Heretics' almanac

Is David Irving a martyr or a patsy?

David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison by an Austrian court for breaking the country's law against Holocaust denial. This has prompted his most noted opponent, Deborah Lipstadt, to object, and similar reservations are heard in Jewish communities.

I have to agree with Lipstadt and also what Alan Dershowitz said a few years ago, namely that punishing Holocaust deniers for exercising free speech only makes them martyrs for free speech. David Irving can now claim unjust treatment, and his supporters can claim hypocricy. Irving and his followers deserve to be discredited and disdained, but free speech has to be free. Austria, Germany, and other countries who make Nazi convictions a crime need to repeal these laws - people should be allowed to have whatever opinions they want, even if they're vile.

But when it comes to Austria, I have an additional problem:

Was Cheney just a little too enthusiastic about bagging a quail?

Surrounded by Secret Service agents, Dick Cheney mistook his hunting compatriot for a bird and shot him over the weekend. Apparently, both the vice president and the agents rushed to help the poor guy immediately after it happened.

I don't know if Cheney is a member of the National Rifle Association - I'm guessing he is - but the one completely valid cause the NRA has committed itself to, is gun safety. It seems to me that if you take all the necessary precautions, these accidents shouldn't happen.

The problem apparently was that Harry Whittington caught up with the hunting party "unannounced" after he had lagged behind to pick up a quail he had shot. Cheney was "ready to fire" and put 28-gauge pellets in Whittington's head and chest.

Using money to save babies

I was doing some comparative statistics between Israel and the Arab states (which seem to indicate that the Palestinians might have been more independent if Israel didn't exist, but not better off in any other way), when I noticed something interesting related to infant mortality rates. Which was that while the poorer the countries were, the more of their kids died young; there wasn't a linear relationship. Some managed to save more infants with what little they had, and others did a poor job even with more money.

So I pulled together stats from 139 countries and ran a correlation analysis between infant mortality and per capital income. I converted all the raw numbers into logarithmic scales, and the coefficient was -0.87, which is pretty high. (For the raw numbers it was -0.6). But to find out which countries did the most with their money to save babies' lives. I calculated the ratio between the logarithmic value of these two numbers.

Interesting findings:

Is an ironic twist ahead?

There is increasing violence and noise over the so-called Muhammed cartoons, and more and more world leaders are asking people to calm down.

What needs to happen, is this: Political leaders in Muslim countries need to explain this to their citizens, that in Denmark, Norway, France, and all other countries that have published this cartoons, there is freedom of speech. Which is to say - what gets published in newspapers can not be assumed to reflect the government's policy. And it would be helpful if pulpit imams explained the same thing.

Which will inevitably raise an interesting but uncomfortable question: if there is free and independent press in Europe, why isn't the press free in Muslim countries also free?

Finally a sensible article

Oh, man, most of the time when I read an opinion piece in Norwegian newspapers I cringe. We have drifted far far from the legacy of Odd Eidem - most articles are now hyperbolic rants with a tenuous grasp of rhetoric and fact.

But I finally found an exception, an article I can be enthusiastic about. It's a shame it's only available in Norwegian, but it can be found here and is written by two Norwegians, one of whom is Christian, the other Muslim. I'd have added my name to it as a Jewish Norwegian if I'd had the opportunity.  Maybe I'll translate it when I have time. But spread the good word - this is good stuff.

Escalating outrage

European newspapers print offensive caricatures; extremists in Muslim countries respond with threats of various kinds, diplomatic condemnations, and now the latest: setting fire to Norwegian and Danish diplomatic posts in Syria and Lebanon, which is to say Syria. Norwegian (and presumably Danish) authorities are probably done apologizing and are now expressing anger.

I hate to bring this up, but:

Maybe, just maybe, Denmark and Norway and a few other European countries are waking up to the fact that the regimes of Iran, Syria, and Libya, are bad not just because Israel and the US says so - they really are bad. Now that they are (justly) outraged by attacks on their sovereign territory by state-sanctioned extremists, perhaps they can start imagining how Israelis feel about rockets, bombs, artillery fire, being a regular occurence from these countries.

It should be getting pretty obvious here: the unrest in the Middle East is not a result of Israel's existence or policy; not the plight of the Palestinians; and certainly not of Islam. It is the result of brutal, corrupt, and unjustly rich regimes (whether secular or theocratic) that are dedicated to nothing but themselves.

Why all hotels should offer 802.11 for free

Steven Landsburg wonders in Slate why some hotels offer free wireless service and others charge for it. His preliminary explanation relates to legal price discrimination, but he can't quite make sense of it.

The reason may be because he assumes there is a rational reason for it. Hotels simply haven't figured out where wireless internet fits into their overall offering - is it a necessary feature, such as a TV, soap or a bedside phone? Is it an optional amenity, such as the beer and nuts in the minibar? Or is it one of those weird things only a few guests want, like shoe polishing services?

My guess is that they haven't figured out how to source it, either, so they're probably paying some third party some ridiculous amount for a service that is utterly lacking in transparency (hint: there may be a business opportunity here).

Did W read my blog?

Let's see, it was January 31st, 2006. It was 1603 days since September 11th, 2001, and 11,794 days since the OPEC oil embargo started. It took this long for Bush to realize something that was self-evident even to me:

Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. Here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.

Further:

The best way to break this addiction is through technology. Since 2001, we have spent nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper, more reliable alternative energy sources -- and we are on the threshold of incredible advances.

We have, I should point out, spent at least $200 billion on the war in Iraq, and heaven knows how much on other, incremental expenses for purposes of national security. So, as a fraction of the total expenditures to protect ourselves, we have spent less than 5% on things that would eliminate funding for terrorism forever.