7 posts from January 2007

I was tagged by matildaben:

"Once you have been tagged, you have to write a blog with 5 facts about yourself. Then choose 5 people you want to tag and list their names. Then leave a comment on their blog letting them know they’ve been tagged."

"Facts," eh?

1. I didn't have any first cousins until I was 16, which made for lonely family holidays sometimes.
2. My favorite color is deep but bright blue, like cobalt or the "midnight blue" Crayola crayon.
3. Until 6th grade I wanted to be a cartoonist when I grew up, but then I realized that I wasn't very good at being funny in four to six panels.
4. I have really tight tendons and rather bad knees and heels, which means I can't stand for much longer than half an hour before my legs and lower back start to hurt.
5. My accent is becoming more and more Chicagoan as I get older. (I've lived in Chicagoland all my life, but always had a fairly generic Middle American "TV" accent.)

1. Cinnamon
2. George
3. Brenda
4. MJ
5. Gaspode

You know, when Wired predicted the death of Apple Computer, I really considered buying some stock. It was trading for about $12 at that time.

Today, they posted a billion-dollar profit for their fiscal First Quarter 2007, a week after announcing the iPhone to ridiculous amounts of press. And their stock price is around $95.

I saw a very expensive Mercedes with the license plate LEARSI today. Which is Israel spelled backwards. My wonder is, was this meant to be a rebus, and if so, was it pro-Israel or anti? It could be read as "Israel is backwards," after all.

Very interesting history lesson. Here's some more information about the
battle against the Barbary pirates, from a slightly less biased source:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjprece.html

Keep in mind that the author of that article is a right-wing blogger --
the "US Veteran Dispatch" [http://www.usvetdsp.com/] is not an official
publication of any sort -- and should be taken with a very large grain
of salt. The fact that he wrote that history lesson in reference to a
duly elected congressman who used the preferred text of his religion
(would Mr. Sampley care to tell the class how many Jews have used the
Torah in their swearing in?), intending to imply that Congressman
Ellison a lawless, bloodthirsty pirate based on the fact that he happens
to also be Muslim, is despicable.

Keep in mind also that there are no religious tracts of *any* sort
involved in the official swearing in of Congress. Bibles, Torahs and now
Qurans are brought out solely for photo opps after the ceremony:
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/11/30/koran-bible-prager-ellison/
It's quite amusing to read right-wing nuts have to retract their rage:
http://righttruth.typepad.com/right_truth/2006/12/retraction_sort.html
They can't even admit that the Torah isn't a Christian book, claiming
Jews get half credit because their book makes up the first part of the
Bible. (So if someone gets sworn in using a Precious Moments angel that
says "John 3:16," does that count?) Jesus Christ is considered one of
the highest prophets of Islam -- a fact very rarely mentioned in these
religio-political screeds.

As for the second piece (from yet another right-wing blog), there's at
least one factual error (the Japanese were not Nazis, they were
imperialists [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Japan] -- big
difference; don't forget that *we* have been imperialists on occasion),
a couple huge gaps in logic, and several gulps of Administration
Kool-Aid (does anybody really still believe that Saddam Hussein had
anything to do with Al Qaeda? how many more times does that have to be
disproved?) But beyond all that, I find it really amusing that amid all
the scare tactics about how "the Muslims are going to take over the
world," the writer apparently has decided that the entirety of Asia
(containing somewhere around one-third of the world's population) and
South America don't exist. It's the Middle East, Europe and then us, and
Total World Domination is complete. Not to mention the ridiculousness of
implying that getting out of Iraq will somehow lead to the dismantling
of our military, allowing the terrorists to win.

Look, I'm not happy we're at war, and I believe we were lied to in order
to go to war. But I also recognize that there's no clean and easy way
out now that we're there. We're in for the long haul -- the quagmire
we're in is not one we can just walk away from. I certainly don't need
to hear yet another tirade about how the Enemy is Bad and America is
Right. If we're so right, why do we seem to need so much reminding?

The situation in the Middle East is not black and white, and it never
will be. Branding every Muslim in the world a terrorist and acting as if
they're the root of all the evil in the world is just stupid and
simplistic. It's no less racist than the hateful generalizations made by
the enemies of Israel against the Jews (which I assume you disagree
with) or the branding of America as the Great Satan. You're doing no
good by perpetuating the cycle of aggression with this sort of
hysterical discrimination and hatred. And you're not persuading me -- if
anything, you're alienating me further.

Please don't forward this kind of scaremongering pseudo-patriotism to me
again.

---Andrew

[Mom] wrote:
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject:
> FW: A history lesson. I'm glad I took the time to read it. - PART TWO
> From:
> [my uncle]
> Date:
> Tue, 9 Jan 2007 14:22:32 -0700
> To:
 ...

> *Subject:* FW: A history lesson. I'm glad I took the time to read it.
> - PART TWO
>
> This I did not know….. interesting read.
>
> As long as we’re dispensing History.. here’s a little more:
>
> What Thomas Jefferson learned from the Muslim book of jihad
> U.S. Veteran Dispatch ^ | January 2007 | Ted Sampley
>
>
>
> Democrat Keith Ellison is now officially the first Muslim United
> States congressman. True to his pledge, he placed his hand on the
> Quran, the Muslim book of jihad and pledged his allegiance to the
> United States during his ceremonial swearing-in.
>
> Capitol Hill staff said Ellison's swearing-in photo opportunity drew
> more media than they had ever seen in the history of the U.S. House.
> Ellison represents the 5th Congressional District of Minnesota.
>
> The Quran Ellison used was no ordinary book. It once belonged to
> Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and one of
> America's founding fathers. Ellison borrowed it from the Rare Book
> Section of the Library of Congress. It was one of the 6,500 Jefferson
> books archived in the library.
>
> Ellison, who was born in Detroit and converted to Islam while in
> college, said he chose to use Jefferson's Quran because it showed that
> "a visionary like Jefferson" believed that wisdom could be gleaned
> from many sources.
>
> There is no doubt Ellison was right about Jefferson believing wisdom
> could be "gleaned" from the Muslim Quran. At the time Jefferson owned
> the book, he needed to know everything possible about Muslims because
> he was about to advocate war against the Islamic "Barbary" states of
> Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Tripoli.
>
> Ellison's use of Jefferson's Quran as a prop illuminates a subject
> once well-known in the history of the United States, but, which today,
> is mostly forgotten - the Muslim pirate slavers who over many
> centuries enslaved millions of Africans and tens of thousands of
> Christian Europeans and Americans in the Islamic "Barbary" states.
>
> Over the course of 10 centuries, Muslim pirates cruised the African
> and Mediterranean coastline, pillaging villages and seizing slaves.
>
> The taking of slaves in pre-dawn raids on unsuspecting coastal
> villages had a high casualty rate. It was typical of Muslim raiders to
> kill off as many of the "non-Muslim" older men and women as possible
> so the preferred "booty" of only young women and children could be
> collected.
>
> Young non-Muslim women were targeted because of their value as
> concubines in Islamic markets. Islamic law provides for the sexual
> interests of Muslim men by allowing them to take as many as four wives
> at one time and to have as many concubines as their fortunes allow.
>
> Boys, as young as 9 or 10 years old, were often mutilated to create
> eunuchs who would bring higher prices in the slave markets of the
> Middle East. Muslim slave traders created "eunuch stations" along
> major African slave routes so the necessary surgery could be
> performed. It was estimated that only a small number of the boys
> subjected to the mutilation survived after the surgery.
>
> When American colonists rebelled against British rule in 1776,
> American merchant ships lost Royal Navy protection. With no American
> Navy for protection, American ships were attacked and their Christian
> crews enslaved by Muslim pirates operating under the control of the
> "Dey of Algiers"--an Islamist warlord ruling Algeria.
>
> Because American commerce in the Mediterranean was being destroyed by
> the pirates, the Continental Congress agreed in 1784 to negotiate
> treaties with the four Barbary States. Congress appointed a special
> commission consisting of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin
> Franklin, to oversee the negotiations.
>
> Lacking the ability to protect its merchant ships in the
> Mediterranean, the new America government tried to appease the Muslim
> slavers by agreeing to pay tribute and ransoms in order to retrieve
> seized American ships and buy the freedom of enslaved sailors.
>
> Adams argued in favor of paying tribute as the cheapest way to get
> American commerce in the Mediterranean moving again. Jefferson was
> opposed. He believed there would be no end to the demands for tribute
> and wanted matters settled "through the medium of war." He proposed a
> league of trading nations to force an end to Muslim piracy.
>
> In 1786, Jefferson, then the American ambassador to France, and Adams,
> then the American ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji
> Abdul Rahman Adja, the "Dey of Algiers" ambassador to Britain.
>
> The Americans wanted to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress'
> vote to appease.
>
> During the meeting Jefferson and Adams asked the Dey's ambassador why
> Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which
> they had no previous contacts.
>
> In a later meeting with the American Congress, the two future
> presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had
> answered that Islam "was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it
> was written in their Quran, that all nations who should not have
> acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and
> duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make
> slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman
> (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise."
>
> For the following 15 years, the American government paid the Muslims
> millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the
> return of American hostages. The payments in ransom and tribute
> amounted to 20 percent of United States government annual revenues in
> 1800.
>
> Not long after Jefferson's inauguration as president in 1801, he
> dispatched a group of frigates to defend American interests in the
> Mediterranean, and informed Congress.
>
> Declaring that America was going to spend "millions for defense but
> not one cent for tribute," Jefferson pressed the issue by deploying
> American Marines and many of America's best warships to the Muslim
> Barbary Coast.
>
> The USS Constitution, USS Constellation, USS Philadelphia, USS
> Chesapeake, USS Argus, USS Syren and USS Intrepid all saw action.
>
> In 1805, American Marines marched across the dessert from Egypt into
> Tripolitania, forcing the surrender of Tripoli and the freeing of all
> American slaves.
>
> During the Jefferson administration, the Muslim Barbary States,
> crumbling as a result of intense American naval bombardment and on
> shore raids by Marines, finally officially agreed to abandon slavery
> and piracy.
>
> Jefferson's victory over the Muslims lives on today in the Marine
> Hymn, with the line, "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of
> Tripoli, we will fight our country's battles on the land as on the sea."
>
> It wasn't until 1815 that the problem was fully settled by the total
> defeat of all the Muslim slave trading pirates.
>
> Jefferson had been right. The "medium of war" was the only way to put
> and end to the Muslim problem. Mr. Ellison was right about Jefferson.
> He was a "visionary" wise enough to read and learn about the enemy
> from their own Muslim book of jihad.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
 ...
>
> This is very, very interesting!!!!
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> --------------------------------
> Written by Raymond S. Kraft
>
> This is HISTORY THAT HAS BEEN LEFT OUT OF OUR TEXTBOOKS. MANY OF YOU
> ARE NOT OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THAT NEARLY EVERY FAMILY IN AMERICA WAS
> GROSSLY AFFECTED BY WWII. MANY OF YOU DON'T REMEMBER THE RATIONING OF
> MEAT, SHOES, GASOLINE, AND SUGAR. NO TIRES FOR OUR AUTOMOBILES, AND A
> SPEED LIMIT OF 35 MILES AN HOUR ON THE ROAD. NOT TO MENTION, NO NEW
> AUTOMOBILES. READ THIS AND THINK ABOUT HOW WE WOULD REACT TO BEING
> TAKEN OVER BY FOREIGNERS.
> -----
>
>
> Historical Significance:
>
> Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe
> and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat, and had
> sunk more than four hundred British ships in their convoys between England
> and America for food and war materials.
>
> At that time the US was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and most
> Americans wanted nothing to do with the European or the Asian war.
>
> Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage
> Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on
> Germany, which had not yet attacked us. It was a dicey thing. We had
> few allies.
>
> France was not an ally, as the Vichy government of France quickly
> aligned itself with its German occupiers. Germany was certainly not an
> ally, as Hitler was intent on setting up a Thousand Year Reich in
> Europe. Japan was not an ally, as it was well on its way to owning and
> controlling all of Asia. Together, Japan and Germany had long-range
> plans of invading Canada and Mexico, as launching pads to get into the
> United States over our northern and southern borders, after they
> finished gaining control of Asia and Europe. America's only allies
> then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia.
> That was about it. All of Europe, from Norway to Italy, except Russia
> in the East, was already under the Nazi heel.
>
> America was certainly not prepared for war. America had drastically
> downgraded most of its military forces after W.W.I and throughout the
> depression, so that at the outbreak of WW2, army units were training
> with broomsticks because they didn't have guns, and cars with "tank"
> painted on the doors because they didn't have real tanks. And a huge
> chunk of our navy had just been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor.
>
> Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600
> million in gold bullion in the Bank of England, that was actually the
> property of Belgium, given by Belgium to England to carry on the war
> when Belgium was overrun by Hitler (a little known fact). Actually,
> Belgium surrendered on one day, because it was unable to oppose the
> German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next
> day just to prove they could. Britain had already been holding out for
> two years in the face of staggering losses and the near decimation of
> its air force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being
> overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking
> the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with
> later, and first turning his attention to Russia, at a time when
> England was on the vergeof collapse, in the late summer of 1940.
>
> Ironically, Russia saved America's butt by putting up a desperate
> fight for two years, until the US got geared up to begin hammering
> away at Germany.
>
> Russia lost something like 24 million people in the sieges of
> Stalingrad and Moscow alone... 90% of them from cold and starvation,
> mostly civilians, but also more than a 1,000,000 soldiers.
>
> Had Russia surrendered, Hitler would have been able to focus his
> entire war effort against the Brits, then America. And the Nazis could
> possibly have won the war.
>
> All of this is to illustrate that turning points in history are often
> dicey things. And now, we find ourselves at another one of those key
> moments in history.
>
> There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants
> and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological,
> or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world.
>
> The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs --
> they believe that Islam, a radically conservative form of Wahhabi
> Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the
> world. And that all who do not bow to their will of thinking should be
> killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust,
> destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews. This is their mantra.
>
> There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East -- for the most
> part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its
> Inquisition and its Reformation, but it is not known yet which will
> win -- the Inquisitors, or the Reformationists.
>
> If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control
> the Middle East, the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian
> economies. The techno-industrial economies will be at the mercy of OPEC
> -- not an OPEC dominated by the educated, rational Saudis of today,
> but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis. You want gas in your car? You
> want heating oil next winter? You want the dollar to be worth
> anything? You
> better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic
> Reformation wins.
>
> If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who
> believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, and live
> in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into
> the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade
> away, and a moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.
>
> We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight
> the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda and
> the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. And we
> can't do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the
> battle at a time and place of our choosing........in Iraq.
>
> Not in New York, not in London, or Paris or Berlin, but in Iraq, where
> we are doing two important things.
>
> (1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly
> involved in 9/11 or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been
> actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam is a
> terrorist.
>
> Saddam is, or was, a weapon of mass destruction, who is responsible
> for the deaths of probably more than a million Iraqis and two million
> Iranians.
>
> (2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic
> terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad
> people, and the ones we get there we won't have to get here. We also
> have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will
> be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East,
> and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the
> Middle East for as long as it is needed.
>
> World War II, the war with the German and Japanese Nazis, really began
> with a "whimper" in 1928. It did not begin with Pearl Harbor. It began
> with the Japanese invasion of China. It was a war for fourteen years
> before America joined it. It officially ended in 1945 -- a 17 year war
> -- and was followed by another decade of US occupation in Germany and
> Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own
> again ... a 27 year war.
>
> World War II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a
> full year's GDP -- adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion
> dollars. W.W.II cost America more than 400,000 killed in action, and
> nearly 100,000 still missing in action.
>
> The Iraq war has, so far, cost the US about $160 billion, which is
> roughly what 9/11 cost New York. It has also cost about 3,000 American
> lives, which is roughly EQUAL TO the 3,000 lives that the Jihad
> snuffed on 9/11. But the cost of not fighting and winning W.W.II would
> have been unimaginably greater -- a world dominated by German and
> Japanese Nazism.
>
> This is not 60 minute TV shows, and 2 hour movies in which everything
> comes out okay.
>
> The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes
> bloody and ugly. Always has been, and probably always will be.
>
> The bottom line is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism
> until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away if we ignore it.
>
> If the US can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we
> have an "England" in the Middle East, a platform, from which we can
> work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East. The history of the
> world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and
> civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates. The Iraq war
> is merely another battle in this ancient and never ending war. And
> now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear
> weapons. Unless somebody prevents them.
>
> We have four options:
>
> 1. We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.
>
> 2. We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which
> may be as early as next year, if Iran's progress on nuclear weapons is
> what Iran claims it is)
>
> 3. We can surrender to the Jihad and accept its dominance in the
> Middle East, now, in Europe in the next few years or decades, and
> ultimately in America.
>
> 4. Or, we can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when the
> Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has
> dominated France and Germany and maybe most of the rest of Europe. It
> will, of course, be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier.
>
> If you oppose this war, I hope you like the idea that your children,
> or grandchildren, may live in an Islamic America under the Mullahs and
> the Sharia, an America that resembles Iran today.
>
> The history of the world is the history of civilizational clashes,
> cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society
> and civilization should be like, and the most determined always win.
>
> Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The
> pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them.
>
> Remember, perspective is every thing, and America's schools teach too
> little history for perspective to be clear, especially in the young
> American mind.
>
> The Cold war lasted from about 1947 at least until the Berlin Wall
> came down in 1989. Forty-two years. Europe spent the first half of the
> 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany
>
> World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten year
> occupation, and the US still has troops in Germany and Japan. World
> War II resulted in the death of more than 50 million people, maybe
> more than 100 million people, depending on which estimates you accept.
>
> The US has taken more than 3,000 killed in action in Iraq. The US took
> more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the
> first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism.
> In W.W.II the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week -- for four years. Most of
> the individual battles of W.W.II lost more Americans than the entire
> Iraq war has done so far.
>
> But the stakes are at least as high ... A world dominated by
> representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and
> personal freedoms .. or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi
> movement,
> by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law).
>
> It's difficult to understand why the American left does not grasp
> this. They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but
> evidently not for Iraqis.
>
> "Peace Activists" always seem to demonstrate here in America, where
> it's safe.
>
> Why don't we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq,
> Sudan, North Korea, in the places that really need peace activism the
> most?
>
> The liberal mentality is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights,
> democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc., but if the Jihad wins,
> wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights,
> democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc.
>
> Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the
> side of their own worst enemy.
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Raymond S. Kraft is a writer living in Northern California. Please
> consider passing along copies of this article to students in high
> school, college and university as it contains information about the
> American past that is very meaningful today -- history about America
> that very likely is completely unknown by them (and their instructors,
> too). By being denied the facts of our history, they are at a decided
> disadvantage when it comes to reasoning and thinking through the
> issues of today. They are prime targets for misinformation campaigns
> beamed at enlisting them in causes and beliefs that are special
> interest agenda driven.
>

So, John Negroponte became deputy secretary of state last week. I've got a theory about that: The reason for the move is Condoleeza Rice is preparing to enter the presidential race. By moving Negroponte to assistant, he's better positioned to take over the office when Condi leaves to pursue the nomination.

The Police are rumored to be thinking about an anniversary tour. Two drops of pee came out when I read the headline.
--Greg Storey, in Longboard (sorry, no permalink)

I think "Two drops of pee came out..." is the rhetorical opposite of "I just threw up a little in my mouth."

NowNow is a new service from Amazon: ask a question and get up to three answers from the Amazon Mechanical Turk. [via]

My immediate thought was, "What's on ThenThen?" Unfortunately, nothing -- both thenthen.com and .net show empty Apache directories.

Oh well.