Category: General

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.

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 ….

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.

lasermonks.com: Divine Solutions for Your Printer

Belgian and German monks (“München” means “monks” in the Bavarian dialect) spent centuries perfecting the art of brewing beer. American monks are now bringing morality to the business of selling ink and toner cartridges for printers. Beer and toner have little in common, but in both cases, the monks are doing much to help humanity. So, chug a good German or Belgian beer, and print something.

pMac keeps chugging along. After four years, two operating system upgrades, one hard drive failure (and swap) and compiling about 10 gigabytes of software, it keeps going, better than ever it seems. This is the second uptime record that I have managed to record, and it was halted only because I misinterpreted a wrong password as a subsystem failure.

Oh, well. There’s always the coming year, I suppose.

At least the jail food will be free… | Oddly Enough | Reuters.com

Ah, to dream of the life of comfort, of the life of freedom and of a life of peace of mind. A life where this qualifies as a crime spree.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Rare river dolphin now extinct

Man’s capacity to destroy the rarest creations that nature produced over the course of all of time remains undiminished. As unusual and unique as a freshwater dolphin was, it was not important enough to be preserved. It lost. It succumbed not to man’s cruelty in this case, but mankind’s voracious appetite for its food. As locusts periodically decimate crops in Africa and bring famine in their wake by decimating the food supply, people so thoroughly decimated this dolphin’s food supply that it vanished. Even swarms of locusts so large that they can be seen from satellite and so tenacious that they can devour everything from North Africa to West Asia cannot make mankind extinct, but mankind’s persistence through time is enough to vanquish any species. Balance is an afterthought for man, and the dolphin was cursed because it was not as adorable as the panda bear.