Day: March 22, 2004

Europe Has Head Up Its Ass

I had to laugh out loud today when reading that EU ministers had condemned Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin as “unacceptable.” British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said,

[Israel has a right to defend itself] But it is not entitled going for this kind of unlawful killing and we therefore condemn it. It is unacceptable. It is unjustified and it is very unlikely to achieve its objective. A measurable restraint is required and I don’t believe Israel will benefit from the fact that this morning an elderly man in a wheelchair has been the target of assassination.

“Leaders” throughout Germany echoed that sentiment, with some of them apparently afraid that Israel’s killing of a Hamas terrorist might lead to Madrid-style terrorist attacks in Europe.

Yassin, of course, is believed by Israel to have personally approved a number of the worst terrorist attacks on Israel by Hamas, including the attack on a discotechque in 2001 that killed 21 people. Despite his being confined to a wheelchair, Yassin has never failed to extol the virtues of Hamas terrorism.

Apparently the European view is that Jews in Israel should follow the same old script — sit around waiting to be murdered by terrorists and other extremists.

Source:

Europe condemns Israeli killing of Hamas leader. Middle East Online, March 22, 2004.

Ann Arbor Anti-War Protests

I spent Saturday photographing and videotaping an anti-war protest in downtown Ann Arbor this weekend that marked the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion last year. I’ve got hundreds of pictures and quite a bit of video to go through, so I’ll be posting images and video from the protest all week (including the closest thing to a music video this site is ever going to host).

There were somewhere between 1,000-3,000 people who showed up. The protest was sponsored by Ann Arbor Area Committee for Peace, U-M Anti-War Action, and Veterans for Peace. Police had to shut down quite a bit of downtown Ann Arbor for about an hour until the protest wound its way to the campus of the University of Michigan. But pretty much the defining image of the protest occurred at the very beginning which I captured on video on my digital camera.

A gentleman with one of the three groups sponsoring the protest got hold of a bullhorn and gave a mini-speech about the horrors inflicted on the world by the United States. Specifically, he said that people in the crowd neeeded to work to stop the United States from continuing to oppressively threaten countries such as North Korea and Syria.

1.5 megabyte AVI can be seen here or 600K MP3 can be heard here.

Western Goes Down Big Time, But My Daughter Has Some Fun Out Of It

My alma mater, Western Michigan University, made the NCAA tournament by winning the Mid American Conference championship only to get blown out 71-58 by Vanderbilt in the first round (this after being 1 point favorites prior to tipoff). The upside was that since they were in the NCAA tournament, my daughter’s school had a WMU day so she was able to show off her Bronco cheerleader outfit,

Go Team!

SanDisk Sticks It to Unsavvy Customers

For some reason, this plan by SanDisk to sucker unsophisticated users into spending way too much to store their digital photographs, really gets under my skin. This gets me so angry, in fact, I’m tempted to stop buying SanDisk products.

Basically, SanDisk is going to push small flash memory cards in the 32-64 megabyte range as “Shoot & Store” cards. This is how SanDisk describes their Shoot & Store products,

SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK) today announced a new line of inexpensive flash memory cards designed to allow users to save their pictures indefinitely without using a computer for downloading, thus giving millions of consumers a major incentive to switch from film to digital photography and providing them with a durable, permanent way to store a lifetime of images. With an initial suggested retail price of $14.99 each-a breakthrough in the industry-the Shoot & Store™ cards are expected to allow people to order prints on a “cost-of-use” basis that is equal to or less than that of traditional analog film. And they won’t have to worry about leaving expensive flash memory cards with retail photo finishers.

. . .

SanDisk officials believe that the Shoot & Store line will create profound changes in the way people think about taking pictures by removing the last barriers to the mass acceptance of digital photography. With its ease-of-use concept, Shoot & Store is intended to convince large numbers of consumers-especially those who have been hesitant to join the digital revolution-that now is the time to buy a digital camera. For the first time, SanDisk believes that it is both economical and efficient to use the same card for capturing and storing digital “negatives.” This solves one of the most vexing problems of digital photography and allows people without computer skills-or without the time to download their images-to use a digital camera.

So rather than storing your photos on a CD-R — or having your local photoshop transfer the photos to CD-R — consumers should load up on $15/apeice 16mb memory cards? Are these people high? Do they think their customers are?

That, and billing 32mb cards as “50 pictures” on the assumption that everyone who buys these will be using 1mb digital cameras is equally outrageous. If they used some sort of system like 50/30/22 or something for 1/2/3 megapixel cameras I would find that defensible, but slapping 50 pictures on there borders on deceptive, IMO, given how prevalent 2-3 megapixel cameras are these days. It’d be like selling 50 miles worth of gasoline to an SUV owner but basing that figure on the mileage that a Prius gets.

Finally, it would seem the possibility of damaging SanDisk’s brand would outweigh any short-term profits from this scam . . . I mean scheme. If I was a customer who spent a couple hundred bucks on a bunch of “50 picture” flash memory cards only to find that for about 1/10th of that the photos could have been stored on CD-R, I know I wouldn’t exactly have good feelings about SanDisk.

Source:

SanDisk Shoot & Store cards. Press Release, SanDisk, February 11, 2004.

How Many Deaths In Iraq?

The local anti-war group, Kalamazoo Non-Violent Opponents to War, held a protest on Saturday, March 13 to call attention to the number of people killed in the year since the U.S. invasion of Iraq began. They created life-size silhouettes to represent the dead,

In the middle of the parade of silhouettes was a banner asking this question,

Being the helpful sort, let me see if I can take a stab at answering that question.

As Deroy Murdock noted in National Review, there is some disagreement over just how many people Saddam Hussein’s regime murdered in order to maintain his dictatorial rule,

Assessments of the devastation vary. Last May, Human Rights Watch concluded that “as many as 290,000 Iraqis have been ‘disappeared’ by the Iraqi government over the past two decades.” Last November 20, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said: “We’ve already discovered just so far the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.” This scale of destruction rivals 1994’s Rwandan genocide.

In the year since the United States invaded and removed Saddam Hussein, those on the Left claim that anywhere from 8,000 to 12,000 civilians have been killed as a result (those figures, by the way, apparently include the civilian victims of terrorism in post-occupation Iraq).

So how many deaths in Iraq? Well, from March 2003-2004 about half as many were apparently killed in the effort to rid the world of Saddam Hussein as Hussein himself murdered every year, on average, for 20 years using the Human Rights Watch estimate.