Reading about the ethnic cleansing going on in East Jerusalem by
fanatic orthodox Jews backed by Israeli army, police and government,
I can´t but remember the words of one Jew who lived two thousand
years ago:"Do unto others what you want them to do to yourself."
Freely quoted.

Sadly the case with Israel is, that when Nazis and their collaborators
thought that it was right to kill Jews because they were Jews, in
Israel the case is otherwise:Jews have right to do whatever they want
to do to others, because they are Jews.

Shimon Peres said a couple of years ago that "Israel has the right to
do whatever it wants to protect itself." I don´ think that he really
thought that over.

The explosions in Uzbekistan brought to my mind the US mumbo-jombo
about "bringing democracy to the Middle East." US has troops now in
most of the former Soviet Central Asian republics. Which are all
dictatorships, whose presidents - except Akajev of Kyrgyzstan - are
former communist bosses, who have maneuvered themselves to the
job for life. They are pretty much Saddam Husseins without the
ambition, or light-weight Stalins.

So, group of undemocratic dictatorships and a lone superpower
preaching the gospel of democracy. And the superpower has bases in
most of these countries. So why not use this position to "bring
democracy to Central Asia"? Certainly US have enough firepower in
the area, if diplomacy fails....

Do the people of Central Asia deserve less than the people of Middle
East? Of course, there isn´t a petty tyrannical state that controls the
White House in Central Asia...

Not all geniuses are misunderstood and mistreated in their youth:

His favourites used to receive very liberal assistance from him; and
such was the submission and deference with which he was treated,
such the desire to obtain his regard, that three boys, of whom
Mr. Hector was sometimes one, used to come in morning as his
humble attendants, and carry him to school. One in the middle
stooped, while he sat upon his back, and one on each side
supported him; and thus he was borne triumphant.

------------------------------------------------------------------

...his only amusement was in winter, when he took a pleasure in
being drawn upon the ice by a boy barefooted, who pulled him
along by a garter fixed round him; no very easy operation, as his
size was remarkably large.

[James Boswell(1740-1795):]Boswell´s Life of Johnson in two volumes * Volume one(Dent edition, 1967; originally The Life of Samuel Johnson,
1791), pages 19-21.

Of course, another question is would anyone else but an englishman
consider Samuel Johnson(1709-1784) a genius. His fame is, after all,
to do more with his personality than his works.

As a continuation of yesterdays theme:

The first dinosaur fossils from Patagonia to come to the attention
of the scientific community were discovered by an Argentine army
officer, Captain Buratovich, near the city of Neuquén in 1882...
Buratovich was sent to Patagonia to conquer land inhabited by the
native peoples, and like other regrettable military campaigns in other
countries, this one resulted in the systematic extermination of most
of the native tribes in Patagonia.

Luis Chiappe & Lowell Dingus:The Lost Dinosaurs. The Astonishing
Discovery of the World´s Largest Prehistoric Nesting Ground(2001),
page 30.

My yesterdays numbers for indigenous people in Argentina was little
bit dated, from a book in the early 90´s. A later work claims 500 000
indigenes. Huge discrepancy, but not hard to explain, if one considers
the huge rise of the number of native peoples in for example US
censuses, which one reason has been that people are now more eager
to claim aboriginal identity than before.

What was exceptional in the genocides and mass murders of the 20th
century was not their scale - after all, the new industrial society gave
ability to kill people more efficiently - but that they were (when given
publicity) condemned. Large scale atrocities were not uncommon
earlier, but they were not usually condemned: Nobody claimed that
the leaders of Argentine should have been brought to justice even
when they managed one the most efficient genocides of the 19th
century when they practically wiped out all the native peoples
of Argentine. To this day, only 30 000 of them remain.

So, the genocides of the 20th century were no exceptions in the
peaceful flow of human history; that stream has always been red
from human blood, and what was exceptional in the 20th century
was that the atrocities were almost universally loathed and some of
their leaders and "ordinary" participants were brought to justice.

USA`s veto in the United Nations Security Council which stopped the condemnation of the murder Sheihk Yassin is a latest in long series of
own goals by USA. Whatever the thing that Israel is accused of, USA
rides to the rescue and Mr Negroponte claims that "Israel has the
right to defend itself!" - even when it kills UN workers and blows up
UN food storages, like happened in the late 2002.

One can ask only why is USA doing this? It gives United States bad
publicity; it gives Israel´s government ideas that government of
United States probably doesn´t mean (like now Israel probably
considers that it has USA´s support to kill anyone it wants to); it
doesn´t help the situation in Palestine and it certainly doesn´t help
either Israel nor the United States.

One should ask, what would happen if USA wouldn´t use it´s veto
to "protect Israel"? Not much. Maybe Israel´s leaders would be a
little bit less belligerent, maybe they would be little more eager to
find peaceful solution. Certainly USA would be viewed bith less
contempt in the Middle East - and the rest of the world. Certainly
Israel would not be any more danger if USA would treat it the same
way as "ordinary countries".

Of course I understand that Israel is not a matter of foreign policy
in the United States. The government´s unconditional support for
Israel is a product of the strong position that Christian Fundamentalists
have in the United States. Some 25% of voters in the last presidential
election are claimed to have been basically protestant fundamentalists,
of whose votes are important when only half of those who have the
right to vote bother to vote. And Israel plays a huge part in their
fantasies of Armageddon.

Ahmed Yassin was not a nice man. But lynching - this time done by
rockets - isn´t nice either, and if you kill 7 other people and wound
17, when doing it, then you are not a good guy either.

If Israel had the proof that Yassin was the mastermind behind
the bombings that Hamas has claimed to be responsible of, then it
could have come clean and show the evidence to whole the world and
demand that the Palestinian Authority bring him to justice or that
otherwise they will. But they didn´t.

Justice, the rule of law, isn´t for nice people only. No one should be
above the law, no one should be outside it, so that you can kill him
or her without that you are yourself brought on trial. If Yassin was
- as I believe, by the way - partly responsible for the current slaughter
in Palestine, then his place would have been in courtroom, not in
morgue. And the same goes for Ariel Sharon, Saul Mofaz and other
Israeli leaders.

Those who support the murder of some 150 Palestinian activists by
Israel, mainly by missiles launched from helicopters, should remember
that about the same number of innocent bystanders have died. And
most of them remember - but don´t care. Because they simply lack
one of the things that makes us human: Empathy.

It seems that the government of Israel wants the country to "live by the
sword" and the majority of the people are backing them. When reading
articles like this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3556593.stm

I can´t but hope that Israel also "dies by the sword". It´s leaders have
since the murder of Rabin destroyed all hope of at least a relatively just
peace settlement and have succeeded in killing of some 3700 people by
now. And what do they want? Decades of war, of course, with endless
victims on both sides.

Major western powers are totally incapable - not by their capabilities,
but because of their lack of will (killing some 20 000 Iraqis seems to
be easy job compared to opposing Israel) - to stop this madness and
force a just peace settlement. In fact they are pretty much doing
everything to ensure that the endless war that the Israelis seem to
enjoy so much - or at least which their current leadership seems to be
so proud of - continues without end in sight. Israel seems to be for
western countries what cows are to Hindus. Pity that they didn´t
exactly have this kind of view of the Jews some 65 years ago.

In a way, Palestinians are also victims of the Holocaust. Because of it
Israel can do whatever it´s leaders want. And for 37 years they have
wanted - except for a short interlude - to be cruel oppressors that
have the whole world on it´s knees before them.

But in the end Israel´s current leadership and it´s backers in other
countries are with each new atrocity digging not the grave of
independent state of Palestine, but the grave of the state of Israel.

You have been impronised for your entire life, and then one day you
get your chance, escape and get to be free for a little time - and then
you are shot: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040319/80/ep15d.html .

I have to admit that I felt terribly sorry for the gorilla, and not so
for the "terrified" zoo goers. After all, there are 6,4 billion Homo
sapiens on this planet, but very few gorillas... Not enough to waste
like this. Police officers, on the other hand, are not endangered
species.

The western countries and their allies are waging a `war´against
terrorism. Pity then that one of their major `weapons´in this fight
is state terrorism, which kills a far more people in a year than all
the terrorist groups of the world, but seems nowadays to be quite
acceptable.

When fighting a minor danger - which terrorism is, whatever claims
are made (last year terrorism claimed something like 2000 lives,
which is pretty low number when compared to the fact that about
20 000 - 30 000 people die EACH DAY because of lack of clean
drinking water) - it seems that a growth of a greater danger is
justified. Typical human attitude. We grow fixated on dangers like
terrorism, which we know will not defeat us, but ignore greater
threats that can. That´s one of the reason why the inhabited
continents of the world are littered with the remains of fallen
civilizations. Our problem is that we have now only one, global
civilization. All eggs in the same basket, which is warming rapidly.

I am a big fan of science fiction and have been for almost twenty years,
but one thing that usually bothers me in science fiction is that even
when describing societies in faraway future the "mainstream" science
fiction novel, tv series or movie supposes that nothing much changes,
and if something changes, then the model for this new kind of society
is taken from Earth´s history, and usually not real history, but from
`popularized´history, which I mean the kind historical knowledge that
an ordinary person has a decade or several decades after their
education has ended. So we end having space empires ruled by
emperors and aristocrats, or like in `Firefly´, the victorious North and
the defeated South, played again in space.

Of course it can be said that science fiction is, like all literature, about this
day. But the `today´that the work is `commenting´ could be hidden
better. And the authors could let their imagination float more freely;
in science fiction tv series and movies the most common alien is the´
"human with a badly-masked face", but even in good sf, like Iain (M.)
Banks´s `Culture´ we find that pretty much the same human type has evolved on a huge number of planets, which I find a pretty... unbelievable.
I have to admit, that an alien civilization or entity, who stays always
a mystery is a better thing that an alien civilization that is practically
`us, but little different´.

And then there are those alien planets in tv series and movies that
are all, so it seems, exactly like California countryside.

2004 FH flies past Earth about now from the distance of 43 000
kilometers. In the press it´s called an `asteroid´, but it´s diameter
is only 25 meters. Compare that with Ceres (934 km) or the newly
found objects of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, like Quoaor, Ixion or
Sedna (1000-1700 km all of them).

It´s claimed that Pluto isn´t a planet because it has - expect it´s
spherical form - little common with the bigger planets. But how much
common 2004 FH has with Ceres? Not much. Ceres - which will be
visited (if everything goes well) by the NASA probe Dawn later this
decade - is a world, even if a small one. 2004 FH is a big boulder,
really a meteoroid and not an asteroid. Objects twice as big than it have
hit the Earth´s atmosphere during the last decades and exploded
without causing any harm.

So, it would be better call it an asteroid. But where to draw the line
between an asteroid and a meteoroid? Usually asteroid is considered
to be bigger than 50 meters. Nice round number, even if a meteroid 49
meters of diameter and an asteroid 51 meters of diameter are really
the same thing. But the line is have to be drawn somewhere, or so we
think.

We have the same problem with the newly found moons of the gas
planets. The number of their moons have doubled in the half decade
or so and astronomers are now finding objects only a few kilometers
of diameter around Jupiter. Can they be called moons? How small a
planetary satellite can be and still be considered a moon?

Certainly the objects that form the rings of the gas planets can´t all
be considered to be moons...

In the end, all our classifications are arbitrary. We can easily distinguish
between a star, a planet and a comet, but as we have found out in the
last decade or so, there are objects that bridge the gaps between them.
For example: Brown dwarfs, which are `failed stars´ and huge planets
ten times the size of Jupiter, which are still too small to be considered
brown dwarfs, but seem huge to be considered to be planets and
large numbers of them seem to be drifting alone in space. Are these
planets? Or are they `failed´ brown dwarfs?

Around the world simple journalists have written that "vote for the
socialists in the Spanish election was a vote for al-Qaida" and that by
voting the socialists back into power, the Spanish people let "terrorism
affect the democratic elections of a free country".

Pathetic. The conservatives tried to hide the truth about the
perpetrators of the deadly attacks because they believed that the
truth was harmful to them. They lied to to the Spanish people and
accused ETA, even when the evidence already pointed to al-Qaida or
it´s affiliates. And when this came out, people got angry and wanted
to get ridden of this scheming and lying ruling party and so they did
by using their democratic right to choose who runs the country.

According to these journalists, the Spanish people had only the right
to vote the ruling conservatives and now that the socialists have won,
these journalists think that they should have betrayed their election
promises and should have started to support the occupation of Iraq,
even if the party has opposed the war from the beginning.

It has been said many times, that one of the casualties of the "war
against terror" are civil liberties, and certainly, many people seem to
think that democracy should be abandoned, so that people would not
make "wrong choice", like the Spanish people did according to them.
Vladimir Putin´s Russia seems and ideal model for the "free world"
that fights against terrorism - by getting rid of it´s own freedom.

And the final irony is, that if the conservatives would have come clean
from the beginning, telling the truth and not fairy tales about ETA
involvement, then they would fared far better in the elections. They
tried to avoid defeat and so brought it upon them.

As the evidence linking Moroccan Salafist terrorist group to Madrid
bombings is becoming stronger, one could ask - playing devil´s
advocate - why Iraq, which had no connections with international
terrorism, was invaded and Morocco not. After all, Morocco is a proven
center of international terrorism. The 43 fighters killed in Chad last week
were most likely Salafists, which group was probably also behind the Casablanca bombings. Moroccan government says it´s fighting terrorism,
but the Moroccan elite has also strong ties with conservative clerical establishment, which then has ties with fundamentalist groups all over Northern Africa.

And Morocco illegally occupies Western Sahara and has for 14 years
succesfully opposed the vote of independence that the 1989 treaty
between Morocco and Polisario, the independence movement of
Western Sahara, called for. Yet there has been no international outcry.
Morocco is seen in the West as a moderate country and 9000 dead
Saharans and 250 000 refugees are forgotten.

Some countries get different treatment than others. Morocco, Saudi
Arabia, Israel and Turkey can do what countries like Syria, Libya, Iran,
Iraq etc can´t. Imagine if the most attackers in September 11th 2001
attacks would have been Syrians or Libyans and not Saudis. Certainly
USA would have attacked both countries, whatever the involvement of
their governments.

US government has been quick to condemn the double-suicide bombing
in Israel that killed 13 people, the teens that blow themselves up
included.

The same government has been very, very tolerant of Israel´s daily
attacks that have killed tens of Palestinians in the last week. But then,
Israel seems to have God-given "licence to kill", which Hamas etc seem
to lack according to the US.

I find it very hard to believe that anyone could not see the connection
between those attacks and the bombings in Ashdod. Israel´s government
"ordered" the murder of its own citizens from Hamas and Al-Aqsa
Martyrs Brigade and now tries to make the most of it to end the peace
process and justify it´s landgrab.

And the western countries just stand aside and leave Israel´s government
to do what they want. And then we wonder about the reasons of
antagonism between the West and the Muslim countries. Ain´t we stupid
or what?

An interesting find in the outer solar system, the farthest known object
in our solar system, prematurely named as "Sedna". Probably under
1700 kilometers in diameter, this very red object orbits the Sun in an
orbit that takes it from 10 billion kilometers to 130 billion kilometers
from it. From outer part of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt to what the
finders want to call the "inner Oort cloud".

A very fascinating find, even if it´s probably too small to be called a
planet - but what is a planet? How do you define it? Well - that´s the
problem. Planets, asteroids, comets etc are all names and classes
invented by human beings; in nature the difference between planet,
asteroid and comet can be pretty much nonexistent. Pluto can be
called a planet, asteroid or Kuiper Belt Object(KBO) - some even call
it a huge comet.

So much wrangling about the definition of planet to come and much
shouting that Pluto isn´t a planet. But what if IAU - the International
Astronomical Union - takes away Pluto´s planet status and then
somebody finds an object in the outer solar system with Sedna-like
orbit that is larger than Mercury? Shall we then demote Mercury?

The fact is that the difference between Ceres, the largest of asteroids,
the bigger members of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, Pluto and Sedna is
largely in the mind of human beings, who always want to classify things
and to be able to say: "That´s a planet, that´s an asteroid, that´s a
comet" and so on.

Regime change in Spain, socialists win the elections. Good thing, but at
what price? Would they have won without the massacre?

They have said that they will bring the soldiers home from Iraq; but can
they keep that promise? After all, can they be seen to be `soft´on
terrorism and still try to catch the people behind the bombings?

The government of Israel seems to have got what it has been trying to
achieve by continues attacks against Palestinians during these last weeks.
A new suicide attack with gives the government an excuse not to
negotiate with the Palestinian Authority and to press on with their
landgrab. And Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade have now given
to Israel´s government just what they wanted. 9 dead in a new suicide
attack in Ashdod.
In the short run Israel will prevail, in the long run it´s digging it´s own
grave. And the pathetic West does nothing except sheds crocodile tears
when Israelis die.
There are in this world many conflicts that are hard to solve, like the
bloody conflict in Kashmir, but the conflict in Palestine isn´t. Certainly a
East Timor -like operation should bring peace, but the western countries
seem to think that it´s easier to let Israel have it´s way.
Pitiful.

I personally think that it´s al-Qaida - or some organisation that has links to
it - that was behind the atrocity. ETA wouldn´t survive an attack like this;
it would lose it´s support. Still, even if it´s al-Qaida - which even the PP
probably acknowledges after the elections - ETA will find it very hard to
continue it´s attacks. ETA declaring ceasefire in whole of Spain wouldn´t be surprising, especially if the ruling conservatives lose the election.

13.03.2004

The terrible bombings in Madrid have got the world´s attention, but I
can´t but think of the massacre in Uganda last month: 240 refugees murdered by the LRA. 40 more than in Madrid, but the difference in
media attention... I read somewhere that the death of an Israeli gets
20 times more publicity than the death of a Palestinian, and it seems
to be the same when we are talking about Spanish and Ugandans:
Not all victims are equal.