| |
|
15. januar 2004
|
|
Short comment
Stupid.
9:17:07 PM 
|
|
Strange headline of the day
"Internet savvy more akin to anti-boob tube man than geeks" (Ars Technica)
8:08:14 PM
|
|
China's Afghanistan contribution
China, which shares a very small border with Afghanistan, has sent its contribution to the peacekeeping mission in the country: Zhang Ming. Yes, one policeman. He better be a very good cop.
6:04:22 PM
|
|
Danish military: No trace of chemical agent in shells
The grenade shells found in Iraq by Danish and Icelandic soldiers has no trace of chemical warfare agents, according to Danish military officials.
I blogged the find some days ago, rather cautionary I am glad to say.
I keep telling myself that the next time I'll just ignore the story as it's going to be another false alert, but I guess I am just too afraid of missing the real thing if it happens.
3:56:20 PM
|
|
Imam sentenced for inciting violence to women
Mohamed Kamal Mustafa, a Muslim Imam, has been given a €2,160 fine and a suspended prison sentence by a Spanish court for publishing a book explaining how men could beat up their wives without leaving those cumbersome visible bruises and scars.
In his book, Mustafa wrote that in disciplining a disobedient wife: "The blows should be concentrated on the hands and feet using a rod that is thin and light so that it does not leave scars or bruises on the body."
Mustafa insists he is really opposed to beating women (yeah right) and was just interpreting the Koran.
I'd rather suggest that he defend himself by saying he was writing an S/M manual.
Two groups representing Spanish Muslims came forward ahead of the trial distance themselves from the cleric's book, saying that the Koran and other sacred texts condemned violence against women.
It would be nice if this was true, but it isn't. The Koran itself advises men to beat their wives at the mere suspicion of disobedience:
[Sure 4.34] Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great.
Doesn't sound great to me at all.
Link from MacRaven.
1:45:32 PM
|
|
PA: Call dead Palestinians "martyrs" or else
The Palestinian Authority has responded with anger and violence to a decision by the TV channel Al-Arabiya to report from the Palestinian conflict in a more objective manner.
Monday's Jerusalem Post reported that the Palestinian Authority has demanded that Arab satellite-TV journalists refer to any Palestinian killed by the Israeli Defense Forces as "martyred." The instructions targeted the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya network, which until now had been using the politically and religiously neutral, though still adequately descriptive, adjective "dead." A PA spokesman suggested that "the Ministry of Information should be entrusted with educating these correspondents by telling them which phrases are used in our political life." (In other words: Use our terminology, or else.) To help drive the lesson home, gunmen who identified themselves as members of Yasser Arafat's ruling Fatah Party beat Al-Arabiya's Ramallah-based Palestinian correspondent Seif al-Din Shahin with their rifle butts.
This is the side of the PA that is never reported in the Norwegian press. Negative coverage of Arafat's government has been limited to some mention of its corruption some years back, easily drowned out in the one-sided reporting of the violence. Allegations that Arafat is directly responsible for terrorism is just reported as Israeli allegations ("the Isralis claim..."). That is rather disingenious after Karine A (not exactly overreported in the Norwegian press either, in case you wonder).
Link via Daniel Glick.
12:54:57 PM
|
|
Mars on 15 cents a day
 President Bush (picture) has, as previously announced, set forth an ambitious drive to put man back on the moon by 2020 and a manned mission to Mars at an unspecified later time. Perhaps the only really surprising part of this speech was the price tag, only $1bn extra over the next five years, the rest to be channeled to the project from Nasa's existing budget.
"Establishing an extended human presence on the moon could vastly reduce the cost of further space exploration, making possible ever more ambitious missions," he said. "Lifting heavy spacecraft and fuel out of the Earth's gravity is expensive. Spacecraft assembled and provisioned on the moon could escape its far lower gravity using far less energy and thus far less cost."
Bush also said the soil of the moon "contains raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air."
I have to say I question this, and I'd like to hear what the real experts say. It makes no sense to launch a Mars mission from the moon if the craft and everything in it comes from the Earth in the first place. If we have lifted it out of the Earth's gravity, it would be a stupid waste to put it back down on a body where it will take expensive fuel to launch it again.
So for this to make sense, there must be a total industrial infrastructure on the Moon, complete with mining, metal industry, factories and engineering and building. Does this sound realistic by 2030, the speculative launch date for a manned Mars mission?
I am also rather bewildered by the speculation that rocket fuel can be processed from the Moon's rocky ground. It sure as hell is not oil on the Moon, so this technology is unknown to me (if we can get fuel from stones on the Moon, we probably can do so on Earth too, right?).
That said, the most immediately benefit of this project is the building of a "crew exploration vehicle," a new manned space craft to take over from the troubled Space Shuttle which will be scrapped by 2010. This will have to be some impressive craft, as it is not only going to be a vehicle for moving objects into low orbit, but will actually be able to play a part in going to moon, too. Naturally, if there is to be manned space travel at all in the future, a replacement for the shuttles need to be developed either way.
Perhaps the biggest question mark is about the price tag. Bush insist this can be done on the cheap without straining already overburdened federal budgets further.
As Nasa administrator Sean O'Keefe says, this is no more than 15 cents a day for each American taxpayer. Surely, just the entetainment will be worth it, not?
However, I am simply not convinced that Mars can be reached on a budget airline. The Brits tried a budget Mars mission, remember. Nobody can take any such hit or miss chances with manned missions.
12:12:25 PM
|
|
Hitchhikers movie
A movie based on Douglas Adams' legendary book series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been in the works for some time, but at times it has looked bad for the project. Now there's been some great progress, and it looks like the wildly anticipated scifi comedy will have liftoff.
Don't panic!
11:07:35 AM
|
|
Master and Commander
Yes, I know I am very late, but I finally watched it today. I sat down in the theatre and was blown away by the ferocious opening. From then on, I just could not help loving it, despite one extremely annoying Hollywood cliche (Yeah, you guessed it: the farwell scence that tells every person in the audience that "this person will die!" Sheesh!).
Still, top marks for story, special effects and acting. The relationship between the tough captain Russel Crowe and the anti-authoritarian doctor and naturalist Paul Bettany was very well developed. The deliberate anachronisms (?) pointing towards Charles Darwin's discoveries at Galapogos decades later just added to the story, as I see it.
3:53:25 AM
|
|
Feminism?
While we're speaking about it, this is women's "liberation", Arab style.
2:10:47 AM
|
|
Bush for women's rights!
Phyllis Chesler, a radical feminist, has decided to vote for President Bush. Does she think Bush is a great supporter of women's rights? Yeah, right. What she has done, is experienced Afghanistan in person, how a medieval state forces women to be more like domestic animals than humans. Yet, her feminist leftist allies hate Bush so intensely that they will prefer the Taliban to rule Afghanistan rather than seeing a succesful American intervention. She disagrees strongly!
My colleagues on the progressive and feminist Left lead relatively safe and privileged lives in the West. Perhaps this is why they are romanticizing and glorifying illiterate, suicidal killers, new Noble Savages; they want "action," they are incapable of fomenting any, (although their ideas of revolution have actually fomented quite a lot of death in the past). Do they think to expiate a false, liberal guilt in this way? Yes, I say. Is this a form of contempt, masked as compassion for the wretched of the earth? Yes, again.
As I've said before: after 9/11-01 the radical left has demonstrated itself to be morally bankrupt. By a massive stretch of goodwill one can perhaps accept some opposition to the Iraq war - at least by appealing to some leftist herd instinct of massive naivety - but the radical left goes far beyond that.
Thus, although I was active in the civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements of the 1960s in America, what I had learned in Afghanistan rendered me immune to the various romanticizations of Third World countries that infected so many American do-gooders in the 1960s.
It is perhaps possible to understand how the leftists left this world and joined a fantasy universe after the fall of the Soviet Union, at least on an intellectual level. Yet, for practical purposes there is a limit to how much we should be forced to accept. Anyone who opposed the US (and NATO) intervention in Afghanistan deserves no benefit of the doubt. We're at war, and they are on the other side.
2:09:18 AM
|
|
|
© Copyright 2004 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.02.2004; 11:32:33.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This is my blogchalk:
Norway, Bergen, Norwegian, English, Jan, Male, 31-35.
|
|
|
