The newly octagenarian dictator, eager to prove he's alive, inadvertently appears in an imperialist pigdog Adidas jogging suit in this AFP photo. Whoops.
One would think Kim Jong Il would have lent him one of the beige vinalon ones he swears by...
From Reuters: "Afghanistan gets first fashion show in decades"
KABUL - Models strode down a catwalk in the Afghan capital Kabul for the first time in decades this weekend as two designers showed off their clothes behind the guarded walls of a luxury hotel.
An audience of expatriates and well-heeled Afghan watched the show in hotel garden, under a clear midsummer night’s sky, to the strains of traditional Afghan music.
All of the models showing the conservatively cut clothes that included designer burqas were expatriate women, to the disappointment of some in the audience.
The organisers said they did not want to court controversy in what is a deeply conservative Muslim country by having Afghan models.
[...]
Sherzad said people used to hold small fashion shows in Kabul before the war begin in the late 1970s.
These days there was a market for fashion in the city, although it may not be obvious, she said.
“There’s not much in terms of the fashion we see in the West but there is fashion within a private environment, within the houses,” she said.
“People like to be fashionable.”
Actually, I could care less most of the time. Jeans, a t-shirt, and sandals are fine by me. But that's not the only reason a "designer burqa" just doesn't sound appealing.
"War is deceit," their prophet said, but... come on.
Who is that masked man? Did Hamas hire former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf? A short and ridiculous item from the Jerusalem Post: "Hamas: We 'have defeated the Israeli army'"
Hamas's military wing, Izzadin al-Kassam announced in a press conference in Beit Lahiya Saturday evening that its fighters "have defeated the Israeli army."
IDF troops began pulling out of northern Gaza late Friday night and Saturday morning following military operations there.
Sorry, guys, but the latest from JPost (mentioned midway through this article) is that Israeli tanks came within 500 meters of Gaza City.
With little fanfare, the deal to provide North Korea with light-water reactors, per the 1994 "Agreed Framework" deal brokered by Jimmy "Dhimmi" Carter, was finally laid to rest last week. The Associated Press reported:
The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or KEDO, was formed in 1995 to finance and build two light-water reactors, from which it is difficult to extract weapons-grade plutonium. Those reactors were to replace a graphite-cooled reactor that can be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
[...]
A Wednesday statement from the executive board of KEDO blamed Pyongyang's "continued and repeated failure" to cooperate with the international effort to induce North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.The executive board members of KEDO are the United States, South Korea, Japan, and the European Union.
KEDO also demanded that North Korea compensate the agency for the multibillion-dollar cost of the project — a dim prospect given North Korea's isolation and belligerency.
It was not clear if the timing of the KEDO announcement was meant to influence Iran to cooperate with a similar "reactors-for-inspections" plan.
I doubt it. The precedent set by North Korea should-- should-- convince those working to resolve the standoff with Iran of the utter futility of offering nuclear and other incentives. But all appearances are that no one has connected the dots. From AFP:
VIENNA (AFP) - The United States has offered to lift some of its trade sanctions against Iran as part of a package of benefits the EU will deliver to get Tehran to guarantee it will not make nuclear weapons, diplomats told AFP.
[...]
The United States is proposing "lifting sanctions partially, not only waiving sanctions but actually lifting them," in an agreement to be worked out in multilateral talks that would start once Iran suspended uranium enrichment, said a senior Western diplomat, who requested anonymity.
Also in the past week, the US has hinted at direct talks, also if Iran suspends"disputed activities." It is worth noting that the criterion for direct talks with North Korea has always involved "complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament (CVID)." Nautilus summarizes:
North Korea must commit to CVID and commence tangible dismantlement before the United States will outline its roadmap of reciprocal commitments to provide security and development assistance to North Korea.
Which country is a more immediate threat? Why the lower standard?
Looks like we're not the only ones battling shrinking attention spans and the excesses of "casual Friday." From the Khaleej Times: "Smarten up and keep it short, minister tells Egyptian imams"
CAIRO - Egypt’s Islamic endowments has [sic] advised the prayer leaders of mosques to smarten up their appearance and shorten their sermons so as not to bore the faithful, newspapers reported on Tuesday.
“How can you people tell you apart from plumbers and carpenters if you don’t wear the (religious) costume of the Al Azhar (institute), which gives prestige and renown?” asked Mahmud Hamdi Zaqzouq, quoted in Al Masri Al Youm.
Speaking to a delegation of 200 imams from across Egypt, the minister said the dress sense of many prayer leaders left much to be desired, singling out the worst offence as wearing babouche, or Turkish-slippers.
Imam Blackwell has spoken, but, no word about the content of the sermons, as long as they're short.
"The question of technology is not 'can we?', but 'should we?'"
- source unknown (to Yahoo! and Google), but it was posted at the front of my high school biology classroom.
America after World War II: An unprecedented blend of affluence, optimism, and faith in technology. Never mind that Cold War; the word "Atomic" had become the leading indicator of being on the cutting edge, and was even more pervasive in business names than even "Cyber" was for a brief, now embarrassing period in the '90s. And amid those sentiments, futurism was not about to stop at the dinner table. Surely they'd have robot maids and hand-held punch-card computers by 2006, but in the meantime, half a century earlier, the food could boldly go where no salad or casserole had gone before:
Better living through chemistry, baby. Take that, Khrushchev... unless the Geneva Convention had already banned it, of course.
Fortunately, James Lileks, writer and founder of the Institute of Official Cheer, realizes that no collection of mid-century ephemera is complete without wanton and gratuitous, graphic depictions of recipies involving gelatin, Dr. Pepper, sour cream, and other ingredients as Nature never intended.
Anyone wondering if humanity has made any progress over the past few decades need only take a moment to visit the aptly named Gallery of Regrettable Food, and sigh with relief that the Dr. Pepper Pot Roast has gone the way of imperial communism and the Edsel-- bad ideas we can now sit back and laugh at.
DETROIT (Reuters) - General Motors Corp. said Friday it will stop building the gas-guzzling Hummer H1 truck, a military-style status symbol with poor sales, and focus its resources instead on better-selling vehicles.
The last H1s, which get about 10 miles per gallon, will roll out in June, the automaker said. The H1 is the foundation for GM's Hummer brand.
"We are discounting it because it's a low volume niche vehicle and we will dedicate our resources now to produce smaller-sized and higher-volume vehicles for Hummer," said Dayna Hart, GM spokeswoman for the Hummer brand.
Hopefully, this is the start of a trend, thanks to higher oil prices, if not to qualms of conscience about needlessly lining the pockets of Mideast regimes that claim to be our allies in the "War on Terror," while funding the "terrorists" (mujahedin, really) with that revenue and gleefully watching the fruits of their work. Yes, there is Citgo, but it's owned by the government of Venezuela, and Hugo Chávez has proven himself to be alltoofriendly with those same shady regimes... and a few horses short of a merry-go-round himself.
Whatever the reason, this is good news. And one hopes the Escalade, Navigator, Suburban, Expedition, and Yukon are headed for a similar fate. That said, I'd like to see a compact car spun off of the Hummer line, though GM would probably still want $90,000 for it... and wonder why no one's buying.
From USA Today, via Yahoo! News: "The Divine Miss Winfrey?"
She's no longer just a successful talk-show host worth $1.4 billion, according to Forbes' most recent estimate. Over the past year, Winfrey, 52, has emerged as a spiritual leader for the new millennium, a moral voice of authority for the nation.
"She's a really hip and materialistic Mother Teresa," says Kathryn Lofton, a professor at Reed College in Portland, Ore., who has written two papers analyzing the religious aspects of Winfrey. "Oprah has emerged as a symbolic figurehead of spirituality."
At least Reed College is a private school: No taxpayer dollars were harmed in funding this "research."
I'd say a "hip and materialistic Mother Teresa" deserves a nomination for the oxymoron of the year. And the undeserved compliment of the year. When Oprah founds an order of nuns who labor in obscurity (not to mention voluntary poverty and celibacy) on behalf of the poorest of the poor, I'll reconsider.
Lofton points out that any discussion of Winfrey should not be one that criticizes her or how she came to be a spiritual icon for the history books but one that examines how it came to be that way. "Why do we all need her so much? What is wrong with us that we so need this little woman in Chicago?"
Do tell.
Jim Twitchell, a professor at the University of Florida who has written several books about branding and describes himself as a cultural anthropologist, says Oprah reverence makes sense.
"Religion essentially is based on high anxiety of what's going to happen to you." Winfrey pushes the idea "that you have a life out there, and it's better than the one you have now and go get it."
If anxiety about the future were the only motivator for religion, we'd be worshipping the Coors plant in Boulder, Colorado for the power of what emanates from it to take our minds off of tomorrow, to make us believe we can dance, and to make that one guy across the room look good all of a sudden. Really good, in fact. But I digress.
I feel sorry for Prof. Twitchell if that's all he ever got out of religion. But what about a sense of awe in the order and beauty of the world around us? What about a sense of feeling blessed for what one does have in life (health, family, friends, education, bills paid for another month) , and at once humbled by one's utter unworthiness of it, and instilled with a sense of obligation to use one's gifts as they were intended? What does that have to do with Oprah? Nada.
It's most apparent in the setting of her show, Twitchell says.
"The guest is sitting beside her, but what she's really doing is exuding this powerful message of 'You are a sinner, yes, you are, but you can also find salvation.'
For Oprah so loved the world...
Religion as a commodity, as a pop-culture accessory, becomes an "opiate of the masses" like nothing before it: As long as it makes you feel good, and you don't have to do anything or take an unpopular position on anything, it's a worthwhile undertaking, because, after all, it's all about you.
From Fox News: "Please Remove My Nonsensical Asian Tattoo":
The touchy-feely, quasi-spiritual trend of getting Asian-language tattoos became popular in the 1990s. For many youngsters, or for people who wanted to feel young, a tat with the characters for “peace” and “truth” seemed just the thing.
Seems like we've been hearing a lot about this sort of thing. First, there was the story about house-blessing rituals with Pythonesque scripts about dry rot and such, in response to which Rebecca aptly noted the regressive trend in pop-culture spirituality toward superstition and shamanism. Then, there was Ian Brown, the amateur syncretist and former rock star who converted to Islam for better food in jail, who said:
"My sister bought me the Koran in 1990. I always thought the stories in it were magical."
And elsewhere (thanks to Mary Jackson for the quote):
He makes no apology for the fact that spirituality is a big part of his life, in quite an amorphous way: he reads the Bible, "for the stories". He believes in a "higher force" and that "all the great people have worshipped one god - Aborigines, American Indians, Muhammad Ali, Bob Marley, Jesus." And he prays. In Japan he'll go to a temple, in Morocco a mosque, in Mexico he'll pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe. And Rastafarianism? "It's full of joy."
Like the characters above (the house-blessing clients, but especially Ian Brown, who might someday find himself quoting the title of this blog entry with respect to his new affiliation), it's doubtful those in the Fox News story have lost their taste for relativism. But they have the added distinction of having evidence of their feel-good, pseudo-spiritual excursions tattooed into their skin for life. And there's another twist: Were they sure the tattoos said what they hoped for in the first place?
But now that the fad-following hipsters of a decade and a half ago have graduated to jobs and families, they are going to tattoo-removal specialists in droves, trying to erase an embarrassing reminder of the mistake they made one drunken night so many years ago: They were permanently inked with an Asian-language word that didn’t say quite what they thought it did.
...
For the non-tattooed, at least, the results can be worth a good laugh. Ko recalled one instance in which a man approached her with a tattoo on his forearm that he had always taken to be the Chinese character for “spirit.”
“I was like, ‘Why did he have that tattoo?’” she said. “It really said ‘gas’” (Ko assured the man that it was close enough).
Blessed are the poor in...? They shall be blameless in elevators and other small, crowded spaces.
However, one may find some consolation in noting that errors in Asian-English translation are quite a two-way street. A former classmate of mine who has traveled to Japan several times has noticed many Japanese wearing clothing with unintelligible or unintentionally, um, striking English phrases written on them-- if not for spiritual self-satisfaction, then for an air of sophistication. Indeed, this has been well-documented:
If there's a moral to the story, I suppose it's this: Attention to detail, in matters of religion as well as fashion, matters to someone, if not to one's self, right now. Though one hopes it may later.
Within the last week, I checked my Yahoo! email to find this ad promoting tourism in Malaysia (main site here) on the main post-login page:
This automatically raises some eyebrows, but following said directions brings up several further examples of flagrant sugar-coating of reality in Malaysia, which beg to be deconstructed.
First off:
Commentary will have to suffice in lieu of a pre-recorded laugh-track, with respect to the bit about "the value of family life and peace." Note also the gender-mixing and lack of veiling. This display of "moderation" belies the increasing Arabization of the Muslim world, driven in part by ideological exports from Saudi Arabia.
An interesting contrast to this bit of sugarcoating is at Malaysia Today, in an article entitled ‘Muslim moderates’ are not for hire, which notes that the alleged "majority of moderate Muslims" could not speak out if it wanted to (per the request of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi), as doing so would run afoul of the militant, authoritarian government, and land one in prison without trial under Malaysia's Internal Security Act. That, of course, was somehow omitted from this ad. Somehow.
And now for minorities in Malaysia:
Where to start? How about the Bumiputra system? They may look happy and equally-valued in the ad, but as non-Bumiputra ("Sons of the Soil," i.e., Muslim Malays), they face discrimination in business, real estate, university admissions, and much more.
Then, of course, there's the general climate of fear under which non-Muslims live in an officially Islamic country, which only seems to get worse, where criticizing Islam can land one a jail sentence or a nearly $2000 fine-- this in a country where the per capita income is US $10,400, according to the CIA World Factbook.
Those are only a few examples of holes one can poke in this presentation by Tourism Malaysia. I shudder to think of how much they spent on this particular ad campaign, but for at least one reader, the exercise in taqqiya was for naught.
From Reuters, via Yahoo! News: "Lionel Richie electrifies Libyans"
TRIPOLI (Reuters) - With Muammar Gaddafi's home as a backdrop, U.S. singer Lionel Richie jived and rocked for an adoring Libyan audience on Saturday in a concert to mark the 20th anniversary of a U.S. raid on the North African country.
... Organizers said the music provided a deliberately upbeat commemoration of the 1986 raid, an event that marked one of the lowest points in the decades Libya spent being seen as an outlaw state that supported terrorism.
Just being seen?
U.S. forces bombed Tripoli and Benghazi in the early hours of April 15, 1986. Then President Ronald Reagan said it was in retaliation for what he called Libyan complicity in the bombing of a discotheque in Berlin a month earlier in which three people, including a U.S. serviceman, were killed.
...
"I stand in front of this silent house where 20 years ago my childhood was torn and my toys were destroyed," said Gaddafi's daughter Aisha, who was about 10 at the time of the attack.
"Twenty years ago on this day I awoke to the sound of bombs and rockets and the cries of my brothers ... But today we try to heal our wounds and shake hands with those who are here with us tonight. Yes for peace, no for destruction," she said.
I don't know what Libya hoped to accomplish, other than creating an opportunity to play the victim, and bandy about platitudes about "peace" without acknowledging responsibility or remorse for the acts that made it a pariah state in the first place.
I also haven't had any luck uncovering any information on why Richie was there in the first place; neither his website, which is current as of 2004, nor Wikipedia, shed any light on his possible political leanings. The one common thread that runs through this surreal display is the presence at the commemoration of the 1986 retaliatory bombing by the US, of a US artist who hasn't been widely popular since that same year. In Qaddafi's mind, I'm sure it all makes perfect sense.
This article caught my eye for what's apparently been overlooked in it: as usual, the underlying element of jihad:
From AFP, via Yahoo! News: "Chad repels rebel attack, points finger at Sudan"
Chad claimed it had put down a bid by rebels to topple President Idriss Deby Itno and blamed neighbouring Sudan for fomenting the coup attempt.
The rebel columns have been completely destroyed... The situation is completely under control," Deby told Radio France Internationale (RFI) early on Thursday.
Intense fighting broke out on the outskirts of N'Djamena at dawn as rebels of the United Front for Change (FUC) advanced on the capital, a number of them entering the city, military sources said.
... The north-central African country plays host to some 200,000 refugees from Sudan's western Darfur region, but on Thursday, officials said large numbers of Chadian civilians fleeing the escalating fighting between government troops and rebels were crossing into Darfur.
There's more to it than that; here's what's not being said:
This is more than a localized conflict, in proximity to Darfur. The rebels in this article were active in N'Djamena, the capital city, which is in the southern half of the country near the western border with Cameroon.
Chad has a makeup highly similar to Sudan-- including a 35% Christian population, mostly in the south.
Chad is also a petroleum-producing country. The oilfields? They're in the south, as well.
Though Muslim, the target of the coup attempt, President Idriss Déby Itno, is a member of the Zaghawa tribe, which, interestingly, is found mainly in Eastern Chad and Western Sudan, including Darfur. Moreover, the Zaghawa are the dominant political force in Chad, but a local minority in Sudan. And yes, like the victims of the government-backed janjaweed in Sudan, they're not Arabs.
This isn't the first time Chad has been targeted by an Arab neighbor, with Libya seizing and holding the Aozou Strip in the north of the country from 1976 to 1987.
It's not difficult to connect the geopolitical dots. Chad is seen as ripe for the sort of activity that has plagued Sudan; if it falls to sympathizers with Khartoum, only mostly Christian/animist Cameroon stands in the way of creating an unbroken chain of Islamist territory from northern Nigeria to Sudan, and paving the way to spread Arab influence in North Africa further south.
From AP via Yahoo! News: "Arab-American Rappers an Emerging Force."
NEW YORK - They rap about checkpoints, military oppression and refugee camps. Their songs express longing for Jerusalem and anger at the hardships of life in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Far away from the their parents' homeland in the Middle East, Arab-American rappers are trying to find their own voice in the United States — expressing the frustrations of the Muslim world at a time when anti-Islamic feelings are on the rise following the Sept. 11 attacks.
And 3/11, Bali, Beslan, 7/7... And it only takes two points to draw a straight line.
There's definitely a feeling of solidarity with other minorities, like African-Americans, and not just when it comes to the music," added Ragtop, 25, whose real name is Nizar Wattad. "Palestinians in Israel and the territories are also second-class citizens."
Appropriating rap as another handy angle for dawa.
Their political lyrics resonate with young Arab-Americans. During a recent concert, more than 300 fans of mainly Middle Eastern background squeezed into the Coda Club in midtown Manhattan. The gig was organized by the Network of Arab-American Professionals of New York and the bands themselves.
..."I place my palms to the east where my people seek peace, and freedom from police control, checkpoints and patrols," Wattad and Chakaki rhymed in the song "Free the P," the P referring to Palestinians.
From AP via Yahoo! News: "A Frenchman Speaking English? Mais Non!"
When top business executive Ernest-Antoine Seilliere announced to the meeting of the EU's 25 government leaders that he would "speak in English, the language of business," Chirac had heard enough.
As opposed to the language of love: German (efficient, precise love).
Together with French Finance Minister Thierry Breton and Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, Chirac promptly quit the ballroom where European leaders were meeting and returned only after Frenchman Seilliere, the head of the UNICE business lobby, stopped speaking.
"We people speak in both French and English around the table in the European council and obviously a lot of business is conducted in English," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Friday. But he did not want to blow the incident out of proportion.
"People do get up and go for all sorts of reasons," he said.
*Polite cough.*
Typically officials at EU gatherings speak in their native tongue, and their remarks are translated.
The incident occurred at the start of the two-day summit on economic issues, often pitting free marketeers from the Anglo-Saxon model against those, like the French, backing a more closely supervised economic system.
Seilliere was warning against protectionism in his speech, but French officials said Chirac's decision to leave had nothing to do with the content, only the language.
The diplomat denied that Chirac had officially left the meeting. "He didn't leave the summit, he just briefly made himself absent."
Euphemisms: The universal "language of (attempted) diplomacy."
European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet, also a Frenchman, spoke in his native language.
Paris has long led a losing battle to keep French a dominating force in politics, business and diplomacy, only to see English make ever deeper inroads.
Could it be that the use of the French language is waning because the ideas stated by those who would speak it as these gatherings, fail to resonate with anyone, once translated into the other participants' languages?
It even has to fight the tide of "Franglais" at home — the use of English terms in the language of Moliere itself.
And the EU has bulged from six members, of which three spoke French, to 25 now, many of whom increasingly use English. Questions at the EU press briefings used to be exclusively French, now English dominates.
The EU provides plenty of guarantees for all official languages of the member states and has an army of translators to back it up.
Even if the language issue was important enough for Chirac to walk out, some barely noticed.
"That was not dramatic at all," said Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson.
It's fascinating that, at one point or another, most societies, from Arabs to Romans to Inuits, seem to have been leery of the southpaw in their midst. Arguably, we were the first minority, the first "other" in our communities, as Ben Franklin adroitly pointed out in "A Petition of the Left Hand":
I address myself to all the friends of youth, and conjure them to direct their compassionate regards to my unhappy fate, in order to remove the prejudices of which I am the victim. There are twin sisters of us; and the two eyes of man do not more resemble, nor are capable of being upon better terms with each other, than my sister and myself, were it not for the partiality of our parents, who make the most injurious distinctions between us.
I'm very thankful to exist in a place and time where left-handedness has been stripped of much of the stigma and superstition that used to accompany it, and still accompanies it in some places. Still, I think I just scraped by at the end of that era, having memories of a kindergarten teacher handing me the right-handed scissors and insisting to me, "You're right-handed!" I thought that to be a simple factual error, and protested, not knowing what the big deal was.
From Fox News: "What Makes a Lefty: Myths and Mysteries Persist"
Lefties have long suffered. In India and Indonesia, as well as in most Islamic countries, eating with the left hand is considered impolite.
Chinese characters prove extremely difficult to write with the left hand. Not so long ago, teachers slapped the wrists of left-handed American elementary students.
Humans have shown the ability to learn to use their non-preferred hand after injuries, when required to perform manual labor, or in the face of cultural pressure.
Yet preference for handedness appears to take root in the womb, or even earlier.
...
Brain damage from trauma in the delivery room is another explanation.
"Proud lefties cringe at the thought of it," said the left-handed Wolman.
"The genetic model has wider support among the laterality community than brain damage at birth or levels of hormones in the womb," Wolman said. "At the end of the day, everyone seems to go back to the gene."
"As of today, immigrants wishing to settle in the Netherlands for, in particular, the purposes of marrying or forming a relationship will be required to take the civic integration examination abroad," the Immigration Ministry said in a statement.
Ultimately, no test is fraud-proof. It also begs the question of how "offended" is "too" offended, and such a reaction can be suppressed or denied.
But I like the way they're thinking. (Creatively, that is!)
From AP, via Yahoo! News: " Afghans to Drug Lords: Keep Profits Home."
Afghanistan will encourage its powerful drug lords to invest their illegally earned profits in the war-shattered country, according to the governor of the nation's top opium-growing region.
...
"We as a government will provide them the opportunity to use their money for the national benefit," Helmand Gov. Mohammed Daud said during a trip to the region this week by U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann.
"They must invest in industries. They must invest in construction companies," he said.
No problem. Drug dealers are always out for the good of their country and fellow man.
The drug trade employs about one in 10 Afghans and brought in $2.8 billion last year, Afghan and U.S. officials say. The vast majority of that goes to traffickers and only a small fraction to farmers.
...
Drug agents in recent years have considered using airplanes to spray herbicides on the poppies, but strong opposition from Karzai halted the idea, the diplomat said.
The ground eradication campaign has also met with resistance.
Taliban rebels have vowed to defend the opium farmers. In some small towns in southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces, posters purportedly by the insurgents have been pasted on walls, promising to prevent widespread destruction of the poppies.
So... give up on stopping opium production, and ask the producers, allied with the Taliban, to invest in public works projects. Bad idea, especially with the lingering memory of Bamiyan as the Taliban's idea of civic beautification.
I'm not a fan of Pat Robertson. I also am more inclined to think of the "cartoon rage" in psychological rather than "demonic" terms, but I'm glad he's making use of his virtually untouchable position as a senior preacher/pundit to say something that needed to be said.
The problem is, he's stuck his foot in his mouth so many times, he invites himself to be written off, or worse yet, discredits himself for those occasions that he actually says something useful. So it's a mixed blessing; no pun intended. The cause of Western civilization needs more stable spokespersons.
He remarked that the outpouring of rage elicited by cartoons "just shows the kind of people we're dealing with. These people are crazed fanatics, and I want to say it now: I believe it's motivated by demonic power. It is satanic, and it's time we recognize what we're dealing with."
Robertson also said that "the goal of Islam, ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not, is world domination."
Amen.
In a statement later Monday, Robertson said he was referring specifically to terrorists who want to bomb innocent people as being motivated by Satan.
Fair enough. Being in driving distance at the moment, I can say with some certainty that Hell will freeze over tonight, whether or not it has anything to do with my agreeing with Pat Robertson. The good news is, as a result, the Browns could win a Superbowl any time now.
Whatever the "flavor" of spirituality, this is a fascinating side effect of the economic growth in China. Even if it's not making the brass in Beijing nervous yet, all that freedom of conscience and devotion to a purpose deemed higher than the Communist Party may yet pose a challenge for the likes of Hu Jintao.
From the Christian Science Monitor, via Yahoo! News:
As China becomes more wealthy and worldly, it's also experiencing a growing interest in spirituality. Chinese are emerging with "more time and freedom to think," says Yuan Ci, a monk who works with the Buddhist Association of China in Beijing. In doing so, they are helping to revive China's venerable religions, like Buddhism.
Affluence. Leisure. Time to think. Sufficient education and training to question the status quo. Uh-oh.
In urban areas, China's new Buddhists are young, college-educated, and upwardly mobile. They are looking not only for purpose in their lives, analysts say, but for a way to cope with the pressures of modernization and high expectations.
A purpose beyond the Party and Motherland? Uh-oh. The Mao vs. Deng clashes of earlier decades may be coming home to roost, but Deng probably didn't foresee this side effect of his market reforms. It seems one can't have it both ways, aspiring to prosperity on the level of the United States, and at the other end of the spectrum, an ideological monopoly such as that which North Korea has maintained.
From AP via Yahoo! News: "Abbas Endorses Olmert, Raising Eyebrows."
Suggested caption: "I'm in my happy place... I'm in my happy place..."
Anyway, isn't there an unwritten rule of etiquette among heads of governments not to openly root for a candidate in another country's ongoing political season?
It's definitely in Abbas' interest (a.k.a. Abu Mazen) both to prefer Olmert over, say, Netanyahu, as well as to distance himself from Hamas by publicizing his willingness to cooperate with an "infidel" government, but he might have taken a page from Brer Rabbit's "Briar Patch" tale instead, or perhaps have erred on the side of saying nothing at all, for I'm sure his comments just helped a fair number of Israeli "swing voters" get, well, unswung.
From AP via Yahoo! News, this trial balloon comes from the same people who let Sudan serve on the UN Human Rights Commission. What illustrious and well-functioning nations will get various other operations?
"We are particularly interested in exploring the benefits of possibly relocating certain administrative functions to lower-cost countries, but we will need to undertake a detailed cost/benefit analysis in each case," the document said, without giving specifics.
Yeah, scattering operations around the globe and paying people less should really help with the corruption issue.
The United States has been pushing for a major management overhaul that would give the secretary-general more power and flexibility. But the 191-member General Assembly, dominated by developing countries, controls the U.N.'s purse strings and is not expected to give up any power easily.
This promises to be a comedy of errors, starring the Non-Aligned Movement.
Mikhail Gorbachev's magnetic brown eyes shine as brightly as ever, and he speaks with the same passion about the collapse of the Soviet Union as he prepares to mark his 75th birthday on Thursday.
Alright, first things first: The above, bold-faced phrase juxtaposes two mental images that are the least likely ever to be placed in the same sentence, even by the proverbial "monkeys at typewriters." No, MG is definitely not in the "magnetic brown eyes" file.
Now, then:
The man who ended the Cold War and launched democratic reforms that broke the repressive Soviet regime continues to enjoy the limelight, globe-trotting on behalf of his political foundation and environmental group and taking part in charity projects.
Poppycock. With a side of horsefeathers. Saying Gorbachev ended the Cold War is like saying Hitler ended WWII in Europe by shooting himself. It was already over by that point.
At a meeting with foreign reporters this week, Gorbachev blamed the United States for losing a chance to build a safer and more stable world following the Soviet demise.
"Ending the Cold War was given as a gift" to the United States, but it only strengthened its arrogance and unilateralism, he said. "The winner's complex is worse than an inferiority complex, because it's harder to cure."
A gift? You lost!
As far as opportunities lost, it seems Gorbachev didn't name any in particular, but just engaged in bellyaching over the USSR's lost opportunity to be even more arrogant a
The newly octagenarian dictator, eager to prove he's alive, inadvertently appears in an imperialist pigdog Adidas jogging suit in this AFP photo. Whoops.