This is beyond cool...

This has got to rank among the 5 or 10 greatest engineering achievments of man...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - With 14,000 laborers toiling day and night, the first of Dubai’s three palm-shaped islands is finally about to get its first residents.
The Palm Jumeirah, a 12-square-mile island group, is part of what’s billed as the largest land-reclamation project in the world, the product of five years of brute hauling of millions of tons of Persian Gulf sand and quarried rock.
On Nov. 30, the palm will open to some 4,000 residents, said Issam Kazim, a spokesman for Dubai’s state-owned developer Nakheel.

When fully complete by 2010, the Palm Jumeirah will be an offshore city, with some 60,000 residents and at least 50,000 workers in 32 hotels and dozens of shops and attractions, Nakheel said.

You would think that if some Arab countries like UAE can be economically prosperous, pro-development, tech-savvy, embracers of post-modernism, then why can't all the Arab countries? To answer that question all you have to do is ask what do all the unproductive, failing, backward, pre-historic, third-world, Arab cat boxes have in common? The answer is a governing belief in radical Islam. All these societies know is hate and resentment of non-Muslims, a neanderthal understanding of modern societal construction, and that all the tribulations of the world's 1.2 billion or so Muslims can be blamed on the existence of 14 million or so Jews. Think of the contributions that could be made to the world community if all Muslims stopped the exportation of hate and violence and used that energy toward progress and development like this man-made island city in UAE...it would be incredible.