Author: Gil

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Help out

oday’s been designated a “Day of Conscience” by people who are trying to stop the genocide in Sudan. If you’re interested in helping save the citizens of Darfur, there are plenty of regional events today that you can participate in.

For more information on the on the genocide in Sudan, you need to go here.

Also: Salim Mansur, a columnist for the London Free Press, discusses the genocide and how it demonstrates the racism of the Arab Muslim world:

This silence is also revealing of culturally entrenched bigotry among Arabs, and Muslims from adjoining areas of the Middle East.

Blacks are viewed by Arabs as racially inferior, and Arab violence against blacks has a long, turbulent record. The Arabic word for blacks (‘abed) is a derivative of the word slave (‘abd), and the role of Arabs in the history of slavery is a subject rarely discussed publicly.

Here, the contrast between the Arab treatment of blacks, irrespective of whether they are Muslims or not, and the Israeli assimilation of black Jews of Ethiopia, known as Falashas, cannot go unnoticed.

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I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver . . .

Article in Forbes about the artificial hurdles that satellite radio faces. Seems that the National Association of Broadcasters actually argues, in front of Congress, that competition would be bad for radio. The NAB also has a history of messing with innovation and stifling consumer choice:

In 1945 many AM incumbents, ostensibly concerned that interference related to sunspots might endanger their rivals in FM, encouraged the feds to uproot the FM dial and move it to a higher frequency band. This rendered half a million FM radios useless and forced the nation’s FM stations to start over. A congressional investigation in 1948 found that the interference fears were bogus and that a Federal Communications Commission report had been conveniently altered to disguise that fact. Too late–the shift helped inferior AM technology remain dominant for the next 25 years. The coda: In 1954 the inventor of FM radio, Edwin Armstrong, frustrated by repeated setbacks and all but bankrupt, penned a suicide note to his wife and leapt out the window of his 13th-floor apartment.

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The Rest Wing

Perhaps the need for clean public toilets will lead to an Iranian counter-revolution. As the Brooding Persian sez:

“A country, I keep telling everyone, which finds it practically impossible to keep its public restrooms clean has no business pursuing nuclear power.”

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Oil for Money

Great piece in the NYTimes today about the scandal of the UN’s Iraqi oil-for-food program. Claudia Rosett at the Wall Street Journal has been way out in front on this story, so it’s good to see it get front-page treatment from the Times.

Because, y’know, it shows that a lot of people had a vested and venal interest in not seeing any sorta change in Iraq. Which is to say, they were making boatloads of money by supporting the regime of a brutal dictator (or a “racketeering crime family,” as Hitchens has put it).

Note: One of the writers of the Times story is getting subpoenaed in the probe of the CIA leak.