noting

New York Times Thursday May 17

"Fatah retaliated by attacking a position of Hamas’s Executive Force, a parallel police force, killing four men. Another Fatah attack on the Executive Force prompted the Hamas men to take shelter in an apartment building, where they gathered the residents into the basement as Fatah forces surrounded the structure and shouted for revenge. The Fatah forces fired rocket-propelled grenades into the building of the Anour Tower and set it on fire."

The folks who fired grenades into a building full of hostages and set it on fire are the moderates.

Better and Better

Nicholas Sarkozy, today the President of France, has named Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister and is expected to name Francois Fillon as prime minister.

Kouchner is a socialist elephant (important Socialist Party members are called "elephants") and the founder of Medecins sans Frontieres. He has the reputation of being an Atlanticist and has notably stood aside from the open hostility of the French Left to the United States. His father is a Jew and his mother a Protestant - he is from religious minorities on both sides.

French Protestants are generally less prone to antisemitism than French Catholics. During the Nazi occupation, French Jews who were in hiding, like Sarkozy's grandfather, usually hid among Protestants. For example Sarkozy's grandfather could only get her parents' permission to marry his grandmother by converting to Catholicism. Kouchner's father was not forced to the same extreme.

Kouchner's tenure as foreign minister at the very least means an end to the possibility of French support for Quebec independence, which Segolene Royal said she favored, and the endless turmoil that would have caused Canada.

Fillon is to be appointed because he is a supporter of Sarkozy's proposed economic reforms. But he fits in in another way as well. He is an Anglophile who served in the French diplomatic corps in England and married a Welsh bride, Penelope. His younger brother Pierre married Penelope's younger sister Jane.

With these three in power it is foreseeable that the dark days of Arafat coming to Paris fresh from some massacre of Israelis and being received as a hero at the Elysee Palace, are over. Similarly French foreign policy reflexively giving the back of the hand to the United States and Britain is over as well.

Reading the Koran

I have started reading the Koran. It is generally assumed that since it is the holy book of a major religion it must somehow resemble the holy books of other religions. It doesn't. For one thing it was written by only one person. The Hebrew bible was written by dozens of hands over a period of almost a thousand years. Its heterogeneity reflects its authorship. The New Testament is a compilation of writings spread over more than a century and also done by several hands. So are the Buddhist sutras. No word of Hebrew, Christian, or Buddhist scriptures is believed to have been written by Moses, Jesus, or Gautama. Every word of the Koran is attributed to Muhammad, the founder and prophet. All of these literatures reflect the character and personalities of the folk among whom they arose as they evolved over centuries. But the Koran reflects only the personality and mood of Muhammad.

Unfortunately Muhammad, when he was writing the Koran, was embittered and resentful. The first chapter, 'The Cow' (which has nothing to do with cows), is an angry man's private ventings of spleen, made into scripture. Unfortunately most of his angry ventings are against the Jews and the Christians. He is quite explicit that the reason for his anger is that both refused to accept him as their messiah. Both refused to change their religions to accomodate him.

I expected that the text of the Koran would be a mass of pious exhortations and an occasional unkind word about the Jews or Christians here and there. Quite the contrary. The great majority of the text is composed on the same verse form. Each verse begins with three or four sentences denouncing Jews (whom he calls 'evil-doers'), Christians (whom he calls 'those who anger G_d'), or unbelievers generally. Occasionally he denounces idol-worshipers by which presumably he means the illiterate pagan Arab tribesmen whom he recruits. The last sentence of each verse is generally an admonishing platitude about G_d.

He says explicitly and repeatedly that it is the duty of Muslims to fight against unbelievers. So much for the 'Religion of Peace'. In most Muslim countries, education consists in large part of memorizing large parts of the Koran. I hope the rest of the book will be less scolding and angry and contain less violent language.

So far my conclusion is that we have been kidding ourselves in believing there is such a thing as a moderate Muslim. Judging by this text, that is an oxymoron. So far as I have read, the bulk of Muslim teaching consists of exhortations to hostility toward Jews, Christians, and pagans.

Our problems with Islam will not go away soon. 'Live and Let Live' is NOT what they are taught. The only way we will ever find to deal with people who accept the teachings of the Koran will be by force and by isolating them. They will ALWAYS attack their non-Muslim neighbors.

Thoughts for Laurel

Laurel, a smart and charming 14 year old girl attending an arts middle school in the southern Appalachians, wrote in reply to my remarks about the Fort Dix Plot:

"You have a point, but remember that if we give up on human rights to fight terrorism, the terrorists win. They make us into what they are and what they want us to be. If that happens, we loose all moral high ground and become what we are trying to defeat. Human rights must always be protected, in war or in peace, if our democracy and the values writen into our constitution are to survive."

And I replied:

"Hi Laurel,
Two thoughts -

As to the terrorists winning, if the Muslims had succeeded in massacring 100 of our soldiers as they planned, would not that have been a big win for them?

Second is a hard truth. Just as five is early to learn that there is no Easter Bunny, fourteen is early to learn that our constitutional rights do not come from G_d. They come from the Supreme Court. The Court both articulates and shapes our laws, values, and customs. And over the past two hundred years of war and peace the Court has said repeatedly that we have fewer freedoms in wartime than in peacetime. Yet another reason to love peace and avoid war.

In simpler more human terms, in wartime we and our enemies are physically destroying one another with the unthinkable violence of high-powered rifles and high explosive bombs. Compared to those affronts to human beings, whether we wiretap them or profile them beforehand is trivial. And it is less important still when the results of the wiretapping and profiling may determine whether that annihilating violence will be done to fewer of our own people."

P.S. Have a great time in Paris.

In Memoriam

Alfonse 2005-2007
To some only a squirrel, to others a mere tree rodent. But to those of us who knew him he was a cheerful if standoffish neighbor. Always energetic, he frequently had a bad word for passing dogs and cats whom he scolded from his tree. To others he was a beloved mate and a devoted dad (or mom - hard to tell with squirrels).

He is now at eternal rest under the apricot tree in the yard (unless a dog or raccoon digs him up - it's not that deep a hole.)

The Lessons of Fort Dix

One wonders whether the FBI investigation that bagged the six Muslims planning a massacre at Fort Dix involved wiretaps? Were the perps' spied on? Were they profiled? Did the FBI infiltrate as many agents into Methodist churches and Reform synagogues as into New Jersey mosques? Were the perps' rights as scrupulously protected as if it was peacetime? I hope not.

What comes after Gen X?

On Jeopardy! College Tournament the final question was "Who was the first president to conduct a televised news conference?" One of the kids, a fairly smart one, thought it was LBJ. I was stunned. How could he have thought that? Then I realized he was born twenty years after Johnson left office. To him Johnson and Eisenhower are equally figures from the Dark Ages. Another moment of feeling senior....

You Heard It Here First

Amid the shouting and brouhaha of the French election campaign, the name that has not been mentioned is that of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was to Britain what Lee Iacocca was to Chrysler. She was elected to reform a British economy running on welfare, deficits, unemployment, strikes, and inflation, and she did it. Britain had become the Sick Man of Europe. Today the British economy is the envy of Europe.

Sarkozy was elected with essentially the same mandate as Thatcher. The contrast with the defender of welfare and political correctness, the Socialist Segolene Royal, could not have been clearer. Whether he will be as successful as Thatcher will unfold over the next five or ten years.

The problem for Americans is whether France, without its snug status quo economy will be as much fun for tourists. Can a recently remodeled restaurant or hotel ever be as good a tourist experience as the old one, unchanged since 1912, was? Can big box malls be far off?

Little Ones and the Big One

Life is a big defeat. We look both ways before crossing the street, we get vaccinations, we stay out of dark alleys, we dodge the draft, we drive defensively. But in the end we die anyway.

That is why small victories are so important. A few weeks ago my kitchen drain stopped draining. But the clog was porous enough that the water would go down eventually. A few days ago the water stopped going down at all. Standing water, dirty dishes. A fetid slum. Guaranteed Miraculous liquid drain cleaner had no effect whatever. Finally I was home and I had a snake in hand.

Fifteen years ago I spent several weekends straining and swearing, to unscrew a rusted-tight galvanized steel drain plug. Each weekend I upped the torque ante and the risk of breaking the pipe. After it ever so reluctantly came out, I replaced the galvanized rust blob with a black plastic screw-in plug. Today I reaped the benefit of my long ago prudence. Out the plug came with no screaming or gnashing of teeth whatever. To quote the sage, "Calloo callay!"

I snaked out a disgusting blob and ran the water and behold! Nothing. It still backed up. Open the plug a second time and run the snake the opposite direction. More disgusting blobs. Free running drain.

It ain't V-E Day but it made my day. Washed the dishes, washed the sinks. I am a simple man and simple things make me happy.

From Lordsburg

Life is full of major defeats and small victories. My small victories today were several. My defeat was major.

I have learned the routine with getting the decorative and thoroughly inconvenient wheel covers off and bought my own pipe wrench so I could get them off myself. With the wheel covers off one can get at the lug nuts. (The Lansing minor league baseball team is the Lansing Lugnuts by the way, in case you were wondering.) They are an oddball size and the truckstop where I wanted them tightened to the specified torque did not have a socket that would fit. I went to a few places that didn't have large sockets, then to one that had a row of them but I didn't know which to get. But by the trial and error of buying one after another and returning them, I discovered that all day I had been wanting a 30mm socket and had not known it. I bought a pipe wrench in the same place. Later I will find a place with a Filson wrench and dump the pipe wrench in California, but for now.....

I actually succeeded by mutual intimations in bribing the wheel-and-tire guy at the truck stop in Deming to work on my bus (using my exciting new 30mm socket) ahead of the 18-wheelers lined up there. Even a palm already greasy can be greased. $30 and worth every penny. It was one of those small adventures that are precious for being preposterous.

Between Deming and Lordsburg on I-10 is a mountain pass which marks the continental divide. For days now there has been a stiff wind out of the west (presumably Mariah) which for me is a head wind. The Pachyderm has an immense cross section to the wind and clearly was going to get me killed by slowing to a crawl on the way up to the pass. My small victory was having the foresight /intimidation to get to Lordsburg via Silver City, an additional 40 miles but over little-used roads.

In addition to other small victories this morning, this eveing I succeeded in broiling steak over a portable Coleman grill I got in Las Cruces. I have been looking forward to this for a while now. Restaurant steak is usually too salty for me so I have learned to avoid it. And there is a sense of accomplishment in cooking one's own dinner.

The last of the small victories was delightful. I arrived in Lordsburg at dusk and was looking for a place to look at a telephone book and came upon Holiday Inn. In looking for a place to park I discovered a large graveled area next to a wide field with a few heavy trucks parked in it. I parked there too. The people at the desk were ungracious because I was not going to stay at their motel and because I am quite dirty from crawling around and under the Pachyderm all day. In returning to the Pachyderm in the broad graveled area, I discovered that I can get Holiday Inn's wi-fi signal just fine. Smile.

The defeat was that in spite of the new alternator, the Pachyderm's electrical system still occasionally shuts down under heavy load and sometimes under not-so-heavy load. It did it once between Deming and Silver City and again between Silver City and Lordsburg. (I love Western place names.) The first time it started again almost immediately. The second time I sat in the road for fifteen minutes before it would start. Even the emergency flasher was disabled. I will take it to yet another mechanic in the morning

But in spite of this frustration, during the whole day I was active and busy, I exerted myself, and enjoyed most of what I did.. I accumulated almost 12,000 steps on my walkmeter. That is a successful day, whether the Pachyderm works consistently or not.

The SOB's at Freightliner El Paso accomplished almost nothing in spite of charging a great deal and wasting eight days of my time. I got almost to Deming, New Mexico and had a sidewall blowout on a front tire. That took two full days of screwing around to get a front tire replaced. And to get the other tire replaced as well because of cracks in its sidewalls. I had the air filter replaced. It was clogged and changing it significantly improved the performance of the engine. But it still spontaneously shuts down under heavy load, i.e. highway speeds. I had assumed that fixing the air filter and thus the air pressure problem would also fix the shutting down problem since I assumed that the engine was being throttled off by too little air.

Now I have no idea at all what the problem is. I drove back to the mechanics shop in Deming that changed the air filter (it is a huge cylinder and hard to get to). They said that they didn't do such work and that I had to go to an RV service department to get it fixed and the nearest ones were in Las Cruces. So I backtracked fifty miles to Las Cruces. And learned the exact opposite. The RV service department I spoke to said they did NOT do that kind of work. So my trip to Las Cruces was pointless. But since I am here I am going to talk to yet another mechanic tomorrow. So it goes on and on. I cannot see a way get out of this without solving it.

While it is discouraging and dispiriting, it is still true that I have gotten three of the problems fixed: the tailpipe, the air filter, and the tires. If I can get the engine shutting down problem fixed, I think I can go home.

The News from Pakistan

New York Times, 20 March 2007

"At least 46 people died in the fighting between militants and tribesmen on Monday and Tuesday, the military official said without elaborating.

The two officials, speaking in Islamabad, said the clash was between pro-government tribesmen and foreign militants. However, a local intelligence official said the fighting was part of a feud among rival militant groups."

Is it still about Israel, or can we give that up now?
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The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

Maybe it isn't. The one customer review of this thing says that it is just a reprint of a not very good book published in 1930. The original covered only French gargoyles and was not well laid out, poorly researched, and badly written. I have sent for it and a few others with the word 'gargoyles' in the title. I may yet become an itinerant
photographe living in a gypsy van. I will know in a few days. It might even provide a place to start and plagiarize from using better modern technology. It might be that the main significance of this thing is that somebody at Dover Press recently thought that a book of photographs of gargoyles was worth publishing.

A day late and a euro short

The project I have been planning to spend about a year of my life doing, has been done. I have been obsessing on the right lens, the right camper-van, and the right season for photographing Europe's gargoyles for a coffee table book. Out of an abundance of caution I checked on Amazon this morning. I was and am aghast that the book, vaguely in mind for more than fifteen years (since Carcassonne with Patty, whenever that was), has been done. And only last August. The Gargoyle Book: 572 Examples from Gothic Architecture (Paperback). I am undone. I literally don't know what to do with myself.

from Arches National Park, Utah

The subject here is sandstone, all the marvels, antiquities, colors, and layers of it, the things ancient seas have built and wind and water have carved of it Arches National Park is not misnamed. Among its other wonders and glories, great sandstone arches abound.

I am going to write Ellen Tauscher, my congresswoman, to ask, nay demand, that something be done about the names perpetuated by the Park Service. I demand that Double Arch be renamed Petrarch and Beatrice Arch, Turret Arch must become Plutarch. In honor of Utah's own Brigham Young, Landscape Arch must become Heresiarch. West Window and East Window must become Patriarch and Matriarch. My demands go on and on, but those are the non-negotiable ones.

I hiked up to Heresiarch today, the extraordinary long narrow one on the cover of flyers about the park. Part of it fell down in 1991 which made it still longer and narrower. There were people under it at the time but they ran away upon the initial rockfall and no one was hurt. There is even a picture of the rock falling. The Park Service has now gone the Forest Service one better by closing off the area underneath for fear of Hazardous Arch Failure.


When I was at Balancing Rock it occurred to me that though the thing has been where it is for tens of thousands of years, it must eventually fall. One would have to be a schlemazzel on a cosmic scale to have Balancing Rock fall on him. But we all have to go sometime. I think it would be good to go in a way so innately preposterous that there would be an inkling of laughter at the last. But later. Much later.

Reading about and seeing geology, deep time, and uniformitarianism is always relieving. I consider the layers in the sandstone as I walk over them. Each tenth of an inch thick layer is a year's cycle of seasons and there are miles and miles of them as I walk, and more miles and miles of them that eroded away long ago. Life seems less serious and compelling then.

News from the Middle East

Would like to hear the bad news first and more bad news second, or the other way around?

That the agreement between Hamas and the Fatah arranged at Mecca brokered by Saudi Arabia ended the fighting between them is well known. Less well known are the terms. One of them is that Fatah agreed to PA schoolbooks teaching that the destruction of Israel is a religious duty, not just a nationalist obligation. A nationalist obligation can be negotiated about, however insincerely. A religious struggle (Ribat) cannot. http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=1908 has quotes.

The other not so good news is that an American Jewish group, Brit Tzedek vShalom, has already come to the defense of the new textbooks. They wrote a letter to Senator Clinton who had publicly criticized the new textbooks, asking her to reconsider, claiming the new textbooks "encourage a peaceful resolution of the conflict" and "endorse democracy".

For the Record

America's "newspaper of record" as it calls itself, has long been considered to be the New York Times. It isn't. The Washington Post recently ran an investigative series on the treatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital which resulted in the dismissal of the Secretary of the Army and the commander of the hospital followed by the dismissal of his appointed successor. This is the highest and best tradition of journalism, both as reporting and as uncovering. The Washington Post, not the New York Times, a generation ago did the investigative series that led to the undoing of the Nixon Administration.

The New York Times has stumbled from internal scandal to internal scandal and its reporting has been locked into an ideological rigidity of that kind often characterized as "mediocre". The New York Times seems to have little to recommend it beside the identification with New York. Reading an account of events in the New York Times leaves me wondering what actually happened. Reading one in the Washington Post leaves me thinking that that is probably what happened.

Stuck Inside of Joplin with the .....

I have the dubious situation of being stuck in Joplin for a few days. Driving through eastern Oklahoma and Kansas, my back became more and more painful. Long since familiar with the signs, I looked for a decent motel in which to hole up. There are none in the dwindling and run-down small agricultural towns of the southeastern corner of Kansas, hence Joplin, the local metropolis. It is all for the best because there was a thunderstorm last night and it is raining today, so I would not have been enthusiastic about driving anyway. Also I am ensconced in a very nice Hilton hotel so I am not unhappy. I can barely walk but I am going to try walking outside this afternoon to see if that helps. And aspirin -- I am going to try aspirin.

It is also an opportunity to explore a whole new dimension in my no-longer-young life -- reading glasses. I am still exploring how many diopters of correction is best. I am toying with 2.00, 2.25, and 2.50. They are cheap and readily available so it is easy to experiment. Having tried them in New Orleans and finding them remarkably clarifying, I am rediscovering the printed page. As always I brought along tons of books, none of which I have heretofore so much as touched. Now I am touching them. Another reason not to be uncontrollably distraught about my sojourn in Missouri.

Which religious training did Obama get?

It is now accepted that Fox's report that Barack Obama attended a madrassah in Jakarta in the 1960's was false. But only if you want it to be.

A video clip of the school shows it to be a secular public school with boys and girls playing together, men and women teachers in Western clothing, and the men teachers beardless.

BUT

In the same video clip the headmaster of the school says that the Muslim children were given religious training in Islam, the Christian children were given religious training in Christianity, and so on.

Which religious training did Obama get? His step-father, though non-practicing, was nominally a Muslim. Obama's middle name is Hussein. When he registered for the Catholic school his religion was listed as "Muslim". Asked why Obama was listed as a Muslim by the new school, the Obama campaign's spokesman Charles Gibbs replied, "I don't know."

Unlike Charles Gibbs, I do know. In a Muslim country like Indonesia proselytizing Muslims to other religions such as Catholicism is illegal. Which would make it imperative that children entering the Catholic school be registered as Muslims if they had had Muslim religious training, so they could be exempted from being taught the catechism. Which also clarifies the throwing-sand-in-your-eyes attempt to confuse the issue with which school Obama attended first.

When I was seven and eight I attended a Jewish Sunday school. That has something to do with what I believe and feel to this day, who I am. What a person learns at that age has a profound influence on his attitudes throughout his life.

At the very least the scandal here is that Obama is getting a free ride from the press, partly because the initial story was over-stated and partly because it came from Fox, and partly of course because Obama is the Great White Hope of the liberals. The initial story that Obama had attended a radical Muslim madrassa having proven false, the press instantly dropped it. But had the story been that Obama had attended Muslim religious school training for two years as a child and that his mother kept a koran in their home, they would have found that the story was true.

Does it matter that Obama was trained as a, let us assume, moderate Muslim? Considering that the koran explicitly teaches the Muslim duty of jihad and to kill Jews and subjugate Christians, I would say yes.

Mardi Gras

I had a good time. I was told there were far fewer people than pK (pre-Katrina) but that may already be the formation of a whole body of Good Old Days lies. Even if it were true, it was a good thing - there were lots of people. Next time I will have a different costume. This time I came as a Clueless Tourist but that was too ironic for most people, many of whom didn't realize it was a costume. My favorite costume was a woman who was dressed as a transvestite. No joke - she handed out wooden nickels with a printed legend describing herself as the doyenne of fake impersonators. Or it was a double imposture. I have no idea.

Katrina Aftermath

The Katrina damage in rural parishes along the coast was impressive. Every outbuilding, commercial building, and church was a broken wreck. In many places there were only bare foundation slabs. There were broken trees everywhere though one could see that the worst of it had been cleared. Equally impressive was the government's success in providing a seemingly endless supply of shiny new bright-colored manufactured homes, each on a three-or-more feet elevated flood platform or stilts. I saw very few wrecked houses, which means that the wreckage of the old ones had been cleared before the new ones were brought in.

The results in the city were more mixed. A large majority of the buildings have been, or are being, rehabilitated. On many only the fronts have been repainted - the sides still show the mud left by the receding waters. The high water mark is usually plainly visible. Around the French Quarter it was usually about or just above the level of the second floor. In other parts of the city there is lots of abandoned property, particularly in poorer quarters. The look of it was that it was slumlord income property which was already marginal before the storm and not worth the investment of restoring. That probably has something to do with the profile of the people still displaced.

Leesville

Leesville, Louisiana is in the Sabine River country bordering Texas. It is mixed patches of trees, open swards, lakes and rivers. Towns are few, small, and rundown. One can see how, if one were from here, one could come to love this country. If not, one would come here to sit in an aluminum boat, pretend to fish, drink beer, and listen to the quiet.

More Brokeback Mountain

Another Kick at Carter

You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't always take the Klan out of the boy.

Carter Explains the Problem

Carter's handwritten note on Carter Presidential Center letterhead stationery reads:

"1/26/07
To Rabbi Marvin Hier:

I don't believe that Simon Wiesenthal would have resorted to falsehood and slander to raise funds.

Sincerely,
Jimmy Carter"

I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief now that we know that the problem is not that Jimmy is a cracker antisemite but that Rabbi Hier is only in it for the money.

Cooling Extremities

Terra Industries seemed to have too much daily volatility so I sold it this morning for a small profit. I bought an almost equal amount of Navistar (NAV) and discovered my feet had cooled for the market generally. Why am I risking money I need for money I don't need? I have a limit order to sell Nav as soon as it goes high enough to pay back the purchase price, the two ten dollar commissions, and lunch.

My Career

Further research has revealed what is meant by Terra Industries' (TRA) "nitrogen products" business. It is a British euphemism for fertilizer. I may have failed as a lawyer, but I am at last in the business of selling bullshit. My parents would be so proud.

Further Reflection on Stock Picking

Another view of my stock picking strategy is that I am waiting for a bull market, then looking for a steady stock with a relatively high beta which rises faster than the market. Then sitting with eyes glued to the screen, finger poised over the 'sell' button, while life passes me by.

Larry P Asks

LP asks:
What if you're a Filipino American who grows up in urban New Jersey who then
attends Rutgers. At Rutgers you read some Arab literature about how Isr has
oppressed the Arab people. Without much investigation you accepts this
simple explanation of the cause and effect of events. He has not heard
much contrary to this story. He then concludes that Isr gets a lot of
support from the US and no wonder the Arabs are so angry at the US and not
so much Eur and Russ? He has no anger at Jews just as he has no real anger
at Arabs but he thinks US foreign policy is titled to the direction of Isr.
His view of Jews is that they are successful for the most part affluent
people as he has seen growing up in and around the Phil area. He even has
some drinking buds that are Jews. In a survey he does write that part of
the problem with US foreign policy is that it has a bias towards Isr over
the Arabs.

Does this make this young adult an antisemite ?


Scenic Route thunders back:
Absolutely. What difference does it make how innocently he comes by his antisemitic persuasions? A guy who assumes that Canada is always in the wrong in all its dealings is anti-Canadian no matter what reasons he gives nor how many Canadian friends he has.

Does being Critical of Israel make One an Antisemite?

Many on the left deny a connection between being "critical of Israel" and being antisemites. This mirrors their denial of any connection between Islam and terrorism. But they are unfairly and consistently "critical of Israel", and unfairly and consistently critical of no one else. It is a fair assumption that they are both enemies of Israel and enemies of the Jews. And we should say so to their faces.

Little Boys Fighting Inside a Sack

Something is afoot but it is not clear what.

In the past six months W.R. Grace & Co. a big chemical company has increased in value by 140%. Its market capitalization has gone from $600 million to $1.47 billion. That is a LOT of money to increase on no increase of earnings. Its p/e ratio has risen to 80, unthinkable for a big industrial company. One of the things Grace makes is catalysts which make heavy crude into light crude. They also make chemicals for desulfuring petroleum. It may be that Bush's decision, announced in his State of the Union address, to double the size of the emergency reserve was made months ago and known to some but not to all. Could that happen? Is the pope a Texas oilman?

Anyway, here are my stock picks for today, based on best balance between volatility and appreciation -

GRA - W.R. Grace. Though a huge old line company, it has to be considered dice-y with that high a p/e ratio, and because it has already appreciated so much. It might be worth a small flyer.

TRA - Terra, another chemical company, makers of nitrogen products. Has a big facility in Trinidad and Tobago. Up 90% in last six months. A very smooth low volatility chart since August.

CHL - Chinese Mobile Phone company - up 91% over last 12 months, 48% over last 6. Not a US company so lower beta to NYSE.

PCP - Precision Cast Parts - High-tech metal fabricator. Sells to aircraft industry, military, and many others. Another huge old company. Up 79% over 12, 50% over 6.

HAS - Hasbro - makes toys, children's books, and media. A big old line company. Up 33% over 12, 51% in the past six months. Notice that it went down over the first six months. Not a good sign but not too significant since the market was generally going down until the August turnaround.

DB - Deutsche Bank - The largest bank in Europe, it also does business in the US. Most of its assets are Euro-denominated so, assuming that the shares are in the whole bank and not just the US branch, its appreciation represents in part the decline of the dollar. It is up 32% over the year, and 27% over six months. That is not as large an appreciation as Grace or Terra but it has been amazingly steady since the turnaround. Its chart since August has been an almost straight line.

This is a perfect example of the value of the buy-low-volatility strategy. Since the price range is so narrow, any price move outside the range will be instantly obvious and should be followed by immediate sale.

Logically, the safer the investment the larger it can be. The scarier it is, the smaller the bet. A buck on Deutsche Bank, a dime or a nickel on Grace?

Wonderful News

Among the more irritating features of a long bicycle trip such as I went on last summer is the ubiquity of immense over-powered gas guzzler pickup trucks. The most successful distributor of these environment-killers has been Ford with its huge F-150, huger F-250, and ludicrous F-350. These things piss away gasoline at such an embarrassing rate that Ford and the other sellers of these climate wreckers have wangled an exemption from publishing the EPA fuel economy ratings on them. The wonderful news is that because of its greedy and irresponsible reliance on these profitable but otherwise pointless display pieces Ford lost $12.9 billion (billion with a 'b') last year when sales of pickups moved down as gasoline prices moved up. It was Ford's biggest loss ever and the second biggest loss ever suffered by an American corporation.

An Admission

Just when you think there's nothing to write about, Nixon says, "I am not a crook." Jimmy Carter says, "I have lusted after women in my heart." President Reagan says, "I have just taken a urinalysis test, and I am not on dope." --Art Buchwald (1925-2007)

Now that the Cracker Antisemite is momentarily in the news, I will meet his moral challenge and admit that I have lusted after women in my pants.

New York Times Drops Pretense of Honest Reporting Early

"Rush of Entries Gives ’08 Race Early Intensity"
[click on photo for larger version]

The article goes on to describe Edwards as "a former senator from North Carolina", omitting to mention that he was the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee in 2004. What does it mean that the most prominent news source reduces itself to a mere propaganda rag? And for no better a cause than the candidacy of Hilary Clinton?

Not that I bear any brief for Edwards. He was on Jay Leno's show recently. When asked about immigration he replied, "The southern border is a mess. Something has to be done to fix that." So we are not going to hear the words "employer sanctions" coming out of his mouth anytime soon. One more standard-issue public liar.

Editor of Turkey’s Armenian Paper Is Killed

Muslims once again affirmed their willingness to assassinate anyone who accuses them of being violent.

The Jews

Not only do we win lots of Nobel Prizes, the current world champion poker player is a guy named Michael Mizrachi.

American Woman Was Killed After Visit to Sunni Office

Would it be better for the murders and endless violence in Baghdad to continue forever? Or better for the Baghdad Sunnis to be resettled elsewhere?

Is Jimmy a Complete Idiot....

or a stalking horse?

It is possible that Carter is a senile fool doddering into anti-semitic fantasies of the blameless peace-loving Palestinians victimized by heartless Israelis. But it ain't likely. It is possible, if one were sufficiently suspicious, to imagine Carter's book as a trial balloon and Carter a stalking horse. Is it possible that the Democrats are testing the waters to see if they can get away with running against Israel in 2008 for lack of any other foreign policy plank whatsoever?

By 2008 US troops will likely be out of Iraq. The Iraqi militias will have given up any pretense that their objective is anything other than mutual slaughter and partition. Power in Baghdad will be either in the hands of anti-US pro-Iranian Shi'ite government or of a virulently anti-US Sunni jihadi one. The Democrats will have set themselves up for taking the blame for the consequences of the withdrawal in the November election. The Republicans will be shameless and aggressive in holding the Democrats and not themselves accountable for the defeat. "Who Lost Iraq?" they will ask. I think the Democrats see this coming.

The way to energize their own leftist base and to blame someone else for the Middle East is to blame Israel. Historically this has been a loser because the facts just aren't there to support the position, but politics has its own facts. The facts are that the left, the Muslims, and the African-Americans viscerally dislike Israel and that Arab money can be had in large amounts in support of an anti-Israel position.

So Jimmy is out there venting his own cracker antisemitism, but he may also be testing the waters to see if Europeanization of the Democratic Party's foreign policy can help them in 2008.

The Obama Phenomenon

has more than a little irony to it. He is the beneficiary of a euphemism. The underclass has changed from black to colored to negro, back to black, of color, and now in imitation of other immigrant groups, African-American. The problems with African-American is that the connection with Africa is vanishingly thin, modern Africa is nothing much to be proud of, and that Africa is a geographic area not a country nor a people. (Asian American is equally useless - it includes Israelis, Tamils, and Russians from Irkutsk.)

But African-American and only African-American is permissible (aside from the penumbra of the n-word, used among themselves but forbidden to others). Now they are hoist on their own petard. Obama is an outsider to the underclass. Since he is literally an African-American there is no denying him the description. So the result is that many African-Americans see him as an interloper, an opportunist, because he is not one of them. Similarly, many whites like him for the same reason - because he is not one of them. African-Americans lose their main weapon, the race card, and liberals get to feel good about themselves.

The whole situation is reminiscent of the controversy over who actually wrote the Shakespeare plays. Mark Twain opined that they were either written by William Shakespeare or by someone else of the same name.

A Man Meets a Penguin

A man meets a penguin. He says, "You look as if you're wearing a tuxedo." The penguin replies, "Who says I'm not?"

One Might Also Add...

to my December 31 post...

The problem is not Jimmy Carter's cracker antisemitism, the problem is Israeli oppression of the peace-loving Palestinians.

The Comet

will be visible at sunset in the western sky. It will be visible first with binoculars and then as the sky darkens with naked eye. It will fade fast as it leaves the inner solar system so the time to see it is this evening or next (Friday or Saturday). It is a fine comet.

The Rematch

Calloo Callay! Second reading of the second act of 'Prequel to Hamlet', this time at Berkeley Play Cafe. I chopped the second act from 6800 words Tuesday in San Francisco to 4500 words this evening in Berkeley, a reduction of a third. They loved it! Everybody said it was great. Even with another botched reading. The only complaint anyone had was the actor who thought King Hamlet's speech, which I trimmed less than the rest, was still too long. I agree. Still walking on air from the change, after nearly getting thrown out of the "Off Market" Theater in the city Tuesday.

Reading of Second Act of 'Prequel to Hamlet' Opens to Critical Semi-Acclaim in San Francisco

The reading and the comments afterwards:
I have seen friendlier lynch mobs. There were about twenty comments, all of them harshly negative. A lot of the comment was stupid or irrelevant. One of the actors dwelt at length on the fact that I have a cutesy comment about ebony and ivory and he objected strongly on the basis that the piano was not invented until well after Shakespeare's time. The same guy also objected at length to my stage instruction that when the musicians are tuning their instruments they should play the first few bars of Beethoven's 9th which opens with what sounds like the musicians tuning up. He lectured me on how Beethoven lived hundreds of years after Shakespeare. A man with an enormous beard pointed out that it was not as good as Shakespeare. At this I laughed aloud and the others were forced to laugh also. Unabashed the same guy who had complained about the piano and Beethoven claimed that every word in Shakespeare had a purpose and mine did not. I dutifully wrote all of this down as though I gave a shit. One thing I noticed was that I did not get the tepid response the other two readings got. Everyone hated it. That alone is worth something.

However the first comment had been that it was too wordy. I thought it was too, and asked who else thought it was too wordy. Everyone raised their hands. I asked how many thought it was WAY too wordy. They all raised their hands again. This I take to be relevant criticism. I am going to have it read again tomorrow at Berkeley Play Cafe. I mean to cut it to about a third or half of its current length by then. Nay - abridged.

Muslims

Pearls Before Swine

All the News that's Fit to Print

From a New York Times article dated 9 January 2007 -

"In Geneva, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees announced an emergency appeal today for what it said were an estimated 3.7 million Iraqis who had been displaced internally or had fled abroad as a result of the fighting.

The agency said that about 1 in 8 Iraqis had left their homes, in what it called “the largest population movement in the Middle East since Palestinians were displaced following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.”

“There is currently no end in sight” to the Iraqi exodus, the agency’s statement said.

John O’Neil contributed reporting from New York."


Since the Palestine Mandate had 1.8 million total population in 1948 this is about what one expects from the UN and from the NYT.