New Battlestar Galactica Series

Last year, I started watching 1979-era Battlestar Galactica episodes on the SciFi channel. The show was pretty decent, and when I heard that a new series was being made, I was initially excited. Then I read the intro:

So we’ve set out to bring the old boy back to life and give him a new look and a new outlook on life. And we’re going to ask him to tell his stories again, from the beginning. Tell them again, but this time go deeper. See, we were young once and when the old guy spun his tales of Apollo and Starbuck, we were satisfied with clear-cut heroes and nakedly evil villains. But we’re older now. We’ve eaten a lot of popcorn over the years. We’re ready for a bigger meal. Make the story more complicated. Make the people less black-and-white. Challenge us, provoke us, grab us by the throat with those massive hands and dare us to invest ourselves in flawed characters who face ambiguous choices in an imperfect world. Dare us to root for heroes with all-too-human weaknesses. See if we’ll still embrace them if they fall prey to their imperfections.

See if I still care to watch the show. Incidentally, that seems to be the theme of all the original movies and many shows the SciFi channel makes: empty, plotless and nihilistic shoot-em-ups where there are no good or bad guys, just hormone and violence crazed lunatics running around and bitching about how pathetic and primitive human beings are.
(There is some good stuff in the mix: Stargate SG1 is a great show, and Tremors isn’t bad either. SG1 and Law and Order is pretty much the extent of the shows I watch on a regular basis.)

The Palestinian people does not exist.

I came across a revealing quote today:

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

It’s by PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein in a 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw.

Glow in the dark fish!

The next miracle of genetic engineering has arrived: glow in the dark fish!

Eco-freaks are already moaning:

“It’s biological pollution,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety. He said that even if the GloFish was not dangerous, failure to regulate it would set a precedent allowing many other ornamental fish to enter the market unimpeded.

The fish may actually be the first positive thing to come from environmentalism: they “were originally bred to help detect environmental pollutants.”

North Korea

The United States, South Korea, Japan and the European Union decided today to suspend construction of two nuclear reactors in North Korea. The nuclear reactors being built for North Korea are extortion payments by western nations meant to delay plutonium production at North Korea’s other nuclear plants (built with western aid as well, of course.) The suspension comes several months after North Korea announced that it was building nukes aimed at annihilating the United States because Bush called it “evil.” Not to worry, the suspension is only for a year, after which our government will resume helping North Korea develop the technology aimed at our destruction.

Meanwhile, aid shipments to support North Korea’s army are continuing by the west. CNN explains why a nice little communist dictatorship like North Korea is in such dire straights:

The isolated, hardline Communist state of 23 million people — branded part of an “axis of evil” by U.S. President George W. Bush — has been hard hit by several years of natural disasters, chronic food and energy shortages, and economic mismanagement.

Damn those isolationist bastards in the Bush administration for causing poor old North Korea such troubles! And here I thought it had something to do with North Korea being a brutal slave state. Silly me.

Not everyone is lining up to support everyone’s favorite dictator – “Japan suspended food aid after relations soured over the North Korean government’s handling of conflicts between the sides, especially the kidnappings of Japanese citizens to train North Korean spies.” How dare they think that the kidnapping and torture of their citizens and a few ballistic missiles lobbed at them justifies taking aid from millions of starting Korean soldier..err farmers. North Korea has responded by demanding that it is Japan that is responsible for atrocities because “all the crimes committed by Japan [before WWII] were war crimes and the most hideous human rights abuses which should be punished irrespective of the then domestic law or the statute of limitation.”

The Glorious Leader himself is sticking to his usual line: “This shows that it is only right for us to increase the nuclear deterrent force.” Wow, this guy can’t go wrong. He threatens to build nukes, and gets free nuclear plants. The more millions he starves to death, the more aid he gets for his military. He kidnaps and tortures Japanese citizens and he gets media sympathy for Japanese century war crimes. The more he shows the world what totalitarianism is really about, the more sympathy, pity and aid he gets. There’s never been a better time to be a communist dictator.

Google

In the first 15 days of November, I had 1008 unique search engine hits from Google, contributing to most of my 38,181 hits and 4,258 visits. Here are the top 8 queries:

  1. jewish racism
  2. cultural misunderstanding
  3. html compression
  4. george bush award for excellence in public service
  5. middle east terrorism
  6. victorian morality
  7. arguments for fox hunting
  8. prostitution and religion

Kabbalah is NOT a New Age movement

I was browsing the web, when I came across the “Kabbalah Centre.” It’s basically Madonna’s attempt to make some money from the New Age movement. I was sure that this was a new age deal when the first thing the video on the homepage said is “Kabbalah is NOT a New Age movement.” The web site is actually very well designed, and sells all sort of neat stuff, like a $36 piece of string (“The Red String protects us from the influences of the Evil Eye”) and $20 t-shirt with mystical “ego-conquering” powers (“Simply focus your eyes on the letters, then visualize destroying your ego.”)
Anyway, Rabbi Madonna has some advice for doctors:

A patient was rushed into the ER with a heart attack. …. I asked that he be taken to the lab, and his heart actually stopped twice on the way. As it turned out, his right coronary artery was completely blocked. We worked on him for about 30 minutes, but nothing was helping. Whatever we tried failed. I felt so helpless. My last option was to start meditating intensely upon the healing sequence..Out of nowhere, the blocked artery opened!And even for network administrators:

Hebrew letters transmit spiritual signals. In the language of the Internet, they do it in broadband. Consider them T3 lines. Faster than DSL. Quicker than cable modems. They’re like fiber optic lines carrying the full spectrum of cosmic energy. I gotta get some of that kabbalaic T3 ego-conquering power, baby, yeah!