Wednesday, December 28, 2005
THE GENTLE RELIGION OF PEACE
Even CNN can't turn away:Nazir Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year old stepsister to salvage his family's "honor" ... Hundreds of girls and women are murdered by male relatives each year in this conservative Islamic nation ...He said he bought a butcher's knife and a machete after midday prayers on Friday and hid them in the house where he carried out the killings. "I thought the younger girls would do what their eldest sister had done, so they should be eliminated," he said, his hands cuffed, his face unshaven. "We are poor people and we have nothing else to protect but our honor." ... [The stepdaughter] was [Ahmed's wife's] daughter by her first marriage to Ahmed's brother, who died 14 years ago. Ahmed married his brother's widow, as is customary under Islamic tradition. "Women are treated as property and those committing crimes against them do not get punished," said the rights commission's director, Kamla Hyat. "The steps taken by our government have made no real difference." ... Ahmed, who did not resist arrest, was unrepentant. "I told the police that I am an honorable father and I slaughtered my dishonored daughter and the three other girls," he said. "I wish that I get a chance to eliminate the boy she ran away with and set his home on fire."For some reason, the Western feminist Left doesn't seem to get too excited by this intrinsic element of conservative Islamic culture. I wonder why?
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:24 PM
KURDISTAN
Many -- probably the vast majority -- of problems that plague the modern Middle East are the result of the territorial arrangements made by Britain and France (mainly Britain) in the immediate aftermath of World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps the single most unjust of the set of lines drawn on the map of the former Ottoman regime was one that wasn't there -- Kurdistan. I have long advocated the creation of a real national Kurdish state as one element of a long-term plan to find something like peace and stability in the Middle East. It still may happen, as this story about continuing Iraqi Kurd national ambitions indicates.
There are a lot of reasons to support the creation of an independent Kurdish state:The US plan to maintain a unitary Iraq flies in the face of these factors. Opponents of a Kurdish state seem to mainly argue that supporting its creation would alienate Turkey. I say, so what? What has Turkey really done for us lately? Anti-Kurdish polemicists also argue that establishing a Kurdish state in northern Iraq would leave the Sunni Arab minority in Iraq with the only part of the country that doesn't have oil, the "Sunni Triangle," and place the houthouse of Baghdad's teeming streets as an impoverished and isolated island, surrounded by hostile neighbors. That's a better argument, but there are other, similar demographic and ethnic problems in the Middle East. Dealing with a Sunni Arab island in the middle of what used to be a unitary Iraq is no more of a problem than dealing with the problem of the Palestinian Arabs and seems like a fair trade for resolving the intractable problem of a multi-ethnic Iraq in a region with no talent for dealing with pluralistic politics.
- It's the right thing to do. The Kurds have been victims of first Arab, then Turkish, and then Arab, Turkish, Persian and Russian oppression for over a thousand years.
- Kurds aren't Arabs. They don't share the Arab resentment against Western "imperialism."
- Sponsoring a strong, independent Kurdish state would create a new entity in the Middle East that would find the U.S. a natural ally and wouldn't share the universal Arab hatred for Israel, serving as a further counterweight to Arab nationalistic violence in the region.
- Although they are Muslims, the Kurds seem more immune to Islamofascism than Arabs.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:30 AM
Sunday, December 25, 2005
MERRY NEWTONMAS!
posted by Greg 7:08 AM
Friday, December 23, 2005
THE STRENGTH OF SCIENCE
It now appears that much if not all of the research results published by Korean geneticist Hwang Wook-suk were "intentionally fabricated." This is a disappointment to people like me, who look to stem cell research to revolutionize human biomedicine. But it is actually a triumph for science.
The greatest aspect of the scientific method is its systematic error-correction. When things like the Piltdown man fraud occur, the scientific community inevitably unmasks the fraud. No scientist accepts the Piltdown fossils as genuine today. This is in sharp contrast to other methods of "knowledge," such as those associated with religious faith. An example is the so-called "Shroud of Turin." Despite significant evidence that the shroud is a medieval pious fraud, the majority of hits one garners from a google search on the term are to web pages arguing for its authenticity.
So, despite the disappointment, I'm happy Hwang has been found out.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:55 AM
Monday, December 19, 2005
FALCON SCRUBBED
... looks like they ran into some serious issues. I sure as hell hope they don't end up proving that spaceflight has to cost as much as it does.
GB
posted by Greg 6:37 PM
WE'RE DOOMED
I got stuck at lunch today -- I was alone and forgot to bring one of the books I'm reading to the deposition. But the facility at which the depo is being taken adjoins a small shopping mall downtown. So I strolled into the Waldenbooks. Big mistake. This "book store" had one half-height book case devoted to "science" (including a book by Art Bell), but FIVE full-height cases devoted to "religion" and FOUR devoted to "New Age" books.
I really have to get off this planet...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:32 PM
FALCON TRIES AGAIN
SpaceX is going to take a second shot at launching their Falcon 1 rocket today. This is the first completely newAmerican design for a rocket capable of reaching orbit on its own in something like 50 years. Wish 'em luck.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:53 AM
MAKING IT PLAIN
Here's someone who knows his Islamic history:But it's "the religion of peace," right?Published on a website on the orders of notorious terror chief Noordin Mohammed Top, the polemic demonstrates the undiminished fervour of Mukhlas, who has been sentenced to death for commanding the Bali bomb blasts in 2002 that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.
“You who still have a shred of faith in your hearts, have you forgotten that to kill infidels and the enemies of Islam is a deed that has a reward above no other,” says the 60-page polemic written in Indonesian by “Sheikh Mukhlas”, posted on the anshar.net website, which has since been shut down by Indonesian police.
“Aren’t you aware that the model for us all, the Prophet Mohammed and the four rightful caliphs, undertook to murder infidels as one of their primary activities, and that the Prophet waged jihad operations 77 times in the first 10 years as head of the Muslim community in Medina?”
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:47 AM
Sunday, December 18, 2005
WHY I AM NOT A CONSERVATIVE
ANOTHER IN AN OCCASIONAL SERIES
... because they want to kill you (and me). Seriously. The New Atlantis is the online journal of the luddite cultural conservatives, most notably, Leon Kass, chairman of the Bush Administration's reprehensible Bioethics Council. In this article, these cave men make their position clear:One way or another, our society needs to reconsider the nature of its commitment to medical progress. We need to stop assuming that every technological innovation is unequivocally good, and that progress should be open-ended, ever advancing, with no final goals or limits.Although this article calls traditional liberals (i.e. what Americans call "libertarians") "conservatives" (and calls socialists "liberals" -- this is the unfortunate norm in U.S. political discourse), the truth is that the author is a true conservtive. He wants to draw a line against progress.
The position staked out here is expressed in terms of offering a solution to the "health care crisis," arguing that unlimited pursuit of human longevity and good health is simply too expensive. But really what's going on here is simple retreat: "The problem is too hard," states the luddite cultural conservative, "and we pay too high a price for our too-changed lives; can't we just go back to the way things used to be in the Good Old Days?" That's what Kass and company want. But make no mistake, part of their bargain is death. In their book, death is good.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:23 PM
Saturday, December 17, 2005
WITH MY SHIELD
Plutarch tells us that Spartan mothers sent their sons off to war with the exhortation to return "with your shield, or on it," meaning to come back alive having served bravely (i.e. not having discarded the heavy hoplite's shield) or to be brought back wounded or dead on the the shield as a stretcher. My partner Hal Watson and I have exchanged this saying when going into trial for almost twenty years. A couple of weeks ago we got to do something we haven't had the opportunity to do in over a decade -- try a case together. We returned with our shields, and victorious.
I make a practice of not blogging about the details of my cases while they are still pending -- for many reasons it would be at least unwise to do so, and probably unethical. So I can't share any real information about the case here, except to say that it was my favorite kind of trial: One that involved lots of technical information, tried to the bench, with a very intelligent judge.
Interestingly, the last time Hal and I tried a case together it was this one, also a highly technical case tried to the bench with great judges involved. The link leads to the first appellate opinion in the case, which reversed our trial victory and remanded the case for another trial, which we won again. Note the author of the opinion -- Judge Alito, who is currently a nominee to the Supremes. The case was appealed yet again, the second time being upheld by the Third Circuit. We then briefed cert to the Supremes and they finally refused to hear the case, resulting in a victory for our client after a long, long fight.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:16 AM
Saturday, December 10, 2005
REBELS WITHOUT A CLUE
Here is a review of Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. Apparently Nation of Rebels, written by leftist who see the emptiness of the counterculure "transformative left," sees a turn in the left from communism to postmodrnist cultural criticism in the 1960s. The book's authors lament the damage done by this postmodern turn to what they see as the legitimate ends of leftist social policy: The accept the funamental value of open, pluralist societies in which markets play a central role, and see the necessity of a society that adheres to a set of basic values -- values which are steadily eroded by the counterculture's stance of all-pervasive irony.
This is an interesting set of observations for someone like me, whose world-view was born in the whirlwind of the counterculture's beginnings. It seems that for my generation, every facet of life is dominated by that whirlwind. For people like me, the current era is characterized by a search for meaning in the land that has been scoured by the counterculutre's storm for thirty years.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 5:50 AM
Thursday, December 08, 2005
WHICH WORLD WAR – AND HOW LONG?
"Which world war?" -- That was the title of a post I made here exactly two years ago, on the 61st anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and then revisited later. The idea behind these posts was to propose that we are now in another global struggle like the two world wars that are commonly identified as such, and that there really were more than two before this one.
Here’s a post by guest blogger Bart Hall over at Winds of Change that explores a similar theme, but instead groups the major conflicts of the last three centuries into three “Hundred Years Wars.” This is an interesting analysis, but goes too far. While the struggles against fascism and communism in the 20th century did in fact have a lot in common in their ideological outlines, they were strategically and tactically very, very different, due in large part to advances in technology that intervened in the short gap between the two conflicts. Going further back, the division Hall makes between his first and second “Hundred Years Wars” glosses over the very important ideological (religious) conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in the 16th and 17th centuries and the concomitant struggle between the nascent parliamentary states (Holland and England) and the remaining absolutist monarchical states (Spain and France).
Hall makes a prediction about the current stage of the global conflict, which he identifies as the fight against Islamic absolutism as the closing phase of his Third Hundred Years War. If his general view of century-long conflicts is correct, we shouldn’t look for a conclusion of that stage of the conflict until around 2017-2019. I think he’s probably right, but for reasons that he doesn’t make clear.
I see two reasons to think it will take until the end of the second decade of the 21st century – at the earliest – to complete the struggle against Islamofascis; one technological-tactical and one strategic-ideological. As to the first reason(s), although we’ve begun the “force transformation” we need to fight a winning war against the terrorist and guerilla tactics of the jihadists, that process will take some years to really come to fruition. It will be ten years before we’ve got the kind of small, flexible and hyper-potent military forces we really need to rip the heart out of Islamofascist terrorists. We also need at least that much time to get our intelligence capabilities to a point where they are a real match for our opponents. On the strategic front, it will simply take at least more than a decade to face and engage with all the various fronts on which Islamofascism is waging its war of aggression against civilization. Finally, it will take at least that long to send the message that defeat of Islamic theocratic militancy is inevitable and for the inevitability of their defeat to sink in to all the dispersed nooks and crannies of the Islamic world. During that time we have to wage a constant struggle – just barely begun – to inform our own people of the nature of the enemy and the seriousness of the struggle.
Every phrase in the in the preceding paragraph should be the subject of pages and pages of material, so I don’t expect that it’s very clear … but that’s the problem with pontificating on complex subjects …
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:23 AM
THAT EXPLAINS IT
Makes sense.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:36 AM
LITIGUS INTERUPTUS
The trial I'm in has been interrupted by factors beyond our control, so I'm heading home from frigid Dallas today with the case not concluded.
A couple of times at night during this trial I've thought about how live-blogging a trial would work. Of course, serving as counsel in the courtroom is one of the most all-consuming things I know of, so it wouldn't be possible for the actual lawyers to do it. Plus, most of the most interesting things couldn't be talked about ... Nah -- it couldn't be done.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:32 AM
Sunday, December 04, 2005
FANS FOR THE X-15
Scott Conklin and I have been working for 6 months or so on creating simulations of the X-15 rocketplane of the 1950s and 1960s for the ORBITER spaceflight simulator. The first release -- in September -- was of the historical X-15 program, and it gathered good reviews on the ORBITER web forum. Through today, we've had 986 downloads at the ORBITER addon hosting site, Orbit Hangar Mods.
Music of the Spheres, a blog devoted largely to ORBITER, has posted a review of the September release. There, the X-15 is called "SpaceShipZero" a nice play on Burt Rutan's "SpaceShip One."
Scott and I are very near release of the second installment in our Project X-15, in which we take the program beyond history into the realm of "what ifs" -- what if the X-15 program had continued on to develop an incremental spaceplane that ended up producing a sensible reusable orbital spaceplane by the early 1970s, instead of the disasterous Space Shuttle that first flew in the early 1980s? This is a labor of love for me, since it demonstrates as clearly as I know how to do that we didn't have to end up at the bleak dead end at which we now find ourselves in American manned spaceflight.
GB, THHoTa
posted by Greg 8:58 AM
Saturday, December 03, 2005
THE NAZI CONNECTION
I've now worked through the World War II period in Sachar's History of Israel. One of the most horrifying and macabre elements of the history of that time is the deep connection between the growth of "Palestinian nationalism" and Nazism. I "sort-of knew" about this, having picked up in reading about the subject before that there had been some kind of connection between Arab politics and the Axis powers. It's telling that this morning, as I was looking for a a link to the subject, that Google presented me with NO sources other than those in "Jewish" or "Zionist" web sites. In other words, the very real and significant connections between the modern phnomenon of Arab nationalism and the mid-20th century cancer of fascism isn't documented well at all in "objective" sources -- the mainstream utterly ignores this important fact. Why?
A quick review: During the late 1920s and 1930s, the Husseini clan of Arabs in the area we now call "Palestine" came to be the most powerful political force among Arabs living there. Although the official policy of the Britsh government, as expressed in the Balfour Declaration in World War I, was pro-Zionist, British officials in Palestine were by and large pro-Arab. One of the most important expressions of this local bias in favor of the Arabs was the appointment by them of Amin Husseini as the "Mufti of Jerusalem," the chief Islamic religious leader of the region in 1922. The Mufti used his position in the 1920s and 1930s to consolidate political power in the Husseini clan, orchestrating a campaign of assassination of members of rival clans. In 1929, the British were forced to take action against the Mufti when it became clear that he had become the chief leader of the anti-Jewish violence that took place in that year. From then until World War II, Husseini continued to control Palestinian Arab political life in exile from French-dominated Syria.
But it is the Mufti's career in World War II that is the real eye-opener. Via Vichy control of Syria, he moved to Berlin, where he actively assisted the Nazi regime to broadcast Arabic language propaganda to the Middle East. He became an associate of Himmler and organized a Bosnian SS division of Muslims. He coordinated the shift of Arab opinion across the region -- especially in Syria and Iraq -- toward the fascist camp, and worked to insinuate fascist ideology into the foundations of Arab nationalist sentiment.
The Mufti survived the fall of the Third Reich, escaping Berlin at the last moment to France, where he was given asylum by the post-war French government. With French complicity (because he was perceived as a useful anti-Anglo agent), he was smuggled back to Syria, where he became the center of Palestinian political and military organizing efforts in the period leading up to the partition of Palestine and the founding of the state of Israel.
In any meaningful sense, the Mufti Husseini was the ideological founder of the modern Palestinian political character. He was a Nazi. His nephew, Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Hussaeini, changed his name to mask his kinship to the Mufti. The nom de guerre chosen by his nephew? "Yassir Arafat."
You will not read about this in the mainstream media. It would be simply too inconsistent with the mainstream's support for the Palestinian war with Israel to point to the Nazi connection with Palestinian politics. It can't be that these inconvenient and unpleasant facts are in "the distant past" because the mainstream of anti-Israeli opinion is more than happy to point to other facts about the founding of Israel to support their opposition to Israel's existence.
The anti-Zionist Arabs were Hitler's active allies in World War II. The fascists lost the war, but left a legacy of genocide against Europe's Jews and hundreds of thousands of desparate survivors seeking escape from the charnel house of central and eastern Europe. The creation and continuing existence of the state of Israel becomes far more legitmate when viewed in this way. So you sure won't hear about this when the mainstream dicusses the legitimacy of Israel's position in the world. It would be too compelling.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:37 AM
Thursday, December 01, 2005
ZIONISM AND MARXISM
As I noted below, I’m reading a Big Fat Book about the history of Zionism and Israel, Howard Sachar’s A History of Israel. I’ve gotten up to the time period following World War I, when Palestine was governed under the British “mandate” from the League of Nations.
Reading so far has provided me with answers to a question that I’ve had for as long as I’ve known anything about the character of Israeli culture and politics, i.e. why are Israeli politics so tilted to the left? The answer lies in the origins of Zionism. Zionism as an ideological movement was a creature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was also very much an intellectual movement, created by people of great learning in the then-contemporary culture of Europe. And to be learned in this time was to be deeply influenced by Marx. Although there was another obvious current of religious revival in Zionism (and thus the origins of the “conservative” elements of Israeli politics and culture), the main energies of the Zionist movement came from people who were at the forefront of “progressive” thought in Europe in the last half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.
Thus the cultural character of Zionism was a mirror of European thought in the time of its birth and that mirror reflected the naïve romance of “scientific socialism.” Looking back from the early 21st century, this romance seems almost incomprehensible. The boldness with which the founders of Israel asserted the most obvious nonsense shows as clearly as anything I’ve seen in history how deeply the Marxist dream had infected European culture in those days.
But that Israel hasn’t been crippled by the consequences of infection by the Marxist disease also shows how healthy the Zionist culture was in other respects. Although the rugged pioneers who encountered almost unbearable hardships in founding the state of Israel in the barren desert of Palestine were infused with Marxist idealism, they were also intensely practical in their commitment to doing what worked to make the desert bloom. They also shared a vast reserve of cultural capital that wasn’t destroyed by the Marxist infection. These factors have offset the continuing romantic attachment to leftist folly that is paralyzing Europe today. In a sense, the Jews who founded Israel were so culturally rich and endowed with such solid common sense, that they could afford to squander time and effort on socialism, and still have sufficient cultural wealth to build a vital society.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:24 AM
RICE WATCH
Drudge has a link to a story collecting comments by Condi and Laura Bush to the effect that Condi won't be running in '08. Ever since I fell in love with the idea of a Condi presidential run a couple of years ago, I've known it was a long shot in many ways, but it's a bummer to see so much cold water thrown on the idea at one time.
There's a commonly discussed scenario that seems to have the most realtic chance of Condi being nominated and elected. In this idea, Cheney steps down as soon as possible, and Shrub replaces him with Condi, to give her time to marshal support. Both of the Bush machines (elder and younger -- and there is a difference) are thrown behind her and she's assiduously groomed over the next two years for the '08 run. With that background, she'd have a bare chance of both getting through the Republican primary -- in which she would be vicously attacked by the religious right of the GOP -- and then beating whoever the Dems put up.
As I've said before, this would require as much or more vision and courage as anything Shrub's done in his political career. But it could be good in so many ways. Doing so right now would deflect much of the negative current that's grown around the administration over the last few months and would provide an unequalled opportunity for Shrub to regain momentum for the rest of his presidency. Doing "the Condi two-step" would electrify the country around a figure who has an absolutely clean political character and who presents a much more difficult target for the leftist mainstream media to attack. It would be a redemptive move of historical proportions.
Will Shrub do this? No. That he won't is one of the biggest dissapointments he presents to me. With every passing day, the opportunity to elevate Rice slowly evaporates, and with it, whatever residual enthusiasm for his administration I still harbor.
Oops -- I posted about domestic politics, breaking my vow. Oh, well. I'll try to do better.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 5:04 AM
