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| January 2004 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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ISSUE #65 - 25th January 2004 [154]
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The Depravity of Suicide-Bombing You see on the news such a
succession of suicide bombers, be it in Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Kashmir,
Moscow, Chechnya, Sri Lanka that to some extent, unless you are personally involved in some
way, you can become inured to the horror of it.
Call it Suicide-Bomber Fatigue. But sometimes one of these outrages is so shocking that you are confronted anew with the utter depravity of the enterprise. It was brought home to me, once more, by the appalling suicide-bombing on 14th January of Reem al-Rayashi at Erez, which is a military
checkpoint on the main
crossing between Gaza and Israel.
Reem came from one of the most wealthy families in the Gaza Strip, owners of the region's biggest car-battery factory whose main market is Israel. There was none of the despair and grief that have prompted other suicide bombers. She was a woman of just 22, married to Ziyad Awad, five years her senior, and they had an eighteen-month old daughter and a son of three. Yet coldly and deliberately, she got herself trained up, and then went out and blew herself to pieces solely in order to kill and injure others. Knowingly and avoidably she left behind two innocent, motherless tots. It is hard to imagine a more evil perverted deed. Yet the totality and context of the act are indeed even more evil and perverted.
But that's not all. For further evil and perversion, there's the wretched Reem herself and her family. Her husband actually dropped her off on her mission. She had told him that when he too blew himself up at some later date, as he had assured her he would, she would be waiting to welcome him to Paradise as one of the seventy “houris”, or nymphs, that the Hadith holy book awards to each (male) martyr. She was evidently unaware of the irony of departing this life as his sole wife only to stand up there in the heavenly clouds amongst 69 other nubile competitors for his dubious favours. But this romantic little vignette does not tell the whole sordid story, for other thoroughly distasteful factors, some say rumours, have emerged which may have played a part. The excellent Not a Fish blog first alerted me.
Yet out of this, there is some dignity. Like others before them, the four parents of the couple are appalled and outraged by what Reem has done, in no way condone it, are refusing condolences and hold husband Ziad primarily responsible. And of course the two small children are blameless victims as much as those whom their mother's explosives, nails and and body-parts killed, injured or bereaved. Moreover, some Palestinian journalists are beginning to protest against the nihilism of suicide-bombing. But personally I blame Reem 100% for her depraved act. No excuses, no dilution. Ziad and cousin are also to be condemned for their wickedness and chicanery, but they didn't detonate the bomb. She did. The whole suicide-bombing atmosphere that prevails among Palestinians and other Muslim groups and even some Christians is like a stinking rotting festering carcass surrounded by bluebottles. But that is to denigrate bluebottles. Every individual has certain responsibilities in this life, and these have a strict hierarchy.
No-one has the slightest right to attempt the third unless and until the first and second are properly fulfilled. By abandoning her toddlers, the further sin of the depraved Reem al-Rayashi was to do just that. May she not rest in peace.
When you buy a car, what do you look for?
One whose value drops like a stone in its first three years or one
which holds a lot of its value compared to other cars?
Obviously you want the one which holds its value. Wrong.
Well, wrong for some. It
all depends on which stage of the car’s life cycle you choose to buy at.
We know that a brand new car loses maybe 15% of its value the
moment you drive it from the showroom.
Nevertheless, we would want it to lose as little of
its value as possible in its early years. On
the other hand, if, for example, you’re buying a three year old vehicle,
you will want it to have lost as much of its new value as
possible so you can get it cheaply (provided it doesn’t continue to
plummet after you have made your purchase). The
Alliance and Leicester insurance group have just published a very
interesting study of car prices and depreciation over one and three years.
It uses figures from the UK market (from What Car?
magazine) but the findings are likely to be applicable anywhere in Europe. It
tells you the best cars to buy new, after one year and after three years.
Also when it is the best time to sell particular cars (after one or
three years) so as to minimise your loss. Below
is a summary of the main findings identifying best buys.
In brackets is each car’s change in value expressed as that
percentage which means most to your pocket, ie you want your car to retain
a high value, but if buying second–hand you want one that has
depreciated by a high amount. It
is these percentages that provide the rankings.
In all cases you want the quoted % figure to be high.
The outstanding overall winner, in terms of preserving value, is the Land Rover Freelander. Horrible as the car itself is, provided you buy it when it's one year old and sell it two years later, you will be out of pocket only to the tune of a paltry 4%. It's worth downloading and reading the whole report (PDF file of 205 kb).
Here's a salutary tale about
two young pranksters, one on each side of the Atlantic, with the same joke
but quite different outcomes.
Moral of the story: If you're going to play these silly games, better do them in wishy-washy Europe. Compared to our American cousins, penalties may be tougher but enforcement's a joke. On the other hand of course, if you want to carry bombs on board aircraft you'll also find that easier in wishy-washy Europe (which is what miscreants seemed to think when only BA and Air France aircraft in Europe were grounded over Christmas due to terrorist threats). Just don't mess with the guys in the cowboy boots.
More on airport security ... By Guest-Bloggers Murat and Zeynap At New York's Kennedy airport the other day, an individual
later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to
board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare,
a slide rule, and a calculator. At a morning press conference, Attorney general John
Ashcroft said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra
movement. He is being charged
by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction. “Al-Gebra is a fearsome cult,” Ashcroft said. “They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like ‘x’ and ‘y’ and refer to themselves as ‘unknowns’, but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country”. “As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, there are three sides to every triangle.” Taking time out from his War on Tourism, President Bush when asked to comment on the arrest said, “If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes. “I am gratified that our government has given us
a sine that it is intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are
willing to disintegrate us with calculus disregard.
Murky statisticians love to inflict plane on every sphere of
influence,” the President said, adding: “Under the
circumferences, we must differentiate their root, make our point, and draw
the line. Rest assured we will hunt down every foreign tourist.” President Bush warned, “These weapons of math instruction have the potential to decimal everything in their math on a scalene never before seen unless we become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to factor-in random facts of vertex.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, fresh from receiving his Foot-in-Mouth award from the Plain English Campaign commented, “As our Great Leader would say, read my ellipse. Here is one principle he is uncertainty of. Though they continue to multiply, their days are numbered as the hypotenuse tightens around their necks.”
Now that you've gone out and bought yourself that new car, are you happy? How joyous are you really? What are your strengths? How satisfied are you with your work-life balance? What about your positives and negatives? The answers to these and other aspects about your character are revealed in a series of simple questionnaires at a website called Authentic Happiness. Try it. It's quite clever. You have to register, but it's free.
Quote: "Sheikh [Ahmed} Yassin [spiritual leader of Hamas] is marked for death, and he should hide himself deep underground where he won't know the difference between day and night" Israel's Deputy Defence Minister Zeev Boim, Refer to this week's leading story __________________ Quote: “Some critics have said our duties in Iraq must be internationalized. This particular criticism is hard to explain to our partners in Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, the Netherlands, Norway, El Salvador, and the 17 other countries that have committed troops to Iraq ... There is a difference however between leading a coalition of many nations, and submitting to the objections of a few ... America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.” President
George W Bush in his 2004 State of the Union address,
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ISSUE #64 - 18th January 2004 [121]
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40,000-Year Voyage from China to Polynesia Last August I promised to explain how it was that the tiny native population of tiny Nauru, one of the Polynesian islands in the Pacific, is descended from native Taiwanese. In 1947, Thor Heyerdal, a Norwegian anthropologist and adventurer, undertook an epic voyage of 6,500 km in a flimsy, primitive
raft made of balsa-wood and bamboo. He and his five companions
sailed and drifted westward from Callao, near Lima in Peru In 1950, he wrote a hugely popular book about the experience, the Kon-Tiki Expedition, and the theory was widely accepted as fact. He died in 2002 aged 87. The islanders themselves are somewhat oriental in appearance, as are the Peruvian Indians from whom they are supposedly descended. And the latter look oriental because, so the complementary theory goes, the original Peruvians' forefathers had trekked up what is now the Eastern coast of China and Russia, across what was then a land-bridge linking Russia to Alaska (today's Bering Straits), and then down the West coast of the American continent till they reached Peru, and indeed continued further to Chile. And why then did they choose to sail across the Pacific? Well, so the theory goes, they didn't choose, but that was the way the winds and currents flow, from West to East. It was postulated, therefore, that over time fishing boats were inadvertently blown out to sea, and that those that did not sink ended up stranded on Pacific islands many thousands of kilometres away. So were new settlements born in Polynesia. Artifacts and flora in Polynesia link the area to both South America and Asia, providing further support for the two migration theories. Except that Thor Heyerdahl's theory of East-to-West migration is balderdash. First, think about it.
But then there's recent scientific evidence that now proves beyond doubt that Polynesia was populated by immigrants not from the American West but from the Oriental East . And, incidentally, that Orientals did indeed make a separate migration north, east and south, overland from China to Peru and Chile. Bryan Sykes is a geneticist in Oxford University who has made a study of mitochondrial DNA, or mDNA. This is a tiny component of your DNA, which serves no known function, yet is passed down the female line of animals, mother to daughter, virtually unchanged. Unlike the rest of DNA, which mutates regularly down the generations giving rise to Darwin's theory of evolution, natural mutations in mDNA are so rare that they can be used as a time-marker for blood-lines.
In the 1990s, Prof Sykes began collecting blood samples from native Polynesians, and to his astonishment concluded that regardless of which island they live on, they are all descended from only a handful of mothers. This is extraordinary when you consider that the Polynesian islands occupy a box in the Pacific of about 5,000 km square. Some incredible maritime feats must have been conducted for so few family lines to have spread so far. But he also analysed the mDNA of natives of New Guinea, Borneo, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, as well as of Peru and Chile, and compared this with the Polynesian mDNA. This uncovered a clear lineage from Polynesia tracing back through the Western Pacific into Eastern China and Taiwan, a lineage that in at least one instance (a family line through New Guinea) was 40,000 years long.
These remarkable findings proved conclusively, for the first time, that today's native Polynesians are immigrants from East Asia, who arrived via a series of steps and stops at different islands, big and small, after a journey lasting in some cases 40,000 years. They did not come from South America. Thor Heyerdahl was wrong. The remaining question is how did they do it, sailing into the wind into the unknown. The answer is through courage, skill, technology, navigation and luck. One can only guess they were driven by economic necessity, or perhaps simply a desire for adventure. And though many must have lost their lives in the attempt, we can at least be sure they did not migrate by accident, not when the prevailing winds were pushing them back to shore. The great advantage of sailing against the wind, is that if you have a problem, or simply lose heart, you still have a good chance of getting back home simply by riding the downwind. Without this “return ticket” it seems most unlikely those canny womenfolk would have been persuaded to come aboard. The south-western rim of the Pacific contains a series of mountainous islands close enough to sail between on visuals, the largest being New Guinea. This permitted those early mariners to navigate fairly safely eastward, one island at a time, as far as the Solomon Islands, over a period of some 40 millennia. Archaeological evidence indicates, however, that they did not venture further east until perhaps only three thousand years ago. That is because the next island, Santa Cruz, was 300 km from the Solomons, far beyond the horizon, and the others further away still. The last series of voyages, therefore, had to wait until about 1000 BC by when boat technology and navigational skills had advanced sufficiently. Then, over a period of some 2,000 years (as dated by archaeological artefacts), the rest of the Polynesian Islands were systematically colonised. The migrants sailed in large, eminently seaworthy, double-hulled canoes up to ten metres long with a prow at each end. This enabled the mariners to tack across the wind and reverse without the hazard of turning round in a high sea. They navigated by keeping a rising or setting star in the same position relative to the canoe, which would maintain a constant latitude. But they also used other clues to detect an island over the horizon -
A continuing mystery, however, is how some of those migrants managed to turn right and sail southeastward, crossing lines of latitude, to find and settle in New Zealand. We know they did, because the mDNA of the Maoris shows indubitably that they too are descended from the same group of mothers as the native Polynesians and those ancient coastal Chinese and (the even more ancient) Taiwanese. But it's all a fascinating story, a confluence of ancient derring-do with state-of-the-art forensic investigation. One of the outcomes is that those Naurans are indeed descended from Taiwanese. But there is an aspect of the evidence of man's extreme longevity on this earth that always troubles me. Why did it take Jesus Christ, the son of God, at least 40,000 years to come on earth and seek propitiation for man's sins? Perhaps it means mankind has a further 40,000 years to go and Jesus therefore chose to arrive at the midpoint of his existence. If not it suggests a certain, er, negligence with regard to the 1,000 to 2,000 generations of the human race that preceded the Christian era.
Once again, a speech on a scratchy audio tape has emerged on Al Jazeera TV, which purports to be Osama Bin Laden exhorting further jihad. The speech must have been recorded only recently because it refers to Saddam's capture. But is it genuine?
Technical experts, linguists and translators at the CIA and National Security Agency have compared the latest message to previous recordings of bin Laden and say they are as certain as they can be that it is genuine. But they present no evidence. I'm sorry, but I just don't buy this guff. For reasons discussed earlier, he is either dead or so badly injured and disfigured he dare not show his face lest it demoralise his supporters and cheer up his enemies.
If Osama were alive and well, you can be sure he would be using the media to put out regular stirring and defiant messages - and making them believable. That means, at the least, using good quality video that leaves viewers - friend and foe alike - in no doubt whatsoever about the identity of the speaker. Imagine the effect that would have in encouraging his followers and depressing the West. But it's very hard to do from an unknown grave deep in the Afghan mountains. </ |
on
the west coast of South America, to the Tuamotu Islands in Polynesia on the
other side of the Pacific Ocean. The purpose of his gruelling,
hazardous 14-week voyage
was to prove the feasibility of the theory that the Pacific islands were
populated by people, ie Peruvian Indians, whose ancestors had made a
similar trip a millennium earlier.