the frig blig

open myFolder

Honestly, what could be easier?

I’ve been searching for this command — the equivalent of Windoze “explorer /e,myFolder” ever since I got a Mac. I just figured it had to be some undocumented arg you passed to Finder. Wrong!

Looking forward to a great night’s sleep.

The U.S. is again accusing Iran of secretly building facilities to create nuclear weapons. Specifically the New York Times reports the U.S. believes that a nuclear facility announced by Iran last Thursday is “far more ominous than the Iranians were letting on.”

President Obama was joined by French Presiden Sarkozy and Prime Minister Brown of Britain in a joint denunciation of the facility yesterday. Brown added “The international community has no choice today but to draw a line in the sand.”

Well there’s always a choice, Mr. Prime Minister. And you are making your choice by making such provocative and ambiguous pronouncements.

It’s ironic that some of the same pundits and politicians who decry Iran’s nuclear power program, are doing all they can to get the U.S. to build more nuclear power plants.

The U.S. today has literally thousands of nuclear weapons ready to launch at a moment’s notice. So do Britain and France. (Other countries possessing nuclear weapons include Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and probably Israel.)

So it’s hardly fair to single out Iran’s nuclear program as justification for further sanctions and/or outright military attacks against that country.

But then again, what country in recent memory has been upfront about their reasons for invading other countries? It’s always to take out a ‘despotic’ leader or for ‘defense’. Same old, same old.

One more time, people: Israel is a country, Judaism is a religion. Criticism of the Israeli government is not criticism of Jews or Jewishness (”anti-Semitism”).

One of the founding principles of my country, the United States, is called ’separation of church and state’. The idea is to allow citizens to freely practice (or not) the religion of their choice, separate from the affairs of government. While breaches do occur, allowing Christians Jews Buddhists and Muslims to coexist with themselves, native Americans and atheists is, I think, a good thing.

Israel illustrates some of the dangers of state-sponsored religion. As if patriotism and missionary zeal aren’t bad enough apart, combining them leads to the exact charge reported now in David Landau’s Sunday Times column, that by criticizing Israel’s invasion of Gaza, the United Nations’ report on that activity is anti-Semitic.

One more time, people: Israel is a country, Judaism is a religion.

Wondering if these days we could use a government principle of ’separation of corporation and state’. Rather too late for my country, I’m afraid. But I digress.

By granting practitioners of one religion (Judaism in this case) more legal rights than others, you explicitly create a society consisting of a privileged group and an underclass. This is a mistake made by many countries, including my own, which we are still undoing damage from.

The United States’ founders had the good sense to grant equality to different religions, but created privileged and non-privileged groups by allowing slavery. That practice flourished for a hundred years, and it took a civil war to abolish, and another hundred years to grant legal parity to non-whites in this country.

But we’re working on it in this country. Israel, founded on the principle of one religion being superior, is not and cannot. And underclasses typically feel exasperated and oppressed.

So right there on 7th Ave near the intersection with Aurora sits the Hurricane Cafe. (It occupies the site of the former Dog House restaurant for you old-timers.)

I ask my fellow Seattleites this: when was the last time you saw a hurricane around these parts? Answer: never. Hurricanes just don’t make it up to the pacific northwest. What we do get are occasional earthquakes and volcano eruptions and lots of fog, mist and light precip.

So I’d like to suggest that the owner(s) of aforementioned Hurricane Cafe get a little more real and more local, and rename their establishment the Earthquake Cafe. Or the Slime Cafe. Or the Drizzler. (”Home of the Tsunami Burger”.) Or something besides a completely foreign weather concept.

Today’s guest link is thanks to Sherri Davidoff of the Philosecurity site: What Does DHS Know About You? (Basically a complete record of every trip you take, including credit card numbers.)

News reports of Scotland’s release of Lockerbie bombing suspect Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi mentioned that the U.S. government had been pressuring Scotland not to release Megrahi, and was ‘dismayed’ at his release.

While some bombing victims’s families made public statements in support of the compassionate release.

Seems to me that certain parties in the U.S. government are scared of new evidence coming to light regarding the 1988 incident, which Megrahi’s release might facilitate.