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Timelapse of Christmas Tree

Inspired by Spencer, I decided to capture a time lapse of our decorating the Christmas tree. We picked it up Friday afternoon, let it sit Saturday while I worked on the dishwasher project (more on this in an upcoming blog post), and put the lights on today (Sunday).

We'll put on the ribbons and ornaments over the rest of the week and I'll continue adding to the quicktime movie. Warning: the movie is 48MB so broadband access is recommended. [Update: Movie no longer autoplays, you need to click the image to get the movie to play- QuickTime required, may not work with IE, your mileage may vary, etc.]

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Time Article on Mumbai

Time is running an article today called Mumbai: The Perils of Blaming Pakistan which echos my blog post from yesterday. Here's a snippet:

Most Pakistanis reacted with horror to news of the Mumbai killing spree starting Wednesday, having lived through equally devastating attacks on their own soil. But that initial sympathy quickly gave way to hostility as the focus of blame landed on Pakistan — a knee-jerk first reaction, rather than one based on any solid evidence. "It is a tragic incident, and we also felt bad about it as Pakistan is going through the same problem," says Abdur Rashid, a 67-year-old retired government servant in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad. "But it was really unfortunate to see that even before the operation [to clear out the attackers] was finished, the Indian government stated that Pakistan is involved. It sounds that the entire incident was concocted to punish Pakistan."

I'm glad to see the MSM covering this angle.

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Playing Their Game in Mumbai

The US reaction to 9/11, invading Iraq, played directly into bin Laden's hands. The US was engaged in a theater of operations for five years as al Qaeda recruited fighers from all of Iraq's neighbors to engage the US.

Now that the Iraq debacle is about to come to a close, we're going to focus our energies on Afghanistan and finally pursue the mastermind of the attacks-- the mastermind who very well may have had a hand in the Mumbai incidents.

Unfortunately, Indian PM Manmohan Singh appears to be committing some similar errors as Bush did with 9/11 and Iraq.

If your goal is to try to destabilize Pakistan, with the intent to bring Islamist parties to power there (it worked in Afghanistan in 1996), that's probably the fastest way to get al-Qaeda a nuclear weapon.

(As an aside, this is a classic example of why it's inappropriate to bring democracy to any religiously fundamentalist nation. The world would do well to learn the lessons of Ataturk. A benevolent dictator, he curbed many religious rights because he knew that without a strong anti-fundamentalist stance (like prohibiting parents from sending their kids to private (read: religious, aka madrassa) schools), Turkish republican nationalist pride would never take root.

Countries like Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan need leaders like Simon Bolivar, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk or Abraham Lincoln, who had to roll back many civil liberties in order to try and establish a country on the verge of permanently splitting in two...)

If you had your choice of militants to conduct the Mumbai attacks, what country would you choose them from? That's right, you'd choose Pakistan, to try and incite regional conflict and distrust. (In fact, it now occurs to me, selecting a bunch of Saudis for 9/11 could have been bin Laden's attempt to undermine the cozy US-Saudi relationship)

For family/historical reasons (the Bush/Saud family ties go back several decades), if not because it would constitute a poorly executed strategy, Bush never made a statement like "These attacks have been conducted with the help of Saudi linkages" or "A group which carried out these attacks based in Saudi Arabia came with single minded determination to create havoc in the commercial capital of the country" or "We will take up strongly with our neighbours that the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated and that there would be penalties for lack of suitable measures not taken by them."

Yet each of these phrases were-- here modified to contrast them against 9/11-- uttered by Indian PM Manmohan Singh (full transcript). I know very little of Indian politics, so I don't know if he is loved or reviled by his people (in parliamentary systems, rule is generally by vote of confidence, so he probably has majority support via the legislature), but I think what he's saying is badly misguided.

A much better strategy would have been to come out with a statement that undermines the terrorist aims, that undermines their message, and reinforces that they are fighting a losing battle.

Imagine if he'd issued a statement closer to the following:

I've just finished conferring with Pakistani PM Gilani who expressed his deep condolences and strongly condemned the terrorist acts. Indian and Pakistani intelligence services will be working together to bring those responsible to justice.

The cowards who undertook these acts are fighting a losing battle that we, along with the rest of the civilized nations around the globe, will ultimately win.

Terrorism is a blight on the face of civilized nations like Pakistan and India, and PM Gilani and I are today announcing a multi-national anti-terrorism task force which will usher an age of renewed peace and cooperation between our nations.

There is nothing more that the terrorists want than to drive a stake between us and our neighbors, hoping to destabilize the region, and our duty is to deny them the opportunity of using tragedies like this to further their evil agenda.

India needs to realize that Pakistan is not their enemy, they need to get past the conflicts of the past, and join together to fight religious fundamentalist terrorism.

Terrorists will always strike at the softest tactical (US bases, ships, hotels, nightclubs, airports, tourism centers, etc.) and strategic (i.e. unrest and distrust between India and Pakistan, etc.) targets, hoping to magnify the greatest sources of instability in the world.

That's why Iraq was such a boneheaded idea (plays into al Qaeda's strategic ploys while giving them thousands of tactical soft targets that can be exploited by little more than an IED), and why it doesn't make sense to make Pakistan out to be the bad guy today.

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Turkey Day Etymology

In the mid 1500s merchants would trade a bird called the “Guinea fowl” (Genus Numididae) imported from Madagascar, via the region of Turkey. Of course, Guinea is a Western African nation, and Madagascar is an Eastern African island, so clearly the people who were attributing names to the creature were pretty well already confused.

In any case, the English began calling the bird (Numididae) "turkey" because of the supposed country of origin. The Turks meanwhile, believed the same bird originated from India, and thus called it “Hindi” (incidentally the Turkish word for the country India is Hindistan). But this isn’t the only geographical association with Numididae. The dutch/norwegians have a name that associate the bird with Calicut, Macedonians “bird of Egypt”, and others “Dutch bird”, “bird of Greece” and “bird of Ethiopia”.


Things got somewhat more confusing because the Spaniards returned from the New World with a very similar, but distinct, bird that we commonly call “turkey” today (Genus Meleagrididae), which is indigenous to the Americas. As these birds appeared in Spain, also assisted by the common misunderstanding that the New World was “India”, the New World bird Meleagrididae took on the name applied to its eastern African cousin, Numididae.

As a bilingual speaker of Turkish and English, I have to smile when I hear the bird referred to as “turkey”, whereas in Turkish they call the word “India” (Hindi)... I’ve always wondered... “What do the Indians call it?”

Speaking to my coworker Krishna who hails from India, the name for "turkey" in his local dialect (many of the Indian states have their own dialect) is "Guinea" (or Guinea chicken). At least they got the right continent. :)

Read more at wikipedia:
Meleagrididae Numididae

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Around the Blogosophere

A couple of my friends are posting about politics. My friend Keith mentions Obama and campaign promises:

The reality of ruling is much harder than making campaign promises. More importantly you can tell everyone what they want to hear but in the end, you can only deliver one path. Someone is going to be disappointed.

I agree completely. I alluded to this idea in my previous post about taxes. Now that Obama's in office, the very sticky situation of Guantanamo is going to be first on the block. Now that he gets to read the dossier on some of the evil people who are stored there-- and the sensitive nature of the intelligence we have to hold them on-- is it going to be as open-and-shut case as some on the left have made it out to be?

This is just one gray area here that Obama is going to have to face, partly because the current administration has refused to. Situations like Iraq, the environment, the economy.. All of these will pit Obama between his campaign promises and the stark reality that requires specific actions that may be contrary to them...

My friend Rus writes about Prop 8. He points out that the LDS church is often being singled out, whereas if the very populace that helped get Obama elected, particularly the black and latino vote, voted overwhelmingly for Prop 8. Without their votes, he argues, Prop 8 would have failed.

This is a valid point, but I think the reason why the focus is on the conservative organizations that helped finance Prop 8 (principally the Knights of Columbus and Focus on the Family rather than LDS-- see californiansagainsthate.com) is because the rank-and-file Obama supporter (who happens to be black or latino) is just expressing their personal opinion. Believe it or not, I think much of the "left-leaning" community doesn't have a problem with expression of personal political opinion. What is outrageous is that religious groups organize to inflict their religious views on others through the political process.

Rus quotes the LDS church:

It is important to understand that this issue for the Church has always been about the sacred and divine institution of marriage - a union between a man and a woman.

The fact of the matter is that the LDS church has only been in existence for less than 200 years, whereas the institution of marriage is many thousands of years older. Marriage predates the birth of Jesus Christ. Marriage predates the Jewish faith which is estimated to have appeared at 2000 BC. Marriage has been around longer than any particular religious faith's assertion of its sanctity and divinity.

If marriage was so beholden to the gods of these faiths, then perhaps it would have been important enough for these faiths to have received word from God predating marriage on what marriage meant? Yet no such historical record exists that warns people from entering into a marriage that God opposes. In fact there is no mention of marriage in the Genesis story (that I can recall), which would have been the perfect place for God to have defined it for the judeo-christian-muslim faiths.

The reality of the situation is that humans, like many mammals, establish a pair-bond for evolutionarily obvious reasons. And when religious faiths took over, much like Christmas was selected to coincide with the Roman winter solstice practices of Saturnalia (and much of the folklore with it), Judeo-Christian adoption of the "institution" of marriage was actually co-opting a concept that predated these faiths.

So I find it hard to believe that somehow, these faiths that have come several millenia too late to predate marriage, can insist on the divinity and sanctity of it.

We're left with the valid political debate about Prop 8. If it's what society defines it to be, as I've been arguing, and society (in California) has taken a very restrictive view of it, then let's talk about it on the merits of the argument.

Rus actually makes this point:

I subscribe to the political philosophy that rights can only be secured by legislative or plebiscite action primarily because I believe in honoring the fundamental principle of a constitutional republic... that the majority rules, subject only to those minority rights which are written down in the Constitution. If you discover a "new" right that you'd like included, you have available to you the process of amendment (or, uh, succession... or revolution). This involves a lot of work as your fellow citizens must be convinced, by way of persuasion and debate, that your cause is worthy of a majority vote.

This mimics the concept of a "social contract", where individuals negotiate their rights and restrictions in the interest of creating a "more perfect union", for example. I find it hard to disagree with this line of reasoning. However, it's undeniable that religious organizations had their impact on the outcome of Prop 8, and that reasoning-- that these religions have designs on the definition of marriage that serve to define it for everybody else-- is what I fundamentally disagree with.

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