The Pessimist

For my loyal readers who are getting a bit tired of the cartoon flap, I would like to get back to my original theme of the looming world-ending energy crises. But first, let's segue through three ridiculous stories in the news this week, tangentially connected via Afghanistan.

Utah Superior Court awards war widow $100M in wrongful death suit
You may recall our good friends the Khadr family -- the Canadian Taliban. Omar Khadr, has been a guest of the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay for his role in a battle in Afghanistan 2 years ago, He apparently killed one and wounded another U.S soldier before he was captured and imprisoned; he was 15 at the time. Seems the soldier's widow successfully sued Omar for the wrongful death of her husband and has been awarded $100 million. Wow! What a victory.

Now, I don't begrudge the widow her grief for a moment. Her husband's death was a terrible thing. However, I have a few problems with this decision:

• don't all soldiers risk death in a war zone? What makes this one soldier's death "wrongful". in a legal context?
• $100M ! Where did that number come from? O.J. Simpson's wife's family was only awarded $30M
• Omar was 15 at the time. Here he would be considered a Young Offender and would face only the most minimal of charges
• He wasn't present at the trial and was therefore unable to defend himself
• The strongest evidence presented at the trial was from news reports
• how's Omar going to pay this decision. Will they garnishee his Gitmo wages?

But here's an idea. Why don't the families of each of the 2400 soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq bring suits against their "killers". Do the math.

$100 million x 2400 = $240 billion.

Voila! The cost of the war would be fully recovered. If the lawyers could implicate the Saudi royal family, they might actually have a chance in collecting the settlements. Unfortunately, then we'd have to kill a lot of rich lawyers.

Edmonton congregation raises $10k for Afghani face cancer victim link
This is a heart-warming story about a little boy with terminal face cancer. He was brought by his grandfather into the Canadian forces base in Kandahar. A soldier emailed his church in Edmonton who collected $10,000 to send the boy for medical attention in Pakistan.

Isn't that nice. All those people in Edmonton can feel good about themselves for easing the suffering of a boy on the other side of the world.

The boy is obviously suffering, as his cancer is a black, golf-ball-sized tumour on the side of his face. It's quite gross actually, but let's look a little closer. The camp doctor diagnosed the cancer as terminal; the boy will likely be dead in weeks at the most. The only thing that can be done for him is to ease his suffering until his inevitable demise. How is that done? With the application of heroin, the most effective pain killer known to man. And where does 75% of the world's heroin come from? Afghanistan. And why is the boy's grandfather taking care of him instead of his father? Because the boy's father is a totally whacked-out opium addict who doesn't have the wit left to know he even has a son.

So, $10 thousand isn't going to do much about the real suffering in Afghanistan. That country needs $10's of billions to eradicate the real cancer - the Taliban and the warlords.

Steve Harper to Visit Kandahar link
I don't know if this makes me laugh or cringe. It is being suggested that Steve Harper visit Canadian troops in Afghanistan as his first trip abroad.

Two things. After all the wingeing Canadians did when George Bush went to see his good buddy Vincente Fox, president of Mexico, before visiting Ottawa, you'd think this would be a no-brainer. Real or imagined, the tradition is that newly elected Presidents of the U.S and Prime Ministers of Canada visit each others capitals for their first official state visits. Steven Harper should go the Washington first.

Visiting the troops would be a great morale booster for the troops, but if he gets his ass blown off, well, lets just say that that would be a bit of a problem. George Bush may be able to sweep into the middle of a war zone on a fully cloaked Air Force One and carve the turkey and shake a few hands while being protected by the biggest most sophisticated military in the world, then bugger off home. But how is Harper going to pull that off? He'd have to take an Air Canada flight to London, transfer to an Air India flight to the immediate neighbourhood, then take a bus (or scarier than a bus - a Sea King helicopter).

I think the Canadian troops are doing a great job there, but I don't think they need the added responsibility of keeping their political master from being blown up or beheaded.

In a rational universe, certain relationships are immutably true. Like:

If A > B and B > C
then A > C

The universe ceases to be rational when all of the following hold true:

A > B and B > C and C > A

In a rational universe, these three statements cannot be simultaneously true, and that is why Western values and Islamic values are incompatible.

Take a look at the following table. Each item in the column is listed in descending order of "badness". e.g.

• Stealing for personal gain is worse than Stealing to feed your family.
• Premeditated murder is worse than killing accidentally

The table above is not a complete list, but I think it will serve our purpose. The column on the left is basically my personal ranking of bad. It may look familiar to you. It bears a striking resemblance to rankings used by British common law and it includes most of the components of the 10 commandments. I've seen rabid Christians make the statement that an atheist couldn't possible know right from wrong because all ethics flow only from God. Fundamentalist bullshit, obviously. I'm an atheist and I would no sooner choose to commit murder than to put out my own eye.

George Bush seems to be having his own problems with the placement of torture on his personal list. And the conduct of war makes collateral damage (negligent death) a more common occurrence than I think any of us should be comfortable with.

But, somewhere on the list one must draw a line and say -- everything above this line is absolutely wrong; below the line is just not nice. I would draw this line somewhere around lying.

Now, the column on the right is an imputed list of extremist muslim beliefs. It is imputed from the behaviour that we see from individuals, governments and imams. I'm not even sure how extreme a muslim must be to hold to this ranking ... over the cartoon flap, our local paper quoted a local muslim grocer as saying "the image of Mohammed is more important than the lives of his children".

Rape is apparently a low ranking crime, since an accusation of rape by a woman cannot be taken seriously, since before the Koran the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. Rape is used as a balancing tool in restoring family honour. The usual outcome of a rape is that the raped woman is stoned to death because she has brought dishonour to her family and her village.

Beating your wife, well, that's not even wrong. It is a man's right.

And we know that extremists draw the line for themselves very high indeed. They see no contradiction with their faith in capturing and beheading innocents, or using suicide bombings in whatever random crowd is handy.

So Sharia law must never be allowed to take root in counties where the law is based on British common law. Drawing a picture of god or the prophets would not even be on my list of bads. Eating pork is only on my list as a nod to the vegetarians. But these two things are more important to muslims then even murder. These two views of right and wrong cannot be reconciled.

So have you ever wondered why there are so few Muslim comics? Seems Muslims can't take a joke.

This world wide riot over the publishing of some Mohammed cartoons does prove a number of things.

• As Barbara Amiel says in this weeks Macleans "it doesn't take much to set off a Muslim riot".
• Freedom of expression is a very important right here in the west that must be guarded against all challenges.

But more than anything else, it proves that there are a lot of stupid people in the world.

I'm not saying all Muslims are stupid, but as Forrest Gump's mother said, "Stupid is as Stupid does". I believe the vast majority of Muslims are not going to take to the street and start a dust-up over such a perceived slight. But the ones that do will fall into one of two groups:

1. The stupid
2. And the trouble makers

And really, the stupid are probably not so much stupid as uneducated. There was a time (1500 years ago) when the Arab world was the most advanced society. But somewhere along the way, that world turned its back on science, math, philosophy and free-thinking and replaced it with navel-gazing religious orthodoxy. The only education permitted comes from rote memorization of the Koran, if you are male, or no education at all if you are female. So, when the trouble-maker comes along and says "you have been insulted so you must kill these people", you grab your hammer and gasoline and start breaking and burning things.

The key to bridging the culture gap is to increase education (real education, not mullah school), and in particular education of women.

Muslims that receive a liberal western education know that one can internally separate society and faith. With that understanding comes the ability to understand a joke. Jews certainly know how to tell and receive a joke. Christians don't riot when they see an image of Christ -- even an offensive one. Muslims think they are being picked on if a joke is made at their expense and actually believe that jokes are made only at their expense. This is patently untrue, and if they were more world aware, they would know this to be untrue. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "holocaust cartoon contest" is a non-starter. Do you think the Jews didn't have some black-humour cartoons even during the holocaust?

To help broaden the Muslim's view of religious humour, I offer up this website I found while looking for the Mohammed cartoons online:
Atheist T-Shirts -- an equal opportunity offender of religious sensibilities.

Enjoy, and start laughing.