The rest of the story

Both RTE (online) & the Irish Times are still ignoring the Richard Armitage angle Valerie Plame story.

Sack of Baltimore

I never heard of the Sack of Baltimore until I read Eoghan Harris's article on Sunday. The sacking of Baltimore, Co. Cork was carried out by Turks/Algerians (Muslims) in 1631. Two people were killed and 100 were carried away as slaves.

Harris provided this detail, which is also pretty interesting:

The Sack of Baltimore caused a sensation as big as 9/11, shocked Charles I and caused a major cover-up by the British authorities. And it contains all the complexities of our own time. The mastermind was not some bearded Muslim madman but Morat Rais, a sophisticated Dutch convert to Islam.

Thomas Davis wrote a poem about the event.

Mushy on Microsoft – for a day

On Tuesday I was thinking about how rarely I have any troubles with Windows crashes. I actually thought to myself, "things have improved". Windows XP is better than Windows 2000, which was better than Windows 95 (I skipped 98 - I know, I know), which was better than Win 3.1, etc. In fact, my mind drifted all the way back to the Windows-free Compaq I had in the late 80s (2MB RAM) and my misty memory of that machine never causing me a lick of trouble. So I said to myself, "Hey Microsoft, good job".

That lasted for a day (actually about 18 hours). Yesterday I installed the latest release of Internet Explorer Ver. 7. Why, oh why, did I do it? Okay, no major troubles, but still …

First, it takes so long to install it. I presume that's because Microsoft is still tying the browser tightly into Windows. (I thought that was going to end?) I have uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox a couple of times and you know what? Takes about 5 minutes to do all of that. Yesterday, it took what seemed like half an hour to finish all that was required to get IE7 running again.

The first thing I noticed is that my toolbar selections were gone. Why? Who knows? Not a biggie to fix, but regardless it left me wondering what else might not work. Then today I went through the usual steps to get my daily Mets fix, but Windows Media Player won't play. I still have no idea why and now I'm angry.

So, here I am, a mere 36 hours after I was thinking nice things about Microsoft and I'm fuming at them again. They just can't stand prosperity.

UPDATE—2pm: Solved my Windows Media Problem over lunch. Found an answer on the discussion boards at Microsoft. Whew! I have to hear those Met games. (Even though they're so far out in front now that the month of September should be nothing more than a tune-up for October.)

Twenty20 cricket

I don't really know what Twenty 20 cricket is even after reading this explanation. The game is quicker, that much I get. But, I like the references to baseball in this article from the Times (London):

The more interesting qualities that Twenty20 shares with its transatlantic cousin are subtle and rhythmic. Baseball is hugely watchable because the game changes after every pitch. When the ball leaves a pitcher's hand it is destined to be either a ball, a strike or a hit, and each has direct consequences.

Because Twenty20 has only 120 deliveries in an innings, (about the same number of pitches thrown in nine baseball innings), the import, and therefore the excitement, surrounding each is enhanced.

But the real similarity is La Russa's point. Baseball is a constantly snappy, aggressive, intense game. It does not meander. You play hard or you lose.

"Snappy" and "intense" are not two words that I've heard anyone on this side of the ocean use to describe baseball.

Armitage

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has admitted he was the 'source' for the Valerie Plame revelations. Unexciting news because Armitage was not part of any Bush Administration plot to 'out' Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. Still, I would have expected the Irish Times and RTE to mention this item given all the print/air time they devoted to this 'scandal' last summer. I couldn't find anything, at least online. Maybe tomorrow?

16

I was watching Manchester United on Saturday and was taken aback when I saw #16 on the back of someone who wasn't Roy Keane. If this were an American sport Keane's number would be retired at a future date where he'd be honored by the club. Maybe the American owners of Manchester United will start that tradition in English soccer.

Islamophobia

First of all, let me say that I hate all these words that end in 'phobia'. According to Webster a phobia is "an exaggerated usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation". If people are 'afraid of Islam' that may not be entirely logical (arguable), but anyone who claims the fear is "inexplicable" is being far less logical than anyone who fears Islam.

Okay, now that I've got that out of the way …

The head of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism claims that "Islamophobia" is "being heightened by recent irresponsible media reports". What's bothering the NCCRI is the press that Sheikh Dr Shaheed Satardien got when he claimed Ireland was a "haven for fundamentalism".

Satardien was on radio shows and in the newspapers for a few days and I heard other Muslims disputing what Satardien had to say. Isn't that the way these things should work? I'm not sure what the NCCRI wants - that people like Satardien not be allowed to speak?

Even if his group is small, that doesn't mean what he had to say was unimportant. What's interesting to me is that when I heard Satardien on the radio I was reassured. I remember thinking that as long as the Muslim community in Ireland has people like Satardien we have less to fear. If anything, Satardien is generating increased 'Islamophilia'.

It's great that the NCCRI has such faith in the Gardai, but I'm skeptical that they have the cultural and linguistic skills to thwart any potential terrorist threat. Citizens like Satardien are a real plus.

Polish migration

Yesterday's Sunday Herald claimed that "[t]he current right-wing populist party running Poland is also a factor spurring immigration to western Europe". How does the Sunday Herald know this? Have they seen any data to indicate that there has been an increase in emigration since the Law and Justice party won the September '05 election? {I looked, but couldn't find anything.} Did Polish emigration not exist when the Alliance of the Democratic Left party was in control?

If they haven't seen any data, then why write such a sentence?

Apostrophe s

The head of the Apostrophe Protection Society in the UK criticized the grammar on a large billboard near Portlaoise for omitting a crucial apostrophe. The sign is advertising "Frans Crash Repairs". Oops.

I actually like grammar and wish I knew it better than I do. I just love rules. It was never emphasized when I was in school. I guess it was too archaic to teach kids how to use apostrophes, commas, semi-colons, quotation marks, etc. {When I got to college it was obvious that those kids who had gone to Catholic school had a much better foundation in grammar than did those of us who went to public school. Different philosophies…}

I keep trying to learn these things, but what really gets me now is that the rules are different on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. So now I'm not only battling my ignorance, but also the conflicts between my American education - such as it was - and the rules on this side of 'the pond'.

Ryder Cup hype

The Ryder Cup was over-sold. There was a sense that the Ryder Cup was something like a weekend-long World Cup. The television audience would be "1 billion"; traders shouldn't "rip-off" the tourists who come for the golf; the Ryder Cup represents a great "opportunity to showcase the wider tourism product".

I never had the idea that the Ryder Cup was a big deal in the US. Big with golf fans? Probably, but not as big as the Masters or the US Open. I suspect that the situation is not much different with European golf fans. I've often wondered if the Ryder Cup was only really a big deal in Britain and Ireland and now we know.

Today's Sunday Business Post reports that the demand for hotel rooms is nowhere near what was expected. Rooms are apparently easy to come by.

I'm sure the organizers know - and have known for some time - that nearly all the tickets to the event were sold to people who live within a couple of hours drive from the K Club. The whole idea that there'd be a large number of people coming here for the event was false.

Baghdad or Philadelphia?

Today's Washington Post has an analysis of the Department of Defense's data on the risk exposure of troops serving in Iraq. One statistical comparison stood out.

The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.

That just seems impossible. A young black guy in Philadelphia would actually be safer if he joined the army and served in Iraq than he is if he just stays home.

Hezbollah's victory

In the aftermath of the war in Lebanon it seemed that all points of view were agreed that Hezbollah had achieved a great victory. Left, right, Arab, Israeli news sources seemed pretty much in agreement. I guess I went along with that, although the thought crossed my mind that surely Hezbollah couldn't afford too many victories like that.

Today, however, I see that Amir Taheri claims that Hezbollah didn't win.

The leaders of the March 14 movement, which has a majority in the Lebanese Parliament and government, have demanded an investigation into the circumstances that led to the war, a roundabout way of accusing Hezbollah of having provoked the tragedy. Prime Minister Fuad Siniora has made it clear that he would not allow Hezbollah to continue as a state within the state. Even Michel Aoun, a maverick Christian leader and tactical ally of Hezbollah, has called for the Shiite militia to disband.

Taheri's optimism can wear me down, but it's nice to read something different for a change.

And, then there's this in the Lebanese Daily Star where Michael Young points out that Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah has a real dilemma now.

So now Nasrallah has a mounting debt owed the Iranians and little room to tell them that he cannot implement a request to heat Israel's northern border if the nuclear issue demands it. Worse, the Hizbullah leader knows that even a devotee like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will have to explain to his own poor electors why billions of dollars are being spent on building Shiite homes in Lebanon, while Iranians continue to face grinding poverty - poverty that might get worse if the UN Security Council manages to impose sanctions. How much can the Iranian regime bear financially when it comes to buoying up Nasrallah's base? Even Shiite businessmen, whether in the Gulf or Lebanon, may hesitate to offer substantial funding if they sense a new war is looming.

Maybe all that post-war gloom was a little premature.

We made you and we can break you

Count me among those who are not in favor of Pluto's delisting as a planet, but if we must change it's better to go back to 8 planets than to water down the definition to every over-sized bit of space ice. Still, I love the response of Alden Tombaugh, whose father discovered Pluto.

But the son of late U.S. astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who identified Pluto as the ninth planet in 1930, told CanWest News Service that the scientific method "guided my father all of his life," and that if reason now dictates Pluto's reclassification as a planetary 'dwarf' then "he would have been all for it" - provided politics didn't "bias" the outcome of the long-running controversy.

"This doesn't change my father's achievement," said Alden Tombaugh, a retired banker in New Mexico whose father's ashes are currently on a nine-year journey to Pluto aboard NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. "Science is an evolving process, and he was a part of that process."

No whining or complaining. If that's what science says, so be it.

Freedom of religion

Cases such as Sarah Yule's do a disservice to the whole notion of anti-discrimination laws. Yule was asked by her employer - a Catholic hospital, as it happens - to remove her lip ring. Yule, was working as a receptionist in the ER, refused and sued. She claims religious discrimination because she's a member of the Church of Body Modification.

This is nonsense. Just because there are people who like to "suspend themselves by hooks dug into their skin" doesn't mean that when those people get together online they have formed a religion. A cult, maybe, but not a religion.

Bungling idiot?

I forgot about this one from the other day. 'Shoe bomber' Richard Reid's lawyer talked about his meeting with Reid.

"I am not crazy as they suggest, but I knew exactly what I was doing," he said. "Of course I would have been sad to have those people die, but I knew that my cause was just and righteous. It was the will of Allah that I did not succeed."

His motivation for turning to violence, he said, was the foreign policy of the US government, which, he said, had resulted in the murder of thousands of Muslims and oppressed people around the world from Vietnam to southern Africa to Afghanistan and Palestine.

… He also said that racism played a large part in the life he had experienced as a young person. For those wanting to understanding radicalisation, this is important. Reid's journey to violent jihad was not just fuelled by radical Islamist propaganda - he talked about the case of Stephen Lawrence and how that exposed discrimination in society.

… Some have claimed that Reid is educationally impaired, but he did not seem so in his talk with me. He was able to express himself and came across as someone who had passed through the state education system and then supplemented his knowledge with a large amount of self-teaching through reading books.

I know I had thought Reid was almost a figure of ridicule. I figured he was a dumb stooge. Not really true, it seems.

Aer Lingus threat

Wow! A bomb threat against an Aer Lingus plane. I hopoe (& presume) that this will be a false alarm, but still that's quite a shocker. Flight 112 from New York had just arrived at Shannon when the threat came through.

We'll have to wait to see if this is the work of one nut or a real attempt at intimidation.

Malaysia in the EU

Looking at my last two posts, I can't help wondering if there will ever be a day when there's a "Malaysia" in western Europe.

Converting from Islam in Malaysia

Lina Joy was a Muslim, but she converted to Christianity eight years ago. Shouldn't be a big deal, but it is. Joy lives in Malaysia, a country with a majority Muslim population. Malaysia's becoming increasingly Islamic and has to worry anyone (including me) who believes there should be no problem marrying Islam with freedom & democracy.

In rulings in her case, civil courts said Malays could not renounce Islam because the Constitution defined Malays to be Muslims.

They also ruled that a request to change her identity card from Muslim to Christian had to be decided by the Shariah courts. There she would be considered an apostate, and if she did not repent she surely would be sentenced to several years in an Islamic center for rehabilitation.

President Bush has often stated that democracy can take many forms. Well, a democracy that doesn't allow someone to change their religion without the possibility of being sent to some religious re-education camp is pretty far removed from a bastion of liberty.

If this is the best we can hope for with the 'democratize the world' push, then let's just stop bothering.

Belgium

This article about Belgium from yesterday's Wall Street Journal is chock full of interesting tidbits. Try this:

In Brussels, notes Joël Rubinfeld of the Atlantis Institute think tank, half of the Socialist Party's 26-member slate in the city's 75-seat parliament is Muslim. In the commune of Molenbeek, longstanding Socialist mayor Philippe Moureaux has made Halal meals standard in all schools; police officers are also barred from eating or drinking on the streets during Ramadan.

The police are barred from eating or drinking on the streets during Ramadan. That is amazing. I know nothing of that town, but just to think that there is a town in W. Europe where Islam is so prominent that during Ramadan the local constable is not allowed to gnaw on an apple as he makes his rounds is way beyond what I would have imagined. I wonder if the police are barred from publicly eating meat on a Friday during Lent? (Yeah, I know.)

And, what about the Halal meat in schools? Does that mean you can't get a ham sandwich in the town's local schools? Would you be allowed to bring one in? And, if a non-Muslim student did bring in a ham sandwich and passed it on to a Muslim, what would happen to the 'ham pusher'?

Then there's this:

Now take the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), the secessionist Flemish Party previously known as the Vlaams Blok until a court ruled it illegal in 2004. The Blok has longstanding links to Nazi collaborators. One of the party's founding members is Karel Dillen, who in 1951 translated into Flemish a French tract denying the Holocaust (possibly the only French text for which a Vlams Blok party member has ever shown sympathy.) For many years, the party's chief selling point was its call to forcibly deport immigrants who failed to assimilate. It also made plain its sympathies with other far-right wing European parties, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front in France.

But that's changing. Younger party leaders, realizing their anti-Semitic taint was poison, began making pro-Israel overtures. And the party's tough-on-crime, hostile-to-Muslims stance began to attract a considerable share of the Jewish vote, particularly among Orthodox Antwerp Jews who felt increasingly vulnerable in the face of the city's hostile Muslim community. Today, Vlaams Belang is the largest single party in the country.

Jews are voting for a party with "longstanding links to Nazi collaborators".

And, this:

Amid a pervasive and growing sense of lawlessness -- Belgium's per capita murder rate, at 9.1 per 100,000 is nearly twice that of the U.S. …

I think I'll see if I can verify that one. I don't know why, but I find it hard to imagine that this is true. What about the stereotype of the gun-happy American and all those well-publicized murders, etc.?

Interesting. I guess it's not all chocolates and beer.

Caveat Emptor

America is the home of capitalism, right? At least it's the world's biggest promoter of capitalism, true?

I'm just checking because in today's Irish Independent there's an article in which the US Ambassador to Ireland is warning against ripping off American tourists coming here for the Ryder Cup.

Mr. Kenny claims that if American Ryder Cup fans are ripped-off it "will cause long-term damage to the Irish tourism industry". You know what? I don't believe that for one minute. This is a specialist event attracting a specialist audience. I don't think there'll be any long term effects at all.

But, that's almost beside the point. The US State Department biography of James Kenny says

[b]efore his appointment, James C. Kenny was Executive Vice-President of Kenny Construction Company and President of Kenny Management Services. Kenny Construction Company, founded in 1927, is involved in building projects across the United States. Kenny Management Services is a new division that has overseen large, complex construction projects such as the Chicago Midway Airport expansion and the new stadium for the Chicago Bears football team.

So, I'm guessing that when Mr. Kenny was selling in a tight market he knew he could raise his prices, and when the market was slack he cut his prices to the bone. That's just a guess, of course, I have no way of knowing for sure. Seems reasonable, though.

So, if the demand for hotel rooms, restaurants, transportation or whatever is high during the Ryder Cup, isn't it natural to expect that those who are offering those services/products will up their prices? Let the buyer beware is all I say.