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"While the West debates whether the Islamic world is ready for democracy, an equally appropriate question is whether the West is ready for Islamic democracy." Parties of God, by Ken Silverstein, is an interesting read on democracy in the Middle East.
comment posted at 8:28 AM on Apr-11-07
comment posted at 12:41 PM on Apr-11-07
comment posted at 12:38 AM on Apr-13-07
comment posted at 12:41 AM on Apr-13-07
comment posted at 12:42 AM on Apr-13-07

The death of Russia [google video]. A very interesting documentary made for Channel 4 in the UK on the state of modern Russia from Marcel Theroux. Marcel is older brother of Louis Theroux and son of the travel writer Paul. Marcel's documentary style is more sober than that of his brother and he deals with a tragic subject delicately and with a sympathetic tone. A very depressing but nonetheless very watchable documentary told by a literate, compassionate journalist. [48 minutes running time]
comment posted at 12:29 PM on Apr-9-07

OK, Here I go, I'm going to make this whole website right now on this dry-erase board.
comment posted at 7:30 PM on Apr-6-07

Go faster, shoot tankers (flash)
comment posted at 6:31 PM on Apr-6-07

Hey, dis here nest you got iz real nize. I sees you already gotcha a pretty leetle egg hera. Be a real pity if somethin' bad happened to dis nest, capisce? By da way, you don' mind takin' care my leetle egg, too, do ya? Do ya?
comment posted at 8:00 AM on Mar-19-07

Facing Life With a Lethal Gene. Say you're in your early twenties. For years you've seen members of your family twist and turn invouluntarily and developing dementia due to your family history of Huntington's Disease. Even if you have the gene for the disease, the symptoms are unlikely to hit until you're 50. Would you want to find out if you're going to share the same fate as your relatives, or live life out as much as you can unaware if you're going to suffer from it too? Another touching human interest story from the NY Times which has had a bunch of these recently.
comment posted at 3:03 PM on Mar-18-07
comment posted at 10:53 PM on Mar-18-07

Michael Zebuhr was a 25-year-old Ph.D. candidate at Clemson University. A year ago he was visiting his sister in Minneapolis, and was killed during an attempted hold-up. The assailant pleaded guilty, but others think there is more to the story.
comment posted at 8:54 AM on Mar-15-07
comment posted at 12:34 PM on Mar-15-07

Mastermind? admitted planning attacks.... can you believe a verdict from partial transcripts edited by the US defence department that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed planned these attacks?
comment posted at 9:06 AM on Mar-15-07
comment posted at 12:31 PM on Mar-15-07

Was I a good American in the time of George Bush? "Before the current administration, it had always been easy to condemn the "good Germans" who did nothing while Jews, Gypsies and others were rounded up for extermination." Uh, is this just a little over the top?
comment posted at 7:15 AM on Mar-14-07

The idea of a single, bi-national state is not new. Its appeal lies in its attempt to provide an equitable and inclusive solution to the struggle of two peoples for the same piece of land. It was first suggested in the 1920s by Zionist leftwing intellectuals led by philosopher Martin Buber, Judah Magnes... and Haïm Kalvarisky... Underlying their Zionism was a quest for a Jewish renaissance, both cultural and spiritual, with a determination to avoid injustice in its achievement. It was essential to found a new nation, although not necessarily a separate Jewish state and certainly not at the expense of the existing population.

Time for a bi-national state
See also B'Tselem's Map of Jewish Settlements In The West Bank
comment posted at 4:38 PM on Mar-13-07
comment posted at 4:40 PM on Mar-13-07
comment posted at 12:21 PM on Mar-14-07
comment posted at 6:29 PM on Mar-15-07

Is it racist to condemn fanaticism? Phyllis Chesler, the Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York, writes of her time as bride of a charming and Westernised Afghan Muslim.
comment posted at 9:42 AM on Mar-7-07
comment posted at 9:44 AM on Mar-7-07
comment posted at 11:59 AM on Mar-17-07

...A few days ago the chief of the Israeli police resigned after an investigation that found several of Israel’s highest police officers guilty of corruption and negligence. This came within a week of the forced resignation of Israel’s Chief of Staff from the military because of the fiascos of the second Lebanon war... some ten days after Israel’s minister of justice was convicted of sexual assault while on duty... after Israel’s president – who holds a largely symbolic position – resigned temporarily following charges of rape and sexual misconduct. ....several other investigations are still pending, not least two or three directed at the Prime Minister himself, Ehud Olmert, concerning corruption and favoritism... Suddenly the Palestinians and the Hizbullah, and even Iranian nukes, have taken a back seat: Israel does indeed seem in danger of imploding from within, at least as a viable democracy.

Is Israel Falling Apart ?
comment posted at 12:28 AM on Mar-5-07
comment posted at 4:23 PM on Mar-6-07

Toxic Wife Syndrome- "She is the woman who gives up work as soon as she marries, ostensibly to create a stable home environment for any children that might come along, but who then employs large numbers of staff to do all the domestic work she promised to undertake, leaving her with little to do all day except shop, lunch, luxuriate. Believe me, there is no shortage of the breed and I've been inundated with horror tales about them."
comment posted at 11:19 AM on Mar-2-07

Digg has been gamed. Wired writer Annalee Newitz used the User/Submitter service to buy votes on news site/social aggregatordigg. Hours after she hired the service, her fake blog site, now popular through treachery, was on digg's front page.
comment posted at 12:02 PM on Mar-1-07
comment posted at 11:32 PM on Mar-1-07

Awesome: Gore "emphasizing the nonpartisan nature of the climate change threat," and his movie, An Inconvenient Truth netting a Best Documentary Oscar. Not so awesome.
comment posted at 5:32 PM on Feb-26-07

A dozen of Putin's critics have been assassinated and Russia's vast natural resources are in the pockets of a chosen few. A 2 part article in The Guardian.
comment posted at 2:26 AM on Feb-25-07
comment posted at 10:44 PM on Feb-25-07
comment posted at 5:27 PM on Feb-27-07
comment posted at 10:40 PM on Mar-3-07

Bombing Iran - motive, opportunity, means (and thuggish accomplice).
comment posted at 12:03 PM on Feb-24-07

The three-decade decline in teenage and young-adult rape accompanies huge drops in all crimes -- murder, assault, drug abuse and property -- committed by youth... Women's rapidly rising status and economic independence in the larger society fostered new attitudes and laws that rejected violence against women. That younger people growing up in this environment of greater gender equality should show the biggest decreases in rape, while older generations lag behind, is consistent with this explanation... Over the last 30 years, rape arrest rates have fallen by 80% among Californians under age 15, much larger than the 25% drop among residents age 40 and older.

The decline of rape
So, kids today are different.
comment posted at 2:59 PM on Feb-22-07

Mohammed Riaz, 49, found it abhorrent that his eldest daughter wanted to be a fashion designer, and that she and her sisters were likely to reject the Muslim tradition of arranged marriages.

So he sprayed petrol throughout their terraced British home in Accrington, Lancashire, and set it alight, killing his wife and four daughters while they slept in an honor killing for being "too Western."
comment posted at 9:53 PM on Feb-21-07
comment posted at 12:33 PM on Feb-22-07
comment posted at 12:45 PM on Feb-22-07
comment posted at 10:14 PM on Feb-23-07

Rep. Ben Bridges (R-Cleveland, GA) is in trouble. A recent memo from his office -- one circulated this week by Warren Chisum, a ranking member of the Texas state legislature -- has caught the attention of the Anti-Defamation League. They are not pleased. And they're not alone. Why? Because in his memo, Rep. Bridges -- sponsor of a perennial anti-evolution education bill in the Georgia State House -- claims that "so-called ’secular evolution science’ is the Big Bang, 15-billion-year, alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion." And that's not all. It would appear that Rep. Bridges is getting his information (and templates for his legislation) from www.fixedearth.com -- a website dedicated not only to the removal of pro-evolution education from schools, but to the idea that "[t]he Earth is not rotating...nor is it going around the sun." Because you see, it's all part of the Copernican Deception, a massive conspiracy propagated by Christian Zionists, NASA and ... Madonna?
comment posted at 9:18 AM on Feb-16-07

The Fountain "No matter how good CGI looks at first, it dates quickly...So I set the ridiculous goal of making a film that would reinvent space without using CGI." Director Aronofsky tapped into the microphotography work of Parks and Parks to bring a new look to special effects in science fiction cinema.
comment posted at 11:32 PM on Feb-13-07

The Last Jews of Cairo As soon as we saw the guns, we knew we’d arrived at the synagogue. Egyptian policemen thronged behind barricades, white uniforms in the dusk, handguns at their hips. Above them, on stairs, Special Forces soldiers in black with red armbands held machine guns as easily as we did point-and-shoot cameras.
comment posted at 5:45 PM on Feb-13-07
comment posted at 7:44 PM on Feb-14-07

Breaking News. Read about what has been called the Kennedy assassination of this generation (includes map).
comment posted at 3:43 PM on Jan-31-07

“Then it came to me — ‘Your sperm, that’s what you want me to take from you’. Right there, I asked the officers who came to visit to make sure his sperm be kept.” 20-year old Keivin Cohen, an Israeli soldier, was killed in the Gaza Strip in 2002. His parents, claiming his wish was to one day have children, had his sperm extracted from his dead body to inseminate in a female volunteer. This week, an Israeli court finally ruled that the parents have the right to do this, and a 25-year old woman Cohen never met will be impregnated five years after his death.
comment posted at 3:52 PM on Jan-27-07

AirTran Airways Removes Family with Unruly Toddler From Plane : AirTran is defending their decision to remove a family of three from a plane after their three-year old daughter refused to take her seat during boarding. The plane, carrying 112 people, was already delayed 15 minutes and the airline felt that the further delay caused by the toddler's behavior was unacceptable.
comment posted at 2:08 PM on Jan-24-07

A television report tracks Muslim extremism in the United Kingdom. See also, part 2 and part 3. (YouTube) (via Digg)
comment posted at 9:58 AM on Jan-17-07

Still more Ferrofluid fun The artist who produced 'Protrude Flow' has a new thing: A spiral tower, presumably full of electromagnets, which pulls ferrofluid up and down and all over it in weird black spikes. That's a hopeless description, so watch the (big .wmv) videos: 1 and 2 for full amazingosity.
comment posted at 8:27 AM on Jan-16-07

The sheer cost of it nearly killed the War Hawks' plans. The secretary of the treasury estimated the war would require imposing high new taxes on a population that didn't want to be taxed at all. Lacking a serious standing army, the U.S. would have to use the state militias -- which by law couldn't be deployed outside the US. (From The Tyee)
comment posted at 10:00 AM on Jan-12-07

Russia's discomfort with its Muslim minority stems from a fear that the higher-than-average fertility of the Muslim population (6-10 children children per woman among Muslims vs 1.5 per woman among non-Muslims) will make the ethnic Russians of eastern-orthodox persuasion a minority within the state. [More Inside]
comment posted at 1:33 AM on Jan-9-07