More (slightly newer) old pictures, finally clearing the backlog:



"Don't Let Instarred Mole Dictate Your Fate"
NOTHING CAN CHANGE THE NATURE OF A MAN


"Women like their men well hung"


Strange seafood. Don't ask me what it is. You use a stick and pull it out. It's a bit like a snail, but since it's just boiled it tastes very strange. The flesh is not as succulent as snail flesh either.


"Braised Pork Belly with 'Mui Chye' (contains pork)" - WELL DONE


"Ice Glass Jelly. $2.00", at Food Republic Vivocity


More wth at Food Republic: "Chinese Tea - Lao Cong Shui Xian - $55.00. Chinese Tea - Dong Din Wu Long - $60.00. Food Republic Distilled Water - $1.50. Hot Water Service Charge - $3.00."


Furama Palace: "Exclusively @ Furama City Centre Singapore. Evian Limited Edition 2008 by Christian Lacroix @ $20++ per bottle".
$23.40 mineral water?!


VCH staircase; Maria Callas on Music: "When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed its point"
I wonder what she thought of Shostakovich and Messiaen. Appropriately, this was on the day I was at the atrociously bad RJ alumni band concert.


Sexist and racist police warning: "LET YOUR HAIR DOWN. NOT YOUR GUARD. Don't be a victim of crime. Alert Police Immediately."
Obviously a reference to the Bangla spraycan-gropings of some years past.


"Mmm...". I don't know about the movie (Breath), but I'd rate the poster NC16 at least!


Some Power Rangers 15th Anniversary game: "Defeat evil forces with an over-the-top combat system"
Uhh...



Raffles Hotel lift: "In a land where every RACE effortlessly mixes, we've dedicated an entire restaurant to a RIOT of drastically contrasting flavours".
For mocking and trivialising the tragedy of our time, we should send all the people responsible for this to prison forever.

Reminds me of this stupid postcard from a SDP conference in 2003 ("International Youth Conference For Democracy"):


"FREE & open debate on democracy. Absolutely no SEX discrimination."


I went back to RI for the choir reunion, and was shocked to see:


A very seditious wall painting. The Last Supper - with McDonalds. To think that taxpayer funds are going towards this! Time to cut off public funds and send the entire staff of the school to jail!!!

Also in the Art Gallery:


Vending Machines

And then there was the best exhibit:


I was not alone in thinking that this installation was the most artistic and meaningful of all the works on display.



I saw this overpriced Coke in a vending machine - $1.60 for 500ml. Where could this outrage have taken place? Sentosa? The Zoo?


St Andrew's Cathedral. Time to throw out the moneychangers!



Tissue pouch. I forgot whose. Wth.


Jigsaw: "Hi dear,
Have u managed to piece up my message?
Just wanted to let u know what u pieced up my life, from the day I met u! Thanks!
I ♥ u!"
I wonder why 'dear' was picked in the first place if his/her life needed piecing up in the first place.


Khong Guan biscuit tin: "WARNING: Legal action will be taken against persons using this container other than for Khong Guan products."
Siao.


Kent Vale: "Private Property. Do Not Enter. Enter At Your Own Risk."
Uhh...


"祖传秘方。。。 我的病有救了！"
Sounds like Snake Oil to me...


I think I took this because of the disturbing connection between the baby and fish-flavoured biscuits.


"If lift breaks down you may be trapped. Please use staircase to avoid missing your exam."
"If staircase collapses you may be killed. Please use lift to avoid missing dying."


"Swee's potato chips". These were going at 2 for $1. Basically you get what you pay for - worst chips in my life (declarations of quality notwithstanding). Even Malaysian Pringles are 10x better.


"Eusoff Hall. The Secret Formula for Winners! Horse Power. Ultimate Nutrition. NutritionPark.com. Good Nutrition, Real Results."
Uhh... This product endorsement isn't appropriate at all.


"Babystar Crispy Noodle Snack, Chicken Flavour". It has pork powder in it! It's so hard to find this sort of thing nowadays...



"Eu Yan Seng Herbal Soothies. American Wild Ginseng"


"Ingredients: Sugar, Glucose, Raw Honey"
Great. Sugar, sugar and more sugar are the three main ingredients. They sure need it to neutralise the taste...


I can't read this either, but I remember it was something about it being thirst quenching. Pfft...



"Ni Hao: A Gold Farmer's Story: Racializing Asian Virtual Labor in World of Warcraft

Leisure players from the US and Western Europe engaging in cross-racial role playing for entertainment purposes or "identity tourism" have been joined by users of color from China and Korea who are often subject to oppression as both a racio-linguistic minority, and as undesirable underclassed social bodies in the context of game play and game culture.

These "farmers," as they are dismissively dubbed by other players, produce and sell virtual goods such as weapons, garments, and even their own avatars or virtual bodies to other players for "real world" money. In-game economies, cultures of scarcity, user ideologies, and a cultural context of anti-immigrant late capitalism combine to figure Asian virtual workers as the enemy, and by extension, Asian culture as foreign, at best exotic, at worst threatening to the beauty and desirability of shared virtual space."

They are discriminated against because they are GOLD FARMERS, not because they are Chinese; Racialization does not mean racial discrimination - when I say "fucking idiot" it's not necessarily less insulting than "damn PRC".

Post-Marxists should just roll over and die (metaphorically, of course - just as their Revolution is metaphorical).

Someone who plays such games: gold farmers ARE evil

they are violating the terms of service of the games they operate in
and they ruin the gameplay experience of legitimate players

that's like saying we discriminate against murderers and thieves, though

huh wait
that says that "We discriminate against Asians because we identify most farmers as being Chinese or Korean"
which is absolutely not true, at least not in my experience

We discriminate against farmers because they are farmers
And it so happens that most of them are Asian

"Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs." - Christopher Hampton

***

A while back, I had what were, hands down, the WORST mussels I'd ever had at The Mussel Guys Seafood and Steak Restaurant at Vivocity.

(Photos suck, but they are posted here so I can't be sued for defamation)

I and SUG each had 18 mussels (500g), in Cream sauce ($19.90) and Belgian style (with wine IIRC, $23.90).

Perhaps the mussels were leftovers from the market, for they were small, not fresh and hard to open.


Notice how pathetic the foot is, and its lack of smoothness and regularity


Witness the small size and thinness of the foot


They outdo themselves with one specimen with an even tinier foot


After some wrestling with the fork (notice the puncture marks in the flesh), it still won't come out of the shell. I was also witness to a hitherto unprecedented event - notice the mussel shell to the top left of the punctured one and you will notice that it is chipped; yes, the shell broke when I was wrestling it open.


Eviscerated foot - and it STILL won't come off!


Most of the mussels we got were almost closed, like this one, and had to be pried apart with great difficulty.


The foot sticks to the top of the shell!

The sauces didn't taste very nice either.

In conclusion: Worst. Moules. Ever. (the Frites were alright though) If you want mussels, go to Oosters (at Church Street, around China Square). You pay LESS for BETTER moules, and you get free frites too.

What enraged me even more was that they tried to smoke us, claiming that their mussels were like this because they were live, and as such they held their shells tightly shut (Quoth I: Determining if mussels are fresh - "James Peterson, author of Fish & Shellfish, says the surest way to determine if a mussel is still among the living is to firmly push the shells sideways in opposing directions with your thumb and forefinger (not your pliers). If the mussel is dead, the shells will fall apart in your hand" - so maybe they gave us LIVING mussels). Perhaps they assumed that we had never had live (or even fresh) mussels, which on reflection was a good assumption - no one who has even eaten mussels would even go to The Mussel Guys.

Since then, multiple people have also informed me that their experiences there sucked (and I got complaints about the service too; one said the Dory was quite good though), so it's not just me. Doing a cursory search also reveals mostly bad reviews. That the place still survives after more than a year is testament to Singaporeans' tolerance for bad food.


Cunning Linguist: THEY ARE FUCKING BAD

their service sucks
and their mussels sucks

it was a bad experience la basically
dunno why they're sitll alive

i'm never going back there

i went there twice
and 2nd time there i scolded ***

i was like
DIDNT i SAY WE ARE NEVER COMING HERE AGAIN THE LAST TIME WE WERE HERE?b

"I no longer prepare food or drink with more than one ingredient." - Cyra McFadden

***

And Adam Knew Eve: A Dictionary of Sex in the Bible - "And Adam Knew Eve gathers from the books of the Bible all sexually related stories, concepts, and laws, and presents them, concisely but with attention to context, in A-Z format (from "Aaron and the Golden Calf" to "Zipporah and Moses"). Sexually related material comprises overall such a significant portion of scripture that some knowledge of it is essential both in appreciating the Bible as a whole and in understanding the difference in attitude toward sex to be found between the Old and New Testaments. And Adam Knew Eve also deals with the issue of women's second-class status under the patriarchal system of the biblical world... And Adam Knew Eve is recommended by websites of Columbia University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rutgers University, University of Toronto, Association of College and Research Libraries, University of London, and many others."

Boy, 11, Uses Toy Lightsaber to Defend Mom From Attacker

Africans in America/Part 4/Frederick Douglass speech - "I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, "It is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, an denounce less; would you persuade more, and rebuke less; your cause would be much more likely to succeed." But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light?"
He's lucky he didn't get lynched for offending slave-owners.

Buddhist monks rapping Sutra to attract followers - "Buddhist monks are donning gold outfits and rapping their way into the minds of young potential Buddhist’s and Buddhist recruits. Titled the “Tokyo Bouz Collection,” the event featured 40 monks and nuns from eight major Buddhist sects blinged out in gold embroidered robes performing a rap version of a Buddhist sutra. They strutted the runway while chanting prayers and throwing confetti that looked like lotus petals."
I didn't see the video so I don't know if it's worse than the MDA one.

Money-shot fever; The current displays of jism only prove how passé men have become - "It's not just a taboo of good taste that Monica's dress and these very different movies smash. They signify our anxiety about the end of male importance in reproduction... What's depressing about this plethora of white goo on screen -- the comedy "American Pie," due this summer, continues the genre -- is the desperate need to insist on its importance. As semen becomes less and less essential to reproduction, we brandish it even more defiantly."
Crazy misandrists feminists. Apparently Ann Marlowe isn't writing for Salon anymore: she can always join some of the crazies at Feministing

In Response to M.T.A.’s ‘Say Something’ Ads, a Glimpse of Modern Fears - "After 9/11, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority coined the slogan, “If you see something, say something,” and put it on posters encouraging subway and bus riders to call a police counterterrorism hot line if they encountered anything suspicious... Mr. Browne said several callers reported seeing men clicking hand-held counting devices while riding on subway trains or waiting on platforms. The callers said that the men appeared to be Muslims and that they seemed to be counting the number of people boarding subway trains or the number of trains passing through a station. They feared the men might be collecting data to maximize the casualties in a terror attack. But when the police looked into the claims, they determined that the men were counting prayers with the devices, essentially a modern version of rosary beads. The counters are a common item in the Islamic shops on Atlantic Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, where they sell for $5 to $8. Ali Mohammed, 44, a Brooklyn grocery owner who was shopping on Atlantic Avenue recently, said many Muslims use a tally counter as they repeat the many names of God."

Pope calls for continuous prayer to rid priesthood of paedophilia - "Pope Benedict XVI has instructed Roman Catholics to pray “in perpetuity” to cleanse the Church of paedophile clergy. All dioceses, parishes, monasteries, convents and seminaries will be expected to organise continuous daily prayers to express penitence and to purify the clergy."
Why didn't they try that for World Peace? It can't be falsified anyway.

Mexico boy tries to stick at home - "A Mexican boy glued his hand to his bed because he did not want to go back to school after the Christmas break."

Apple's new machines are "fastest ever," obviously - "Can we just say how sneakily brilliant this copy is? Apple's putting out standard processor upgrades, the same upgrades that the rest of the PC industry is releasing, and only because Intel, everyone's chip supplier, is making faster chips (because that's what chip makers do). So of course your new Macs are faster than your old Macs -- all new computers are faster than the ones that came before, because that's how the business works. Put out a new Mac that's as slow as an abacus, that would be a story. Apple is like the car dealer who throws in a spare tire with the purchase of your new car. But hey, you know what? Those dealers clean up. And why not? They're giving you a spare tire, for free!"

Think censor: Apple's lawyers shut down rumor site - "Apple wins everything here, closing down a journalist who did exactly what reporters are supposed to do -- establishing contacts with insiders to shed light on a secret much in public demand. Imagine if Dick Cheney were able to do the same thing to the New York Times, to shut down the paper for reporting on the "trade secret" of NSA surveillance, say?... Am I mistaken, or was Apple the firm that once plumbed George Orwell for a famous TV ad? Probably I'm mistaken."
Think Different. Don't buy an iPod.

Goodbye to All That
"This struggle to embrace modernity without abandoning faith falls on one of the fault lines in the modern world. It is arguably the critical fault line, the tectonic rift that is advancing the bloody borders of Islam and the increasingly sectarian boundaries of American politics. As humankind abandons the secular totalitarianisms of the last century and grapples with breakneck technological and scientific discoveries, the appeal of absolutist faith is powerful in both developing and developed countries. It is the latest in a long line of rebukes to liberal modernity—but this rebuke has the deepest roots, the widest appeal, and the attraction that all total solutions to the human predicament proffer. From the doctrinal absolutism of Pope Benedict’s Vatican to the revival of fundamentalist Protestantism in the U.S. and Asia to the attraction for many Muslims of the most extreme and antimodern forms of Islam, the same phenomenon has spread to every culture and place. You cannot confront the complex challenges of domestic or foreign policy today unless you understand this gulf and its seriousness."
Good bit in an otherwise blah article about Obama, who is after all just all-rhetoric.

"Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself." - A. H. Weiler

***

More religious hatred from a known terrorist:


Science, Islam, and Christianity
Robert Spencer

"The idea that Islam extols science while Christianity is hostile to it is historically and conceptually false...

In Islam, Allah's "will is not bound up with any of our categories" and quoting Ibn Hazm saying "Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry," the Pope was not so much saying that in the Islamic view Allah would command his people to do evil, but that he might change the content of the concepts of good and evil. In other words, Allah would always enjoin "justice and kindness," but what constitutes "justice and kindness," just as what constitutes "innocent blood," might change. [Ed: Err. Not like they don't have this in Christianity, especially according to many modern Christians.]

This idea has extraordinarily important implications for the development of science. There is an odd passage in the Qur'an that sums up this perspective, and how it differs from the Judeo-Christian view of God: "The Jews say: Allah's hand is fettered. Their hands are fettered and they are accursed for saying so." (5:64).

The Jews, in their wickedness, claimed that "Allah's hand is fettered," but in fact Allah's hand is not fettered. It is unclear what Jewish concept the Qur'an is referring to in this case, but the indignant response to it is clear: Allah's hand being unfettered is a vivid image of divine freedom. Such a God can be bound by no laws. Muslim theologians argued during the long controversy with the Mu'tazilite sect, which exalted human reason beyond the point that the eventual victors were willing to tolerate, that Allah was free to act as he pleased. He was thus not bound to govern the universe according to consistent and observable laws. "He cannot be questioned concerning what He does" (Qur'an 21:23).

Accordingly, there was no point to observing the workings of the physical world; there was no reason to expect that any pattern to its workings would be consistent, or even discernable. If Allah could not be counted on to be consistent, why waste time observing the order of things? It could change tomorrow...

It is logically not impossible that a deviation from this habit should occur, namely, that fire should cause cold, move downward, and still be fire; that the water should cause heat, move upward, and still be water. On this foundation their whole fabric is constructed.

This odd theory was derived entirely from the Islamic conviction of the absolute sovereignty of Allah. Relatively early in its history, therefore, science was deprived in the Islamic world of the philosophical foundation it needed in order to flourish. Consequently, Jaki observes, "the improvements brought by Muslim scientists to the Greek scientific corpus were never substantial." The consequences of this have been far-reaching. Jaki details some of them...

"Islam," notes Stark, "did not fully embrace the notion that the universe ran along on fundamental principles laid down by God at the creation but assumed that the world was sustained by his will on a continuing basis."...

Maimonides' depiction of Muslim philosophers envisioning elephants becoming snakes and fire turning cool. And to be sure, to a pious Muslim of Aquinas's day the idea that God could not do anything would have appeared as the highest form of blasphemy. It would have been equivalent to saying that "Allah's hand is fettered." But Christians did not consider it blasphemous in the least. "The rise of science," Stark explains, "was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God. In order to love and honor God, it necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork. Because God is perfect, that handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover those principles."

The importance of this cannot be overemphasized. Stark concludes: "These were the crucial ideas that explain why science arose in Christian Europe and nowhere else."... Much of [the idea that Science originated in Islam] has been exaggerated in regard to both Islam and Europe, often for quite transparent apologetic motives. The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what we know today as "Arabic numerals" did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India. Aristotle's work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. Another Christian, Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873), translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic. The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn 'Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own, The Reformation of Morals. His student, another Christian named Abu 'Ali 'Isa ibn Zur'a (943-1008), also translated Aristotle and others from Syriac into Arabic. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate -- not by a Muslim, but a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia - by Assyrian Christians.

In sum, there was a time when it was indeed true that Islamic culture was more advanced than that of Europeans, but that superiority corresponds exactly to the period when Muslims were able to draw on and advance the achievements of Byzantine and other civilizations. But when the Muslim overlords had taken what they could from their subject peoples, and the Jewish and Christian communities had been stripped of their material and intellectual wealth and thoroughly subdued, Islam went into a period of intellectual decline from which it has not yet recovered...

Stark points out that "Islamic scholars achieved significant progress only in terms of specific knowledge, such as certain aspects of astronomy and medicine, which did not require any general theoretical basis. And as time passed, even this sort of progress ceased."...

Indeed, clocks originated in medieval Catholic Europe, while in 1560, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Austrian ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, wrote that his hosts had "never been able to bring themselves to print books and set up public clocks. They hold that their scriptures, that is, their sacred books, would no longer be scriptures if they were printed; and if they established public clocks, they think that the authority of their muezzins and their ancient rites would suffer diminution." It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, time in which Islamic norms were on the defensive and in retreat, that the first public clock was installed in Constantinople; this may have been the first public clock erected in any Islamic country.

The effects of the Christian openness to innovation and the Islamic resistance to it reverberate in many fields. Even in medicine, while the Islamic world points proudly to many early physicians and medical theorists, it was not a Muslim, but the Belgian physician and researcher Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), who paved the way for modern medical advances when he published the first accurate description of human internal organs, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) in 1543. Why was a Muslim not able to do this? Because Vesalius was able to dissect human bodies, while that practice was forbidden in Islam. What's more, Vesalius' book is filled with detailed anatomical drawings - but also forbidden in Islam are artistic representations of the human body."

"It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish." - Aeschylus

***

Random pictures and videos (some months old - you know what they say: better late than never):


Shamima's Trick. Everyone needs a good party trick


Meowing pussy in rescue op



"Covert Acquisition. Private investigation & security services
Our Coat of Arms
As the unicorns of hope hold up the shield
on life's rocky paths,
the guiding star shines brightly
over life's stormy waters."
Uhh...


Ikea ad: "Our girls[']... rooms have become castles that reflect their personalities... we're just happy to recaptured (sic) the living room, now that they spend more time in their rooms"
Funny, my mother complains I spend too much time in my room. I also love the Occidentalism of this ad, since they didn't waste money redoing it with Asian models to reflect our 'Asianness'.


"U-TURN HIM ON. Strip your entire body for baby smooth skin. No man can resist ...it's not all about the hood! Ministry of Waxing"
This is a damn silly ad. Hood?!


"Free sex. 999"
A brilliant transgressive act which subverts the dominant paradigm!


"Tatara.com.sg. Dream it. Own it. Singapore's FIRST Premium Lowest Uniq"
Using a woman in a swimsuit to promote an auction site?! I'm with the feminists on this.


Marine Parade renovation display: "Toilet for display only. Strictly no [usage]"
Uhh...



Christie's disgusting toe-socks with sandals



NUS AIDS poster: "He looks yummy... She tastes yummy... Taking risks? For our loved ones? To have Safe Sex? Or simply Abstinence? We have choices."


"Sextreme. Feel Good, Play Safe."


"Ahhhhhh.... yes! yessss!!... 'Slip it' condom demo"


"FACT: There is no cure for HIV/AIDS. Once tested HIV-positive, you will be burdened for life. Be wise, don't let HIV/AIDS take over your world."
Brilliant. So what will people do? They won't get tested.


"Ready For a BIG Night Out? Cash. Cellphone. Condom."
They're encouraging moral hazard. How immoral!



Presentation on Boat Quay: "WHERE ARE THE LOCALS??"


"Bagus!" cup, with the Malaysian Thumbs Up sign


Munchie Monkey's smoothies: "A tasty treat for those in heat"
I need a phone camera that can focus.


"One step closer to the Nobel prize. Get to know how at Sweden day... Taste exotic food such as Meat balls"
Exotic food? They need to get out more.


NUSSU is very smart, placing the power sockets in the lounge far away from where people sit, and having pool tables in between (hopefully they've changed the layout after 2.5 months)


"Fish & Chips with Rice"
Where're the chips?! Truly Pseudo-Western (BTC).


"Depending on God: The worth of Prayer"
Someone should regress life outcomes on praying.


"Temporary road closure. Event: PAP Awards & Convention 2007"
This otherwise unassuming poster is here because we weren't told what event it was. SBS sees it fit for the public to know, but apparently the administration doesn't think students should know what's happening in their own school.


"LAJ2201. Please do NOT tell your classmate what you were asked about in the interview. If you do so, other students will get benefit from you so that your grade will drop after all. Please do not forget taking your homework back.
Yay, Engrish!


NUS's very own Holocaust memorial at PGP! In comparison, pictures of the main installation in Berlin:



From an exhibit on vegetarianism (some Save The Earth bazaar):

"PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE EXHIBITS. This area is PROTECTED by SURVEILLANCE CAMERA."
They must have been afraid of irate visitors, riled by FUD [Ed: Fear, Uncertainty and Disinformation] such as:


"IMAGINE AN ALIEN SPECIES
whose abilities and technology
are far superior to humans'. We are no match for them.
They take over the Earth, mass breed humans by the millions,
they imprison, kill, cook and eat humans.
They also manipulate humans' bodies for cosmetics, clothes and anything else they need,
with no respect at all for human lives.

Imagine you are one of the victims and
have no one to turn to for help, no chance of escape...
the police, army and any other form of protection have become non-existent.
You scream and cry for your life but NOBODY CARES...
and the aliens invent machines to deal with the gore and blood.
They love your meat; it tastes so good.

This treatment is exactly what humans do to farm animals.
For you, this is just imagination.
For farm animals, this is REALITY.

BE KIND. Do not create a demand for meat.
Better still, help speak for a better world through the Vegetarian Society (Singapore)"
Carrot Juice Is Murder. And apparently they don't know that eating meat kills fewer animals than eating cereals.


"Are we consuming meat... or, is meat consuming us?
1. Meat is contributing to major health problems (like cancer, hear diseases, stroke) in affluent countries, while it worsens the hunger problems in developing countries.
2. Much of the Planet's topsoil is used to grow huge amounts of crops to feed animals for humans to eat. We are depleting that biological capital [fertile soil] at an alarming rate.
We are depleting the Planet’s resources [Ed: Capital P? They think what - Gaia Theory ah?!]
3. By destroying forests to grow crops for livestock, we destroy the green lungs of the Earth. This contributes to global warming. [Ed: By eating Organic food, we are not maximising the productive capacity of land and have to destroy more forests to grow crops. This contributes to global warming.]
4. The billions of animals bred in farms by humans, produce methane gas, which is a greenhouse gas 23 times stronger than carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas which is 296 times stronger
The meat industry generates more greenhouse gases and thus contributes more to GLOBAL WARMING than all the vehicles on the Planet
5. As long as we have animal farms, we have to live with one great potential source of a pandemic, which threatens to kill humans by the millions.

SAVE THE PLANET. Eat less or no meat.
Better still, help speak for a better world through the Vegetarian Society (Singapore)"
Obviously they are economically, scientifically and historically illiterate.

[The New Paper on Marcus Ng] "He had raised his voice and argued aggressively with his superior, 2nd Warrant Officer K Saraswathi, at the operations room of the SAF Medical Training Institute in Nee Soon Camp.

During the incident, Ng, who is a service medic, also rudely shrugged off the hand of another superior, Master Warrant Officer Ger Ah Kee, when the latter tried to calm him down.

He was sentenced to one week's jail for each charge, which were to run concurrently."


Shouting at someone - one week in jail
Shrugging off a hand - another week in jail

"Military justice is to justice what military music is to music." - Groucho Marx

"If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer." - Alfred North Whitehead

***

The new Muslim anti-Semitism (The Jerusalem Post)
Mark R. Cohen

ISLAM AND Judaism had (and continue to have) much more in common than Judaism has with Christianity.

Jewish-Muslim relations are at a nadir today. But the mutual hatred and anti-Semitism on the Muslim side are relatively new phenomena, born of political, rather than religious factors. When the Islamic caliphs ruled large swaths of Asia and Africa, their Jewish subjects enjoyed a protected status their brethren in Christian Europe - victims of anti-Semitism - never thought possible.

Today, Muslim apologists have distorted this age of coexistence. They appropriate an old Jewish myth about an “interfaith utopia” in the Middle Ages and blame the Jews and Zionism for destroying the traditional harmony between the two peoples.

In response, there is a new Jewish “counter-myth” that claims that Islam has persecuted Jews from its origins and that anti-Semitism is endemic in the religion. This counter-myth has been propagated by Jewish writers in the Diaspora especially since the 1970s. It parallels a similar conviction among some Oriental Jews in Israel. Seeking to find their place in a predominantly European Jewish world scarred by centuries of Christian persecutions culminating in the Holocaust, they claim that Islam has persecuted Jews from its origins. By implication, they have a past of suffering like the Ashkenazim, including dislocation from their ancient homelands, and are thus eligible for a larger piece of the Zionist pie than the mostly Ashkenazic founding fathers of Israel have granted them.

THE HISTORIC plight of Oriental Jewry falls somewhere between these two extremes. To discover it, one must move past the layers of propaganda and mutual recriminations that have obscured our view of history.

First of all, however, let us not make the mistake of thinking that Jews lived in the Middle Ages as the equals of Muslims. They were second class citizens, at best. They were classed along with other religious minorities as unbelievers who did not recognize the prophethood of Muhammad and the truth of the Koran. But this kind of unbelief was not as threatening to Islam as Jewish unbelief was to Christians, for unbelief in Christianity means rejection of Jesus as Messiah and as God, a greater affront to the dominant faith than Jewish unbelief was to Islam because it challenged the theological basis of the whole religion.

Moreover, restrictions on Jewish (and Christian) life - they were not to build new houses of worship and were required to wear distinctive garb, avoid Muslim honorific titles, and so forth - were intended not so much to exclude them from society as they were meant to reinforce the necessary hierarchical distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims within a single social order.

Non-Muslims were to remain “in their place,” avoiding any act, particularly any religious act, that might challenge the superior rank of Muslims or of Islam. Non-Muslims, however, occupied a definite rank in Islamic society - a low rank, but a rank nevertheless. They managed to co-exist more or less harmoniously with the higher-ranking dominant Muslim group because both sides recognized and accepted the place of the other - whether superior or inferior - and this facilitated interaction with a minimum of conflict.

THE FLIP SIDE of the discriminatory regulations imposed upon Jews is that they (as well as Christians) were a “protected people,” ahl al-dhimma or dhimmis in Arabic, who enjoyed security of life and property, religious freedom, freedom from forced conversion, communal autonomy, and equality in the marketplace. For all its religious exclusivity and hostility towards the Jews, expressed in the Koran and in other Islamic literature, Islam contains a nucleus of pluralism that gave the Jews in Muslim lands greater security than Jews had in Christian Europe. For other important reasons, too, Jews in the Islamic orbit were spared the damaging stigma of “otherness” and anti-Semitism suffered by Jews in Europe. They were indigenous to the Near East - not immigrants, as in many parts of the Christian West - and largely indistinguishable physically from their Arab-Muslim neighbors.

Moreover, Jews were one of two and in some place three non-Muslim minority religions, which also diffused the natural hostility towards the “other.” The contrast with the Christian West is revealing. Although for a few centuries in the early Middle Ages (up to the 11th century) Jews enjoyed a more or less secure place in the natural hierarchical order of Christian society, as well as substantial economic rights, a combination of factors led to the expulsion of most of western Jewry by the end of the 15th century. These factors include the loss of the pluralism that had marked the Germanic, “barbarian” early Middle Ages; the spread of Christianity to the masses by the 11th century; the commercial revolution that relegated Jews to a few, despised economic activities like money lending; the erosion of the old doctrine of St. Augustine that Jews must be allowed to live in Christian society as witnesses to the triumph of Christianity; and, finally, the gradual political unification of European countries, especially England, France, and Spain, which left the Jew even more of an outsider than in the past.

ISLAM AND Judaism had (and continue to have) much more in common than Judaism has with Christianity. This mutual recognition of religious similarities includes monotheism, which made Islam more tolerant of Jews than of Christians, whose Trinity smacked of polytheism, the greatest sin in Islam, and made Jews more tolerant of Islam for much the same reason. Another well known commonality are laws concerning animal ritual slaughter and other kashrut/halal practices. Partly because of shared religious beliefs, Islamic polemics against Judaism and the Jews in the Middle Ages were minimal and banal compared to the large body of anti-Jewish polemics in the Christian world. In the 13th century this led to the burning of the Talmud in France - an act of aggression against Judaism that had no parallel in the Muslim world and which was accompanied by other violent excesses like the blood libel that wrought the anti-Semitism whose tragic outcome in the 20th century is all too well known.

In the Muslim world, Jews retained for centuries their substantial security as well as their recognized place in the natural hierarchical social order. They did so by acknowledging, at least by their behavior in public, the superiority of Islam, by adhering to the prescribed restrictions of Islamic law, by paying an annual head tax called jizya, and by refraining from serving in government offices, where they might be in a position of superiority over Muslims. To be sure, there were periodic outbursts of violence, though they were almost always directed against dhimmis as a category, and not against Jews per se. These excesses occurred when the dhimmis were seen to be violating the terms of the dhimma arrangement; or when a particular ruler was pressured by Muslim clerics - the ulama - to crack down on the violators; or when Islam as a polity came under attack from the outside, as happened from the late 11th century on during the Crusades (the Crusade against the Muslims in the Holy Land and the Crusade to reconquer Spain from the Muslims) and during the Mongol invasions of the 13th century.

Jews were, however, rarely forced to convert to Islam (the Koran forbids compulsion in religion) and, with two major exceptions proving the rule, they were not expelled from Muslim lands. One expulsion took place in the Hijaz, the holy sanctuary of Arabia that includes Mecca and Medina, shortly after the death of the Prophet, and the other, in Yemen in the 17th century.

AGAIN, TO understand the relatively decent Jewish-Muslim relations in the medieval period, one needs to contrast them with the Christian world, where, from about the 12th century on, Jews were subject to a shaky adherence to an older commitment to protect the Jews and to guarantee their freedom of religion, as well as their liberty to practice any economic walk of life they wished - all of these things, of course, a function of time and place and the policies of particular secular rulers or the Church.

In Christian society, moreover, hostility was focused on one, “evil” non-Christian group, the Jews, paving the way for what was to become - beginning in the 12th century - anti-Semitism, understood as a religiously-based complex of irrational, mythical, and stereotypical beliefs about the diabolical, malevolent, and all-powerful Jew, later on infused, in its modern, secular form, with racism and the belief that there is a Jewish conspiracy against mankind.

This kind of anti-Semitism did not exist in the medieval Muslim world. It did not make its appearance there until the 19th century, when it was fostered by European Christian missionaries living in the Middle East.

ALL THIS adds up to one thing: Jews and Muslims got along better in the Middle Ages than they do today. But the co-existence of Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages could not easily be maintained in the modern era. Colonial disruption of Muslim society, conflicting nationalisms, Arab belief that Zionism is just another form of European colonialism robbing them of their own right to self-determination in a modern state, and Jewish fear that Arab and Muslim enmity - and more recently, terrorism - might lead to something akin to another Holocaust, have dramatically degraded Muslim-Jewish relations. This has manifested itself in a new Muslim anti-Semitism, which is not, however, indigenous. It represents an Islamized version of its Christian roots. Muslim anti-Semitism has also provoked amnesia in Jews from Arab countries.

They (or most of them) no longer remember the friendships with Muslims that Arab Jews knew in the “old country.” They no longer remember the substantial exemption from Muslim violence that the Jews of the Islamic world enjoyed in most places until the events of the 20th century. And they have forgotten that until the 20th century, in some cases right up until the 1940s, many in the Arabic-speaking Jewish middle class were deeply embedded in Arab society and culture, much like their ancestors in the medieval world, who wholeheartedly embraced Arabic and the Islamic culture of philosophy, science, medicine, scriptural study, and poetry in what was not an interfaith utopia, but an era of co-existence that can stand as a distant mirror of what might yet be possible in our own time.

The writer is professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is the author, among other works, of Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, which has been translated into Hebrew.


Only Christians and Jews were dhimmis? Time to jail him for inciting religious hatred!