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20. september 2006
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Hugo Chavez used the opportunity speaking to the UN General Assembly to talk about his favourite person: George Bush.
"The devil came here yesterday," Chavez said, referring to Bush's address Tuesday. "He came here talking as if he were the owner of the world."
He also urged all Americans to read leftist author Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony and Survival", holding up a Spanish-language edition of the book.
Chavez has embraced just about every extremist ruler in the world, including Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Now it's Noam Chomsky. I wonder how the Harvard professor feels about this company? It guess anyone who hates America is good enough for him
7:06:25 PM 
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Didn't we suspect this? Early birds have a genetic defect:
Early to bed and early to rise may be a prescription for prosperity, but for some morning larks, it's an unfortunate condition written in their genes. These people suffer from familial advanced sleep phase syndrome (FASPS), a rare condition in which people hit the hay and wake up about four hours before everyone else. A simple expulsion of protein from the cell nucleus seems to be at the root of the syndrome, report researchers who studied the way that a previously identified mutant protein behaved in cultured human skin cells.
The circadian clock is our body's inborn tool for keeping us on a roughly 24-hour schedule, sleeping and eating at regular intervals, but it can go awry. In many of those with FASPS, researchers had identified a mutation in a protein called PERIOD2. Some hypothesized that the mutant protein's effects arise from the lack of a key phosphate group, but nobody had identified a mechanism, says circadian researcher Achim Kramer of Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
Well, I know my circadian clock is pretty much messed up, but it's not making me a consistent morning lark. I think a 26-hour day would be perfect for me, which indicates I'm really from another planet [I knew it! --ed].
4:01:55 PM
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Gail Hapke has done some interesting research on the "educated Persian" Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos had a religious debate with. You will remember that the Pope got into some serious problems by quoting the Emperor's rather candid statements about Islam.
Now, when you hear about a conversion between an emperor and some other person, you will assume the man with the great title is in the position of power. Not so. At this time, the Byzantine emperor was such only in name, and was in fact a vassal of the Turkish Sultan. The Persian man was at the time acting as an interpreter between the Sultan and his Islamic judges and the vassal emperor. And it was in this position that the Emperor yet was able to speak his mind very openly. Gail comments:
How interesting indeed, that in the old days of Muslim ascendency, no one offered to cut off the head of the questioning infidel, although they could easily have done so. Instead, his gracious hosts encouraged him to speak his mind and amused themselves by answering his objections and correcting his misconceptions, as they understood them.
The behavior of the Qadi and his Sultan, in my opinion, should be celebrated as one of the high points of Muslim civilization. Has that civilization declined so much in the intervening centuries, that the way debates are settled is now by vitriol and violence instead of by reasoned and dignified discourse?
It is a fact that extremism, in acts and words, is a sign of great weakness not strength. In the era of great Islamic power, Muslims were charitable with the kuffar and engaged in frank debate.
Fundamentalism is always the choice of religion that has lost power. Fundamentalism in Christianity evolved when it was rapidly losing power to science, technology and secularism. The Islamic world, once vastly superior to Europe, has since deteriorated in power and prestige, and by rejecting those values it once held high, it has become a society tragically devoid of scientific, technological, economic, intellectual and artistic productivity. Islamic extremism is nostalgism, longing for that past golden age, but espousing an ideology and a mindset that will only drag them down even further.
11:59:08 AM
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 Several cities in the US have drafted a swimming army of bluegills to protect water supplies against terrorist attacks.
San Francisco, New York, Washington and other big cities are using bluegills — also known as sunfish or bream — as a sort of canary in a coal mine to safeguard their drinking water.
Small numbers of the fish are kept in tanks constantly replenished with water from the municipal supply, and sensors in each tank work around the clock to register changes in the breathing, heartbeat and swimming patterns of the bluegills that occur in the presence of toxins.
"Nature's given us pretty much the most powerful and reliable early warning center out there," said Bill Lawler, co-founder of Intelligent Automation Corporation, a Southern California company that makes and sells the bluegill monitoring system. "There's no known manmade sensor that can do the same job as the bluegill."
This sounds like a brilliant idea, and similar biological safeguards can probably be employed as early warning systems in other situations, too.
I just wonder what procedures are put in place to deal with alerts from this fish warning system. Procedures and drills are much more crucial than the physical defense systems in place; we certainly learned this the hard way on September 11. Let's say these fish suddenly go belly-up. What do the authorities do? Immediately stop the water supply and advise citizens to not cook, drink, bathe, shower or wash until further notice? One can imagine the problems, and this needs a quick backup solution and massive alternative water supplies. Such biology-based systems, even well maintained, will be vulnerable to false alerts. Some fish disease could infect the fish tanks, for example. Hopefully all these procedures are well planned and able to avert real danger as well as dealing with the inevitable false alerts.
3:55:18 AM
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Judith Apter Klinghoffer has an interesting article putting the recent shooting against the Oslo synagogue in some context.
Anti-Semitism in Norway is a very strange phenomenon, and can surely not be attributed to the Arab-Israeli conflict, even as it is mostly expressed through that lense today. There are no more than around 1,500 Jews in Norway, after all, and there has never been any significant community of Jews here. There were never any significant activities of the much maligned 'Jewish bankers' that at least served as an excuse for anti-Semitism in continental Europe. There weren't any visibly rich Jews. Through long stretches of our history the country had a total ban on Jews entering the country, so there simply weren't any Jews to be angry at, jealous at or consider a conspiratorial threat to our country. The whole phenomenon is utterly weird.
Yet, when our Founding Fathers, the Eidsvoll men, drafted our Constitution in 1814, still celebrated as the law of the land and in fact one of the world's oldest, they found room in that holy document, the second paragraph even, for a total ban on Jews entering the kingdom (an interesting aside is that this was assumed to refer to Ashkenazi only, the so-called 'Portugese Jews' being exempted). Though I doubt many of them had ever met a Jewish person, these esteemed men agreed to write anti-Semitism into our very constitution.
In 1851, after tireless efforts by among others the poet and national hero Henrik Wergeland, the parliament abolished the ban on Jews, and they were allowed to enter the Kingdom and live here. It is still, however, a fact of national shame that when Nazi Germany occupied Norway between 1940 and 1945, they found many willing hands among the police and elsewhere willing to hand Jews over to their deaths. Half of Norway's already tiny Jewish population of around 1,800 people perished in the Holocaust; almost everybody else had fled to unoccupied Sweden. Denmark, by comparison, lost only 481 out of 7,000 Jews in the country.
Thanks to David for article link.
3:29:35 AM
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A military coup in Thailand has overthrown the elected government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
The sudden, well-orchestrated coup — the first in 15 years and a throwback to an unsettled era in Thailand — was likely to spark both enthusiasm and criticism at home and abroad. The military said it would soon return power to a democratic government but did not say when.
Striking when Thaksin was in New York at the U.N. General Assembly, army commander Gen. Sondhi Boonyaratkalin sent tanks and troops into the drizzly, nighttime streets of Bangkok. The military ringed Thaksin's offices, seized control of television stations and declared a provisional authority loyal to the king.
The coup leaders declared martial law, revoked the constitution and ordered all troops not to leave duty stations without permission from their commanders. The stock exchange was to be closed Wednesday, along with schools, banks and government offices.
Thailand, a country of around 65 million inhabitants, has been considered a great success story in South-East Asia. The economy has prospered, there has, at least outside the Islamic south, been peace and quiet, and after a period of instability up to the 80s, peaceful democracy. Compared to the brutal despotism in Burma, the genocidal communist regime that plagued Cambodia, or the still remaining backwards Marxism of Laos, Thailand has surely been the region success story, along with the city-state Singapore. Because Thailand is an amazingly beautiful country combined with good infrastructure, tourism provides huge income for the country, making up around 5% of the Thai GDP.
Thaksin Shinawatra's party Thai Rak Thai (translated 'Thais love Thais') has been a nationalist and populist party enjoying enormous electoral success. The Thais are a proud people, and Thaksin has capitalised on a policy of national pride, bringing cheap health care to the people, and of course economic prosperity. He still enjoys great popularity on the countryside, and would be expected to win a new election, but a number of controversies and solid opposition in cities, especially Bangkok, has weakened him substantially.
Thailand is a constitutional monarchy, but King Bhumibol Adulyadej enjoys popularity bordering on religious reverence. If you handle the country's currency, having the picture of the king, in a way that is considered disrespectful, like crunching it up, you can expect Thais to politely straighten the bill out, or even rebuke you. The king has not said anything publicly about the coup, but the coup-makers wisely declared total loyalty to him on taking over. It is assumed that without at least tacit approval from the king, the coup-makers could not have made any move.
It is unclear whether Thaksin Shinawatra will now return to Thailand. There may well be army units loyal to him. Hopefully this coup will not lead to serious bloodshed. If any serious unrest follows, it will immediately and harshly damage the country's tourist industry, which is the living for so many people.
Thaksin has been subject to criticism for his harsh tactics in the Muslim south of the country, where Islamic terrorists cause daily bloodshed. A new regime is likely to face the southern unrest as its first major challenge, and this being a military coup, I doubt the methods will be perceived any less brutal.
It will also be interesting to see if Gen. Sondhi Boonyaratkalin and his "council for political reform" will promptly return the country to democracy, assuming they are able to hold onto power. Even if they do, the damage done to the institutions today will last for a long time, as everybody will know the true power still rests with the armed forces, and democratically elected leaders will only be able to rule with approval from the generals.
2:41:06 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.10.2006; 03:11:03.
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