evolution

I have the StumbleUpon extension for Firefox. Sometimes I like to waste time by clicking the StumbleUpon button to take me to a random site.

Sometimes, I regret it. (Work-safe.)

Egyptian police shot 23 unarmed Sudanese immigrants:

CAIRO, Egypt Dec. 30 - Egyptian riot police rushed into a crowd of unarmed Sudanese migrants early this morning, killing at least 23 people, including small children, after the group refused to leave a public park it had occupied for three months hoping to pressure United Nations officials to relocate them.

The police tried for hours to persuade thousands of men, women and children to leave the small square, hosing them with water canon [sic], surrounding them with cordons of riot police, imploring the women and children to board buses, and repeatedly warning that they would be removed forcefully.

But the crowd was desperate, having moved with all their possessions, suitcases loaded with clothing and family photographs, jewelry and kitchen wares, into what amounted to a traffic island in a middle class neighborhood. They hoped the authorities would declare them refugees and send them abroad. They had fled war-torn Sudan, but the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in Cairo - across from where they camped out - told them that they were not eligible for refugee status or for relocation because it was safe for them to return home.

That’s worth paying our U.N. dues for.

UPDATE: Read an eyewitness account from an Egyptian citizen. [inherited from: protein wisdom.]

I don’t have much to say other than “Happy New Year.” Stay safe wherever you are; if you are drinking, get someone sober to drive you home.

Or to the house of that one chick you’ve been ogling. You know, whichever.

I hope to have my blogging mojo back soon.

Get your football and basketball games on Sirius satellite radio. Soon. KU’s is.

» is giada de laurentiis pregnant — I swear I was only with her a few times, and they were totally innocent.

Oh, and those occasions occured only in my dreams.

» naturist yoga blog — Is that what I think it is? UPDATE: Yup. (NSFW.)

» how money dose the average bahrainian makes — Per capita income is $19,200 as of 2004, according to the CIA. *

» jennifer aniston nuked — Unfortunately, no.

» west lafayette blogs — Let me tell you, when evolution was a West Lafayette, IN blog (August 2003-May 2004), it was one of the least known blogs in the universe. Arguably the most widely-known West Lafayette blogger is Paul Deignan, the subject of some ham-handed threats and attempts at intimidation. Deignan is, as I was, a Purdue university graduate student. It’s entirely possible we were there at the same time.

» administrators pay prince of peace olathe kansas — I’m sure Jesus is not a paid shill for the City of Olathe.

UPDATE: Deignan wrote to tell me that it’s possible we may have even taken some of the same classes. I of course was in the mathematics Ph.D. program there, and he’s in the mechanical engineering program.

“Activists” are threatening what was a fairly-tolerant democracy. A must-read on Slate.

I guess the Reuters employee who wrote this story is disqualified as a candidate to be the president of Harvard University: What men, women want on the Web (CNN/Reuters).

SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters) — Internet users share many common interests, but men are heavier consumers of news, stocks, sports and pornography, while more women look for health and religious guidance, a broad survey of U.S. Web usage has found.

The study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project to be released on Thursday finds men are slightly more intense users of the Web. Men log on more frequently and spend more time online. More men also have access to quick broadband connections than do women.

“Once you get past the commonalities, men tend to be attracted to online activities that are far more action-oriented, while women tend to value things involving relationships or human connections,” said Deborah Fallows, a research fellow at Pew and author of the report.

A larger number of men surf the Internet for pleasure, with 70 percent acknowledging they go online to pass time, compared with 63 percent of women. Men are more likely than women to listen to music, view Webcams and pay for digital content.

Surprised? Me either. It’s a simple fact that anyone with working sensory organs and an IQ over 64 knows to be common sense: Men and women, in general, process and react to information and outside stimuli differently. That’s the way it is; that’s the way it’s always been, and that’s the way it will probably always be.

Also:

Already, women are heavier users of e-mail, often going beyond the matter-of-fact responses of male correspondents to use e-mail to share stories, solve issues and reach out to a wider network of friends and family.

It seems broads can’t stop yapping, even on the Internet.

More: Ace of Spades.

Hey… what if I took one of those Pollock-joke e-mail chain letters and replaced “Pollock” with “librul”? That’d be, you know, original and funny, right? *

The Lawrence Journal-World is reporting that the Kansas Corporation Commission has ordered that Westar Energy’s electric rates can be raised 5.1% in much of eastern Kansas and that they should be cut 4.8% in much of southern Kansas.

This amounts to an average increase of $3 and a similar cut for those in southern Kansas.

That’s okay with me. Westar had asked for an $84 million rate increase to “offset financial problems from former chief executive David Wittig’s tenure, and to improve services.”

Uhh, yeah… improve services… that’s it.

They’ll get about $3 million.

UPDATE: You are now free to make any and all jokes involving David Wittig, “service”, and prison.

From the January 2006 issue of Scientific American comes an article titled “Murdercide,” by Michael Shremer, who chooses to gloss over the primary motivation for al-Qaeda terrorists:

Police have an expression for people who put themselves into circumstances that force officers to shoot them: “suicide by cop.” Following this lingo, suicide bombers commit “suicide by murder,” so I propose we call such acts “murdercide”: the killing of a human or humans with malice aforethought by means of self-murder.

The reason we need semantic precision is that suicide has drawn the attention of scientists, who understand it to be the product of two conditions quite unrelated to murdercide: ineffectiveness and disconnectedness…

…The belief that suicide bombers are poor, uneducated, disaffected or disturbed is contradicted by science. Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, found in a study of 400 Al Qaeda members that three quarters of his sample came from the upper or middle class. Moreover, he noted, “the vast majority–90 percent–came from caring, intact families. Sixty-three percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent that’s usual for the third world. These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways.” Nor were they sans employment and familial duties. “Far from having no family or job responsibilities, 73 percent were married and the vast majority had children…. Three quarters were professionals or semiprofessionals. They are engineers, architects and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion.”

Joiner postulates that a necessary condition for suicide is habituation to the fear about the pain involved in the act. How do terrorist organizations infuse this condition in their recruits? One way is through psychological reinforcement. University of Haifa political scientist Ami Pedahzur writes in Suicide Terrorism (Polity Press, 2005) that the celebration and commemoration of suicide bombings that began in the 1980s changed a culture into one that idolizes martyrdom and its hero. Today murderciders appear in posters like star athletes.

The fact that the sample space of al-Qaeda members not having “had any background in religion” does not preclude religious fervor, as I’m sure you can convince yourselves of rather easily. (We all have that friend or relative who spent his early years boozing and “chasing skirts,” only to become a “holy roller” later in life.) Minds change according to time and place, as we all discover one way or another. Furthermore, what constitutes “background in religion?” That isn’t made clear for the readers of this article.

Perhaps I can answer that question for Mr Shermer. What follows is an excerpt from a State Department report on religious freedom in Saudi Arabia (Osama bin Laden is Saudi, as were 19 of the 20 September 11 hijackers) from 2004:

Freedom of religion does not exist. It is not recognized or protected under the country’s laws, and basic religious freedoms are denied to all but those who adhere to the state-sanctioned version of Sunni Islam. Citizens are denied the freedom to choose or change their religion, and noncitizens practice their beliefs under severe restrictions. Islam is the official religion, and all citizens must be Muslims. The Government limits the practice of all but the officially sanctioned version of Islam and prohibits the public practice of other religions. During the period covered by this report, the Government publicly restated its policy that non-Muslims are free to practice their religions at home and in private. While the Government does not always respect this right in practice, many non-Muslims engage in private worship without harassment. As custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites in Mecca and Medina, the Government considers its legitimacy to rest largely on its interpretation and enforcement of Shari’a. Consequently, the Government has declared the Koran and the Sunna (tradition) of Muhammad to be the country’s Constitution. The Government follows the rigorously conservative and strict interpretation of the Salafi (often referred to as “Wahhabi”) school of the Sunni branch of Islam and discriminates against other branches of Islam. Neither the Government nor society in general accepts the concept of separation of religion and state.

All of the provisions I’ve bolded are provided for under shari’a law. In a culture where those who strike out at the hated Jews and infidel West are, as Mr Shermer notes, glorified in posters for children, it’s little wonder that organizations like al-Qaeda have little trouble finding new recruits.

Mr Shermer quotes a Dr Marc Sageman, a forensic psychologist at the Foriegn Policy Research institute who conducted the survey of 400 al-Qaeda members, as saying:

“The suicide bombers in Spain are another perfect example. Seven terrorists sharing an apartment and one saying, ‘Tonight we’re all going to go, guys.’ You can’t betray your friends, and so you go along. Individually, they probably would not have done it.”

That is certainly true to some extent, but again glosses over the question of how they came to be in Madrid with a large amount of explosives and a plan to use them in the first place. Something had to motivate them all to get into that situation in the first place; that “something” is radical Islam, as the group itself said:

“We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid exactly 2.5 years after the attacks on New York and Washington. It is a response to your collaboration with the criminals Bush and his allies.

“This is a response to the crimes that you have caused in the world, and specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there will be more, if God wills it.

“You love life and we love death, which gives an example of what the Prophet Muhammad said. If you don’t stop your injustices, more and more blood will flow and these attacks will seem very small compared to what can occur in what you call terrorism.

“This is a statement by the military spokesman for al-Qaida in Europe, Abu Dujan al Afghani.”

What’s also annoying about this article is that in the very same issue of Scientific American in which this article appears, an article with a more frank discussion of jihad also appears, in the context of the Internet-as-recruiting tool. (Dr Sageman, the forensic psychologist referred to earlier, makes another appearance.) One could reasonably assume that since the same expert is quoted in both articles that the authors at least spoke to each other and perhaps exchanged information. Why then is one so frank and the other trying so hard to avoid a mention of the role of radical Islam in terrorism?

That is a question that becomes more difficult to answer when considering Mr Shermer’s final paragraph, which arrives at conclusions with which I concur.

One method to attenuate murdercide, then, is to target dangerous groups that influence individuals, such as Al ­Qaeda. Another method, says Princeton University economist Alan B. Krueger, is to increase the civil liberties of the countries that breed terrorist groups. In an analysis of State Department data on terrorism, Krueger discovered that “countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking in civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil liberties are unlikely to spawn suicide terrorists. Evidently, the freedom to assemble and protest peacefully without interference from the government goes a long way to providing an alternative to terrorism.” Let freedom ring.

Indeed™.