MetaFilter

What's That? Sadly, the education of the youth of amerika is declining in more than one way. The other day I was at the grocery store and the checker was unable to identify a portabello mushroom. And no, she wasn't new...and to make matters worse the checker next to her didn't know either. (more inside)
comment posted at 10:02 AM on Nov-12-05
comment posted at 2:25 PM on Nov-12-05
comment posted at 9:39 PM on Nov-12-05
comment posted at 9:06 AM on Nov-13-05

"Every important marker of her life had to do with clubbing. She wore her first bra to a club. She went out without a bra for the first time to a club. Her first kiss, her first crush on a gay guy, the first time she saw Jimmy Choo sandals, the first time someone passed her a joint." A preview of the high literary talent that is Nicole Richie. (Is it eligible?)
comment posted at 7:11 AM on Nov-12-05

Y. professor thinks bombs, not planes, toppled WTC Yeah, yeah. We've heard it all before. Or have we?
comment posted at 8:17 PM on Nov-11-05

Wahhabi U. A top U.S. diplomat recently revealed Saudi Arabia still teaches students to hate non-Muslims and the West. So why are we making it easier for Saudi students schooled in that hatred to visit the U.S.?
comment posted at 11:23 AM on Nov-11-05

Loose change A one hour analysis of 9/11 and how it is more likely than not that the government was actually behind the attacks. A documentary analyzing the footage and presenting an alternative view to the official version.
comment posted at 10:48 AM on Nov-11-05
comment posted at 1:39 PM on Nov-11-05

"On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive him at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. [...] Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago." Coral cache quicktime here.
comment posted at 9:11 AM on Nov-10-05

Explosions in three hotels in Amman, Jordan kill at least 57 people. Authorities suspect suicide bombers. The Grand Hyatt Hotel, the Radisson SAS Hotel, and the Days Inn were involved in the bombings; most of the deaths were focused at a wedding reception where a man allegedly entered into the crowd with eplosives strapped to his body. Arrests have been made, and the government is asking anyone who filmed the bombings to give the government a copy. An al-qaeda website has taken responsibility, stating "A group of our best lions launched a new attack on some dens ..."
comment posted at 9:00 AM on Nov-10-05
comment posted at 9:33 AM on Nov-10-05

Animated video broadcast on Iran's IRIB state television, apparently aimed at children, seemingly promotes the virtues of becoming a suicide bomber. Coralized wmv link, transcript.
comment posted at 7:15 PM on Nov-6-05
comment posted at 4:31 PM on Nov-8-05

Why Paris Is Burning Officially, the French state doesn't recognize minorities, only citizens of France, all of them equal under the law. But that republican ideal has seemed especially hollow over the past week as the children of impoverished, largely Muslim immigrants from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa fought running battles with police throughout the banlieues, or suburbs, to the east and north of the French capital...
comment posted at 10:02 AM on Nov-6-05
comment posted at 8:04 PM on Nov-7-05

Become Republican [flash]. A how-to guide for non-Republicans and other liberal trash. Plenty other cartoons and such at the frown.
comment posted at 6:16 PM on Nov-4-05
comment posted at 9:54 PM on Nov-4-05

Iranian students demonstrate outside Italian embassy in Iran.Chanting anti-Zionism slogans, the ralliers called for the withdrawal of the Zionists from the occupied Palestine.
They also called for the Italian government's explanation on the Nov 15, 2000 assassination of the Eduardo Agnelli suspiciously at the hand of the zionists. Edoardo Agnelli, born in June 9, 1954 in New York of a Christian father and a Jewish mother, had converted to Islam four years before the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. He was the only son of the Italian tycoon Gianni Agnelli -director and the main shareholder of Fiat and Ferrari automaking factories - who died of prostate cancer in January 24, 2003.
Some pictures which prove he was a Moslem.
comment posted at 9:11 PM on Nov-3-05

Newsfilter: Rioting continues in the suburbs of Paris. In Clichy-Sous-Bois, a predominantly (80%) North African muslim banlieu of about 28,000 people, night battles have been raging (video) between youths and the police after two muslim youths died by electrocution while they thought the police were chasing them, a charge the police denies. That was 5 nights ago. Since then, 27 people have been arrested, 3 convicted, numerous cars destroyed and property damaged, and 23 police officers wounded in street battles involving "up to several hundred" participants. The muslim community now accuses the police of firing tear gas into a mosque, and things look far from calming down. These tensions are hardly confined to Paris, however - In Lyon, 800 cars have been burned in "low level" violence this year; Across France, 9,000 police cars have been "stoned" this year, and 20-40 cars are destroyed a night (!!!), according to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. I knew that relations between "the French" and the "Beurs" were somewhat less than pleasant, but am I the only one that was unaware that France has been in a state of low-level but direct civil and religious war for the last few years?
comment posted at 9:44 PM on Nov-1-05
comment posted at 5:02 PM on Nov-2-05
comment posted at 12:46 PM on Nov-5-05

Cindy Sheehan for President Or Senate. The anti-war left seeks a challenger for Hillary Clinton
comment posted at 10:05 PM on Nov-1-05

Why Does God Hate Amputees? - Marshall Brain, creator of HowStuffWorks and author of Robotic Nation, has posted his latest work, a multi-chapter website examining the delusion of religious belief. If you're busy, he suggests reading Understanding Delusion. If you want the whole story, start at the beginning. (title explaination)
comment posted at 6:19 PM on Oct-29-05
comment posted at 6:59 PM on Oct-29-05
comment posted at 9:25 PM on Oct-29-05
comment posted at 10:27 PM on Oct-29-05
comment posted at 12:00 AM on Oct-30-05

Look at me riding a luck dragon! Jealous? You're jealous....
comment posted at 11:11 PM on Oct-28-05
comment posted at 11:14 PM on Oct-28-05
comment posted at 11:15 PM on Oct-28-05

Rusty's family tried to accept his kinkier interests. "Father, will you buy me that leash for my birthday?" "But Patches already has a leash," said Father. "I didn't want it for Patches," said Rusty. Father chuckled uncomfortably.
comment posted at 9:59 PM on Oct-28-05
comment posted at 10:53 PM on Oct-28-05

Go Rangers This is the tale of a young man who lost an eye to a suicide bomber in Iraq and THEN joined the U.S. Army Rangers. I don't think that he was busy calling his Mom.
comment posted at 5:59 PM on Oct-28-05
comment posted at 9:16 PM on Oct-28-05

If You're a Christian, Muslim or Jew - You are Wrong - A rant over at the Huffington Post.
And let's be clear about this, it IS a rant, and a beaut at that. But it's a sentiment that's run through the head of everyone who isn't a member of the three mentioned groups. No one in the mainstream media says things like this, I wonder why?
The post is made. Let the emphatic agreements, and the vicious denials... begin!
comment posted at 7:30 PM on Oct-23-05
comment posted at 8:40 PM on Oct-23-05
comment posted at 9:27 PM on Oct-23-05

Kansas Supreme Court ruled on Friday that homosexuals cannot be treated differently. In what conservative homophobes decry as another instance of judicual activism, the Kansas Supreme Court unanimously struck down a state law that punished underage sex more severely if it involved homosexual acts, saying "moral disapproval" of such conduct is not enough to justify the different treatment. In the decision the court ruled: 1. K.S.A. 2004 Supp. 21-3522 violates the equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and § 1 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights. 2. The equal protection violation inherent in K.S.A. 2004 Supp. 21-3522 is cured by the severance of the words "and are members of the opposite sex" from the statute.
comment posted at 8:08 PM on Oct-22-05

OCTOBER 22 IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY!!!
EVERY YEAR WE GET TOGETHER AND MAKE SALMON FOR TOAST, EVERY YEAR WE GET A CROCKETY BLOAT, EVERY YEAR WE GET DRUNK ON THE DOCKS, AND EVERY YEAR WE HAVE SEX WITH OUR CAPS LOCKS!!!!
comment posted at 9:50 PM on Oct-21-05
comment posted at 9:57 PM on Oct-21-05
comment posted at 10:02 PM on Oct-21-05
comment posted at 10:07 PM on Oct-21-05
comment posted at 10:14 PM on Oct-21-05

The Simpsons are going to... the Middle East! As a treat for viewers during Ramadan, Dubai-based network MBC has dubbed 30 episodes of the Simpsons into Arabic. But in order not to offend their audience, this version of Our Favorite Family is, well, a bit different; for instance, Homer (rechristened Omar) doesn't eat bacon or drink beer. Speculation about the fate of other characters abounds, One Angry Arab is not impressed.
comment posted at 9:04 PM on Oct-21-05

U.S. soldiers videotaped desecrating Taliban corpses. The bodies were positioned to face Mecca and burned -- an act of desecration that violates Islamic burial rites and the Geneva Conventions. A U.S. PsyOps specialist broadcast an inflammatory message to the nearby town in order to incite an attack. "Attention, Taliban, you are all cowardly dogs. You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned. You are too scared to come down and retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be."
The video aired last night in Australia, but hasn't surfaced yet in the U.S. It won't be long, though.. "Wow, look at the blood coming out of the mouth on that one, fucking straight death metal."
comment posted at 9:19 PM on Oct-21-05

"Undeclared Global Weather War" : you're now living in a bad James Bond flick Yeah, I know: a Hoagland morass.'Cept there's that damn pending weather mod bill in Congress, the anomalous "tuning fork" patterns that seem to guide recent hurricanes ( see main link, esp. Ophelia footage ) , the USAF document, "Weather as a Force Multiplier", the '97 quote by Secretary of defense William Cohen..... Is somebody lobbing Hurricanes at the US ? Weather sure has been weird, I'll say that. Could it be......TeslaFinger™ ?
comment posted at 12:33 PM on Oct-19-05

$250,000 award - if you can prove Darwin's theory of evolution.
comment posted at 5:41 PM on Oct-18-05

A fatwa here and a fatwa there and before you know it, you're reading the Soccer Fatwa.
comment posted at 4:38 PM on Oct-18-05

What of Iran's nuclear program? That was not a pressing concern for the young people I met. None of them raised the issue in conversation with me. When I asked them about it, they fell into two groups... Yet both insisted with equal vehemence that an American or Israeli bombing of nuclear installations, let alone an Iraq-style invasion, would be a wholly unacceptable response to Iran's nuclear ambitions... A perceptive local analyst reinforced the point. Who or what, he asked, could give this regime renewed popular support, especially among the young? "Only the United States!" If... whatever we do to slow down the nuclearization of Iran does not end up merely slowing down the democratization of Iran; and if, at the same time, we can find policies that help the gradual social emancipation and eventual self-liberation of Young Persia, then the long-term prospects are good. The Islamic revolution, like the French and Russian revolutions before it, has been busy devouring its own children. One day, its grandchildren will devour the revolution

Soldiers of the Hidden Imam
comment posted at 11:54 AM on Oct-15-05