Sometimes, there is justice.
It has been widely reported that a Pakistani man died the other day… as a result of breathing in the fumes of an American flag that they set on fire.
It does not happen that often, but sometimes, the world actually works the way it is supposed to.
(Part of me is wondering, though, exactly what material was that flag made of, in whatever Chinese sweatshop American flags are made in these days?)
So an American (or not; the identity, ethnicity and nationality of the filmmaker(s) are not entirely clear) filmmaker creates a rather amateurish production bearing the title, The Innocence of Muslims, screened originally to an audience of less than 10 when it was first shown in a theater earlier this summer. To say that the movie is obscure is an understatement… It doesn’t even appear to have an entry in the Internet Movie Database (though chances are this will change soon.)
So what’s the best way to defend the honor of your Prophet? Why, how about launching a world-wide publicity campaign for this film, attacking embassies and consulates, burning American flags, and generally making sure that every news media talks about the film and its availability on YouTube. The trailer has now been seen by more than 1.2 million people.
So, dear protesters, if your goal was to promote this hack job on your religion, give the filmmaker worldwide fame (and no doubt help him earn a few dollars in the process) and, incidentally, by murdering America’s ambassador to Libya, produce evidence that perhaps the movie’s point is not entirely to be dismissed, you succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. Mohammed must be proud.
Busy celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary yesterday, I forgot that there was another important anniversary on September 12: it was fifty years ago yesterday that a certain John F. Kennedy uttered the words, “We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” And with those words, an astonishing sequence of events took place, and before the 1960s came to an end, two Americans indeed landed on the Moon… a technological feat the like of which the world has not seen since 1972, when the last of the Apollo Moon shots took place.
At this moment, there are protesters ripping down US flags at the American embassy in Cairo, upset over some film (no idea which one, just repeating what I heard on CNN) that in their mind insults the prophet Mohammed (many Muslims like to add the phrase, “peace be upon him” to his name, but there is nothing peaceful about the name of a prophet in whose name suicide bombers kill innocents, even if most followers of Islam do not subscribe to such violence. No, I don’t think Christ represents peace either.)
I think it’s about high time we tell something to violent Islamists who believe it is alright to intimidate others who, in their view, offend their religion. You, Islamists, offend us. You offend one of our most sacred beliefs, our belief in the right to free speech and freedom of expression. And yes, if necessary, we are willing to resort to violence if that’s what it takes to protect these rights. And don’t think for one moment that our beliefs are less important to us than your beliefs are to you. So what shall it be? Shall we go on and murder each other in the name of our mutually incompatible beliefs? (Don’t forget, there is a good chance that we might win. Westerners have become rather good at this war business after two world wars and countless smaller ones, and we are armed to the teeth. We also invented industrialized murder, you know, Auschwitz and all that.) Or shall we just let each other be?
I suggest the latter. And if you believe that there is a veiled threat behind this suggestion, you might not be wrong.
So next time you hear about a film that you don’t like, here is an easy solution: don’t watch it. Then we can just happily leave each other alone.
Some interesting plots from Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman, courtesy of The New York Times. Compare Obama’s and Bush’s record for private sector employment in the first 40+ months of their respective presidencies (yes, this would mean Bush’s first term, in 2001):
And compare their public sector employment statistics:
So which one, exactly, is the “big government socialist”?
Rapper Curtis James Jackson III, aka. 50 Cent, was apparently in Hungary a few days ago. While in the country, he must have visited a grocery store, where he took a picture of something that, to him, obviously looked horrendously offensive: a product carrying the name “Negro”, with what appears to be the stylized image of a hanged black man on the plastic bag.
Except that it isn’t. While racism and the rise of the far right are increasingly troubling issues in Hungary, in this case there is a completely innocent explanation. The packaging in question contains candy, throat drops to be precise, made using a nearly century-old secret recipe. And while Negro lozenges are traditionally black in color, the name has nothing to do with the candy’s appearance either: reportedly it is named after its inventor, Italian confectioner Pietro Negro.
And what about the image of a hanged black man? Not exactly. The classic Negro advertising slogan calls the throat drops “the chimney sweep of the throat”. And what may appear as the silhouette of a black man in a noose is, in fact, a chimney sweep doing what chimney sweeps usually do: sweeping a chimney!
In any case, it’s not like it’s hard to find truly offensive product names in Hungary. Like this one:
The Hungarian-language label reads “Negro kiss, vanilla flavored”. But although in this case, the word unambiguously refers to black people, there is again no offensive intent: this is a traditional product name that has been in existence for decades.
Warning: the language of this post is offensive. I find ordinary words insufficient to express how I feel about Iran’s latest, a broad ban on female attendance at Iran’s universities.
When my wife asked the obvious question, “why?” I could only offer a very crude answer: because the ayatollahs had trouble jerking off last night and needed to find another way to get a hard-on. There really is no sensible way to describe this medieval theocracy that has been Iran’s curse for the past several decades.
There is a silver lining though: by depriving themselves of a capable, educated work force (quite capable, in fact, as women routinely outperformed men), perhaps they are hastening their moronic regime’s imminent demise. Cannot happen too soon, if you ask me.
I tend to sympathize with Julian Assange and Wikileaks. That said, the facts may not necessarily be on Mr. Assange’s side, according to an excellent New Statesman article. In particular, the article asserts that he is less likely to be extradited to the United States from Sweden than from the United Kingdom. The author also makes a very good point about Ecuador’s presumed commitment to freedom of the press: the country is about to extradite a blogger who sought asylum there in 2008, Alexander Barankov to, of all places, Belarus, where he may face the death penalty. I also wonder if we are going to see Wikileaks publish Ecuadorian secret documents now. My guess is… not anytime soon.
It has been two decades since the collapse of the Soviet empire but Russia still has political prisoners.
The names of the latest three are Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevitch, members of the feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot. Their crime? Singing a punk rock anti-Putin song in an orthodox church. This earned them a two-year sentence for “crudely undermining the social order”.
Needless to say, I am thoroughly disgusted by this deplorable show trial. But I am also left wondering: is Mr. Putin’s regime really so insecure that they feel threatened by these young women? (The irony, of course, is the the decision to jail them and put them on trial probably harmed Mr. Putin’s regime a great deal more than their songs ever could. But then again, according to statistics quoted by Wikipedia, most Russians seem to think that the trial was fair and impartial. So perhaps Putin’s thugs know what they are doing.)
In the fall of 1956, after Soviet forces crushed Hungary’s anti-Communist revolution, cardinal József Mindszenty sought refuge inside the American embassy in Budapest, where he remained for the next 15 years.
Not even the Communists claimed the right to withdraw the diplomatic status of those embassy grounds or threatened to storm the embassy to arrest Mindszenty.
I am not particularly impressed by Julian Assange’s narcissism, nor by the latest shenanigans of Wikileaks, including the production of a fake newspaper editorial. But the notion that the United Kingdom might use force to remove Mr. Assange from Ecuadorian embassy grounds is just unthinkable. If this threat was meant to impress and intimidate, well, it didn’t seem to work very well, did it? If they were serious about it, I think Mr. Cameron might need to have his head examined.
Today, I was waiting for Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN in vain. I had no idea at first why the program was preempted, but then on Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz explained: Zakaria was was suspended by both Time and CNN for plagiarism.
Zakaria was caught by the conservative news watchdog site Newsbusters, for writing the following:
Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic. Laws that banned the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon followed: Indiana in 1820, Tennessee and Virginia in 1838, Alabama in 1839 and Ohio in 1859. Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.”
This was supposedly plagiarized from a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore, who wrote this:
As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed: Indiana (1820), Tennessee and Virginia (1838), Alabama (1839), and Ohio (1859). Similar laws were passed in Texas, Florida, and Oklahoma. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, the “mission of the concealed deadly weapon is murder. To check it is the duty of every self-respecting, law-abiding man.”
Zakaria admitted making a “terrible mistake” and apologized. But wait a cotton-picking minute. What exactly happened here?
Lepore found some relevant data in a book by Adam Winkler. Most of the paragraph in question is just a summary of facts obtained from Winkler’s book, and a direct quote. Zakaria presumably found out about this book from Lepore’s article, and reprinted the same facts. But plagiarism? It’s not like the Lepore paragraph was full of original thoughts. Indeed, if I take the list of states and dates and the direct quotes out, very little original text remains:
Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in Gunfight […]. Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic. Laws that banned the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813. Other states soon followed. As the governor of Texas (Texas!) explained in 1893 […]
Zakaria’s version:
As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, “Gunfight” […], firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were passed in Kentucky and Louisiana in 1813, and other states soon followed. As the governor of Texas explained in 1893, […]
Perhaps it might have been wise for Zakaria to mention that this paragraph was based on Lepore’s article. But then, unlike papers written for scientific journals, newspaper articles are rarely sourced.
In any case, I just don’t see how this warrants a suspension and a public humiliation of a journalist who is respected around the world. Not to mention giving an undeserved opportunity for right-wing nuts who find even Zakaria’s centrist views much too liberal for their taste to rant again about the “liberal bias” of the “mainstream media”. A prime example comes from the blog site American Thinker: “wouldn’t it be prudent to cut him and let him paste away elsewhere? I mean, I know you have a Muslim quota to fill, but I’m sure there’s an acceptable replacement you could poach from Al Jazeera.” Huh? Yes, I know Zakaria was born a Muslim, but he is no more a practicing Muslim than I am a practicing Catholic. I guess these are the same “American thinkers” who cannot tell the difference between a Muslim and a Sikh when going on a murderous rampage. But then, who cares about such nuances when you can spew hate?
Julian Assange might be a weird fellow, but until now, I had no reason to distrust Wikileaks.
But that was before Wikileaks concocted up a fake New York Times article, combined with a spoofed PAYPAL official blog site to back it up.
Now I regret having sent them money once. My respect for them was based on their perceived moral authority, taking considerably risks for the sake of public transparency. But apparently, their high moral standards apply only to others, not to themselves.
I admit I read Ayn Rand’s
magnum opus from cover to cover several years ago. I may not be an adoring fan, but… I get Ayn Rand. I think I understand her and I certainly appreciate her message.
She was trying to create an intelligent ideological counterpoint to radical collectivism. Her novels always suffered from heavy-handed, preachy writing; it’s sometimes hard to decide if the author meant what she wrote or if it was a clumsy attempt at satire. Still, the message of Atlas Shrugged is not to be shrugged off (pun intended). It is a magnificent defense of free market capitalism, enlightened selfishness as the driving motor of a successful society, but dragged down by collectivism, entitlements, corrupt politics and lobbying.
One thing Atlas Shrugged doesn’t represent is populism. In fact, it is the antithesis of populism. Which is why I found it ironic that some of the support for the recent movie adaptation came from neo-conservative circles such as the Tea Party. Perhaps they don’t realize that their views are almost as contrary to Ayn Rand’s teachings as the presumed “socialism” of Barack Obama. Ayn Rand’s enlightened capitalist heroes are not ignoring facts that they find inconvenient. They aren’t advocating off-loading hidden (e.g., environmental) costs onto the rest of society. They simply do not believe that anyone has a right to demand their self-sacrifice. They do not owe anything to society. They have a right to what they own: their assets and their ideas. Okay, Ayn Rand sometimes took it a bit too far; some of her heros, after all, turn to overt terrorism in order to defend their ownership rights.
Anyhow, I just finished watching Atlas Shrugged Part I, courtesy of Netflix. It’s not a great movie by any means, but it was better than I expected. As a matter of fact, it was less preachy than Ayn Rand’s book, which certainly helped. I am not sure I approve of the idea of moving the story’s setting to the near future. Ayn Rand’s original story had a sense of timelessness. Keeping its timeframe ambiguous, but with a kind of 1950s, early 1960s atmosphere also could have helped avoid a somewhat artificial explanation behind the importance of railroads. Still, the rewrite wasn’t clumsily done, and I am actually looking forward to the sequel, if it is actually produced. (Supposedly, it is in the works.)
Yes, I am looking forward to watching Atlas Shrugged, Part 2… even as I am rooting for Obama’s re-election. Does this mean that I am delusional?
Here are some recent gems from my country of birth, all uttered this week by Hungary’s ever so democratic prime minister:
It must be great to know that the future of democracy in Hungary is in such committed, firm hands.
According to a recent survey, Hungarians believe they are a minority or threatened majority in their own country. They believe that Hungarians represent only 46-58% of the country’s population, with the rest being mostly Roma (14-21%), Jew (10-12%) or other foreign nationalities (10-11%).
In reality, according to the 2001 census (the latest available), the population of Hungary is 93.2% Hungarian. Roma represent 1.9%, the number of Jews is not known (Jew is not a recognized ethnicity in Europe) but the number of practitioners of Judaism is around 0.1%; and people of foreign nationality (e.g., Arab, Chinese) represent only 0.16%
It is not difficult to guess that quite likely, this cognitive dissonance is closely related to the alarming rise of right-wing nationalism in my country of birth.
My country of birth, Hungary, is rapidly deteriorating into the kind of surreal place more familiar to fans of Terry Gilliam films.
Take the following letter that was sent, among other places, to all hospitals (hospitals!) in Hungary. This is my translation; I tried to be as literal as possible but of course bureaucratese is not an easy language to master.
File Number: 29482-I/2012-KTF
Administrator: Ildikó Bátri
Attachments: Forms, 2 pcs.
To the chief financial officers of all budgetary institutions under the management or maintenance and management of EMMI
On location
Subject: Call for reports for the National Equestrian Sector Registry as specified under Government Decree 1061/2012. (III.12.)
In accordance with the text of paragraph 9 of Government Decree 1061/2012. (III.12.) about the duties and the regulations needed to carry out priority duties in the National Equestrian Program, to facilitate unified asset management goals, the affected ministers must provide recommendations for the creation of a national equestrian sector registry.
Even in these days, significant assets are present in the equestrian sector. Assignment to accepted strategy is an essential condition for responsible asset management in this sector. A first step in this direction is to create a sectoral state asset inventory.
This requires a full survey and census, based on unified criteria, of all state asset elements related to the equestrian sector (real estate, land, related fixed assets, movable assets, horses, immaterial goods, etc.), a determination of asset values, and on the basis of this, the creation of an asset register (inventory) that forms the basis of asset management.
On the basis of the above I request that, by completing the attached forms, exclusively via electronic transmission – also indicating negative answers – no later than
Monday, July 9, 2012, 4 PM,
please return your responses to the e-mail address ildiko.batri@****.gov.hu.
I bring to the attention of intermediate managing agencies with respect to institutions under their management that they should arrange for the collection of the data and its timely submission.
Budapest, June 26, 2012.
With regards,
Signed and sealed, of course, with a very official-looking stamp.
The mind boggles.
The first American president who made a serious effort to introduce universal health care was Teddy Roosevelt, almost exactly 100 years ago. Teddy Roosevelt is of course also famous for the eponymous bear.
And now we have ObamaCare, upheld by the United States Supreme Court in a surprise decision, with conservative justice Roberts being the “swing vote”.
You put bear and care together and what you you have? A care bear, of course. Maybe supporters of ObamaCare will celebrate by sending plush care bear toys to the White House…
I was watching CNN this morning. At around 10:08 AM, they announced that the United States Supreme Court struck down the key “individual mandate” provision of Obama’s health care reform law.
A few minutes later, it dawned on them that the justices’ comments relating to the Commerce Clause were not the end of the story. They still weren’t sure of themselves but they corrected the headline.
Finally, after an additional several minutes, it became clear: the law has been upheld.
I am sure I will hear more about this “save” on CNN’s Reliable Sources this Sunday…
Parliament passed Bill C-11 Monday evening. That means that we are one Senate approval away from having a law in Canada that criminalizes acts such as watching a foreign DVD (even one with expired copyright!) using region-free software.
I am really ticked off about this. So much so that I am contemplating doing just that: breaking the law every day by watching a Hungarian DVD or ripping a DVD to my hard drive, and announce publicly what I have done.
But then… life is too short. There are more important things to be outraged about. And realistically, this government knows fully well that the letter of this law is unenforceable; that in reality, nothing has changed insofar as our daily lives are concerned, except that there is now one more law on the books under which all of us can be treated as criminals at the pleasure of the Powers That Be. Just what Ayn Rand warned us about.
Still, if someone were to start such a civil disobedience campaign, I would be sorely tempted to join it…
Elie Wiesel is a well known Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate.
Wiesel was also a recipient of the Grand Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary.
Not anymore. He decided to repudiate the order. This is his means to protest the participation of László Kövér, Speaker of the Hungarian National Assembly, in a ceremony in Romania honoring the author József Nyirő, a member of Hungary’s national socialist Arrow Cross parliament in 1944-45.
Elie Wiesel had enough and I can’t blame him.
