hulleye comes by.

migrated

2006-11-02T15:11:00.000-05:00

well. i've done the move. i can now be found at

http://abbashalai.com

you should be taken there in a few seconds, if not, just click the link above.

blogger just wasn't working out.

googling the googly

2006-10-27T16:58:00.000-04:00

before google came around, the only other funny six letter word with two g's and two o's was googly. now google has taken that role, and taken it well. and the word is on everyones lip and searching (on google.com) is now referred to as googling. the google blog explains the legal problems that this stirs up and how you can google someone, and how you can't.

the death of habeas corpus

2006-10-27T09:58:00.000-04:00

keith olbermann may be one of the greatest american patriots out there today after this 'special comment' of his. is habeas corpus really dead? did dubya really do the unthinkable? watch this clip and find out.

paint brush

2006-10-26T12:09:00.000-04:00

these are some real nice tips for the fox. keep it real folks. and keep the faith with the fox. dump IE NOW NOW NOW!

shrug

2006-10-25T14:40:00.000-04:00

for anyone who cares, i've answered the titillating title references here, in the comments. please leave a comment.

david attenborough

2006-10-25T13:54:00.000-04:00

facts and figures of our ecological forthcoming doom in this living planet. an interesting quote from the article:

If current trends continue two planets would be needed by 2050 to meet humanity's demands.

click for more.

the lottery

2006-10-25T11:08:00.000-04:00

ernest hemingway is said to have written an entire story in six words and claimed it to be one of his best works. wired magazine looks at this phenomenon and asks various sci-fi writers to write such stories. click here to read all of them. a few examples below.

Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.
- William Shatner

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

With bloody hands, I say good-bye.
- Frank Miller

I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss … ?
- Neil Gaiman

spread the fox

2006-10-25T11:02:00.000-04:00

if i was a gambling man?

2006-10-23T01:28:00.000-04:00

if i was a gambling man, i'd bet this has never occurred anywhere before in history.

the goblin king

2006-10-20T15:31:00.000-04:00

An invisibility cloak that works in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum has been unveiled by researchers in the US. The device is the first practical version of a theoretical set-up first suggested in a paper published earlier in 2006.

The cloak works by steering microwave light around an object, making it appear to an observer as if it were not there at all. Materials that bend light in this way do not exist naturally, so have to be engineered with the necessary optical properties.

Earlier in 2006, John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, UK, and colleagues showed how such an invisibility cloak could, in theory, be made (see Physicists draw up plans for real 'cloaking device'). Now David Smith and colleagues at Duke University in North Carolina, US, have proved the idea works.

In recent years, materials scientists have made rapid progress in making so-called "metamaterials", which can have exotic electromagnetic properties unseen in nature. These are made up of repeating structures of simple electronic components such as capacitors and inductors.

In 2001, Smith built a metamaterial with a negative refractive index, which bends microwaves in a way impossible for ordinary lenses. Now he has gone one step further.

Keep reading.

history of the saracens

2006-10-20T12:26:00.000-04:00

Who has controlled the Middle East over the course of history? Pretty much everyone. Egyptians, Turks, Jews, Romans, Arabs, Greeks, Persians, Europeans...the list goes on. Who will control the Middle East today? That is a much bigger question.

random realism

2006-10-18T16:36:00.000-04:00

head on over to random realism if you are so inclined.

phineas taylor barnum

2006-10-18T13:39:00.000-04:00

deep fried chips

2006-10-17T16:22:00.000-04:00

This hardware hacker was experimenting with liquid cooling for an old motherboard, immersing it in oil in a tin pan. Once that worked, he decided to heat the oil up and make french-fries in it, while playing Quake on the PC that was being slowly deep-fried along with the chips. It worked for a while, then the machine had to be rebooted (and it continued to work after that!)

Eventually, though, the strain of 120 degrees C ambient temperature and the load of Quake 3 caused the computer to overheat and crash. I rebooted it, and it loaded back into windows. Although Quake 3 still crashed when trying to play. At that point, the chips were ready. I turned off the heat and enjoyed my snack while I waited for the oil to cool so I could use the computer again.

The pictures on this forum and his write up is just phenomenal to read.

ansel adams would be proud

2006-10-16T16:30:00.000-04:00

A SINGLE-PIXEL DIGITAL CAMERA, scientists at Rice University believe, will reduce power consumption and storage space without sacrificing spatial resolution. The new approach aims to confront one of the basic dilemmas of digital imaging, namely the huge waste factor. Consider that a megapixel camera will, when you take the picture, capture and momentarily store a million numbers (the light levels from the pixels). No camera can store that much information for hundreds of pictures, so an immediate data compression takes place right there inside the camera. A tiny microprocessor performs a Fourier transform; that is, it converts the digital image into a weighted sum of many sinusoid waves. Instead of a million numbers, the representation of the image can now been compressed into something like 10,000 numbers, corresponding to the most important coefficients from the mathematical transformation. These are the numbers actually retained for later processing into pictures. The Rice camera saves space and energy by eliminating the first step. It gets rid of the million pixels. Instead it goes right to a transformed version (about 10,000 numbers rather than a million) by viewing the scene prismatically with a single pixel. No, the light from the object doesn’t go through a prism, but it is viewed about 10,000 different ways. The light, in a quick succession of glances, bounces off the myriad individually driven facets of a digital micromirror device, or DMD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_micromirror_device). The mirrors of a DMD (only a micron or so in size) do not image an object or record data but merely steer light; they can be individually angled in such a way that the light strikes a photo detector or not, depending on whether the light is representing a digital 1 or 0 at that moment.

The main idea is that the DMD is acting as a sort of analog optical computer. Each time the pixel views the object, a different set of orientations is imposed on the array of micromirrors. And, in an interesting twist, the Rice camera uses random orientations. Looking like the haphazard splotch of black and white squares of a crossword puzzle, the DMD’s surface is reflective here and dark there; some of the mirrors will faithfully reflect light from the object to the pixel while others will, in effect, appear black. Then the object is viewed again with a different micromirror activation pattern; again the pixel will record an overall light level. This process recurs about 10,000 times. Later, offline on a computer, the single pixel light levels, along with the micromirror patterns are processed using new algorithms to reconstruct a sharp image. This isn’t quite the old type of imaging process, the kind used in x-ray crystallography or CAT scans (which also convert pinpoints of data into images), but a new kind of imaging called compressive sensing that is only about two years old.

To summarize, the acquisition of imaging data is reduced many-fold (saving on data storage), only a single pixel is needed (freeing up valuable space in the primary detector), and the bulk of the processing can be offloaded to a remote computer rather than a chip inside the camera, thus greatly reducing power needs and extending the usefulness of batteries. Rice researchers Richard Baraniuk (richb@rice.edu) and Kevin Kelly (kkelly@rice.edu) say that an additional virtue of the camera is that with only a single pixel, the detector (a photodiode) can be as fancy as you want. It can even accommodate wavelengths currently unavailable to digital photography, such as x ray, terrahertz waves, even radar. A working camera prototype has been built. One of the main tasks is to reduce the time it takes to record an image; the price for compressing space, pixels, and power is to spread everything out in time since the cyclops-like pixel must blink ten thousand or more times to capture the image. As Baraniuk says, the Rice form of photography is multiplexed in time. The Rice results were reported last week at the Frontiers in Optics Meeting of the Optical Society of America (OSA) held in Rochester (www.osa.org/meetings/annual/) (For a picture of the setup and the imaging results, see the web page http://dsp.rice.edu/cscamera and the research paper at http://www.dsp.ece.rice.edu/cs/cscam-SPIEJan06.pdf )

titillating titles

2006-10-16T13:58:00.000-04:00

some of my posts comes with a unique title. a lot of them may seem nonsensical but they're really not. does anyone ever get them, or am i just too random for most people?

let's take a test. see if you can figure out the references in these post titles.

link 1 , link 2 , link 3 , link 4 , link 5 , link 6 , link 7 , link 8 , link 9 , link 10

martin castillo

2006-10-16T12:05:00.000-04:00

Battlestar Galactica, now entering its third season, is not science fiction—or "speculative fiction" or "SF," or whatever you're supposed to call it these days. Ignore the fact that the series is a remake of a late-'70s Star Wars knockoff. Forget that its action variously unfolds on starships and on a colonized planet called New Caprica. And never mind its stunning special effects, which outclass the endearingly schlocky stuff found elsewhere on its network. Sullen, complex, and eager to obsess over grand conspiracies and intimate betrayals alike, it is TV noir. Listen to Adm. William Adama (Edward James Olmos) gruffly rumble along as a weary soldier in a crooked universe. Check out the way that Hitchcock kisses lead seamlessly to knives in the gut. Just look at the Venetian blinds.

Keep reading damn you!

living dangerously

2006-10-15T15:54:00.000-04:00

FIRST ANTIMATTER CHEMISTRY. The Athena collaboration, an experimental group working at the CERN lab in Geneva, has measured chemical reactions involving antiprotonic hydrogen, a bound object consisting of a negatively charged antiproton paired with a positively charged proton. This composite object, which can also be called protonium, eventually annihilates itself, creating an even number of telltale charged pions. Normally the annihilation comes about in a trillionth of a second, but in the Athena apparatus (and its very thorough vacuum conditions) the duration is a whopping millionth of a second. The protonium comes about in the following way. First, antiprotons are created in CERN’s proton synchrotron by smashing protons into a thin target. The resultant antiprotons then undergo the deceleration, from 97% down to 10% the speed of light. Several more stages of cooling, including immersion in a bath of slow electrons, brings the antiprotons to a point where they can be caught in Athena’s electrostatic trap. This allows the researchers to study then, for the first time, a chemical reaction between the simplest antimatter ion---the antiproton---and the simplest matter molecular ion, namely H2+ (two H atoms with one electron missing). Joining these two ions results in the protonium plus a neutral hydrogen atom (see figure at http://www.aip.org/png/2006/269.htm ). This represents the first antimatter-matter chemistry, if you don’t count the interaction of positrons (anti-electrons) with ordinary matter. (Previously antiprotons have been inserted into helium atoms but this did not really constitute “chemistry” since the antiprotons merely replaced an electron in the helium atom.) According to Nicola Zurlo of the Universita’ di Brescia (zurlo@bs.infn.it) and her colleagues, the experimental output from the eventual protonium annihilation (see depiction at www.aip.org/png) allowed the Athena scientists to deduce that the principal quantum number (denoted by the letter n) of the protonium had an average value of 70 rather than the expected value of 30. Furthermore, the angular momentum of the protonium was typically much lower than expected---perhaps because of the low relative velocity at which the matter and antimatter ions approached each other before reaction. The Athena scientists hope to perform more detailed spectroscopy on their proton-antiproton “atom”in addition to the already scheduled spectroscopy of trapped anti-hydrogen atoms, which consist of antiprotons wedded to positrons. (Zurlo et al., Physical Review Letters, 13 October 2006 lab website at http://athena.web.cern.ch/athena/ )

via aip.

baxter and reed

2006-10-15T15:49:00.000-04:00

i love comics. though i think i've gone past the stereotype of marvel and dc comics, they still fascinate me. i think i'm more of a dc fan than i am a marvel one though. not really sure why. in any case, here's an individual directory with bio's of over 700 characters from the marvel universe.

don't call me baby

2006-10-15T15:40:00.000-04:00

a telemarketer bugging you? you do realize that they follow a script to make all their conversations. well, how about you use the same thing on them.

here's the anti-telemarketing counterscript.

in the line of fire

2006-10-15T14:35:00.000-04:00

Zara salees o shagufta Urdu hai, but highly recommended, especially since Musharraf get's blasted up the ass.

no tengo deniro

2006-10-13T16:28:00.000-04:00

a giant list of band name origins.

AC/DC - 1) It is said that one of the band member saw it on an appliance and thought it had something to do with power. (It does mean "alternating current / direct current".) The band used it not realizing it was also slang for a bisexual- the band claims NOT to be bisexual. 2) In the vogue of other anti-everything bands it stands for Against Christ/Devil's Children.

ALICE IN CHAINS - a funny rumor is that they were named after a lost episode from The Brady Bunch series!...

CHUMBAWAMBA - In a band member's dream, he didn't know which door to use in a public toilet because the signs said "Chumba" and "Wamba" instead of "Men" and "Women"...

JETHRO TULL - popular 70's band that is named after the rather obscure inventor of the farmer's seed drill...

JUDAS PRIEST - originally a mild curse said to avoid saying "Jesus Christ" - also from the Bob Dylan song "The ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest"...

T PAU - after a high priestess from the planet VULCAN in the American TV series STAR TREK...

YO LA TENGO -translates to "I have it" from Spanish - said to be the phrase called out by Hispanic baseball players when fielding a pop fly ball. Singer/guitar player Ira Kaplan got the expression from a book he was reading about baseball called The Five Seasons.

ZZ TOP - taken from the name of a Texas Blues man ZZ Hill. Though a rumor is that they got their name by combining Zig Zag and Top, two well known brands of "cigarette" rolling papers.

interest free?

2006-10-13T15:47:00.000-04:00

The population of earth fell into "ecological debt" with the planet yesterday. "The date symbolised the day of the year when people's demands exceeded the Earth's ability to supply resources and absorb the demands placed upon it." In 1987, ecological debt day fell on December 19.

Weirdly enough, Bob Holmes for New Scientist has this interesting tidbit.

Imagine that all the people on Earth - all 6.5 billion of us and counting - could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let’s not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust.

“The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,” says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet?

snail's pace

2006-10-13T15:43:00.000-04:00

Yossi Vardi shows that data transfer by snail is faster than broadband. "He showed a slide of a snail hitched to a tiny chariot with DVDs for wheels. If each disk contains 4.7 gigabytes of data, and if the snail (chasing a scrap of lettuce) travels at 0.000023 metres per second, the snail-system performance rate is over thirty-seven megabits per second. That blows ADSL out of the water."

random news and links

2006-10-12T16:52:00.000-04:00

Sensors will be fitted to pedestrians and in buses as part of a £4.1m project aiming to measure pollution levels across England.
Indian firms are facing a talent crunch.
Hydrogen sulphide gas can induce “suspended animation” in mice and may one day help preserve organ function during intensive surgery.
The founders of The Church of Cognizance, that considers marijuana a sacrament and deity, have stepped down as leaders, saying pending federal criminal charges make it impossible to fulfill their roles.
A German lawyer hopes to drum up more business by pursuing state compensation claims for people who believe they were abducted by aliens.
Within a Deep Forest is a freeware 2D platform game for Windows, featuring challenging gameplay, beautiful music, an evil doctor, infinite cuteness, and a deep forest.
Researchers at Goddard and the Merate Observatory, Merate, Italy, studied a type of quasar called a blazar. Blazars are quasars with their particle jets aimed in our direction.
Russian customs officers say they have discovered a mile long pipeline that was pumping vodka to Latvia.
Archeologists have uncovered a 600-year-old, large underground cemetery belonging to a Peruvian warrior culture, thought to be the first discovery of its kind.
With the population soaring past one billion and with a driving need to boost agricultural production, Indians are tapping groundwater faster than nature can replenish it, so fast that they are hitting deposits formed at the time of the dinosaurs.
Frustrated by their government’s position on the environment/climate change/stem cell research, a group of US scientists have decided to actively promote the election of a president in 2008 who is more receptive to science.
A team of U.S. scientists says it has used a plant virus to construct a memory device.

youtube = google video

2006-10-09T23:39:00.000-04:00

well boys and girls, it had to happen. google just bought the tube for $1.65B .

one hundred

2006-10-05T22:32:00.000-04:00

if you could reduce the earth's population down to a small community of 100 people, this is what that miniature earth would look like.

fred and barney

2006-10-05T22:26:00.000-04:00

man. i don't know how many of you are fred and barney fans out there, but this is just ridiculous. i love it.

p.s. i'm sorry for posting so many videos, but youtube is just kicking ass lately.

2006-10-05T22:20:00.000-04:00

see this korean archer split a soy bean from 30m away. he then goes on to manage the stereotypical arrow splitting from robin hood fame. cwazy stuff.

brick by brick

2006-10-05T22:05:00.000-04:00

for all you lego fanatics out there, next time you want a nice cold drink, have it with lego cubes.

2006-10-05T21:58:00.000-04:00

so you guys remember those super cool transparent illusions. well, how would you like a ride in this elevator?

on the edge of forever

2006-10-05T21:37:00.000-04:00

Scientists teleport two different objects - Oct 4, 2006

Beaming people in “Star Trek” fashion is still in  the realms of science fiction, but physicists in Denmark have teleported  information from light to matter bringing quantum communication and computing  closer to reality.

Treatment ‘to neutralise  all flu’ In preliminary tests, it was found to protect  animals against various strains of the virus - and may also protect against  future pandemic strains.

Wicca veterans seek  grave symbolsWiccans in the US are taking the government to  court over its refusal to allow their symbol on gravestones in military  cemeteries.

Arctic sea ice declines again in  2006, researchers sayWhile cool August temperatures prevented sea ice in the Arctic from reaching its lowest summer extent on record, 2006 continued a pattern of sharp annual decreases due to rising temperatures probably caused by  greenhouse warming.

Chet writes up a brilliant post on what the Zionists really get upto in their spare time.

spy hard

2006-10-04T15:28:00.000-04:00

A Japanese mental health counselor recited pi to 100,000 decimal places from memory on Wednesday, setting what he claims to be a new world record.

Akira Haraguchi, 60, needed more than 16 hours to recite the number to 100,000 decimal places, breaking his personal best of 83,431 digits set in 1995, his office said Wednesday. He made the attempt at a public hall in Kisarazu, just east of Tokyo.

Pi is a physical constant defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

useless fact of the day: There is a building in the Googleplex numbered 3.14159...

a fighter by his trade

2006-10-04T12:01:00.000-04:00

so they've lost a boxer now.

best lines of the article.

This is the second time that an armed forces boxer has slipped abroad. In 2000 Sydney Olympics, light-welterweight Ghulam Shabbir of Pakistan Army vanished from the airport along with welterweight Usmanullah Khan of Wapda.

....

After several incidents of sportsmen disappearing during offshore tours, Pakistan Sports Board (PSB) made it mandatory for the athletes’ parents to fill a surety bond that they will pay one million rupees if their son or daughter slips during a tour abroad.

....

“A Pakistani swimmer slipped few years ago in Spain. The swimmer as well as team manager Lt-Col Ahmad Nawaz were banned for life. A case to convert the life ban against Nawaz to five-year ban is pending before the PSB executive committee.”

little known fact: germany, according to their own constitution cannot deny asylum to anyone who claims it.

abbashalai.com

2006-10-04T10:26:00.000-04:00

for anyone who cares, you should be able to access this blog from http://abbashalai.com now.

celebrate and jubilate

2006-10-04T10:22:00.000-04:00

this article is moderately funny.

Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

HIStory

2006-10-03T16:56:00.000-04:00

thriller. bollywood style.

be all that you can be

2006-10-03T16:52:00.000-04:00

so much for what hollywood teaches you.

third rock from the sun

2006-09-29T18:09:00.000-04:00

A recent shot from Cassini, in the orbit of Saturn, some 930 million miles away. The pale blue dot, of course, is Earth.

frank horrigan

2006-09-27T13:35:00.000-04:00

Looking for Musharraf on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Well, here are two clips seperated because of the Commercial break.

Part 1 of 2: http://youtube.com/watch?v=XK2qRsA_Vak
Part 2 of 2: http://youtube.com/watch?v=o9UILI8M8jw

jihadistan

2006-09-27T11:47:00.000-04:00

newsweek article: the rise of jihadistan.

Five years after the Afghan invasion, the Taliban are fighting back hard, carving out a sanctuary where they—and Al Qaeda's leaders—can operate freely.

It is midday on the central Afghan plains, far from the jihadist-infested mountains to the east and west. Without speaking, the sentinel guides his visitors along a sandy horse trail toward a mud-brick village within sight of the highway. As they get closer a young Taliban fighter carrying a walkie-talkie and an AK-47 rifle pops out from behind a tree. He is manning an improvised explosive device, he explains, in case Afghan or U.S. troops try to enter the village.

In a parched clearing a few hundred yards on, more than 100 Taliban fighters ranging in age from teenagers to a grandfatherly 55-year-old have assembled to meet their provincial commander, Muhammad Sabir. An imposing man with a long, bushy beard, wearing a brown and green turban and a beige shawl over his shoulders, Sabir inspects his troops, all of them armed with AKs and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. He claims to have some 900 fighters, and says the military and psychological tide is turning in their favor.

keep reading.

the sword of islam

2006-09-27T10:56:00.000-04:00

because everyone has made such a fuss on this entire pope's speech debacle, i'm going to a quote an article i recently read at Gush Shalom. written by a man named Uri Avnery. he is an israeli author and activist. this article is not only well worth a read (when you have 6 minutes), it is not only a good historical vision, it is an essential element in the re-creation of understanding and peace in this dangerous world that has been fabricated and manipulated by politics in the interest of capitalism, where there is no longer any consideration for the value of human life nor the suffering of human beings. enjoy.

Since the days when Roman emperors threw Christians to the lions, the relations between the emperors and the heads of the church have undergone many changes.

Constantine the Great, who became emperor in the year 306 - exactly 1700 years ago - encouraged the practice of Christianity in the empire, which included Palestine. Centuries later, the church split into an Eastern (Orthodox) and a Western (Catholic) part. In the West, the Bishop of Rome, who acquired the title of Pope, demanded that the emperor accept his superiority.

The struggle between the emperors and the popes played a central role in European history and divided the peoples. It knew ups and downs. Some emperors dismissed or expelled a pope, some popes dismissed or excommunicated an emperor. One of the emperors, Henry IV, "walked to Canossa", standing for three days barefoot in the snow in front of the Pope's castle, until the Pope deigned to annul his excommunication.

But there were times when emperors and popes lived in peace with each other. We are witnessing such a period today. Between the present Pope, Benedict XVI, and the present emperor, George Bush II, there exists a wonderful harmony. Last week's speech by the Pope, which aroused a worldwide storm, went well with Bush's crusade against "Islamofascism", in the context of the "clash of civilizations".

In his lecture at a German university, the 265th Pope described what he sees as a huge difference between Christianity and Islam: while Christianity is based on reason, Islam denies it. While Christians see the logic of God's actions, Muslims deny that there is any such logic in the actions of Allah.

As a Jewish atheist, I do not intend to enter the fray of this debate. It is much beyond my humble abilities to understand the logic of the Pope. But I cannot overlook one passage, which concerns me too, as an Israeli living near the fault-line of this "war of civilizations".

In order to prove the lack of reason in Islam, the Pope asserts that the Prophet Muhammad ordered his followers to spread their religion by the sword. According to the Pope, that is unreasonable, because faith is born of the soul, not of the body. How can the sword influence the soul?

To support his case, the Pope quoted - of all people - a Byzantine emperor, who belonged, of course, to the competing Eastern Church. At the end of the 14th century, Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus told of a debate he had - or so he said (its occurrence is in doubt) - with an unnamed Persian Muslim scholar. In the heat of the argument, the emperor (according to himself) flung the following words at his adversary:

Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

These words give rise to three questions: (a) Why did the Emperor say them? (b) Are they true? (c) Why did the present Pope quote them?

When Manuel II wrote his treatise, he was the head of a dying empire. He assumed power in 1391, when only a few provinces of the once illustrious empire remained. These, too, were already under Turkish threat.

At that point in time, the Ottoman Turks had reached the banks of the Danube. They had conquered Bulgaria and the north of Greece, and had twice defeated relieving armies sent by Europe to save the Eastern Empire. On 29 May 1453, only a few years after Manuel's death, his capital, Constantinople (the present Istanbul), fell to the Turks, putting an end to the empire that had lasted for more than a thousand years.

During his reign, Manuel made the rounds of the capitals of Europe in an attempt to drum up support. He promised to reunite the church. There is no doubt that he wrote his religious treatise in order to incite the Christian countries against the Turks and convince them to start a new crusade. The aim was practical, theology was serving politics.

In this sense, the quote serves exactly the requirements of the present Emperor, George Bush II. He, too, wants to unite the Christian world against the mainly Muslim "Axis of Evil". Moreover, the Turks are again knocking on the doors of Europe, this time peacefully. It is well known that the Pope supports the forces that object to the entry of Turkey into the European Union.

Is there any truth in Manuel's argument?

The pope himself threw in a word of caution. As a serious and renowned theologian, he could not afford to falsify written texts. Therefore, he admitted that the Qur'an specifically forbade the spreading of the faith by force. He quoted the second Sura, Verse 256 (strangely fallible, for a pope, he meant Verse 257) which says: "There must be no coercion in matters of faith."

How can one ignore such an unequivocal statement? The Pope simply argues that this commandment was laid down by the Prophet when he was at the beginning of his career, still weak and powerless, but that later on he ordered the use of the sword in the service of the faith. Such an order does not exist in the Qur'an. True, Muhammad called for the use of the sword in his war against opposing tribes - Christian, Jewish and others - in Arabia, when he was building his state. But that was a political act, not a religious one; basically a fight for territory, not for the spreading of the faith.

Jesus said: "You will recognize them by their fruits." The treatment of other religions by Islam must be judged by a simple test: how did the Muslim rulers behave for more than a thousand years, when they had the power to "spread the faith by the sword"?

Well, they just did not.

For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.

True, the Albanians did convert to Islam, and so did the Bosniaks. But nobody argues that they did this under duress. They adopted Islam in order to become favourites of the government and enjoy the fruits.

In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were still the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country, did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the Arabic language and the Muslim faith - and they were the forefathers of most of today's Palestinians.

There no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the "spreading of the faith by the sword"?

What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics reconquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.

Why? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the "peoples of the book". In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll tax, but were exempted from military service - a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion - because it entailed the loss of taxes.

Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by the sword" to get them to abandon their faith.

The story about "spreading the faith by the sword" is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims - the reconquista of Spain by the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. I suspect that the German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables. That means that the leader of the Catholic world, who is a Christian theologian in his own right, did not make the effort to study the history of other religions.

Why did he utter these words in public? And why now?

There is no escape from viewing them against the background of the new Crusade of Bush and his evangelist supporters, with his slogans of "Islamofascism" and the "global war on terror" - when "terrorism" has become a synonym for Muslims. For Bush's handlers, this is a cynical attempt to justify the domination of the world's oil resources. Not for the first time in history, a religious robe is spread to cover the nakedness of economic interests; not for the first time, a robbers' expedition becomes a Crusade.

The speech of the Pope blends into this effort. Who can foretell the dire consequences?

smelling of sulphur?

2006-09-27T02:01:00.000-04:00

Tavis Smiley interviews Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on "his oil-for-poor program, U.S. foreign relations policy, his controversial anti-Bush comments and criticism of the United Nations."

pants on fire

2006-09-27T01:43:00.000-04:00

for anyone who's interested in listening to carol off's interview with pervez musharraf, you can listen to it here. (real audio stream only, sorry).

also, in case anyone is interested, or is keeping track, Rice gets caught in her lies today by the pdf of the actual memo from Richard Clark that demonstrates contradiction about statements made about clinton and pakistan.

hewson and evans

2006-09-27T01:35:00.000-04:00

somebody has wayyyy too much time on their hands.

castling

2006-09-25T00:55:00.000-04:00

here is an extensive list of movies, with screenshots, over the past 100 years which feature chess. it's absolutely fascinating how extensive the game is in our culture.

o sole mio

2006-09-25T00:52:00.000-04:00

In a country with a long history of corporate problems and financial issues, the inexpensive and flexible nature of open source software is gaining a lot of ground. "Two years ago, New Delhi said the best way to improve computer literacy in India was to adopt open source software in schools. Although Kerala is the first to introduce such a program statewide, 18 of India's 28 states either are using Linux or have pilot projects for its use in various government departments and schools. The education ministries in most states, and in Delhi the federal ministries of defense, transport, communication, and health, are all using the software on server computers.

why i love open source

2006-09-25T00:35:00.000-04:00

i love the concept of open source technologies. i love it even more when its applied to non-software applications. in this case, prosthetics. it's unreal to know that "state of the art" prosthetics for upper torso's haven't really changed since the early 1900's. i'm glad to see some reform in this area.

good luck hampster

2006-09-24T17:11:00.000-04:00

richard hammond has just suffered a major brain injury from a car crash in which he was going at close to 300mph. sad news. he is best known for being a presenter on the BBC show, Top Gear.

somewhere over the rainbow

2006-09-24T16:38:00.000-04:00

Violating the Human Rights of Kashmiris seems to be another thing that India and Pakistan have in common. From Human Rights Watch:

In Azad Kashmir, a region largely closed to international scrutiny until a devastating earthquake hit last year, the Pakistani government represses democratic freedoms, muzzles the press and practices routine torture, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
Based on research in Azad Kashmir (which means “free Kashmir”) and Pakistan, the 71-page report, “‘With Friends Like These …’: Human Rights Violations in Azad Kashmir,” uncovers abuses by the Pakistani military, intelligence services and militant organizations.
“Although ‘azad’ means ‘free,’ the residents of Azad Kashmir are anything but,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The Pakistani authorities govern Azad Kashmir with strict controls on basic freedoms.”

thanks 3qd

owned

2006-09-21T16:27:00.000-04:00

classic but worth revisiting.

save the day

2006-09-21T01:38:00.000-04:00

Great, so now smoker's got one more thing they will have to read off the back of their cigarette packs.

Smokers may be at greater risk of HIV infection than non-smokers, reveals an analysis of published research issued ahead of print in the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections. Cigarette smoking has already been linked to a higher than normal chance of contracting other infections generally, including those that have been sexually transmitted.

shiny

2006-09-21T01:31:00.000-04:00

you all remember the floating bed? well, this dude designed an almost floating bed.

the knights who say ni

2006-09-21T01:26:00.000-04:00

so everyone knows microsoft loves distributing damn encarta cd's every chance it gets. this dude started to IM with the encarta bot and tried to outsmart it. little did he know he wouldn't get very far. so he asked him what the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow was? check out the image below to see the response much to his astonishment.

if you don't get the joke, too bad.

benedict arnold

2006-09-19T00:30:00.000-04:00

in case anyone is interested, karen armstrong has written an op-ed in the guardian in response to the pope's speech and comments.

found via ifaqeer.

days go by and still

2006-09-19T00:26:00.000-04:00

and in today's news in religion aside from burning effigy's,

World doesn’t end, sect upset - A Kenyan sect that predicted the world would end Tuesday in a nuclear war ended the day in some confusion.
Sharia could come via democracy: Dutch minister - Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner has provoked an angry response by stating it has to be possible for Sharia Law to be introduced in the Netherlands via democratic means.
Cult leader’s trail of lies - Cult leader Debra Geileskey has been allegedly travelling on a false passport claiming to be a diplomat from a fictitious country called Caledonia Australis: had postage stamps issued from the fictitious country, used them to send mail to the US.

2006-09-19T00:17:00.000-04:00

The Best of Borat. If you're wondering why the Kazakhstan government is so upset, this 25 minute compilation should give you a pretty good idea. This is also why Sacha Baron Cohen is genius.

shazzam

2006-09-19T00:15:00.000-04:00

the top ten dumbest secret identities ever.

gates + buffet

2006-09-18T23:58:00.000-04:00

Susan Okie in the New England Journal of Medicine:

In a world with many celebrities but few heroes, Bill Gateshas attained heroic status by committing much of his enormousfortune to the advancement of global equity. He and his wifehave targeted the causes of health disparities between richand poor, and their foundation has become a driving force ininternational aid and in research on AIDS and other diseases.In June, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's likely impacton global health was amplified when Warren Buffett, the world'ssecond-richest man, announced plans to give most of his fortuneto the foundation established by the richest one.

Buffett's gift, worth about $37 billion, will double the foundation'sendowment from $29 billion to approximately $60 billion, makingit by far the world's largest charitable foundation. The giftwill also increase the foundation's annual giving from $1.36billion last year to about $3 billion, or approximately $1 peryear for every person in the poorer half of the world's population.By comparison, the World Bank estimates that total health-relatedaid to developing countries in 2004 (from governments, internationalorganizations, and private sources) was about $12.7 billion.

More here.

i heart wikipedia

2006-09-14T16:40:00.000-04:00

this is a fascinating list of unusual recorded deaths. after skimming through the list, these are some of my favourites.

1327: Edward II of England, after being deposed and imprisoned by his Queen consort Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, was rumored to have been murdered by having a red-hot iron inserted into his anus.
1834: David Douglas, Scottish botanist, who fell in a pit trap, was crushed by a bull that fell in the same pit.
1935: Baseball player Len Koenecke was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher by the crew of an aircraft he had chartered, after provoking a fight with the pilot while the plane was in the air.
1997: David Bailey, an Irish man died when he was urinated on by a rat while attempting to retreive a lost golf ball from a ditch. Bailey apparently startled the rat, causing it to dart up his pant leg and urinate on him. After the incident, Bailey's companions urged him to immediately shower, but Bailey refused stating that he had no bites or scratches. He died two weeks later from kidney failure brought on by an acute case of leptospirosis.
2003: Brian Wells, pizza deliveryman, was killed by a time bomb which was fastened around his neck. He was apprehended by the police after robbing a bank, and claimed he had been forced to do it by three people who had put the bomb around his neck and would kill him if he refused. The bomb then exploded, killing him.

leaks

2006-09-14T16:29:00.000-04:00

The first five pages of the transformers movie leaked and scanned also including new photos of Ironhide and Ratchet.

a tribute

2006-09-14T16:10:00.000-04:00

i don't know how many of you are the daily show or jon stewart fans, but he did a show after the fifth anniversary of 9-11 in which he ripped apart the president and how he marked the anniversary. what most of you probably don't remember is the first show he did after 9-11 itself. it is not an intellectual viewpoint though it is an engaged, traumatized, and hopeful New Yorker's viewpoint. go through it and i hope you understand what he is trying to say.

indocti discant

2006-09-11T19:03:00.000-04:00

i'll let one of my favourite blogs do the usual roundup of the things they do so well in order to remember what all has happened from five years ago. good job guys.

personal note: we all remember what happened five years ago today and we shall not forget. hopefully we won't forget the other wars that the US has used which have pillaged the rest of the planet and we don't hear about them because they are not important enough for the media. Both the US and UK failed to stop the murder of a large number of civilians in what most of the neutral world sees as Israel's disproportionate response to Hizbullah's capture of two IDF soldiers. Afghanistan has been abandoned again and the Taliban are returning. Iraq is at the brink of Civil war. Kashmiris have had their legitimate freedom struggle labelled as 'terrorism'. Innocent people die everywhere in the world in terrorist attacks on a daily basis.

i wish people wouldn't have to be killed so i can "live happily" in north america.

pseudo geek

2006-09-09T12:20:00.000-04:00

a bit of geek humour. you can now buy a t-shirt.

blogofascists

2006-09-08T10:14:00.000-04:00

in flemish news

2006-09-07T21:08:00.000-04:00

Somehow I doubt you'll see this cited on Fox as an example of our present grave danger in North America.

howzat

2006-09-07T20:54:00.000-04:00

fact of the day for you: the first official international cricket match ever played was between the united states and canada.

i doubt most of you will believe me, so go ahead and google it. anyway, it would seem, as per this article that it's making a come back.

san pedro redemption

2006-09-07T20:15:00.000-04:00

Came across a very neat photo journal on BBC of a prison in La Paz, Bolivia.

San Pedro prison, the biggest in Bolivia's main city, La Paz, is home to about 1,500 inmates.
Once you pass the thick walls and the security gates, any resemblance to a normal jail disappears: there are children playing, market stalls, restaurants, hairdressers and even a hotel. It looks more like the streets of El Alto, Bolivia's poorest neighbourhood that sprawls on the outskirts of La Paz, than a prison.
The prison is divided into eight sectors and facilities range from miserable to luxurious.
There are no guards, no uniforms or metal bars on the cell windows. This relative freedom comes at a price: inmates have to pay for their cells, so most of them have to work inside the jail, selling groceries or working in the food stalls. Others work as hairdressers, laundry staff, carpenters, shoe-shine boys or TV and radio repairmen.

lessons of life

2006-09-07T13:27:00.000-04:00

what won't youtube teach us. (don't bother clicking if you get grossed out easily or are at work).

wile e. coyote

2006-09-07T09:56:00.000-04:00

let's see how long this one remains "the fastest". can someone please explain to me whether these are actually computing clusters or a single machine? because the internet combined can be considered a "fast computer" using this jargon?

When Roadrunner is finished in 2008 it will cover 12,000 square feet (1,100 square metres) of floor space at Los Alamos National Laboratory

kirk vs bart

2006-09-06T07:32:00.000-04:00

the talent in this world makes me extremely jealous.

stan lee's watchmen

2006-09-05T20:31:00.000-04:00

click here to read excerpts of watchmen as if they were written by stan lee. alan moore wrote watchmen and it is considered to be the best comic book ever written. stan lee was the genius behind most of marvel comics and heroes such as fantastic four, spiderman, the hulk etc.

getting around - click to enlarge

2006-09-05T15:41:00.000-04:00

harrowed

2006-09-05T15:29:00.000-04:00

it took me almost 48 hours to get to toronto due to the emergency in which i had to get back, the only route available to me was khi, dbx (12 hr stop), lgw (7 hr stop), msp (1 hr stop which became 5 hrs as they made me claim luggage and go through customs again and hence miss my connection) and then finally to yyz. wasn't a fun way to travel. the reason i bring it up is because i got the third degree and got "randomly" pulled out of line conveniently almost every time. here is bruce schneier's article on what terrorists really want. read it and leave me alone now.

memento

2006-09-05T14:14:00.000-04:00

Scientists at SUNY Downstate Medical Center have discovered a molecular mechanism that maintains memories in the brain. In an article in Science magazine, they demonstrate that by inhibiting the molecule they can erase long-term memories.

great scott marty

2006-09-05T14:06:00.000-04:00

so i was out of town for a while. didn't really get a chance to blog much, if at all. am back in toronto now to find my home has been flooded from a leaking washroom. not fun. i doubt i'll be catching up with blog posts and updates. a lot has happened since i've been away so there really is no point as i'm sure you guys read about it or heard about it elsewhere. i'll continue to post new and cool stuff as i learn about it myself from this point on.

- a.

the price of dictatorship

2006-08-26T03:01:00.000-04:00

i didn't think i'd post here until i got back to canada but i came across something and really had to take the time out to post here. benazir bhutto has written an op-ed in the guardian on august 23rd. the comments after the article are well worth the read as well. do go through them here.

Benazir Bhutto
Wednesday August 23, 2006
To some, the disquieting pattern of the link between Pakistan and terrorist plots against the west may seem irrelevant and coincidental. To me the pattern is a consequence of the west allowing Pakistani military regimes to suppress the democratic aspirations of the people of Pakistan, as long as their dictators ostensibly support the political goals of the international community.
In the late 1970s the democratically elected government of Pakistan was toppled by a coup led by the army chief General Zia ul-Haq. At first the international community demanded a restoration of democracy. But after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan these demands subsided as the US saw an opportunity to hobble the Soviet Union. The US funnelled aid for the fundamentalist mujahideen through Pakistan, specifically through the military intelligence agencies Zia had created to cement his iron rule.
This alliance converted my homeland from a peaceful nation into a violent society of weapons, heroin addiction and a radicalised interpretation of Islam, and the diversion of resources to the military devastated Pakistani society. As the government relinquished its responsibility in education, health, housing and social services, people looked elsewhere for support. The clearest manifestation of this was the spread of political madrasas. They became the breeding ground for hatred, extremism, militancy and terrorism. Once the Soviets left Afghanistan, the west abandoned democracy there. Pakistan and Afghanistan became the sources of a political and religious extremist movement that morphed into the Taliban and al-Qaida.
The new Pakistani dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, has played the west like a fiddle, dispensing occasional support in the war on terror to keep America and Britain off his back as he proceeded to arrest and exile opposition leaders, decimate political parties, pressure the press and set back human and women's rights by a generation. His regime, claiming sections of the frontier are ungovernable, has relinquished responsibility to the Taliban and al-Qaida. During both of my tenures as prime minister, my government enforced the writ of the state there through the civil administration and paramilitary troops.
The Musharraf dictatorship doles out ostensible support in the war on terror to keep it in the good graces of Washington, while it presides over a society that fuels and empowers militants at the expense of moderates. And the political madrasas, which I spent years as prime minister dismantling, flourish and grow under the military dictatorship. Why is it that the terrorist trail always seems to lead back to Pakistan? Why are second-generation Pakistani emigres far more attracted by this pattern of terrorism than other disillusioned Muslims in the west? What is it about Islamabad that puts it at the centre of terrorist plots?
For decades the message sent to Pakistani youth through repeated military interventions is that might is right. The west, by supporting the suppression of the democratic aspirations of Pakistanis, has enabled the dictatorship to permeate this message among a new generation of Muslim youth. Further, the use of radical institutions to superficially address some social needs is the key to understanding the pattern that links Islamabad to terror-related incidents.
Democratic governments do not empower, protect and harbour terrorists. Democratic societies largely produce citizens who understand the importance of law, diversity and tolerance. A democratic Pakistan, free from the yoke of military dictatorship, would cease to be the Petri dish of the pandemic of international terrorism.

on vacation

2006-08-03T21:47:00.000-04:00

since i'm on vacation in karachi, all you'll get from me lately are remaindered links.

bush calls for democracy in cuba. surprise surprise. castro is rumoured in miami to be dead. more surprise.
strange new worlds.
how to profit from global warming.
high tech cave men?
liquid armour, the new bulletproof vest?
william gibson on the bush/blair speech.
vanity fair has a military history of 9-11 including audio tapes to NORAD and what the air force did to prevent the hijacked planes.
if you're reading blogs at work and shouldn't be, you might want to read the site as if it looked like Microsoft Word.

Al-Karim

2006-08-01T10:17:00.000-04:00

The earliest copies of the Qur'an were written in a script called Kufic Arabic, which had no vowel signs. It was not until the rule of the Umayyad Caliph 'Abd al-Malik (685-705) that the first written version of the Qur'an with diacritics was produced. Seven different ways of reciting the Qur'an were also fixed, but that occurred still later, ca 934 CE. The same seven forms of Qur'an recitation have remained a canonical standard ever since.

Revelations are sorted out into chapters and verses, and the causes of each revelation provide context for its content. The number of revelations exceeds 200. They came to the Prophet Muhammad via a divine mediary (the Archangel Gabriel) between 610 and 632 CE. They are now arranged in 114 chapters. All but one begin by invoking God's Name, then qualify the Name as at once Compassion and Compassionate: "In the Name of God, Full of Compassion, Ever Compassionate". Different people close to the Prophet Muhammad heard these revelations as he uttered them. They remembered the words and repeated them orally. A few wrote them down. In all they total at least 6,219 verses. The contents of the surahs (chapters) and ayat (verses) are informed by the causes of revelation - that is, by events and circumstances that marked the Prophet's life and the early Muslim community.

Definitely keep reading more here. Also for reference, here is Wikipedia's entry.

via 3qd

men and women

2006-08-01T10:09:00.000-04:00

It's not difficult to make a woman happy. A man only needs to be:

1. a friend
2. a companion
3. a lover
4. a brother
5. a father
6. a master
7. a chef
8. an electrician
9. a carpenter
10. a plumber
11. a mechanic
12. a decorator
13. a stylist
14. a sexologist
15. a gynecologist
16. a psychologist
17. a pest exterminator
18. a psychiatrist
19. a healer
20. a good listener
21. an organizer
22. a good father
23. very clean
24. sympathetic
25. athletic
26. warm
27. attentive
28. gallant
29. intelligent
30. funny
31. creative
32. tender
33. strong
34. understanding
35. tolerant
36. prudent
37. ambitious
38. capable
39. courageous
40. determined
41. true
42. dependable
43. passionate
44. compassionate

WITHOUT FORGETTING TO:

45. give her compliments regularly
46. love shopping
47. be honest
48. be very rich
49. not stress her out
50. not look at other girls

AND AT THE SAME TIME, YOU MUST ALSO:

51. give her lots of attention, but expect little yourself
52. give her lots of time, especially time for herself
53. give her lots of space, never worrying about where she goes

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT:

54. Never to forget:
* birthdays
* anniversaries
* arrangements she makes

HOW TO MAKE A MAN HAPPY

1. Show up naked
2. Bring inebriating substances & food

Chomsky on Hizbullah and Deterring Israeli Aggression

2006-07-28T23:01:00.000-04:00

In response to Assaf Kfoury’s July 12 ZNet article “Noam Chomsky in Beirut”, where Chomsky is quoted as saying ” I think Nasrallah [head of Hizbullah] has a reasoned and persuasive argument that the arms should be in the hands of Hizbullah as a deterrent to potential aggression, and there are plenty of background reasons for that . . . .”, a ZNet Sustainer asked Noam “Now, I know you dislike labels, but I’m pretty much feeling your ethics are Consequentalist, so I am wondering what are a number of the top consequences you expect (ed) from making this statement?”

Click here to read Chomsky's response.

harvey dent

2006-07-28T13:59:00.000-04:00

at least the man has a sense of humour.

blogging in lebanon

2006-07-27T08:55:00.000-04:00

From K5

Since the perspective of ordinary Lebanese on the current Lebanese-Israeli conflict doesn't seem to be well represented in mainstream media, I've been looking for Lebanese bloggers to give at least some window into what some subset of the population thinks. I've tried to find a few of the more widely read blogs from multiple perspectives.

The following blogs are some of the more popular (from my research) in the English-language Lebanese blog community; most started in the turmoil last year that forced Syria to withdraw from Lebanon, either to support or oppose that withdrawal and/or to give opinions on what should happen next. A caveat is that these views mainly represent a cross-section of the better-educated and middle-class population of Lebanon.

Click here to read the rest of the entry and find the blog links.

God Bless America

2006-07-27T08:40:00.000-04:00

The Homeland Security Department wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars last year on iPods, dog booties, beer-making equipment and designer jackets, congressional investigators have concluded.

Among the expenses that investigators described as abusive or otherwise questionable:

_More than 2,000 sets of dog booties, costing $68,442, that have sat unused in storage since emergency responders decided they were not suited for canines assisting in Gulf Coast recovery efforts.

_Three portable shower units for $71,170 from a contractor who investigators said overcharged the government. Customs and Border Protection agents could have gotten similar showers for nearly a third of the price _ and faster.

_12 Apple iPod Nanos and 42 iPod Shuffles, worth $7,000, for Secret Service "training and data storage." Because the Shuffles cost less than $300, the Secret Service said they were not required to track them to ensure they were used properly.

37 black Helly Hansen designer rain jackets, costing nearly $2,500, for use in a firing range that the Customs and Border Protection purchaser later acknowledged shuts down when it's raining.

_Conference and hotel rooms at a golf and tennis resort at St. Simons Island in Georgia, worth $2,395, for training 32 newly hired attorneys when they could have used a nearby federal law enforcement training center.

_A beer brewing kit and ingredients for more than $1,000 for a Coast Guard official to brew alcohol while on duty as a social organizer for the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. "The estimated price for a six-pack of USCG beer was $12," the investigators noted, adding: "Given that the six-pack cost of most beers is far less than $12, it is difficult to demonstrate that the Academy is achieving cost savings by brewing its own beer."

Investigators also noted that Customs and Border Protection wasted up to $464,586 by buying meals-ready-to-eat over the Internet instead of contracting through the Pentagon, as is standard procedure. And they found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot locate 107 laptops, 22 printers and two GPS units worth $170,000. FEMA also cannot find 12 of 20 boats the agency bought for $208,000.

oh did i mention that all these expenses were for helping Hurricane Katrina victims. How fortunate the Americans must feel that their taxes are going to such noble causes.

black hole sun

2006-07-27T08:30:00.000-04:00

The first plasma discharge from China’s experimental advanced superconducting research center — the so-called “artificial sun” — is set to occur next month.

The discharge, expected about Aug. 15, will be conducted at Science Island in Hefei, in east China’s Anhui Province, the Peoples Daily reported Monday.

Scientists told the newspaper a successful test will mean the world’s first nuclear fusion device of its kind will be ready to go into actual operation, the newspaper said.

The plasma discharge will draw international attention since some scientists are concerned with risks involved in such a process. But Chinese researchers involved in the project say any radiation will cease once the test is completed.

The experiment will take place in a structure made of reinforced concrete, with five-foot-thick walls and a three-foot-thick roof.

Everything You Need To Know

2006-07-24T19:47:00.000-04:00

A perilous excursion into the distant past, starting seven whole weeks ago.

Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

As the tv networks give unlimited airtime to Israel's apologists, the message rolls out that no nation, least of all Israel, can permit bombardment or armed incursion across its borders without retaliation.

The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should be denied the slightest access to any historical context, or indeed to anything that happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture of an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by Hamas hit the headlines, followed soon thereafter by an attack by a unit of Hezbollah's fighters.

Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28, 2006.

Let's go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I'm talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.

Now we're really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.

That's just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn't regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn't even bother to pretend to regret. It says, "We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the 'peace process'".

Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they're not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried.

Israel regrets… But no! As noted above, it doesn't regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton who is the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America's ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one.

None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them. Go to the website fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity.

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before O'Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green light to "solve its security problems" by destroying Lebanon.

In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution.

Israel didn't want a two-state solution, which meant -- if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously -- a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory. So Israel decided chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel.

Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel's northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there'd been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.

With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon's forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.

The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2.42 and 3.38 -- of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine.

When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel's case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its "fence". Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.

Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. Israel doesn't want any "peaceful solution" that gives the Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can murder them pretty much at will.

So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can't endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it's the only thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back to the stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first stop on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb Teheran.

Of course they won't destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah. They've even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just voted unanimously -- Sunnis and Shi'ites and Kurds alike -- to deplore Israel's conduct and to call for a ceasefire.

I hope you've enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth. But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of Americans in CNN's instant poll –- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as of midday, July 19 -- don't like what Israel is up to.

Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn't help much. Israel's 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician is prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon and Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice.

colonization

2006-07-24T16:50:00.001-04:00

Below is a picture with Lord Macaulays short speech to Parliament dated 1835. Thanks F. Click on the image if it is unclear.

Sadly the truth of this philosophy still runs rampant in the world today.

deported

2006-07-20T19:17:00.000-04:00

one of the more popular pakistani islamic feminists known in the past couple of decades, farhat hashmi is being deported from canada back to pakistan. the story has been revealed in the fantastic magazine macleans.

A controversial Pakistani scholar living in Canada who, critics charge, teaches her female students a fundamentalist brand of Islam promoting polygamy and subservience to men, remains here illegally some nine months after immigration officials demanded she leave the country, federal court documents obtained by Maclean's reveal.

Farhat Hashmi arrived in October 2004 on a visitor's visa, and has twice been denied the work permit she sought to teach her interpretation of the Koran in Canada. But she has nevertheless established a school where she lectures to mostly young, middle-class women from mainstream Muslim families, not only from across the country but also from the U.S. and as far away as Australia.

keep reading. it gets better.

kolachi

2006-07-19T13:03:00.000-04:00

a site which attempts to index the history of karachi once again. it's a very good attempt. the site itself is an extremely traditional static html website which made me lost interest after a few minutes unfortunately. good luck in growing your website and hopefully and you can fill it up with as much information as possible.

link via asifnama

they killed kenny

2006-07-18T13:52:00.000-04:00

every. episode. ever.

2006-07-18T11:43:00.000-04:00

welcome to the new age of wireless my friends. things will become fairly seamless pretty soon.

A chip the size of a grain of rice that can store 100 pages of text and swaps data via wireless has been developed by Hewlett-Packard. The chip contains memory, modem, antenna and microprocessor. The tiny chip was small enough to embed in almost any object, said HP. The chip could be used to ensure drugs have not been counterfeited, on patient wristbands in hospitals or to add sounds or video to postcards, said HP.

kitt

2006-07-18T01:31:00.000-04:00

here ladies and gentlemen, you will find the finest craftsmenship ever in the automobile industry. i present the world's top 10 most expensive cars.

secretary's

2006-07-17T23:21:00.000-04:00

i believe the politically correct term lately is executive assistant.

tit for tat

2006-07-17T13:53:00.000-04:00

blogspot and typepad and geocities are banned by the indian government as well. i guess they had to follow suit because the pakistan ban has been in place for quite a while now. as always, no explanation given by anyone whatsoever.

edited to add: it seems the ban is in place after the mumbai blasts. anyway, to circumvent you can go here, or as always you can use pkblogs.

atlas shrugged

2006-07-17T13:45:00.000-04:00

ayn rand's atlas shrugged, to be made into a movie. this should be rocking.

taking a dump

2006-07-15T11:32:00.000-04:00

where all are you comfortable taking a dump? i realize this is a very personal question. a lot of people can go just about anywhere. other people require their own little private hole in their own home. it's all about comfort levels. here is a picture of a public crapper in switzerland. i personally need my own washroom, and own lota. unless in dire straits, i won't go anywhere else.

nice isn't it. click here or the image above to find out what it looks like inside and THEN tell me whether you'd be able to take a dump in it or not.

of course you all remember my previous poll.

found on koolstuffs.net

15th july, 2006

2006-07-15T01:47:00.000-04:00

great round up on 3qd of the world's news.

Here are a few of today's news stories:
Afghanistan  is a Mess -- from the Sydney Morning Herald
Gunmen  ambush Shi'ite pilgrims in Iraq, kill five -- from Reuters
Hezbollah  ready for 'war on every level' -- from CNN
Iran  threatens to halt inspections, quit treaty --from Business Day
N.  Korea has more missiles, U.S. says -- from the Washington Times
Israel  Vows to Crush Militia; Group’s Leader Is Defiant -- from the New York  Times
India  PM: Pakistan ties threatened -- from CNN
EU worries  Mideast conflict could spread to Syria -- from Reuters
Shiite  leader in Pakistan killed -- from CNN
Militants  Hit Nigeria Oil Facilities -- from the Los Angeles Times
16  Killed in Rebel Clash With Sri Lanka -- from the Washington  Post
Southern  California Wildfires Spread, Burning Homes -- from  Bloomberg
Indonesia  stuck with bird flu as US confirms latest H5N1 death -- from Monsters  and Critics

he's from barcelona

2006-07-15T01:33:00.000-04:00

The terrrible hotel that inspired Fawlty Towers, the funniest TV show ever made about bad hotels, has been remade as a four-star boutique hotel.

Under new ownership since February, the hotel's luxury facelift has ushered in a new ground-floor swimming pool and al fresco dining area, a luxurious lounge and a conservatory. Ceilings have been raised and Italian chandeliers installed, while over 40 skip-loads of rubbish have been removed.
The character of Basil Fawlty was inspired by a former manager at the hotel; he gave John Cleese and the Monty Python team a frosty welcome when they booked in 1971. The ferocious host berated them for not holding their knives and forks correctly and threw one of their briefcases over a wall believing it could be a time bomb.

via BB

zizou international

2006-07-13T13:23:00.000-04:00

As seen by the Germans

As seen by the French

As seen by the Italians

As seen by the Americans

As seen in Hong Kong