"Various dates for the assault were 1066, 1776, 1899 and 1948"
You always cringe when somebody has done a knowledge survey of school children in your own country, don't you? You just know that two thirds of them or worse will be massively ignorant about even the most important events in your country's and the world's history.
A survey of British school children about D-Day and World War II, just a few days shy of the 60 year memorial, confirms this general rule.
It is 1899 and Denzel Washington, the American president, orders Anne Frank and her troops to storm the beaches of Nazi-occupied New Zealand.
This may not be how you remember D-Day but for a worrying number of Britain's children this is the confused scenario they associate with the events of June 6, 1944.
So what do they teach children in school these days, or is that not even the right question to ask?
Why do they call it 'common' sense when it is so rare?
The balance between privacy and security is a particularly urgent question in the age of terrorism. Heather Mac Donald is convinced that privacy advocates have been going crazy, and that they are hurting the services and the military's ability to fight terrorism and protect us, for very little benefit to privacy.
A prestigious advisory panel has just recommended that the Defense Department get permission from a federal court any time it wants to use computer analysis on its own intelligence files. It would be acceptable, according to the panel, for a human agent to pore over millions of intelligence records looking for al Qaeda suspects who share phone numbers, say, and have traveled to terror haunts in South America. But program a computer to make that same search, declares the advisory committee, and judicial approval is needed, because computer analysis of intelligence databanks allegedly violates "privacy."
This nonsensical rule is the latest development in the escalating triumph of privacy advocacy over common sense.
I agree that this sounds like overdoing it, but not knowing all the details, I can't judge either way. However, having in mind how the wall between security and intelligence brought about the disaster that was 9/11, it is important not to prevent the intelligence services from protecting us.
The advisory committee's technophobia does not end with intelligence analysis. It would also require the defense secretary to give approval for, and certify the absolute necessity of, Google searches by intelligence agents. Even though any 12-year-old with a computer can freely surf the Web looking for Islamist chat rooms, defense analysts may not do so, according to the panel, without strict oversight.
Even though I have been a computer programmer since the days of the dinosaurs, regular readers will not have seen much geek material in this blog. My theory, so far successful, was that if I avoided messing with the technical side of blogging, I would not be distracted from writing about current affairs, which is what I really wanted to do. I know myself, and I know that if I started messing with the technical details of blogging, my writing would suffer. I think I'll call that a good plan.
However, over the last months I have had a growing urge to blog about computer programming, and now I don't want to resist it anymore. I have created a new category for my programming postings, so the regular readers need not be disturbed by a new set of obscure three letter acronyms and language legalese bitfiddling.
I call the new category simply Visual Basic since that has been my favourite programming language and development tool for many years, but I also do related stuff like ASP, C#, IIS, SQL Server, Office VBA development and not-so-related stuff like Navision Financials (I know, I know, but everybody has to live, and it's actually a few years ago now).
I am very excited about .NET. That is probably going to be my primary subject. But who knows? Intent and outcome are rarely coincidental in the world of blogging.
"People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news." (A. J. Liebling)
Bonus apropos quote:
"Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's 'St. Matthew's Passion' on a ukelele." (Bagdikian's Observation)
I'm not really hot on the alternative energy bandwaggon, mostly because many proponents are entirely unrealistic about the costs and possibilities of things like solar and wind energy.
Biodiesel, on the other hand, is something I find quite exciting. It will not solve all the world's energy problems, but can contribute to making us a bit less dependent on fossil fuel. It is cheap and easy to produce, it often uses waste products, and it can be used with many diesel engines with no changes. Especially with the present surge in oil prices, consumers should be able to save serious money by using biodiesel in their cars (assuming they run diesel cars, that is). In the US, it is still more expensive than normal diesel, but in European countries which have high fuel taxes, biodiesel should be significantly cheaper.
The last legal cigeratte has been smoked in Norwegian bars and restaurants. Today smoking is illegal in all public places indoors (even the royal palace!), except a few smoking rooms in work places, and in particular this includes bars and restaurants.
I quit smoking last year, and so did quite a few of my friends, so this does not directly affect me (in a negative way anyway). I am really opposed to the nanny mentality behind this ban, but I don't deny the law will have a lot of benefits. Your clothes not stinking when you come home from town is one of them.
"Are you Muslim or Christian? We don't want to kill Muslims. Show us where the Americans and Westerners live," Islamic militants told an Arab after launching a shooting spree on Westerners in Saudi Arabia.
The four gunmen, aged 18 to 25 and wearing military vests, grabbed Abu Hashem, an Iraqi with a U.S. passport, in front of his home in the Oasis compound in Khobar but let him go when he told them he was a Muslim.
"Don't be afraid. We won't kill Muslims even if you are an American," he quoted them as saying.
Another eyewitness:
Abu Hashem, the director of a Saudi firm who has been in Khobar for six months, said he wanted to move to Bahrain.
He said the four gunmen had been polite and calm.
"They gave me a lecture on Islam and said they were defending their country and ridding it of infidels," he told Reuters at Qusaibi hotel.
"The gunmen were so polite. I cannot comprehend this politeness they showed me because I am a Muslim and this cruelty to others," said Abu Hashem, who declined to give his first name.
He said that while talking to the gunmen he saw the bloodied body of a Swedish cook who worked in the compound. He had been shot dead.
This time we didn't use the "Keystone Cops", we used an elite commando unit. And while the operation was as successful as such operations can be, three terrorists still managed to escape from a single surrounded building. Not that that will be a surprise to anyone. There's a quota, you see.
Quota? Well, this seems to be a running joke among Saudis.
Speaking of whom, what do ordinary Saudis think about these terrorist acts? Sadly, my own cynical comments are matched by Alhamedi's:
I'd like to be able to say that the overwhelming majority of my fellow Saudis totally condemn this terrorism. Sadly, that is just not true. There is a substantial minority, if not verging on a majority, who applaud any action that discomfits a royal family whom they perceive to be "unreliable" in religious terms, and to be too friendly with the US. So they support any action against them, regardless of who dies. And I see this support for the terrorists all around me, both in furtive conversations and more overt celebrations, the smiling jokes among friends, the victory fist punched in the air.
So while it would be nice to see Madrid-style mass demonstrations in the streets of Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, Makkah, Madinah, condemning this terrorism in all its manifestations, forget it, it's not going to happen. We have other priorities. Hitler was obsessed with the racial purity of Greater Germany. We are obsessed with the religious purity of the Arabian Peninsula.
I have seen it before, but have to link it again: The World as a Blog. A massively cool page, where you can see bloggers across the world pop up across the planet as they post.
