This reminds me of the American atrocities at Abu Graib

An AP article by Dusan Stojanovic in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Al-Qaida's arm in Iraq released a video Saturday showing its militants lining up five captured Iraqi security officers and executing them in the street..."


"A statement posted on an Islamist Web site along with the video denounced the five men as "American dogs" and warns other Iraqis they would meet the same fate if they join the security forces. In the video, the five men are seen lined up, their hands bound behind their backs, and shot in the back on a street in front of passers-by."

Click here: JS Online: News: or http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ?SITE=WIMIL&SECTION=HOME

Early responses to wudndux blog

"Your profile is singularly uninformative"

"......you have too much time on your hands!"

"you are a nut!"

eBay litachur and history

"ALL MARKS ON THE BOTTEMS ARE INTACKED"

"Pre WWI (1906) Shell Casing Trench Art .... I believe this is from the Spanish American War or The Boer War"

Perturbative Gravitational Interactions

Ok this is a Cool Space Pic of the Day, tho not of this day but a prior day, a very prior day if you include how long it took to get here, which would make the trilobites look like mere glimmers in their Ancestral Units' beady little eyes. Neat pic of a cool galaxy, whatever caused it, PGI or an intergalactic fender bender.Click here: APOD: 2002 September 9 - Hoags Object: A Strange Ring Galaxy or maybe cut and paste http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020909.html

If you are in NYC before April 17th...

...there is an exhibit of Helenistic artifacts related to Alexander the Great which sounds like it would be worth a gander. The NYT has a review in the 31 Dec issue. His father:

Philip II hired Aristotle to tutor Alexander at age 14 in Greek, Hebrew, Babylonian and Latin, rhetoric and justice.

So, a preppy of the day who took up a life of crime and died far from home. It sounds like there is some very nifty stuff to see, including goldwork from his father's and grandmother's tombs. The show is at the Onassis Cultural Center, Olympic Tower, 645 Fifth Avenue, at 51st Street. Click here: The New York Times > Arts > Art & Design > Antiques: The World of Alexander Was Rich and Beautiful Even Before the

Profits from endangered species

Brian Ellsworth has a brief article in the New York Times on what looks like a very primitive form of creating economic incentives to preserve endangered species. It sounds so primitive at this point that it may make things worse instead of better, but time may change that.

Rather than enforcing a strict ban on the sale of macaws, Venezuela's environmental authorities have instead opted to allow some 30 Warao delta residents to capture and sell a controlled number of these birds. The idea is to provide income to the Warao, and an economic incentive to maintain the macaws.

Venezuela's macaw program is part of an increasingly popular but controversial conservation movement known as sustainable use. The philosophy is that saving a species may require commercially exploiting it.

Without some sort of legally enforcible property rights in the birds prior to their capture, I don't see how this can succeed: we simply create another "Tragedy of the Commons" in which he who takes the last one reaps the benefit while all bear the cost.

Trojan...um...horses

Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy has a humorous little essay in the Texas Review of Law & Politics, Vol. 8, on trademarks which don't make a lot of sense. Would you really feel better with Amelia Earhart luggage? Click here: http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~volokh/trojan.pdf Actually, don't clik there, copy and paste, as I still haven't bothered to find out how to write the code, and copying and pasting a link seems not to work. Time for Blogger.com to make things easier, but I won't hold my breath, and you shouldn't either as you're likely to get tired and blow a gasket, or at least your eardrums and we can't have that on New Years Eve eve, can we lest we overburden the poor long suffering emergency rooms with needlessly self-inflicted aural injuries. Hmm...try clikking here as mayhap I have figured one way. I'll feel downright brilliant or at least not to be lightly laughed out of kindergarten computer time if this works: http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~volokh/trojan.pdf

Hmmmmmm

There seems to be a difference between what the post preview window shows and the actual post on the blog: paragraph breaks disappear. I also haven't found the handy-dandy instructions on how to create links which do not require the reader to cut and paste the durn e-address. Instructions there must be and easy to find, but I thrashed about to no avail for 20 minutes last nite.

Something along the lines of an icon labeled: Instruction on How to Post if you can barely turn the Infernal Computer on" would be a real pleasure to find blinking red/green.

This post has three paragraphs.

Democracy=Apostasy

Here's an interesting bit from an AP article by Slobodan Lekic in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "In another statement on its Web site Thursday, Ansar al-Sunnah and two other militant groups denounced democracy as un-Islamic. The statement said that democracy could lead to passing un-Islamic laws, such as permitting homosexual marriage, if the majority agrees to it.

"Democracy is a Greek word meaning the rule of the people, which means that the people do what they see fit," the statement said. "This concept is considered apostasy and defies the belief in one God - Muslims' doctrine.""
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ?SITE=WIMIL&SECTION=HOME

Dangerous stuff, democracy. Osama bin Laden has denounced anyone who votes in Iraq in January as "infidels," and we have a pretty good idea what he wants to do about infidels.

Daniel Pipes vs Islamism

There is an interesting profile of Islamic scholar Daniel Pipes in Harvard Magazine. ""It's a mistake to blame Islam, a religion 14 centuries old, for the evil that should be ascribed to militant Islam, a totalitarian ideology less than a century old. Militant Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution." ~Daniel Pipes" http://www.harvard-magazine.com/on-line/010540.html His critics call him McCarthyite, racist, and a bigot. I haven't read his writings so I have no opinion other than that he seems to inspire strong opinions.

I wonder what she thinks of Kristal Nacht

Hate speech laws to punish those whose speech offends others? Will the law only tolerate that speech which offends no one? That seems like a funny sort of tolerance. Why were the rioters rewarded instead of jailed?
Click here: OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts

http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006080 Also, in the Sunday Telegraph: >>Ms Mactaggart," (the Home Office minister) "whose constituency of Slough has a large Sikh population, refused to condemn the mob and told Radio Four's Today programme on Tuesday that the play would be helped by the closure.
"I think that when people are moved by theatre to protest, in a way that is a sign of the free speech which is so much part of the British tradition. I think that it is a great thing that people care enough about a performance to protest," she said. << href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/12/26/nrushdie26.xml">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/12/26/nrushdie26.xml Are the lights twinkling out over there? In the name of free speech?

Well, why not?

Half the world seems to have a blog, so I have decided to give it a try. At the very least it will relieve some of you from the torrent of email with which I have inundated you. Now you can clik or do without. Feel free to send comments or snicker in obscurity.