Renault ads

This is such a great commercial:
http://youtu.be/3axug8TEPII

This is pretty funny, too:
http://youtu.be/1pwN-yiho4M

Accidental security

The world being what it is, synagogues have to provide security at services.  At the London synagogue I attended, all members were expected to participate once or twice a year.  I joined the Maidenhead synagogue in December,  but no one had contacted me about security detail, so last Friday I asked.

Huge mistake.

It turns out Maidenhead has a small team of volunteers who provide security once or twice a month.

And I had just volunteered.

I actually don't mind.  For some reason, I'd wanted to give something back, perhaps because the way the rabbi welcomed me, or maybe because the London synagogue had given me so much.  For whatever reason, I was happy to help out.

Today I met with the head of the security team, who has been doing this for 27 years.  I thought we'd take an hour or so -- we took three, plus I have a follow-up appointment with the caretaker to go over the building procedures, and then I have to shadow three other details, on a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday service!  Then I'll be allowed to stand out front and open the gate for people.

Is it overkill?  Perhaps. There have been no incidences in Maidenhead in 27 years, other than being picketed once during the 2009 Gaza blockade.  However, the 'Community Support Trust' (which coordinates security information for the Jewish community in the UK) documented almost 600 incidences in the UK in 2011.  (You can read more here.)

So that's it.  I won't get a badge or a star or anything other than the satisfaction of helping the community.  I've never done that before--should be interesting.

At 32

At 32, I had just started working for American Honda, making great money, working with a fantastic team, cycling into work, had lots of responsibility, and for perhaps the first time in my life really loved my job.

At 32, I accidentally became vegetarian.

At 32, I had been in a relationship for over 10 years, and was quite sure it would last forever.

At 32, I'd been living in the same house for 6 years, longer than I'd lived anywhere in my life.

At 32, I was just beginning to plan the bed and breakfast, which would eventually cost me my savings, my home, and my relationship.

At 32, I'd never lived outside of Los Angeles, and had only been out of the country twice -- a European trip when I was 19, and a trip to the Canary Islands 10 years later.

At 32, I never wanted to have children.

At 32, I didn't know how much I could love someone.

At 32, I had a great life, but I hadn't really lived.

Longest-running West End shows

These are the longest running shows that are currently still running:

1. Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap at the St Martin's Theatre – opened 25 November 1952 – 60th year
2. Les Misérables at the Queen's Theatre – opened 8 October 1985 – 27th year
3. The Phantom of the Opera at Her Majesty's Theatre – opened 9 October 1986 – 26th year
4. Blood Brothers at the Phoenix Theatre – opened 28 July 1988 – 24th year
5. The Woman in Black at the Fortune Theatre opened 15 February 1989 – 23rd year
6. Chicago at the Garrick Theatre opened 18 November 1997 - 15th year
7. Mamma Mia! at the Prince of Wales Theatre – opened 6 April 1999 – 13th year
8. Disney's The Lion King at the Lyceum Theatre – opened 19 October 1999 – 13th year
9. We Will Rock You at the Dominion Theatre – 14 May 2002 – 10th year
10. Stomp now at the Ambassadors Theatre opened 25 September 2002 – 9th year

Interesting that 8 out of 10 are musicals, including Blood Brothers, which I saw last night (albeit the touring version in Reading).  The music was instantly forgettable, but its saving grace was a lead actor, Sean Jones, who moved from a 4-year-old kid to an adult having a psychotic breakdown, and everything in between, with absolute genius.  The final scene was so tense, it was hard to believe that scarcely an hour before he'd been pretending to ride a horse around stage!  I really wish him great things.

You can't go home again

You could say I had a bit of a breakdown at Trader Joe's the other day. It wasn't the fantastic selection of nuts, wines, and frozen vegetarian foods; it was the memories associated with so many products, and the different stages of my life. The ak-mak crackers were from my late teens, a period of discovering new foods, books, and music, and really defining myself. The dalmatia fig spread was my mid-twenties, buying a house near a Whole Foods market, settling down, and socialising. The meatless corn dogs took me back 10 years, when I accidentally went vegetarian and had to rediscover eating all over again.  The "volcano" coffee is what I served at the B&B, after discovering a Trader Joe's had opened 45 minutes away  The cashews were a sad reminder of when I finally decided to cut nuts out of my diet because of a mild allergic reaction (although I still cheat occasionally).  But the most poignant item were the blue corn tortilla chips, which just reminded me of my dad, gone 17 years last week.

It's funny to consider my history in terms of foodstuffs, but I guess that's what history is made of--not the sharp highs and lows but the daily grind. I'm grateful to have had all these wonderful experiences and times in my life, and to be able to relive them through such simple reminders.  However, at the moment I really miss that stability and financial freedom I once enjoyed, and so the memories can be bittersweet.

But in writing this, I discovered that Trader Joe's was bought by a German company which also operates the Aldi stores in the UK.  4 years here and I've not been to an Aldi's, but there is one less than a mile from my house, so I will be checking them out soon!

Stoolball

Um...not sure what to say about this. They describe it as "medieval baseball." I think they should change the name.

Guantanamo Bay

I have no idea why I thought Guantanamo Bay was an existing prison which the Bush administration decided to use, when in fact it was the Bush administration who created the Guantanamo Bay detention camp!  (And why doesn't that surprise me?)

The naval base has been in Guantanamo Bay since 1903, when the US had friendly relations with Cuba and established a "perpetual lease" for the land.  Of course, after the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro claimed the lease as invalid and demanded the US leave.  The US insists the lease is valid and continues to send rent checks for an inflation-adjusted $4,085 per month, which the Cuban government refuse to cash, and literally keeps stuffed in a drawer in the President's office.

The play and movie, "A Few Good Men" -- written in 1989 and loosely based on an event in 1986 -- is about Guantanamo Bay naval base, and has nothing to do with the detention camp (which didn't exist at the time).

The first twenty detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan arrived at Guantanamo on January 11, 2002.   As a detention camp, it is meant to hold people awaiting trial; it is not a prison--the people at Guantanamo Bay have not been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to anything.  It was not until 2006 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that prisoners were entitled to the minimal protections under the Geneva Convention, and 2008 that the detainees were entitled to the protections under the US Constitution.

On January 22, 2009, President Obama announced that the detention facility would be shut down within the year. However, Republicans in Congress passed an amendment blocking funding.  On January 7, 2011, Republicans added an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill forbiding the transfer of Guantanamo prisoners to "the mainland or to other foreign countries," thus effectively stopping the closure of the detention facility.

Also in January 2009, Susan J. Crawford, who was appointed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to review practices used at Guantanamo Bay, told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post that Mohammed al-Qahtani was tortured while being held prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, making her the first Bush administration official to concede that torture occurred there. 

In April 2011, Wikileaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.  The documents reveal that over 150 innocent Afghans and Pakistanis, including farmers, chefs, and drivers, were held for years without charge.  The youngest detainee was 14, and the oldest was 89.  Approximately 60 detainees were minors, although the number is hard to confirm as the US military considers minors to be people under 16 years of age, not under 18 as defined by most human rights groups.

One detainee was a journalist from the respected news agency Al-Jazeera, who was detained from 2002 to 2008 "to provide information on...the al-Jazeera News Network's training program, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations."  One detainee was waterboarded at least 183 times by the CIA, who "revealed" that Al-Qaeda had a nuclear bomb and, if Osama Bin Laden was captured or killed by U.S. allies, a "weapon of mass destruction" would be detonated in a "secret location" in Europe.

The Justice Department has said the leaked documents remain classified and therefore the lawyers representing the prisoners are not even allowed to read the documents which were published in the New York Times!

The United Nations has called for the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to be closed, with one judge observing, "America's idea of what is torture ... does not appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations."

As we mark the tenth anniversary of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, 171 detainees remain, including 12 of the first 20 detainees who arrived in 2002.  It serves as a continual reminder of the low point in American foreign relations and human rights.  To quote President Obama in 2009:

There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world. Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al Qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law. [...] Meanwhile, instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained. [...] Rather than keeping us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security.

BBC News has a slideshow of photos from Guantanamo Bay.

An atheist defends religion

Bruce Sheiman is "guest editing" today's blog entry, via an extract I found from his book, "An Atheist Defends Religion."  I think he is spot-on when he talks about atheism being a "bankrupt ideology" because it provides no benefit to believers.  I've always argued that atheism wasn't the absence of religion, it was just another religion, something people believed without having any rational reason to do so.

As an atheist, I approach religion much like an economist. I believe religion persists in our market-based culture, despite the prevalence of secularism, because it provides net value over and above its required investment, and because it beats competing belief systems in the same value proposition. I evaluate religion in terms of its pragmatic usefulness to humankind and seek to answer the question posed by William James: "Grant an idea or belief to be true, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life?"

Atheism is a bankrupt ideology on empirical grounds: Its benefits simply do not come close to covering its opportunity costs. Religion, by contrast, offers the vast majority of people a high-value transaction: Its enduring benefits far outweigh its costs. Religion persists, in short, for the reason that it provides the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Thus, by book "An Atheist Defends Religion" is not mainly a critical examination of the New Atheism. Rather, I am making a broad statement about the affirmative role of religion in the contemporary world and what is lost in a purely secular conception of the world.

For centuries, the theism-atheism debate has been dominated by two positions: hard-core believers fervently committed to their faith in a living God; and militant atheists vehemently driven to repudiate the Divine. The time has come to admit that after more than 2,000 years of back-and forth proofs and counterproofs, this debate has reached an insolvable impasse. The question about the existence of God can never be resolved to either side's satisfaction. But the discussion need not end there. We are still left with the important issue of the value of religion. And this is a debate that religion can win. "An Atheist Defends Religion" redefines the terms of the debate, offering a new direction and perspective.

I am not a person of faith: I do not feel the majesty or mystery of the Holy. But neither do I stridently repudiate God. Indeed, there is a part of me that wants to believe in God. That makes me an "aspiring theist." And I want to believe in the Divine because, on balance, religion provides a combination of benefits -- moral, emotional, aesthetic, psychological, existential, communal, and even physical-health -- that no other institution can replicate. These are the essential qualities that make religion so enthralling, enriching, enlightening, and enrapturing. They explain how we achieve our fullest humanity only in religion.

The question I present is not whether God exists, but whether the world is a better place because people believe God exists. This book, as a consequence, is not a defense of God; rather, it is a defense of the belief in God and of religious belief in general.

Being an atheist is not something that I or any one else rationally or deliberately chooses. I did not think through all the competing belief systems and chose unbelief. It is just something that I am. I must admit, however, that the more I understand the world as revealed by science, the more I find the materialist and reductionist explanation for our human destiny terribly devoid of depth, value and meaning. This offends not my religious sensibility (of which I have none), but my existential vanity - the strongly held personal view that my life counts in the grand scheme of things. As a consequence, I am an atheist who is sympathetic to religious aspirations and who is prepared, if not to defend God, then to defend the belief in God.

A mature view holds that religion is more about meaning and purpose than facts and events. Through religion, we experience the mundane as miraculous and the normal as numinous. Religion teaches us that our lives have inherent worth and that the world is shot-through with value. Paul Tillich said, "He who enters the sphere of faith enters the sanctuary of life." And that is because the core preoccupation of religion is the preservation and perpetuation of human existence.

More than any other institution, religion deserves our appreciation and reverence because it has persistently encouraged people to care deeply - for the self, for neighbors, for humanity, and for the natural world - and strive for the highest ideals humans are able to envision. And there is no more eminent ideal than religion's clear declaration of human specialness and the absolute sanctity of life.

Faith is one of the most powerful forces in human development and a strong impetus to personal transformation and collective progress. Religion's misdeeds may make for provocative headlines, but the everyday good works of billions of pious people is the real history of religion, one that parallels the growth and prosperity of humankind. There are countless examples of individuals lifting themselves out of personal misery through faith. In the lives of these people, God is not a delusion, God is not a spell that must be broken - God is indeed great.

The debate about the existence of God is neverending. What is not in dispute is that God exists in people's hearts, minds and spirits. What is not in dispute is that religion is adaptive, constructive and healthful - and thereby makes a positive difference in people's lives. Reflecting James' pragmatic conception of belief: When we act as if religion is true, we act with greater optimism, hope and benevolence.

The take-away from this book is that religious experience is the essential human experience. Mine is a human-centric evaluation of religion. By any empirical measure -- defined in terms of theism's practical impact on individuals, society, and culture -- religion is profoundly beneficial.

In the end, "An Atheist Defends Religion" cogently explains that the most rational and definitive argument for dismissing atheism is not found in the interminable debate over the existence of God, but in elucidating the enduring value of religion itself.

Bruce Sheiman is the author of the new book "An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off With Religion than Without It."

Red, white, and blue

Whenever an American references the "red, white and blue" I can never tell if it's out of ignorance or hubris.  Granted, few other countries in the world revere the national flag as Americans do, but the fact is there are twenty nine countries whose flag is red, white and blue!

I found this curious, but it turns out is was just from countries copying other countries:

• The Union Jack was created from the red-blue English flag and Blue-White Scottish flag, and is used by the former colonies, including USA, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Tuvalu.
• The US flag, as a symbol of revolution, was adopted by Liberia, Chile, Malaysia, Uruguay.
• The French flag was designed in 1794 and adopted by French colonies such as Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, etc.
• The Pan-Slavic colors were red, white and blue, and adopted by Russia, Czech, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia.
• The flag of the Netherlands was originally the flag of the Prince of Orange, and was orange–white–blue. Somehow, though, it got changed to red–white–blue.  (New York adopted the original orange–white–blue as its state flag.)

Cambodia
Chile
Costa Rica
Croatia
Cuba
Czech Republic
Dominican Republic
Faroe Islands
France
Iceland
North Korea
Laos
Luxembourg
Nepal
Netherlands
Norway
Panama
Paraguay
Philippines
Puerto Rico
Russia
Samoa
Serbia and Montenegro
Slovakia
Slovenia
Taiwan
Thailand
United Kingdom

Tuition fees

I found an interesting list comparing tuition fees across the world.  (Sorry, it's in pounds.)  Almost every country has different limits, and almost every country has nationalized education -- only the US has a thriving private sector.  In the UK, there are only 2 private universities, and they aren't Oxford or Cambridge.  (One is the University of Buckingham, the other is BPP--and I don't know what that stands for.)

Most European countries have to offer the same terms to students from anywhere in the EU -- a marked contrast to the public universities in the US, which only offer discounted admission to students from that particular state.  Almost all universities have higher fees for international students.  This isn't a comprehensive list -- there are just too many variables to consider -- but I think it gives a good idea of the overall landscape.

• Finland, Sweden and Norway: No fees for home or EU students.
• France: No charges, enrolment is £145.
• Belgium: No tuition fees but an enrolment charge of £438.
• Germany: £845 a year, some universities do not charge.
• Ireland: Trinity College, Dublin, £1,454 a year. £10,500 for international students. EU students pay £800 registration fee.
• Scotland: First degrees from £1,820 a year.
• China: Up to £2,500
• US: From £3,200 to £19,000.
• Holland: Students of departments such as business schools charged up to £4,400. Graduate schools have tuition fees as high as £7,000.
• Canada: £5,600 - £9,400.
• Australia: Most degrees - both undergraduate and postgraduate - are £6,200 to £12,500 a year.
• Japan: Undergraduate course fees are on average £6,200 a year.

Personally, I think everyone can agree that higher education is a necessary requisite to support a healthy economy.  What I find so odd is that so many countries are happy to accept international students to train them, but then kick them out as soon as they've graduated.  While they may have captured a few thousand dollars in revenue, think about how much they just lost in terms of intellectual capital.

Some people argue that fees are necessary in order for people to value education--which I think is nonsense.  How many private college students are working part-time jobs so they can afford the average $38,000/year tuition?  There some people today who argue that college no longer provides a cost-benefit -- that is, you'd be better off going straight into the workforce than you would going to a 4-year college and getting a better job, but spending most of that money paying off your student debt.

I'd also argue that college should be meritorious -- that is, based on ability, not how much your family can afford to pay.  (I know I have the wrong word there, but can't think of the right one at the moment.)  Too many good students are passed over because of their parents pocketbooks.  And certainly Oxford and Cambridge prove that higher fees do not make a better college -- they charge the same as every other university in the UK.

While I'm not saying we should nationalize education, I am saying that the tuition fee rises of the last 10 years are unsustainable, and as a whole we need to look at the effect this will have on the future of the country.  Because if we don't, the world in 20 years is going to look very different than today.

And this isn't a problem that's about to occur, it has occurred:

- The US had the highest proportion of students who graduated from college, about 33 percent.  In 2000, the US slipped to fourth place, with Today, Norway, Britain, and the Netherlands are at 35-37 percent.

- In 1998, the United States trailed 22 other countries in the number of students graduating from high school.

- And this shouldn't surprise anyone: The United States pays teachers less per capita than all but three other countries surveyed, and teachers work 300 hours longer than average.

(From the Boston Globe, May 17, 2000)

Fortunately, China produces some 20 million graduates per year, and about 7 million emigrate to other countries, many to the US.  That helps, but it also isn't sustainable.  At some point, the Chinese economy will surpass the US, and there will be a brain drain of epic proportions.

Think about it.