Balafon

Charlie Stross waxes sycophantic about France. One of his reasons is that France refused to go to war with Iraq. Oh so principled.

Meanwhile, the French were:

• Getting cheap conflict hardwood from civil-war-ravaged Liberia.
• Bombing the crap out of Cote d’Ivoire.
• Slaughtering peaceful protesters, also in Cote d’Ivoire.

I am not interested in living in a world where people feel they are justified in killing others simply because they’re offended.

Therefore, I am participating in Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. If you are offended by depictions of your prophet, I apologize, but I feel that the principle of freedom of religion is more important than not offending you. If you say that it’s only a few extremists who would want to kill people over this, then I say to you: clean your own house, then we’ll talk. If you’ll stand up in your mosque tomorrow and condemn violence against blasphemers, then we’ll talk.

The picture below is a miniature illustration on vellum from the book Jami’ al-Tawarikh (literally “Compendium of Chronicles” but often referred to as The Universal History or History of the World), by Rashid al-Din, published in Tabriz, Persia, 1307 A.D. It depicts Mohammed supervising the rebuilding of the Kaaba.

In other words, it’s an image of Mohammed drawn by a devout Muslim. There are many such images.

An excellent article in Vanity Fair about General David Petraeus, the commander who turned around the war in Iraq in the face of considerable opposition at home in the US.

Let’s hope he turn things around in Afghanistan as well.

Since my lights are powered by nuclear fusion¹, I will not be turning them off tomorrow night.

Instead I will be turning on all that I can, in order to celebrate human ingenuity and technology.

If you really care about the earth, why don’t you spend a month naked in the woods, without fire, which, after all, produces carbon emissions!

The nefarious corporate behemoth Glaxo-Smith-Kline, whose dastardly deeds we’ve covered before, has added yet another horrendous entry in the ledger of terrible deeds that oppress the poor and downtrodden of the world.

It has put all its knowledge and patents of chemicals that are useful in killing malaria parasites in the public domain.

When will the madness end?