Author: Payam

Chemist, philosopher, vagrant.
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How to Reduce the Number of Abortions

Family Planning Reduces Abortion Rate | The Lancet

The most comprehensive study carried out to date demonstrates that education and easy access to contraception reduce the number of abortions. Hence, if the Bush Administration, the Vatican, and virtually every “pro-life” organization that exists are to be believed when they equate abortion with murder, then every one of them is committing mass murder–by their own reasoning–when they deny funding for sex education and contraception. By denying people sex education and contraception, they are increasing the number of abortions. Thus, they are contributing to mass murder, it would seem. 

Of course, those who do not subscribe to these extreme notions of “life” and the protections that it requires do not see a crime for which these “perpetrators” should be punished. Curiosity does drive me to ask, however, what punishment these groups prescribe for contributing to mass murder. 🙂 After all, many American pro-life groups equate the number of abortions to the Holocaust, and, if this Lancet study is to be believed, these “pro-life” groups are now faced with the reality that they are complicit in this embryo “holocaust”.

Then again, denial and double standards are the hallmarks of extremism. 

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Women in Computing

Wrens Operating the Colossus | Science and Society Picture Library

The Science and Society Picture Library is another magnificent internet project that performs a superb job of making 20th century history accessible to everyone. This particular photo is a terrific reminder of what it meant to be a computer operator. It is perhaps derivative of what it meant to be a telephone operator.

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The New “America”?

Leaving for the Chinese Dream | washingtonpost.com

Mark Twain famously said “history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme”. Now, it seems as if China’s emerging affluence and its tolerance of foreign traits are turning it into another “America”: the America that accepted millions of foreigners seeking a better life.

It is a very loose rhyme, to be sure. Of the more than half million foreigners in China, only 700 have green cards, and the article does cite considerable tension directed against African immigrants. Nevertheless, the reaction of one Arab immigrant from Iraq is quite telling:

Anwar said that despite the tensions he’s happier to be in China than elsewhere in the world.

“My brother lived in the Netherlands for nine years,” he said. “There, if you are a foreigner, you are below them. When he came to China, everything was different. Here, if you are a foreigner, you are treated better than Chinese.” 

Given the number of reports about the State Department’s slow processing of Iraqi refugees, this testimony has considerable meaning beyond the few simple words.

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Hal Fishman 1931-2007; The Primordial Soup Remembers an Advocate

KTLA anchor Hal Fishman dead at 75 | Los Angeles Times

It is an awful thing to rejoice in another human’s demise, and that is not the intent of this essay’s writer. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to feel a sense of relief at the demise of a mainstream newscaster who had made the spreading of ignorance the primary purpose of his life in his final years. Hal Fishman, the famed anchorman of the ten o’clock news hour on channel five in Los Angeles is the subject, and his death feels like a blessing for the utterly anesthetized citizens of Los Angeles.

Although the thinking denizens of this city had long ago tuned away from the inane commercial blather that has passed for local broadcast news in Los Angeles, Fishman’s presence was singularly vexing in this lanscape of stupidity because he refused to hold the line at commercial blather. He insisted on disseminating an altogether common and utterly senseless ignorance in the guise of news analysis–the acceptance and the repeating of which by many in the primordial soup has been a source of anguish for the thinking members of this city since September 11, 2001. Fishman’s manifest existence as an irresponsible news director, a horribly misinformed reporter and a man radically deficient in faculties of reason and compassion is missing from all the obituaries that have been written. Perhaps, this post will set the record straight.

The Channel 5 News at Ten was a venerable news program, until Fishman became the news director some twenty years ago. On his watch, world news was reduced from a quarter of the broadcast to a minute while Los Angeles became the most ethnically diverse city in the United States. Fishman greeted the influx of Mexicans, Chinese, Koreans, Persians, Japanese, Israelis, Armenians, Russians and countless other nationalities with a reduction in the coverage of global events. As the American and especially the Californian economy became ever more dependent on global politics, Fishman deprived viewers of the information they needed to understand their own city.

At the same time KTLA became a member of the new Warner Brothers television network, and Fishman spinelessly went along with corporate directives to promote the networks programming during the news hour. Consequently, the raw news content of the news hour was reduced to less than twenty minutes of news and nearly forty minutes of advertising posing as “entertainment news” and sports advertising masquerading as “sports news”. Naturally, as the foreigners were driven to the international channels to get international news, Fishman and the rest of the management justified this stupidity on grounds of ratings.

To compensate for this demise, Fishman elected to speak his mind on subjects as inane as Britney Spears and as profound as military strategy in Iraq. In the former case, Fishman exhibited unbelievable hypocrisy, and in the latter he displayed his prejudices and his ignorance as proudly and as conspicuously as a peacock.

Fishman was the consummate curmudgeon when he complained about all the attention that Britney Spears was receiving from the press. Yet, he allowed the prime time news hour to be hijacked for the sake of advertising by the CW network bosses. It was on Fishman’s watch that half of the News at Ten (and the entirety of the KTLA morning “news”) became advertising space for Warner Brothers products. Fishman complained, but he never complained about the corporate overlords to whom he had capitulated when he allowed his news program to be used in the service of people like Spears.

Fishman also never cared to reconcile his half-baked patriotic ideas with the realities of world and war. In one salient instance, when a New York Times article that the insurrection in Iraq had reduced some cities to virtual “ghost towns”, Fishman advocated the carpet bombing of these cities because this action would have minimal “collateral damage” and because carpet bombing of cities like Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin had won World War II. Fishman even went so far as to claim that such carpet bombing wins wars.

Apparently Fishman was unaware that historians (civil and miliatry) have assessed the indiscriminate bombing of German and Japanese towns as strategically useless in WW II. Germany ultimately succumbed because its production of munitions, fuel and soldiers was insufficient for a fight on two fronts. Similarly, Japan’s resolve was not weakened by the firebombing of the country, but by the specter of the atomic bomb. No historian has ever claimed that indiscriminate bombing of civilians win wars. Why would they? The strategy had no effect in WW II and disastrous effect in Vietnam.

Nevertheless, Fishman felt emboldened to speak something that was completely and utterly false on the air. One can offer a great many reasons for why he did so, but it is difficult to ascribe such comments to anything other than ignorance born of misplaced patriotism and arrogance.

These elements suffused nearly every commentary Fishman ever made. He never bothered to correct the record, or to make his remarks more considered. When I corrected him by bringing to his attention that his remarks regarding Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction had been thoroughly and absolutely refuted by the WMD Commission years prior, he only responded by saying that he may take those findings into consideration. In as much, Fishman spent his later years not just as a lousy commentator, but a decidedly incompetent reporter. 

What a shame that the man felt compelled to forego the legacy he had built through many good years in the seventies and eighties. May Hal Fishman rest in peace, and may his legacy be defined by the good years he had; not the miserable final years. People should not forget, however, what an instrumental role he played in the destruction of the news service in Los Angeles.

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Is Less But Poor Regulation Better Than More But Good Regulation?

US demands air passengers ask its permission to fly | The Register

This is an absolutely incredible step that the United States government is taking against the airline industry. It is hard to conceive of how a complete passenger manifest can be produced 72 hours before a flight is to take off, yet the Transportation Safety Administration seems intent on forcing the airline industry to do the impossible: produce a definitive list of passenger 72 prior to a flight’s departure. 

The names on this manifest are then going to be compared against a massive list of terror suspects in order to clear the flight for departure. The number of names on this list of suspects is astonishing.

ACLU’s Barry Steinhardt quoted press reports of 500,000 to 750,000 people on the watch list (of which the no-fly list is a subset). “If there are that many terrorists in the US, we’d all be dead.”

TSA representative Kip Hawley noted that the list has been carefully investigated and halved over the last year. “Half of grossly bloated is still bloated,” Steinhardt replied.

What is most  vexing about this proposition is that the TSA has offered little evidence that this draconian measure will reduce the threat of terrorism in any measurable way. Hence, the airline industry–arguably the must competitive on the planet–is going to be forced to lose money by refusing to sell tickets during the 72 hour period before a flight without any real justification. This step by the TSA provides significant support for the contention that the only reason Americans resent government regulation is that American government regulation tends to be ineffective and senseless. Perhaps Frank Zappa said it best: 

 The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.

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Single Bullet: How the Holocaust was Pepetrated

A Priest Methodically Reveals Ukrainian Jews’ Fate – New York Times

It is a travesty of historical education that few people in this world are aware that the Nazis’ primary means of eliminating Jews was not the extermination camps that everyone knows. The preferred method of extermination was a single bullet to the head. 

The corollary to this is that the Nazis’ preferred means of disposing of bodies was not the crematorium, but the mass grave. The vast majority of Jews who perished in the Holocaust met their demise this way. Frequently, they dug the giant ravine in which they were shot and buried, en masse.

In the Ukraine and the Baltic States, the executioners were frequently locals, not the Nazi invaders. As students of antisemitism have pointed out, these regions were as ripe as Germany with extreme antisemitism, and the Nazi approval of the wholesale slaughter of Jews was sufficient license and encouragement for these populations to participate actively in the process.

This remarkable New York Times story of a remarkable Frenchman, Patrick Desbois, is a stark reminder that, in as much as the general public is concerned, the account of the Holocaust is as yet incomplete. Besides reading this disturbing account in the New York Times, everyone ought to read Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen in order to begin to understand the evil in the service of which ordinary people are willing to be conscripted, to acquire an awareness that such ignorance and barbarism persist, and to realize that Bosnia and Rwanda prove that the machete and the bullet remain far cheaper, far more efficient and absolutely real methods of genocide.

Alas, it is clear that neither the Musuem of Tolerance in Los Angeles nor the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, has succeeded in educating the masses of the simple, cheap and fast ways in which genocide was perpetrated by the Nazis, still is perpetrated by Serbs, Rwandans, and will be perpetrated by the next gang of ignoramuses who will be permitted to wield weapons. Perhaps the Taliban, perhaps the warlords in Somalia, perhaps ….

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Welcome to the Unsocial

Microsoft Updates the Zune Player | New York Times

Shockingly, Microsoft’s update of the Zune media player more like the iPod. Streamlined interface, more vibrant colors, and simpler graphical menus. Whether it will sell enough for it to become a “sociable” remains in serious doubt.

The Zune’s advertising slogan is “welcome to the social” because it allows one to listen to songs on nearby Zune players wirelessly. This “social” exercise has almost certainly never been experienced by anyone because the Zune’s paltry sales (only about 1.2 million units, compared with more than 300 million iPods) guarantees that one will never encounter another Zune player within the range of Zune’s wireless capabilities.

Now, of course, the new iPod touch has complete wireless connectivity, a fully functional browser and the capability to buy and download songs anywhere. These capabilities are positively better selling points than the Zune’s “new” features. If the Zune player is ever going to sell substantially enough for it to become “the social”, it had better start competing with the iPod. Zune 2.0 is still hopelessly behind the iPod. If Zune 3.0 is not released soon, it may cease to be altogether. 

Bill Gates’ investment in his foundation seems to be a wiser move than any further investment in this ill-conceived product. 

 

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West Hollywood Book Fair

The West Hollywood Book Fair is not by any means the largest in the country or even in LA. The largest book fair in the primordial soup is indisputably the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which is held annually at UCLA. The West Hollywood Book Fair is a very small and civilized affair held in West Hollywood Park. (The term “park” is used liberally here, for the actual plot of land allotted to the public under this designation is astoundingly paltry. Public spaces in the primordial soup typically are astoundingly paltry.)

The WeHo Book Fair is composed primarily, naturally, of gay and new age literature. A healthy contingent of writing groups are also well represented because this is the city where nearly 50% of the population (yours truly excluded, for now) are writers. And, last, though by no means least, are the various political groups: the ACLU, Pacifica Radio and other fringe groups. Especially radical groups were pleasantly and conspicuously absent.

I was surprised to see John Dean‘s name listed on a panel that was about to start in five minutes, so I lingered to hear what he and the others were going to say. The other panelists were Dennis Loo and Susan Estrich, who neglected to show up.

It proved to be an instructive panel to attend primarily because of the juxtaposition of an eminently rational man like John Dean against a polemicist like Dennis Loo. (The juxtaposition would be instructive were it made with any polemicist, even with Bill O’Reilly.) Such a juxtaposition is the perfect means of demonstrating the intellectual deficiencies of the political fringes. Whether it’s the radical right or the radical left, placing either one next to a man who coolly and civilly advocates the boring, fair and historically proven method of due process vanquishes all doubt regarding whom people need to support politically: the boring guy.

Lest one be tempted to dismiss the boring guy, one must bear in mind that the boring guy here, John Dean, brought down the entire Nixon Presidency. Hence, it is absurd to think that such men are ineffective or otherwise useless in the establishment of an effective government. Quite the contrary, history and the cabal of fanatics that has been in control of the US government since 1994 clearly demonstrate that it is the fanatics that invariably destroy governments and subsequently nations. Hitler, Mussolini, Khomeini, Pol Pot, Karadzic, Mugabe and countless others have proved the destructive force of fanaticism beyond the shadow of any doubt. Yet, we are stuck with fanatics.

And, what do we do against fanatics? Dean admirably argued for the restoration of the processes that have kept fanatics out of the political system and have kept in check the fanatics who managed to enter politics. Loo argued for buying and wearing orange colored products in order to advocate impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

Dean argued that the processes that assert the will of the people and that advocate the interests of the nation need to be restored. Loo asserted that we need a “hero” to fight this battle against the titans of evil who are governing our nation. Dean advocated a practical focus on winning elections. Loo simply asserted that elections are hopeless, and that we have no remedy, though he did offer hope in the form of his book. 

The moderator gave me the microphone, and I asked these men what we, the disenfranchised public, can do to reverse the nation’s course? Loo suggested that I buy orange personal decorations, because it was his brilliant idea to start an “orange campaign” for impeachment. Dean reasserted the fact that the Republicans understand the importance of process enough to have modified it heavily in their favor. He, therefore, advocated that Democrats erase these imbalances while they wield power. Loo did not disagree with this, but all he could advocate was wearing orange and protesting.

Loo also employed fear tactics for no apparent reason. He insisted that the US will attack Iran, that electronic voting machines are hackable and will be hacked, that impeachment is the only answer even if diverts resources from worthwhile causes. Naturally, he offered no real remedy to these doomsday scenarios. An ostensibly educated man, Loo could not offer so much as a notion of a process by which electronic voting machines could be challenged. Fear of the devices was apparently enough for him.

And, that is where I lost my faith in the “left” in American politics. The American “left” differs little tactically from the radical right in American politics. Its tactics consist of fear. Practically, the difference is like night and day. The right, as Dean correctly noted, understands process. It understands power, and it has the desire to wield it. It will go far in corrupting the process, as Hitler did (Dean’s comparison, not mine!), in order to wield absolute power. And, the American “left” responds to this corruption of process with a symbolic orange campaign. In insisting on a “hero” it was almost as if Loo was begging for another Martin Luther to start a new movement, a new government, a new nation.

Heroes are the desire of the hopeless. I have no heros for I have some confidence (still) in my abilities. Dean asked for no heroes because he has been in politics enough to know that process has a far greater impact than the impact that any one “hero” can have. After all, the only difference between democracy and fascism is, in fact, the process. 

Perhaps it’s in keeping with the American tradition of creating a new religious sect or movement when one is not satisfied with one’s innate religion. The American left’s fantasies of revolution (a mantra repeated ad nauseum by the left and the right), however, can never become reality. Freedom of religion enables new religions. The Constitutional system provides little recourse for change outside the Constitution itself. Hence, Dean is absolutely right when he says that it is important to restore and repair the processes of governance, and Loo and his fellow “leftists” are little more than egomaniacal fear mongers who are far more content with selling orange clothing than they are with advocating action. “Turn on, tune in, drop out” is a message that many baby boomers are happy to propagate, albeit from their comfortable tenured positions. And, somehow, they are mystified by the (good) fact that they wield no power.

Ahhh, to be free to think and to act. Neither the left nor the right will ever advocate freedom of thought and expression, for this freedom is inimical to the stupidity that both sides advocate under the headings of objectivism, neo-conservatism, liberalism, communism and, yes, even conservatism. 

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Good Eats

NYTimes.com | E. Coli Tainted Meat Recall is Expanded 

Update: Topps goes out of business

Many frozen beef products produced by the Topps Meat Company of New Jersey have been discovered by regulators to be tainted with a nasty strain of e. coli. The products that are being recalled are identified as such:

The recall, by the Topps Meat Company of Elizabeth, N.J., covers a wide range of frozen hamburger patties and other products manufactured over the last year and bearing a “sell by” date or “best used by” date between last Tuesday and Sept. 25, 2008, along with the United States Department of Agriculture designation EST 9748.

The big question is why the hell would anyone eat shit that does not expire until 2008? As always, what is shocking about the United States is not what is illegal to do. What is legal to do is what is shocking. It is frightening what is allowed to enter the food supply.

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Muenster, Germany

LambertikircheI remember my time in Germany fondly. Life in general is easy. Everything is organized, cities are clean, public services are outstanding, and people are generally quite energized, albeit in an understated manner. After over two years, I have managed to get these photos up. With (very little) thanks to Apple’s brand new iWeb application, my magnificent photos of Muenster can now be viewed online. They include spectacular night scenes from the Altstadt (the old city enter), and some nifty pictures of the Eurofest, which was a fairly new excuse for a big city party.