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17. april 2006
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Another terrorist atrocity in Israel.
A Palestinian suicide bomber killed nine people and wounded at least 40 others in an explosion Monday afternoon near the old central bus station in southern Tel Aviv.
The blast ripped through Falafel "Rosh Ha'ir," the same restaurant that was hit by an attack on January 19 in which 20 people were wounded.
The restaurant is in the bustling Neveh Sha'anan neighborhood near the bus station, and is home to large numbers of migrant workers.
Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa are fighting for the "credit" for this atrocity, with the former being more credible by releasing a tape of the suicide bomber, 21 year old Sami Salim from Jenin. Notably Hamas praises it as "self defence," which begs the question what diners in a restaurant have done to them lately.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stated Israel doesn't really distinguish between terrorist groups coming from the same extremist camps.
"From our point of view it doesn't matter if it comes from Al-Aqsa, Islamic Jihad or Hamas. They all come out of the same school of terrorism led by Hamas," he said.
Ra'anan Gissin, a spokesman for Olmert, said that Israel holds the new Hamas-led Palestinian Authority government responsible for the bombing.
"This Palestinian Authority, which has clearly defined itself as a terrorist entity, has tried to instigate terrorist support more than the previous one did, and we will act accordingly," Gissin said.
For Israel, it is a cause for concern that the security fence and a massive security apparatus out for Passover failed to stop a terrorist group travelling from the West Bank to Tel Aviv.
11:29:09 PM 
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I missed this, but Andreas Lauvstad over at The Crimson Sunset didn't: The day before Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterated his intentions to destroy Israel, and shortly after announcing successful uranium enrichment, Iran was elected to hold a vice chair at the United Nations Disarmament Commission!
The day before, the UN's Disarmament Commission elected Iran's Mehdi Danesh-Yazdi as one of its three vice-chairs. "The continued existence of thousands of nuclear warheads in the stockpiles of the nuclear-weapon States, which could destroy the entire globe many times over, and the increasing resort to the threat of their possible use, are the major sources of concern with regard to global peace and security," Danesh-Yazdi said, adding that Israel was required to place all of its "clandestine nuclear facilities" under UN nuclear watchdog supervision.
What's next? Sudan on the UN human rights commission? Oh, that's right. Never mind.
4:57:22 PM
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The loonie left rag The Independent is furious, and you just know that is a good thing.
The environmental movement is facing one of its biggest-ever reverses, over one of its most cherished causes: Save The Whale.
In a remarkable diplomatic coup, Japan, the leading pro-whaling nation, is poised to seize control of whaling's regulatory body, the International Whaling Commission (IWC), and so hasten the return of commercial whale hunting, which has been officially banned worldwide for the past 20 years.
While the world has been looking the other way, the Japanese have spent nearly a decade and many millions of dollars building up a voting majority in the IWC, by buying the votes of small member states with substantial foreign aid packages.
Their aim is to reverse the moratorium on commercial whaling brought in by the IWC in 1986 as a result of the long Save The Whale campaign by Greenpeace and other environmental pressure groups.
Yes, those evil Japanese using their evil Yen to buy votes on the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to start slaughtering whales again. But of course no mention of who started the game of buying irrelevant, poor countries into the IWC: That was Greenpeace and the other enviro-nuts.
In the early days of this blog, I wrote about an amusing Swedish voting mistake (!) allowing Iceland to come back on the IWC. Now, Iceland is a great, traditional whaling nation, one that certainly has every right to a seat at a commission set up to, one could believe, assure a responsible administration of whales, like humans have always used cattle, sheep and fish for food. But the IWC whale huggers tried to block that move, and, as I wrote back then,
it is much more important for the IWC to have among its members Switzerland, not to mention tiny San Marino, both landlocked!
Now the countries who have wanted to allow responsible whaling, Norway, Iceland and in particularly Japan, has caught on to the green's dirty politics, and are about to beat them at their own game. It is absolute hypocrisy for the Indy to complain about a move their beloved eco-friends have used all through IWC history.
The bottom line is "whale" is not a species, it is a categorisation of many species in the order Cetacea (by comparison, humans are in the order Primate, which includes not only our close siblings the chimpanzees but also lemurs and baboons). Whales are a wide variety of marine mammals, some of which are very plentiful in the ocean (like minke whales, which whaling nations want to hunt), and some of which are endangered, and hunting them is not on the cards. The enviro-nuts have created a public myth about the intelligent, cute, exotic, endangered whale that is a composite figure, not a real animal.
The whaling debate has really opened up a lot of eyes here in Norway to the fanaticism of the green movement, how easy it seems to win public (that is, newspaper) debates even as it has few real arguments on its side. Hopefully, this question can again be debated on the merits of facts and arguments, not emotional appeals from the green fanatics who really believe that slaughtering and eating an animal is morally equivalent to murdering humans. While nobody would take that seriously if the argument was made about cows, whales are more cute and easier to sell.
Link from Goldie to Norwegian daily Dagbladet, which strangely let journalist Harald S. Klungtveit write an anti-whaling article from the viewpoint of Greenpeace et al, without any comments from anybody in the Norwegian whaling industry. Believe me, those guys are usually not very hard to get hold of! The excuse was that the one guy he tried to call was unavailable in the Easter holidays. Now that is sloppy journalism, Harald!
Update: Well, Harald Klungtveit just wrote a follow-up in Dagbladet, interviewing Karsten Klepsvik, the Norwegian commissioner to the IWC, who says much of what I write above. Greenpeace ruined the IWC as a serious body a long time ago, and now they just taste their own medicine. There is simply no basis for the Indy's assertion that this means an "environmental disaster." There are between 1 and 1.5 million minke whales in the south-east ocean, and a responsible hunting is no danger whatsoever.
PS: Think the Indy will allow any pro-whaling voices on its "environment" pages? That would surprise me.
3:45:30 PM
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A picture of a plane from the troubled Brazilian airline Varig, which is not about to take off as you may believe. The plane suffered from bad organisation of its heavy cargo, and fell on its tail.
Picture from Norwegian newspaper VG.
4:57:21 AM
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Kevin Ray Underwood, the Oklahoma man who was arrested for the horrible murder of a 10-year-old neighbour girl, kept a number of blogs. On his Blogger profile, he describes himself as "Single, bored, and lonely, but other than that, pretty happy," but a number of blog posts, not to mention the horrible crime he would commit, showed the lie of that statement. Most disturbing, considering he apparently had planned to dismember and eat the girl, is that the profile carries a single, eh, joke.
If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner?
The skin of last night's main course.
His blog, or one of his blogs if reports are correct (I am really not in the mood to read too much of what he wrote), is called Strange Things are Afoot at the Circle K but has the link name FutureWorldRuler. Most postings are short amusing story links similar to what you'd find on thousands of blogs even, shudder, this one. He also has a "chatterbox" on the page, which of course is filled with many angry comments now.
The AP reports:
On his blog, an online diary that he had kept since September 2002, Underwood described himself as "single, bored, and lonely, but other than that, pretty happy."
He mentions cannibalism, asking "If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner?" and responding: "The skin of last night's main course."
In an entry dated February 4, 2006, Underwood wrote that he struggled with depression and social interaction.
"Pretty much the only time I believe in God is when I blame him for something," he said. "Or, when I'm really depressed, to cry and beg him to make me better, to make whatever is wrong in my brain go away, so that I can live like a normal person.
"That's all I want in life, is to be able to live like a normal person."
He wrote that he rarely left his apartment for long stretches, except to go to work and to buy food. "I just sit here at the computer every minute of the day, when I'm not at work. A week or so ago, I spent my day off sitting here at the computer, barely moving from the chair, for 14 hours."
He said one of his main interests was the online role-playing game "Kingdom of Loathing," in which stick figures battle one another.
In September 2004, he wrote that his depression deepened after several months without taking the medication Lexapro, an antidepressant also used in the treatment of anxiety disorders.
"For example, my fantasies are just getting weirder and weirder. Dangerously weird," he wrote. "If people knew the kinds of things I think about anymore, I'd probably be locked away. No probably about it, I know I would be."
And how much better off everybody would be if he was! Unfortunately, there is no reliable method to distinguish between harmless people with problems and potential threats like Underwood.
12:23:39 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.05.2006; 13:04:33.
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