Category: Networks

— This rundown on the state of the war on terror by Middle East scholars is well worth reading: (Experts’ give their view of world since Sept. 11 / Security, diplomacy crucial for future)

Quite recently, I attended a forum in Istanbul convened by the Turkish government for the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the European Union, and I was surprised at the moderation. There was no condemnation of American action in Afghanistan.

That was Bernard Lewis.

— These are from a book called Disorder in the Court, and are things people have
actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court
reporters who had the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually
taking place.

Q: Are you sexually active?
A: No, I just lie there.

Q: What is your date of birth?
A: July fifteenth.
Q: What year?
A: Every year.

Q: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
A: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.

Q: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
A: Yes.
Q: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
A: I forget.
Q: You forget. Can you give us an example of something that you’ve forgotten?

Q: How old is your son, the one living with you?
A: Thirty-eight or
thirty-five, I can’t remember which.
Q: How long has he lived with you?

A: Forty-five years.

Q: What was the first thing your husband said to you when he woke
up that morning?
A: He said, “Where am I, Cathy?”

Q: And why did that upset you?
A: My name is Susan.

Q: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo
or the occult?
A: We both do.
Q: Voodoo?
A: We do.
Q: You do?

A: Yes, voodoo.

Q: Now doctor, isn’t it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he
doesn’t know about it until the next morning?

Q: The youngest son, the twenty-year old, how old is he?

Q: Were you present when your picture was taken?

Q: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?

A: Yes.
Q: And what were you doing at that time?

Q: She had three children, right.
A: Yes.
Q: How many were
boys?
A: None.
Q: Were there any girls?

Q: How was your first marriage terminated?
A: By death.

Q: And by whose death was it terminated?

Q: Can you describe the individual?
A: He was about medium height
and had a beard.
Q: Was this a male, or a female?

Q: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition
notice which I sent to your attorney?
A: No, this is how I dress when I go to
work.

Q: Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?

A: All my autopsies are performed on dead people.

Q: All your responses must be oral, OK? What school did you go to?

A: Oral.

Q: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
A: The
autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
Q: And Mr. Dennington was dead at the
time?
A: No, he was sitting on the table wondering why I was doing an
autopsy.

Q: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?

Q: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a
pulse?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for blood pressure?
A: No.
Q:
Did you check for breathing?
A: No.
Q: So, then it is possible that the
patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
A: No.
Q: How can
you be so sure, Doctor?
A: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.

Q: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
A: Yes, it is
possible that he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere.

— Teaching Math in 1950: A logger sells a truckload of lumber
for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price.
What is his profit?

Teaching Math in 1960: A logger sells a truckload of lumber
for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80.
What is his profit?

Teaching Math in 1970: A logger exchanges a set “L” of
lumber for a set “M” of money. The cardinality of set “M” is 100.
Each element is worth one dollar. Make 100 dots representing the
elements
of the set “M.” The set “C”, the cost of production contains 20 fewer
points than set “M.” Represent the set “C”
as a subset of set “M” and answer the following question:
What is the cardinality of the set “P” of profits?

Teaching Math in 1980: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20.
Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

Teaching Math in 1990: By cutting down beautiful forest trees, the logger makes $20. What do you think of this way of making
a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question:
How did the forest birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down the
trees? There are no wrong answers.

Teaching Math in 2000: A logger sells a truckload of lumber
for $100. His cost of production is $120. How does Arthur Andersen
determine that his profit margin is $60?

Thanks to my esteemed brother Eric for supplying this item.

— I liked this letter in the Japan Times online

In many ways, today’s religious extremists are no different from the Marxist extremists of a bygone era. West Germany, Europe’s richest country during the Cold War, was the birthplace of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, and in Italy, another rich country, the Red Brigades carried out violent attacks in the name of socialism for years. Japan, the world’s second-richest country, suffered one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in 1995. The terrorists, members of a religious cult, were from the affluent middle class.

Most of the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center were from oil-rich Saudi Arabia; their leader was a Saudi millionaire. This belies the contention that terrorism is the product of poverty and deprivation. The issue of poverty should be addressed on its own merits. The fight against terrorism must be a military one, and Afghanistan can serve as a model. Only after the menace of terrorism is lifted can the world address the serious problems of poverty and underdevelopment.

MAHMOOD ELAHI

Ottawa, Canada

There are sane people all over the world, many of them Arabs.

— In heavily Muslim areas of England such as Bradistan, sentiments such as this are openly displayed (Radical, Retaliatory and Right There on British Bookshelves)

“They say we are terrorists. Terrorism is an obligation in the book of Allah. The East and West have to know that we are terrorists and that we strike. Terror is an obligation in the creed of Allah.”

Yes, it’s shocking that England hasn’t knocked some sense into these loons. And yes, we’d better not underestimate the depth of their hatred for all things modern, Western, and non-Muslim.

— The always astute More Than Zero comments on the Shadow Government non-issue, as do several of the less-astute. It’s the ultimate irony that Bush-haters would bring this issue to the Internet. Why, you ask?

Well, boys and girls, the precursor to the Internet was a little deal called ARPANet whose main purpose in life was providing a communication system to link government facilities in the event of an attack rendering civilian communications systems inoperable. The ‘Net is, after all, a redundant, distributed system that can survive multiple outages. And why would it have to do this? Well, part of the reason is to enable defense and the other parts of the Executive to continue to function from secure locations after a devastating attack. The Bush Shadow Government uses facilities that have been in place to ensure the continuity of government in the event of attack since, um, at least 1969.

— The web page that this information comes from is extinct, so I’m preserving it here for the benefit of dog-lovers everywhere:

Few breeds of dogs can claim as mystical or mysterious a past as can the chi. One of the very few native American breeds, the chi’s roots can be traced back to the ancient Olmec, Toltec, and Aztec civilizations of Central America and Mexico. The Olmecs (now thought to be the mother culture of Mexico) had two sources of domesticated meat: turkey and dogs. Although repulsive to us now, this tradition of eating dogs was not unusual.

By the age of the Toltecs, there is evidence that a plump, thick-necked little dog with short erect ears and tail was bred for the table to be eaten principally by the nobility. It was not the Chihuahua as we know it today; but the Toltec carvings dating from the ninth century A.D. show a small dog with a rounded head and erect ears, reminiscent of the Chihuahua. This early dog, known as the Techichi, is believed to be the ancestor of most Central American breeds and was most fully developed my the conquerors of the Toltecs, the Aztecs.

The Aztecs kept several distinct types of dogs for a variety of reasons, the most unusual being sacrificial animals. Aztec life was filled with attempts to ensure prosperity by appeasing the gods with ceremonial blood offerings, usually of captive humans. These dogs lived in the temple with the priests. Dogs were believed to be able to see into the future, and to cure disease by transferring sickness to other people. A small red dog was believed to guide the souls into the underworld of the dead. Such a dog was kept in every Aztec household and killed at the grave and buried with any family member who died. Archaeologists have found the Techichi in human gravesites all over Mexico. Occasionally a pottery dog figurine was substituted for a real dog.

The Techichi was larger than a chihuahua, usually had long hair and was said to be mute. There are a lot of legends of how the modern chi was derived. Some say it was interbred with prarie dogs, others say it was crossed with a small Asiatic hairless dogs brought into the region by migrating Indian tribes, still others point to a more recent influence from China. At any rate, it was over 300 years or more until the dog known as the Chihuahua made its appearance

To celebrate multiculturalism and to express solidarity with the Korean people, I’ll now post a recipe for Chihuahua Vindaloo.
Continue reading “The noble Chihuahua”

— We scooped the Western press on the Leno/Korean dogmeat flap here, sourcing the Korea Herald Monday. The story has legs like a Russian Wolfhound (Yahoo! News – NBC Seeks to Quell Flap Over Leno Dog-Meat Joke)

But she said Leno himself was “very gracious” during a 30-minute telephone conversation with her and the head of the Korean-American Coalition, Charles Kim. But she said the comedian at first professed surprise that his joke was so hurtful because “from his perspective it was based in fact.”

Leno says what we said. I really should be charging for this.

A relative who works for Dell Computer has this to say about the Sierra Times fiasco:

The export compliance lawyers and administrators at Dell [are] at a heightened
state of alert. The US government told Dell and other computer
manufacturers that if they sold computers to those who they shouldn’t “like
terrorist corporations, bad countries and such” that Dell would be fined a
Million Dollars a day.

The people on the phone taking orders are just that… order takers with a
script they have to follow. Many of them are contactors hoping that Dell
will hire them one day, scared to make any mistake. They were told to be
careful selling anything to anyone that might be on the bad guys list. I am
sure this is just one of these people that did not understand any more
detail then that. Kind of like going to Wal-Mart and trying to get help
from the sales people behind the counter. The service is less than you
would expect many times.

We were told in England you have to sign a document that says you will not
use the computer for terrorist activities!

Bureaucrats!

Make of it what you will; we report you decide.

— Robert Locke, writing for FrontPage Magazine, makes a strong case for Islam as a defective religion that gives rise to a defective civilization. The main points appear to have been cribbed off this blog, which makes them credible, of course. Here’s a sample of Locke’s argument:

There are also disturbing aspects about Islam purely as a religion, independent of any social consequences. For example, its conception of paradise with the 70 virgins, et cetera, is, to be quite blunt, repulsively crude and I do not think this is just a Western bias. Everything I have gathered in conversation with representatives of other traditions suggests to me that a serious Buddhist, Hindu or Chinaman finds this equally unattractive. The ultimate end of man should not be a teenage fantasy. It is, of course, a wonderful myth for motivating young men to become killers.

The Sharia problem, the non-separation of church and state problem, and the crude nature of the Islamic religious imagination all weigh heavily against Islamic progress. Certainly, there is a serious force pushing Muslims in the direction of madness for them to believe that Arabs were not involved in 9/11.