Paul's blog

The other night, right after work, my wife went for a nice cool-down swim in our pool.

While happily splashing around she suddenly noticed she wasn’t alone in the pool.

Calmly and quietly she left the pool and called me at work, asking me to come home and escort the intruder off our premises.

Which I did.

Here’s a link to a picture I took of the intruder prior to urging him to leave.

(Disclaimer: my description of the manner in which she left the pool may be slightly in conflict with reality)

 

A certain Laura Mallory, of Loganville, GA, is loudly campaigning to ban the Bible from class rooms an libraries. This young mother of four is horrified about the book’s content and fears that the book will cause children, who can’t think critically yet, to indulge in, and even attempt to experiment with, the super-natural. I’m with her on this. I also think we should ban books in which people drive cars. I mean, haven’t you read those stories where 9 year olds get into daddy’s car and cause all kinds of accidents? Comic books are probably the worst: can you imagine the horror when kids think they can do what Superman and Spiderman can do?

We should also keep them away from anything that has to do with politics: kids are so gullible, they may think that politicians actually mean what they say (although, I must admit, the chance that kids understand what politicians are saying is quite remote). In fact, we must ban any form of fiction, because it could be taken as reality, and we all know that fiction is the exact opposite of reality, and we don’t want our kids to get confused about which is which. In fact, it’s better that we don’t expose our kids to any of the craziness that’s going on out there: keep your kids in the house (which, needless to say, is TV and radio-free).

Way to go Laura Mallory! Ban that Bi… errrr hang on… I read that wrong, it’s not the Bible she wants banned, but Harry Potter books. Oh well… same thing. Evil evil evil.

Now, go take your meds.

 

(I guess no Halloween for the four Mallory kids either… can you imagine, oh horror, a night full of witchcraft?)

 

Wake up, Laura Mallory! This is the 21st century.

 

For the story, just google ‘Laura Mallory’. I lost the link to the article, but the most frightning thing about the whole story was, that there was a poll connected to the article: of over 68,000 people who took the poll, 11% agreed with her!

I live in a country where 11% of the people think Harry Potter books should be banned and are dangerous for kids to read. Maybe I am the one who needs to wake up… from a very very bad dream!

Why is it that people in uniforms or with a badge so often think they’re above the law and that you, in dealing with them, automatically lose all your constitutionally given rights?

We all (well, almost all) know that it is unwise to joke about carrying a bomb when you’re anywhere near an airport, and we sort of, reluctantly (don’t we all love bomb jokes?), go along with it. Even though the automatic detainment (and heavy penalty) for using the word ‘bomb’ is a bit silly: statiscally the odds of someone cracking a joke about a bomb actually carrying a bomb, is incredibly much smaller than the guy who doesn’t announce carrying a bomb, actually having one. In fact, it is a bit scarry that in the process of searching for bombs, officials would take anything said to them by the subject-under-investigation into account. Taking someone in custody for joking to have a bomb, is logically as silly as waving him through unsearched when he claims he does not have a bomb. Why all the over-reacting drama? Why not ask the joker “Really? Show me!” and pat him down. And if the bomb-jokes get a bit old, put up a big sign saying ‘Please, no bomb jokes. Heard them all. Not funny’. That would be far more effective than not puting up a sign and sending naive innocent people to jail for five years for making a joke.

 

But again, silly as it may be, I can live with it. It gets way different when the TSA starts detaining people at the gate for calmly and passively expressing non-threatening opinions, as in the case of Ryan Bird, who wrote the political protest statement ‘Kip Hawley is an idiot’ on his toiletry bag. (Kip Hawley is head of the TSA, and I’m not referring to the Tourette Syndrome Association here, although, one has to wonder). He was first told he couldn’t write those things (huh?), then the supervisor had the audacity to inform Ryan that, basically, in dealing with TSA-uniforms and badges, Ryan in essence lost all his constitutional rights (“you can express your opinions ‘out there’, but not ‘here’“), and then proceeded to have Ryan detained. I just checked the first amendment and couldn’t find any exclusion concerning TSA officials!

This is outside of outrageous. What is next? Getting detained for not smiling at some grumpy TSA nazi?

Again, ‘security theatre’, this time by the TSA, whose slogan, ironically, is “TSA … VIGILANT, EFFECTIVE, EFFICIENT” .. they were exactly the opposite in this case.

 

Link to article

I just finished reading Sam Harris’ new book(let) “Letter to a Christian Nation”.

The book instilled in me the urge to buy a big bag full of them and go knock on people’s doors on Sunday mornings at 8am to urge them to read the ‘Better Book’.

However, I realize that in order for this crusade to have any success, the people I would be targetting would be asumed to approach religion in a rational fashion, as Sam Harris’ arguments are all very rational and logical.
Since I know from experience that even some of the smartest and best educated people I personally know have ‘decided’ to not ever let reason interfere with their religious beliefs, this expedition is doomed to fail.

So I will NOT actually go knock on people’s doors.
Which is good, because I don’t like getting up at 8am on Sunday mornings.

Instead .. I just started in Richard Dawkins’ (whom, I can proudly say, I once met. Okay, so it was during a book signing session, so what? I am actually in a picture with the Great Man himself! So! There! I bet you’re all jealous now! And so you should!) new book “The GOD Delusion”. Very promising! So far I only read the introduction, and even THAT was already delightful reading!
 

Sam Harris: Letter to a Christian Nation 

Richard Dawkins: The GOD Delusion

Do fundamentalist Muslims scare you?

Fundamentalist Christians scare me too. And you should be scared too.

How Christian (supposedly a faith based on love, compassion and tolerance) are you really, when you send death threats to a judge who ruled that today’s most popular delusion (Intelligent Design) cannot be taught in public schools?

Scary bigots!

Link to article

My blog’s right sidebar is too wide, especially for smaller screens; I need to fix have fixed that.

In Turkey there is a law that makes it a crime to ‘insult Turkishness‘.

To criticize this law is considered an ‘attempt to influence the judiciary‘. Which is also a crime.

Turkish authors who have written about the brutal slaying of over one million Armenians during WW1 by the Turkish, have been charged with the crime of ‘insulting Turkishness’.

Turkey, who is seeking membership of the European Union, has been told, by that same European Union, that European Union members have a thing against putting writers in jail for expressing opinions. Something to do with that silly thing about freedom of press and speech.

During the trials of these ‘Turkishness insulting‘ writers, there were large protests by people waving European Union flags with Nazi swastika’s on ‘m and slogans referring to ‘EU Fascism’, thereby 

• expressing their opinions about the EU’s suggestion to not put people in jail for expressing their opinions
• supporting a law which, if the EU would adopt a similar one (criminalize insulting ‘European Unioness‘), they would go to jail for.

I’d say, let’s not make Turkey a member of the European Union just yet.

(btw, when was Turkey geographically moved to Europe? Last time I was there, it was still firmly planted in the Middle East)

(link to article)

Note: I hope I didn’t insult anyone’s ‘Turkishness‘ with this post. If so: I’m profoundly sorry for your reaction! (I learned this clever way of ‘apologizing‘ from the Pope!)

Usually, stories in which a person goes to jail, a woman is viciously attacked and another person dies, are very sad stories.

I guess the story I just read is a sad story, but I had to smile anway: the bad bastard went to jail, the dumb scumbag died, and the attacked woman came out on top.

Hiring your ex-custodian to kill your wife, because you don’t like the divorce proceedings? And then this tiny skinny brainiac goes to the wife’s house, uses the security codes he has been provided with by the almost-ex hubby while carrying a backpack with in it the first name of the ex husband and his cellphone number?

Following these smart moves, this same skinny ‘slight’ genius attacks the tall strong female nurse when she comes home.

If he had done some research, he probably would have realized that a ‘close combat’ weapon, like a claw hammer, shouldn’t have been the weapon of choice in this quite uneven match.

A hammer? This Einstein must have taken his boss’ suggestion to become a ‘hit’-man a little bit too literal.

Anyway, she took away his hammer and when the ‘assasin’ then tried to bite her to death (real pro!) she simply grabbed him by the throat and squeezed the life out of the varmint like a rotten banana.

I’m sure that’s not exactly how it was worded in the police report, nor how she experienced the whole ordeal, but that’s how I like to read it, and that IS what the outcome of it all was: Moron husband to jail, not likely to score high points in the divorce proceedings, the lady is safe AND got rid of the annoying husband for a LONG time, and the ‘hit man’ … out of the gene pool!

Yeah!

(read the article)

This is a copy of two separately posted messages, some three weeks ago, from my previous Livejournal blog, in which I wrote under the name of ‘Dutchdoc’ (‘Dutch’ should be obvious, ‘Doc’, because Grumpy and Dopey were already taken, or so the story goes).

I’ll explain the reason for re-posting this later.

It was somewhere in February 2005.
A true story.
I was in line at the security checkpoint at Melbourne (Florida!) Airport. After a stopover in Atlanta, I would soon be on a transatlantic flight.
In front of me, at the security checkpoint, were four guys who were very obviously traveling together.
I estimated them to be in their mid-twenties, conservatively dressed and clearly from Middle Eastern descent. Well.. Middle East.. they could have been Afghani or Pakistani too. But you know what I mean. NOT a group of four guys you want to see board YOUR plane! I mean.. four guys with blond hair and blue eyes… sure… But this.. MAYBE not!
Understandably they were VERY closely scrutinized by the security folks. Every single one of them had their carry-on luggage hand searched, were thoroughly frisked and even had to take apart their cell phones. On top of that: they were treated RUDELY! Barked at. Two of them were visibly angered by the whole ordeal and the other two just giggled. But all four of them endured the whole thing remarkably patiently.
Was this profiling? Of COURSE it was. And I have to admit, legal or not, I don’t care! Profiling, despite being racist, in a way, simply makes sense.
Does that make me a racist? I don’t think so. Just careful. It’s all a matter of statistics.
Anyway.
As I now know, the first names of these four Pakistani-looking 25 year olds were: (8/29: names removed. No longer relevant to the story, besides I shouldn’t have used their real names, especially not in this context).
What was NOT obvious about this whole thing was that there was actually a fifth member traveling in this group.
He followed the four from a distance, watched with interest when they were being frisked, barely noticeably shook his head, smiled, joked with the security officer when he put his THREE laptops on the conveyor belt, and was waved through without any further incident.
I remember thinking: THREE laptops, isn’t that a bit suspicious?
Apparently, it wasn’t.
The five of them would fly to Paris.
And from there, according to their tickets, on to New Delhi.
As for the name of this fifth guy, let me just suffice by giving you his ‘code’ name…

(to be continued…)

And a few days later I posted the rest of the story …

Frightflight II

The (not-so)fright flight saga continues …

As mentioned in the first part of this story, the mystery fifth member of this group was waved through the security checkpoint without any incident.
One may have wondered about this, since I clearly mentioned that the security folks were heavily profiling!
There was a reason the fifth guy wasn’t bothered:
He was blond and had blue eyes.
And his code name, that I promised to reveal, was ‘Dutchdoc’.

And before you fearfully and astonished ask me ‘Are YOU a terrorist? We had NO idea!” .. no, of course I’m not a terorrist. Nor were my 4 companions terrorists.

They were just four co-workers from our software design center in Noida, India, (I have now removed their names from the first part of the story: I didn’t feel comfortable using their real names), who worked here in Palm Bay for a few weeks with some of my team’s members on various issues.
They were returning home, and I travelled with them to attend a design review meeting at said development center.
As for the reason for telling this story I have to add this: some of my Indian co-workers had purchased some electronics gadgets here like games, portable dvd-player and cell phones -yeah, I guess we pay them too much ;-)-. They were very thrilled about this and while we were seated, waiting for the plane to take off, they were showing eachother stuff, handing the gadgets back and forth, pointing, giggling and overall being very excited.

Nobody seemed to care and nobody asked them to quit doing that.
HAD someone told them to stop passing these gadgets around, chances would have been that some of them wouldn’t have immediately realized what was being asked of them: Their English is, well, while better than mine, slightly different from what’s commonly used here in the US.

Since I have SEEN this, I IMMEDIATELY knew what happened when I read the first stories of Northwest flight 42 that returned to Amsterdam after some passengers ‘displayed behavior of concern’ (passing around cell phones).

Again: security theatre!
I can understand that the onboard Air Marshall (yes, there was one) was alerted by this and payed some attention to it.
Had he DONE this calmly and without panicking, I’m almost SURE he would have recognized the innocent nature of the whole thing.
But to recommend to the captain to return IS panicking. (And I won’t even go into the absurdity of the Dutch police holding and questioning these 12(!) kids for TWO days, without realizing these guys were just passing around gadgets).

I guess this is all a matter of training.

The security theatre is becoming rampant. Last Saturday there were SIX flights being diverted here in the US, one for something silly as a woman filing her nails!

We need better training for air marshalls and cabin crew:

– If a guy tries to set his shoe on fire: sure, take him down.
– If a woman doesn’t realize you’re serious when you tell her to quit filing her nails .. diverting the flight is over-reacting.
– If a an elderly American woman goes to the bathroom ‘too often’ .. NOT a reason for TWO airmarshalls to tackle her and make the plane land.
– If you find dynamite in someone’s luggage: yes, that’s a reason for concern and requires some investigation.
– Taking someone into custody for bringing two tubes of toothpaste on a plane .. you need training! (What’s wrong with holding on to the toothpaste and returning it after the flight).

Every year the bi-monthly magazine Annals of Improbable Research awards the so called Science Ig Nobel Prizes for ‘results that cannot, or should not, be reproduced‘

The purpose of this post is to invite you all to read the list of prizes awarded so far, and leave a comment here indicating your favorite(s).

The list can be found here.