For years now I have been going and seeing movies that are part of Nefest, the NY GLBT Film Festival. Besides the obvious silly gay films from around the world, I am often struck by some of the documentaries. I tend to see about 12 movies, with a 50/50 breakdown of serious to fun.

Last night Idan and I saw Be Like Others, a film about Iranian boys undergoing sex change operations to become female. My understanding, from the film, is that homosexuality is forbidden, but transexuals need to be medically treated and in fact the state help pay for this treatment and care.

The movie is very well done, simply, is shows you many sides of the issue in Iran and lets you make up your own mind. That said, it does confront several issue head on; if you cannot be an openly gay male, what other choice do you have?

There are several different people profiled. Vida, is a transexual who is very happy with being a women now. She turns out to be a leader type, even mother figure, to other men seeking this operation. She is the only one in the film who is very obviously ok with what she has chosen.

Anoosh and her boyfriend are kind of a sad case. Before the operation the boyfriend as very loving and kind, later in the movie, post-operation the boyfriend is obviously unhappy and distant. Who can guess why this happened, but it because clear that he probably was in reality gay and is no longer attracted to Anoosh now that he is a female.

There are also several people who, as time progresses, choose not to have the operation. You are welcomed into their fears, how they are treated by strangers and family, as well as the strict Iranian society.

The other point of view you are shown is of a transaexual who post-op has no choice but to arrange temprary Islamic marraiges. This is a form of legal prostitution.

Overall the movie leaves you with a sense of sadness for these Iranian boys and you wonder how they would be if they lived in NYC where being gay isn’t a cause for surgery and moreover, what the exact nature of sexual identity and sexual orientation are. It is indeed very complicated.

I don’t have much to ad. This sums is all up!

The rulers of Gaza cannot bring themselves to accept the concept of sharing the Holy Land with the Jews.

The best that the rulers of Gaza can do, is to bring an end to hope among their own people and ours as well.

They believe that the Jewish state is temporary, and that they Jews will soon abandon it to Islamic rule.

After all this time, you’d think they’d know the Jews a little better.

Exactly.

I have an RSS feed to my desktop of newly published Rand reports. I tend to read the summaries instead of the long studies, as even a student of the world doesn’t need to know the detail invovled in 700 pages treatises on a particular subject.

The report cited in the title, War by Other Means — Building Complete and Balanced Capabilities for Counterinsurgency, is typical of Rand works: a wonderful read. I give you this quote as proof:

Information resourcefully gathered, widely shared, and wisely used can engender healthy pluralism and expand the awareness and options of individuals. It can be used to pry apart local insurgency and global jihad, improve operational decision making, and sharpen the precision and effectiveness of force. When seen and treated as a strategic asset, information power can help redefine the struggle with Islamic extremism from one of spiraling violence to one of competing truth, from a self-perpetuating war of attrition to a winnable war of cognition.

I only worry that the ideal of pluralism sponsored from information is a very “western” ideal and doesn’t jive with how Islamic societies seem to function. The need to pray 5 times a day, and in particular how the prayers come up on the TV and people drop to the ground quickly 5 times a day feels very big brother like. I have no real direct proof of this, but the homogeneity of at least subsets of Muslim peoples is driven by Islam itself, or perhaps the current rightist inclination of Islam. This translates into a lack of a desire for plurality. Think Catholic controlled medieval Europe.

Next, I hope all the neo-con idiots read this one:

The greatest weakness in the struggle with Islamic insurgency is not U.S. firepower but the ineptitude and illegitimacy of the very regimes that are meant to be the alternative to religious tyranny—the ones tagged and targeted as Western puppets by jihad. Success thus hinges on improving the performance and accountability of governments in the Muslim world.

Got it yet? Just like in Latin America, supporting the government that likes us is NEVER in our best long term interests. Supporting a government that supports the people, that certainly is.

It would seem there is an interesting nexus in Islamic tradition and in what our very own Moses was up to.

From a web page about participating the the Hajj: It is Haram (prohibited) for men to wear sewn or stitched clothes in Ihraam (state of participating in the Hajj).

What did Moses wear while consecrating the tabernacle? According to Rav Kahana in Taanis 11b he wore a white frock that does not have a hem or a seam. The note states this means it was woven from a single thread.

I wonder what the significance of these two similarities is?

On the cover of YNet this morning. This is really, very, very, funny. He threw a properly attired pig’s head into a mosque. I am still laughing. Adam, did you have anything to do with this?

I admit that I got swept up in the hype over the cartoons of The Prophet, may he not rest in peace at the horror of the actions of his followers, when I got in a fight with a cab driver and told him to chill out for he was very angry. I then suggested he might want to take out his prayer rug from the trunk and pray to Allah for peace. When he was enraged (which was the point, duh), I told him that if that upset him, I have some cartoons to show him. Score one for multiculturalism here in NYC. Anyway, I have been trying to get copies of the Iranian repartee cartoons but no luck so far, only text descriptions are online.

Most of the descriptions seem to be prerecorded, phoned in from the normal set of stereotypes of Jews. But this one is great:

That sentiment finds expression in a split-image cartoon from a Brazilian entrant in which a stand-up comic is portrayed performing in a venue called the West Club. In one image, captioned ‘Making jokes about Islam’, the comedian is greeted with raucous laughter. But the accompanying picture, marked ‘Making jokes about the Holocaust’, shows him being booted out of the window.

Did this genius miss the whole The Producers hype? The whole thing is a spoof on accounting, production, and THE HOLOCAUST! Maybe someone should send him a copy of the soundtrack so he can sing along to the mocking of Hitler, Germany, and so on. I cannot imagine anyone reading this has not heard of The Producers…

As has been noted, no one is burning anything in the streets, in fact this topic is hardly in the news here. I even would relish the MoMA or The Met doing an exhibition on the history of antisemetic or racist cartoons which includes both the Danish and the Iranian cartoons. Often you can examine your own perceptions of race, the changes in culture, and just laugh at the cliches. Do I need to point out the juxtaposition here, I doubt it.

Listening to NPR this morning there was a fun report on the topic of biodiesel. The more and more I read about the subject, the more I think this just might be it!

Hand-painted biodiesel fuel tanks at Carl’s Corner. “We want to create an alternate fuel city. Wind power, diesel power, solar power, soybeans, sunflower seeds, mustard seeds — all kinds of alternate fuels,” Cornelius says. “We’re thinking about family farms with this BioWillie.” The Kitchen Sisters

I recall hearing about biodiesel about 10 years ago at the Commonground Fair, in Maine and at the time I wondered if it would really take off and be a viable fuel alternative.

It doesn’t take much to connect the dots: take trash oils, made from American grown crops, filter them, “cook” the results, pour into your slightly modified diesel motor, save on emissions, save on the waste chain, unburdened yourself from the grip of Big Oil, and the best part: no longer give your hard earned cash to islamofascist regimes.

Ok, so you need a bit more explanation! Biodiesel can start with all kinds of input products, mostly vegetable oils derived from corn or soybeans. American produces a heck of a lot of both. If we stop here, we have already improved the situation by creating a more stable market for American farm products and no longer handing billions of dollars to our Arab “friends” (allowing us to lay waste to them once and for all). We could stop here, but why? If you read a bit more about the nature of biodiesel, it is pretty clean when compared to fuels based upon petroleum.