The History of Assaulting Progress

I own many books in the genre of "non-fiction miscellany" (I find 'trivia' to be too, uh, trivial a term for these things). In any case, I just read in Panati's "Browser's Book of Beginnings" about the formation of FM radio (p.221-2). Basically, Edwin Howard Armstrong patented FM to provide a clearer, less static, signal than the currently dominant AM radio. His patent was in 1933 but FM didn't become available until the late 40s. Why? Well, before I answer that, I will ask you that if you *do* listen to radio, do you do so on AM or FM. I believe the majority will answer FM. OK, so let's continue.

According to Panati and the Wiki, RCA successfully sued the FCC to prevent FM from being allowed on the radio. The suit lasted years. Sarnoff, head of RCA, also sued to prevent Armstrong from getting patent royalties from inventing FM and Armstrong committed suicide in 1954 as a result of that battle.

Why did RCA try to block FM? Because they owned AM. Did RCA succeed in getting the FCC to hamstring and restrict FM? Oh yes indeed. Was this good for the world. No, I don't think it was - considering that everyone prefers FM.

Does this remind you of anything? I'm sure somebody put a list up somewhere, in some book, about these types of things - The History of Assaulting Progress - where a company, or the government - uses all of its resources to hurt others, and hurt progress, in order to keep its own money flow.

I'm not naive, so I am not arguing against commerce or against companies looking out for themselves. But if there's any mature theory of government (libertarians, Marxists, and fellow travelers need not apply), all of these theories try to strike a balance between individual rights and community rights. The corporation ("Big Business") is basically a private collection of individual rights - but the rest of society has a right to progress.

I'll look for the list of those who've assaulted progress but off-hand we can include all those Oil Companies, and their marionettes in the Republican Party including their bought and paid for President G.W.B, who furiously try to keep us from alternative fuel.

Pic of RCA from here, of Armstrong from the Wiki.

Boston 'Catastrophic' Water Woes

Right after Motzei Shabbat, my internet connection wasn't working, so it took a bit for us to get the message that there was a 'boil water' emergancy condition for eastern Massachusetts after a 'Catastrophic' water main break. This is not a good way to begin the week. Add onto that the terrorist bomb attempt in Times Square and a children's Tylenol recall, and you got a trifecta of Doom.

I have a few musings on the water subject:

1. After taking a shower last night, bathing myself in e-coli, I realized that I hadn't felt so dirty after 'washing' since I went to the Washington Heights mikvah erev Yom Kippur.
   
2. It's situations like these that we need to recall whenever we feel high-and-mighty about our technical mastery of nature. A busted pipe - a few centimeters gone wrong - will leave 2 million people without potable water.
   
3. Also, this should remind the crunchy green granola types that 'natural' water is deadly.

I hope the crisis will pass quickly - it's not fun to be frightened of a normally life giving substance.

Pic from the Globe story.

Gaza Thoughts 2

Part I asked the question how not only will the Gaza War end, but the whole Arab-Israeli war? My quick answer: end oil as a valuable commodity. Let me expand:

1. First Dispel the Thousand Year War Myth

This is a clear sign of vigorous ignorance: if a blowhard says that the Arabs and Jews have been fighting for centuries, so there's no way the war will ever end, call bull-scheisse. Yes, there's been fighting in that region for centuries, but those battles (a) did not involve Jews except as victims, never as belligerents, and (b) many of the battles were between Christians and Muslims, and no matter how much both sides would like to claim otherwise, Jews and NOT interchangeable with Christians.

A side note to explain that point: Muslims seem to consider Jews and Christians part of the same category and since Jews have thrived in the western (read: Christian, usually Protestant) democracies, modern Muslims just seem to think we're the same. So the crusades were Jewish both because they were fought by infidels, and what's the difference among 'em, and because Jews and Christians work together nowadays so they must have always worked together! People who have not risen up into modernity (like most of the Muslim world) are stuck with the ahistorical Medieval frame of mind which flattens the present into a permanent past.

Now the modern Christians - in the US - identify the Jews as a form of Christian. Note, this is not done (as far as I've seen) in Europe. Not only are there gads of Catholics who have long memories of roasting Jews on open fires for their Traditional Christmases, but Europeans in general have clear Us-Them battle-lines drawn in their brains and Jews are permanently on the Them team.

But American protestants think of Jews as just another form of Christians. First of all, American Judaism is so watered down that its basically protestantism anyway. But for the fundamentalists, who see Jews as part of a religious plan, they see Jews - and Israel - as just a form of Christianity. My feeling is that a random fundamentalist Christian would be shocked to know Jews think Jesus wasn't a savior but a cranky hillbilly carpenter, at best. Fundys read the Old testament as a Christian document, and Israel is *theirs* because it's Jewish. I could elaborate more, but that should be enough for now.

So: to say that there's been Jewish-Muslim violence for centuries is to say (like Muslims) that Jews are just anti-Muslim, like the Christians, or to say (like the Fundamentalists) that the Jews are acting as Christian agents in the most recent crusade. Both these ideas are stupid and wrong. Call that bull-schiesse!

There's a third option, though, for the morons: to claim that the *region* has been in war for centuries and the Arabs and Israelis are just acting out some kind of war-curse the region engenders. Somehow these idiots think Israel is the hotel from the Shining. Morons who say this are usually atheists (or anti-religion theists) who think that religion makes people bloodthirsty and insane. And thus they depict the Arab-Israeli wars as religious conflicts.

Pardon me while I laugh derisively. These atheist dimwits (Michael Ramirez is one of them, when he's not sucking the Gooper trough) don't take the time to understand that Israel is pretty damn secular. Even though the settlers are generally Orthodox weirdos, the majority of Israel - every single Prime Minister for example - are secular. So boom goes that canard.

The bottom line is that the current Arab-Israeli conflict is about 150 years old - speaking expansively - and before 1948 the "war" was generally the Arabs massacring Jews. Since 1948 there has been the current conflict. So even give the innumeracy of the pundits and associated bellyachers, 60+ years does not equal hundreds.

And it bears repeating over and over: this is not a two sided war. As I said (somewhere) that the old slogan from the Hippie 60s was "What if they declared a war and nobody came?" is beyond stupid because of the Arab-Israeli conflict which is "what if they declared a war and only one side showed up?" There'll be a war for as long as the Arabs and/or Muslims have the *means* to destroy Israel. Because they are committed to do so, because of religion or because of some broken vision of their grandiose past. We need to take away their means...

2. The Arab-Israeli War Has Had Two Phases

From 1948-1993 the Arab-Israeli conflict must be seen in the light of the cold war. Simply put, the Western World gave a flying fig for Israel - and the world cared about the Arab states - mainly as a proxy battle between the US and the USSR. The Arab armies were aligned with the Soviets and their weaponry (and money) came from that massive part of the globe. The US supported Israel in the same way we supported South Korea, Taiwan, Greece, or the Contras.

The great tragedy of Oslo was that a point when the Cold War was over the PLO was poised to become irrelevant. All of their resources and support dried up because the Russians had bigger fish to fry. Just like we could have gotten total control of the Western Wall and of Hebron - but gave it away due to idiotic ideology - so too we could have lived without the PLO. But nooooo; Rabin-Peres took a failed organization, dazed and dashed along with the Berlin Wall, living in exile in Tunisia, and gave them an international platform.

However, one can argue that even without Israel giving the Palestinians relevance, they would have risen up on their own because of the second source of funding (and now sole source following the breakup of the Soviets): Arab oil.

Post Oslo (which is post-Berlin Wall) the Arab world maintains a relevance because they are stinking' rich off oil money.

How else can Iran fund both Hamas and Hezbollah? Why would we even care about Saddam Hussein? How is it that Muslim terrorists can be so well funded and protected? Why is it that France rolls over and kisses Arab tush? Because of oil. Oil is what protects the Palestinians and what makes the whole world listen to the raving hatred of the petro-nations that hate Israel.

Were oil to become worthless, then Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, etc wouldn't be able to fund terrorism, the world would consider the Arabs to be as important as undeveloped backwaters like Bangladesh or sub-Saharan Africa.

3. Green=Peace

Support alternative fuels! The idiot Republicans - and their poster airhead Sarah "Drill, I have Babies, Drill" Palin - talked only of ending our dependence on "foreign oil." That little world "foreign" is the rub. It sounds like an innocuous addition and that's the power of PR/Marketing - to create logical sounding slogans for unpleasant truths. (e.g. When did toilet paper become bathroom tissue?! I know there's a difference! I'm shomer shabbat: bathroom tissue is kosher on Shabbas and toilet paper ain't. Stop messing with words, Madison Avenue!! Ahem)

"Ending dependence on oil" means to switch to alternative fuels; "ending...foreign oil" still means we're dependent on oil, but it means we'll just buy more domestically. It's so stupid that people just swallowed it up: it sounds 'green' but is in fact designed to line the pockets of Texans and Alaskans. Goopers are even worse than the bathroom tissue people.

Anyway, by ending dependence on oil; if we turn the world onto cheap fuel (e.g. remember coal?) then we can end the Arab-Israeli conflict: (1) the bad guys won't have the money for weapons, and (2) the world won't need to listen to the Arabs complaining about Israel/Palestine because who listens to poor sand-farmers?

How will the war end? The Palestinians will wake up one day and realize that nobody is giving them money to kill 100 of themselves for every Israeli (the current ratio, or so it seems) and they'll then do what all petulant parasites do when the cash cow dies: they'll get jobs. They'll build roads and schools instead of bombs and will find it better for day-to-day life to actually let Israel live in peace.

Comic Watch: Prickly City

In addition to my daily political cartoon intake, I have a monthly/bi-monthly regular ol' cartoon intake. Politics I need to follow every day, Garfield can wait for a 6x year binge. By waiting a buncha weeks, the storylines make more sense anyway.

My subscription is "Mycomicspage.com" and over the years (I've subscribed on and off since 2000) some of the best 'toons have left. Some of the new ones are very good (probably the best new one is "Cul De Sac"), but others not so much. Usually the cruddy ones don't make it on my subscription page, but there are a few I keep under 'watch,' which brings us to Prickly City.

This is a pathetic attempt to be a Republican Bloom County. As with GOP sponsored comedy, the sense of humor is shrill and insulting; the messages are actually much stupider than the comic medium is assumed to be.

The main characters are a black Republican girl (chyeah, those are common) and a Democratic yellow dog. The girl is the voice of reason and intelligence, the dog is a stand-in for idiotic liberals. Or whatever. Here's a great example (from April 24,2008) of the "political relevance" as Da City takes on the myth of global warming:



Things to emphasize: how every argument about global warming from the GOP devolves into a hissy fit about Al Gore. No matter what Bush and his slack-jawed lackeys say, it REALLY bothers them that Al got a Nobel Prize.

Note, though, that Glenn McCoy, who writes one of the worst political cartoons, has a rather decent daily strip The Duplex. I want to give Glenn credit for both doing a daily strip and political cartoon (not easy) but keeping the politics out of the strip (which explains why it can be funny on occasion).

The Pie and Thomas Friedman

Or, as another blogger put it: "Don't Pie Me, Bro!"

I don't like the NYTimes' Thomas Friedman at all. He's a pompous ignoramous, especially about Israel. Par for the course for the Times which now appears to have NOBODY of value on the op-ed page. Anyway, some pissant group of puerile environmentalists threw pies at Friedman right before he was to give an Earth Day address at Brown University:


A few thoughts:

1. As a professional public speaker, watching this video put me in a cold sweat. I don't like thinking that I can get attacked on a podium and I don't condone it - even for the pie attack vs. Ann Coulter. It's the mildest kind of terrorism - near the level of vandalism - but still terrorism. And I condemn it.
   
2. I still don't understand why Friedman was targeted. Evidently it has to do with his bad attitudes about environmental policy. "Greenwashing" so I'm told. Yawn.
   
3. Brown University should prosecute the terrorists to the full extent of the law. They caught one of the schmucks. No joke: Brown should expel the student - for the assault on an invited guest, and for embarrassing the students, faculty, and alumni. If I were Friedman, I would bring suit against the student for assault, public embarrassment, etc.

h/t Yglesias.

Update: If you really want to mock Friedman, read this. (h/t RBC)