Of flushing Qur’ans and hate crime

via Pharyngula

Recently, a man was arrested for flushing two Qur’ans in the public restrooms at Pace University for hate crimes. Apparently, after the first Qur’an was found in the toilet on October 13 last year, Pace University officials called it vandalism, but after pressure from Muslim student groups referred it the NYPD hate crimes unit, which made the recent arrest.

Personally, I think that University officials were correct to call the incident vandalism, because that’s what it is. Media reports have not directly stated whether or not the Qur’ans were his property or whether they belonged to someone else, though from this report:

He was busted after cops discovered a surveillance camera that filmed him leaving the meditation room where the Korans had been kept before the vandalism.

It does seem like the books were stolen. If that is indeed the case, the student, Stanislav Shmulevich, should be held responsible for stealing, destruction of property, and clogging the toilets, which are public property, but he should not be charged with hate crimes.

Before I continue with why this is, I’m going to bring forth the reason that desecration of the Qur’an is being considered a hate crime. In Islam, the Qur’an is held as sacred and its desecration represents a violation of Islamic law. This makes the desecration of the Qur’an, at least in principle, more insulting to Muslims than an equivalent act of desecration performed on the Bible would be to Christians. This is why Muslim groups including CAIR, which was involved in this case, have pushed for this to be considered a hate crime.

So why is this not a hate crime? The answer is simple: it was not a crime against an individual but a crime against property. Flushing the Qur’an is powerful statement, akin to burning an American flag, which has caused many to seek legal prevention of those acts but the fact of the matter remains that it is a political expression, which is protected by the Constitution.

The First Amendment was intended especially to protect the most provocative forms of expression, not just those that the majority find most comfortable. The whole point was to avoid a tyranny of the majority (or of any vocal minority for that matter). We United States citizens are protected from legal suppression of opinions by the laws to which we are subject, which do not include the laws put forth in the Qur’an.

So to restate, Stanislav Shmulevich should be held responsible for the stealing, destruction of property, and vandalism of the public restrooms. This is clear. But holding him responsible for hate crimes is a precedent that should not be set anywhere in the United States of America.

My first 30 days on WordPress

Today is my thirtieth day of having a blog on WordPress.  This is not significant beyond the fact that WordPress provides statistics relating to blog traffic, with the number of visits (excluding those made by you while logged into WordPress) shown for the past 30 days, so I thought I use this post to share some of the statistics relating to this blog.  Here is what my site visits chart looked like as of 11:45 CST this morning (so the stats for today aren’t complete:

I think it’s a good start for an unknown college blogger.  Of course, the most notable part of this is the peak on July 22, which corresponds to my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I posted to digg, noting that there were spoilers.  This post was by far my most popular, pulling 382 views total, and 174 its first day, enough to get it spot 61 on WordPress’s list of 100 most popular posts for the day.  More after the break for those so inclined.

The Annenberg Political FactCheck

Dick Cheney brought a lot of attention to the Annenberg Foundation’s non-partison FactCheck.org when he mistakenly referred to it as factcheck.com during the Vice Presidential Debate in 2004.  Afterwards, many people flocked to the site to find out the latest in political dishonesty before the 2004 election.

Though I wasn’t able to vote in the 2004 Presidential election, being only 17 at the time, I was still interested in the election and I chose to receive email updates from FactCheck.org.  I have continued to receive them but I haven’t been paying a great deal of attention to them because for the most part they discussed statements I hadn’t seen or heard, and often the same was true of the politicians they concerned.

However the subject of their July 25th article caught my attention because it was on the topic of the CNN-YouTube debate, which I watched via YouTube and posted about briefly.  Apparently there were a few factual errors, but most of them were not incredibly severe (after all, it is early in the race), but it does serve as a good reminder to be wary of what comes out of candidates’ mouths.  They may have the charm and good looks and talk about issues you care about, but remember that they are still trying to sell something and will resort to fibs or even outright lies if they think they can get away with them.

I’m going to link to FactCheck.org on my Election 2008 resources page, which is still pretty basic.  I’ll add more when I have more free time.

NASA’s bad news day

Today, there have been three negative news stories relating to NASA. The first of these was this story from Aviation Week, which claims in its first two paragraphs:

A panel reviewing astronaut health issues in the wake of the Lisa Nowak arrest has found that on at least two occasions astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons and other astronauts warned they were so intoxicated that they posed a flight-safety risk.

The panel, also reported “heavy use of alcohol” by astronauts before launch, within the standard 12-hour “bottle to throttle” rule applied to NASA flight crew members.

Following this was a story from CNN that a computer destined for the ISS had been discovered to be sabotaged by an employee who deliberately cut wires.

Finally, there was this story that NASA employee Elizabeth Ann Osborn was caught embezzling over $150,000 through her employee Bank of America card and pleaded guilty on July 17.

NASA certainly has not had a good year for its PR with the Lisa Nowak debacle in February and the hostage shooting shortly after the more severe Virginia Tech shooting. While it would be nice if there was more public interest in what NASA is doing, I think that this raft of bad news will probably end up hurting the organization despite the attention it brings.

Stories found via Bad Astronomy posts here, here, and here.

Autostereogram Tetris

While looking at a link from a recent post from Pharyngula, I came across a link to an interesting variation on the well-known (I know, that’s an understatement) game of tetris at deviantART:

Autostereogram tetris

Autostereograms are commonly refered to a “Magic Eyes” after the book series that made them popular.  This isn’t the highest quality game of tetris available, but it certainly is a fun and interesting concept.

The CNN-YouTube Democratic Presidential Debate

Yesterday, CNN held a debate among the 8 Democratic Presidential candidates where the questions were asked in the form of videos posted to YouTube.  While these questions came from YouTube viewers, it is worth noting that it was CNN that made the final selections of which would be presented.

There have been several similar debates held before this one, the first of which was held April 26 in Orangeberg, SC.  I haven’t been able to watch these debate live because of a lack of cable TV and work-schedule.  Before this one, the only debate that I had watched clips from on the Internet was the first one.  Watching these clips and how they contained many vacuous, obviously scripted soundbite responses lowered my interest in watch more, so I didn’t put in extra effort to searching the torrents for them, for instance.

However, because this debate was co-hosted by YouTube, it was much easier for me to access the full debate, because YouTube has a page with the debate segmented into a video per question here.  They make a few mistakes, including replacing the sex education question with the video that was displayed, which you can find here.

One of the problems I find with the current debate format is the lack of uniformity in the questions that have been asked, which makes it difficult  to compare the positions of different candidates because they each answer different questions.

It is interesting to see how the frontrunners tend to play it safe when answering, as opposed to the second tier candidates, who seem to more freely make bold statements, the boldest statements, of course, coming from Mike Gravel and Denis Kucinich.

The three frontrunners each had their own little quirky tendencies.  Hillary Clinton tended to answer using the most platitudes of the bunch, Obama liked to turn questions in to references about change or how he’s not accepting money from PACs or lobbists, and Edwards liked to give his own interpretation of what a question meant (often a quite a stretch from the original question) and tried to focus on poverty.

News coverage on past debates commented on things like how “Presidential” one candidate or another has sounded (as if this constituted a sound criterion for election).  If candidates performed similarly in past debates to this one, then I have a hard time believing that anyone was particularly impressive, as much of the candidates’ energy, especially among the top tier (Clinton, Obama, and Edwards) seemed to go into changing the questions and packaging their words in politically correct sentiments and euphemisms.  Of course, Mike Gravel is the exception to that, but he’s not looking for the Presidency, but rather to create some ripples in the political pond:

EAA AirVenture show starts today

Every year, Oshkosh, WI is host to the EAA AirVenture Oshkosh airshow, where thousands of planes are brought in for display and aerial acrobatics.  The show is one of the biggest events in the area each year.  I have been to a few of them since my family moved to Neenah in 1993.  At one of my early visits, I got to see the Concorde take off.  Last year, I got a job as dishwasher at the nearby Hilton Garden Inn on a temporary basis as a result of the high traffic that it brings in.

This year I sadly won’t be able to attend, but it is a noteworthy event for those in the area.

A review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Well, I just finished the last Harry Potter book, and so it is time to post my review of the book. I will start off with a short summary of my feelings about the book in general and then move on to a fuller review with spoilers.

In this book, it seemed that Rowling was trying to fit as many events into as few words as possible, which made it a bit difficult to understand what was happening at certain points. Because of this, I thought that the book lacked a lot of the charm that made its predecessors so popular. Most of the book was devoted to explaining in fuller detail past events and finishing off the storyline, which had quite a ways to go after the sixth book.

Overall, I’d say it was one of the less enjoyable Harry Potter books. However, despite this, I would still recommend recommend it to those who have liked the previous books because of its explanations and completion of the story. Of course, some of you may be tempted to read the spoilers (some of which are provided below), but you won’t get a fuller experience or explanation from anywhere but the book itself.

Burj Dubai now the world’s tallest skyscraper

According to the BBC, Emaar Properties, the company developing the Burj Dubai skyscraper, claims that the under construction skyscraper has now surpassed the height of the Taipei 101 tower to become the tallest skyscraper in the world.  Currently, the building doesn’t look too pretty but, I’m sure it will look better once the glass curtain is installed:

This is a cropped version of the AFP picture used in the above linked article

Waiting at Barnes and Noble

So, I went out and bought the last Harry Potter book tonight. I haven’t opened it yet, but I assure you, once this blog entry is posted my nose will be in the book. I got it from Barnes and Noble in Appleton. I got there at 23:45 (11:45 pm) to see a full parking lot. So, I parked in an empty one across the street, hoping to avoid the crowd rushing out of the parking lot once I had gotten the book. This proved to be unnecessary. The wait for the book took me until 0:50, and by then the parking lot was not so crowded. When I first arrived, there was of course a line:

But what you see in this blurry photo is not a line for the book, but simply a line to get yellow wristbands to certify that the bearer had indeed reserved a copy. There were also blue wristbands for those who wanted one but had not reserved one. As I waited in line, midnight came and there were cheers heard and the first customer came out triumphantly to flaunt his book. This was the best picture I could get of him:

Of course, one of the first things he did after raising it in the air and taking a picture with his mother was to open the book to the back in order to spoil the ending for himself. After a while, I finally got my wristband and went into the store:

Barnes and Noble did not do a good job organizing the mass purchase. When I went in, it was not clear where to go. They had set up a path for the line to follow, but if one didn’t know where the end of the line was, this was pretty pointless. I settled in to part of the mass that I figured represented a nebulous end of the line. Here is what it looked like from this vantage:

This part of the crowd didn’t start moving for about twenty minutes, though we got some glimpses of others moving. The line was a zigzag through the bookshelves, which of course allowed convenient access to books that the store would actually be making money on. For members (which includes me), the store had docked the list price to $18.89, which is $19.83 after tax. For non-member, the price was $20.99 or %22.04 after tax. This was advertised by a large sign above the checkout counter:

The books were taken from the boxes and pre-bagged at the checkout counter. Here is a picture I got of some of the empty boxes:

In the end I walked out with my book and drove home. I will now begin to read it and once I finish, I will post a review on this site.