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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

POP goes the weasel? "A number of Iraqis apprehended two Americans disguised in Arab dress as they tried to blow up a booby-trapped car in the middle of a residential area in western Baghdad on Tuesday. Residents of western Baghdad’s al-Ghazaliyah district told Quds Press that the people had apprehended the Americans as they left their Caprice car near a residential neighborhood in al-Ghazaliyah on Tuesday afternoon (11 October 2005). Local people found they looked suspicious so they detained the men before they could get away. That was when they discovered that they were Americans and called the Iraqi puppet police. Five minutes after the arrival of the Iraqi puppet police on the scene a large force of US troops showed up and surrounded the area. They put the two Americans in one of their Humvees and drove away at high speed to the astonishment of the residents of the area. Quds Press spoke by telephone with a member of the al-Ghazaliyah puppet police who confirmed the incident, saying that the two men were non-Arab foreigners but declined to be more precise about their nationality.
comment posted at 5:45 PM on Oct-13-05
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comment posted at 9:12 PM on Oct-13-05

A new television series ["Beautiful Maidens"] being broadcast around the Middle East tells the story of Arabs living in residential compounds in Saudi Arabia and the militant Islamists who want to blow them up so they can collect their rewards in heaven - 72 beautiful virgins. One of the show's writers, Abdullah Bjad, is a Saudi and self-described former militant who was consulted on religious aspects of the script. He said that just before one of the 2003 attacks on a residential compound in Saudi Arabia, an attacker who was in contact with his superiors was "heard on the mobile phone counting down the seconds to the 'beautiful maidens.' His last words were: 'One second to the 'beautiful maidens.' He then blew himself up."
New Syrian TV show angers some Arabs • But what will a woman have when she enters paradise?
comment posted at 6:49 PM on Oct-12-05
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comment posted at 8:53 PM on Oct-12-05

Is the Blair government creating another dodgy dossier? Following Tony Blair's recent outburst accusing the Iranian government of supporting attacks on British troops, a team are being dispatched to Iraq on a hunting expedition, in the hope of proving him right. Meanwhile, a prominent neo-con who served as the Iraq desk officer for the Office of Special Plans is telling the British that only the threat of force will tame Tehran. Sound familiar?!
comment posted at 8:17 PM on Oct-9-05
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comment posted at 12:50 PM on Oct-10-05

My cell was 8 ft by 6 ft, the same size as the detainees’ cages at Guantanamo. It was my turn to be humiliated every time I was taken to have a shower. Naked, I had to run my hands through my hair to show that I was not concealing a weapon in it. Then mouth open, tongue up, down, nothing inside. Right arm up, nothing in my armpit. Left arm up. Lift the right testicle, nothing hidden. Lift the left. Turn around, bend over, spread your buttocks, knowing a camera was displaying my naked image as male and female guards watched. It didn’t matter that I was an army captain, a graduate of West Point, the elite US military academy. It didn’t matter that my religious beliefs prohibited me from being fully naked in front of strangers. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been charged with a crime. It didn’t matter that my wife and daughter had no idea where I was. And it certainly didn’t matter that I was a loyal American citizen and, above all, innocent... I knew why I had been arrested: it was because I am a Muslim.

James Yee: An American in chains It's OK to demonize the 'Other' if the Other is a Muslim.
comment posted at 3:30 PM on Oct-9-05
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comment posted at 12:48 PM on Oct-10-05

Pixel Fest - "Here's the game: can a group of random people, each contributing a teensy weensy bit, make a coherent piece of art/design/garbage purely through the influence of the work itself?" A time-lapse video of the project so far can be seen here (heavy load time)
comment posted at 8:33 PM on Oct-8-05

Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency have won this year's Nobel Peace Prize. (previous)
comment posted at 8:40 PM on Oct-7-05

Another Starwars kid? (AVI, no sound)
No, this man claims to be a Spetsnaz instructor, being deadly with an entrenching shovel. "The Spetsnaz soldier loves his spade. He has more faith in its reliability and accuracy than he has in his Kalashnikov automatic.".
comment posted at 8:35 PM on Oct-7-05

BBC confirms the story That box on his back, that earpiece? He's never said exactly how God talks to him, only that He does ....
comment posted at 6:55 PM on Oct-6-05

NYC Subway Warning The New York Police Department is investigating what it deems a credible tip that 19 operatives have been deployed to the city to place bombs in the subway, and security in the subways will be increased, sources told ABC News. Also here.
comment posted at 8:25 PM on Oct-6-05

Charming and unexpected vocabulary from many languages. Why did Persians need a word, alghunjar, to express 'the feigned anger of a mistress'? Could there really have been that many insincere mistresses in Persia? Why does Russia need a word meaning, 'dealer in stolen cats'? Or 'someone with six fingers'? And who can resist the Chinese xiaoxiao, meaning, 'the whistling and pattering of rain or wind'? "These are more than funny foreign vocabularies; they are tiny windows into the way other people live, and the obsessions that drive them." [via]
comment posted at 10:09 AM on Oct-2-05
comment posted at 10:11 AM on Oct-2-05

Did anyone at Boeing really think this ad through? Boeing/Bell Helicopters recently put out a print advert showing US soldiers rappelling from an Osprey helicopter onto the roof of a mosque.

Predictably, Muslim groups are not too happy with the ad. It ran twice in the National Journal and Armed Forces Journal. coincidentally, the United States is also trying to repair its image in the Muslim world... with a campaign led by Karen Hughes.
comment posted at 11:14 PM on Oct-1-05

Selected images from Saturday's anti-war rally in San Francisco. More from Zombietime. Warning: contains snarky captions.
comment posted at 9:14 PM on Sep-29-05

Judy, please turn off the lights while Wayne starts the projector. Streaming video of old educational films with a forum for snickering.
comment posted at 9:58 PM on Sep-4-05

Satellite photos of airplanes in flight. This is a great time-waster, but for some reason I keep looking for more (you may need to adjust the zoom bar on the page to maximum). These are all at the Atlanta airport, and I was surprised how close they were to each other.... check out the one that left before, and the one before that, and the one before that... Those are all taking off, here's one that's landing. Can anybody find any more? Or does anyone care?
comment posted at 5:48 PM on Aug-28-05

The Great Queers of History - I am sometimes asked, ‘But does it really matter that some historical figure, for example Tchaikovsky, was gay? ... But I like to pose some questions of my own in response: ‘If it doesn't really matter, why has society taken such great pains to conceal Tchaikovsky’s sexuality, maybe even murder him for it? from Lists of famous homosexuals ( ... and a prior related post by anastasiav, Homosexuality in 18th Century England)
comment posted at 6:34 PM on Aug-21-05

Cindy Sheehan's Sinister Piffle
By Christopher Hitchens

The military and its relatives have no extra claim on the chief executive's ear. Indeed, it might be said that they have less claim than the rest of us, since they have voluntarily sworn an oath to obey and carry out orders. Most presidents in time of war have made an exception in the case of the bereaved — Lincoln's letter to the mother of two dead Union soldiers (at the time, it was thought that she had lost five sons) is a famous instance — but the job there is one of comfort and reassurance, and this has already been discharged in the Sheehan case. If that stricken mother had been given an audience and had risen up to say that Lincoln had broken his past election pledges and sought a wider and more violent war with the Confederacy, his aides would have been quite right to show her the door and to tell her that she was out of order.

comment posted at 9:05 PM on Aug-15-05
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A private foundation is investing $14m to purchase greenhouses in Gaza. Israeli settlers had originally planned to demolish their greenhouses instead of seeing them handed over to Palestinian farmers. Under a deal brokered by former World Bank President James Wolfensohn 80% of Gaza's greenhouses will be preserved and turned over to Palestinian management. It is, of course, a trap for the Palestinian Authority. The greenhouses are simply the most visible part of a supply chain that the Palestinians cannot possibly manage. Without agricultural knowledge, market expertise, water management skills, good roads, and all the other infrastructure of a modern state, the greenhouses will fail spectacularly. The Palestinian Authority will be exposed as incompetent and unable to run even a simple enterprise. This will cast doubt amongst Palestinians about the practicality of an independent Palestine.
comment posted at 5:03 PM on Aug-16-05

The Rift: The state of Islamic Alienation in Europe and for that matter any Western nation. Do Muslims get to retain their complete identity, values, and customs unfettered by their residency in the West? I think not. Inversely, if 1-5% of the population in Saudi Arabia was western what could they expect of their adopted (i.e. a choice) Wahhabi nation... Where does this end?
comment posted at 9:57 AM on Aug-14-05
comment posted at 1:52 PM on Aug-14-05

Applause? you be the judge. of course, it takes a legend to know a legend.
comment posted at 7:21 PM on Aug-1-05

Senate proposal to ban Chimeras - How long will it take our elected betters to tank all US scientific research on moral grounds. I don't see christian ethics stopping the Chinese
comment posted at 3:14 PM on Jul-31-05

Major Incident on London Underground reported. Anyone have any further information?
comment posted at 7:39 PM on Jul-7-05

Why "Intelligent Design" Isn't. The New Yorker takes an informative look at the "factual" basis for so-called "Intelligent Design" theory, while an all too infrequent victory is won in Georgia.
comment posted at 8:41 PM on May-25-05

Leaving the left. "I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion." Keith Thompson
comment posted at 12:33 PM on May-23-05

Sri Lankan Maids Pay Dearly for Perilous Jobs Overseas The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class of wide-eyed women before her to clean it properly. If it smells, "Mama," as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their female employers, "will be angry and she will hammer and beat you." Sriyantha Walpola for The New York Times More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids. Sriyantha Walpola for The New York Times Some maids being trained in Kegalla, Sri Lanka, will find brutal work conditions in the Middle East. "This is where you go wrong," the teacher continued. "That is how Mama beats you and burns you - when you do anything wrong."
comment posted at 8:36 PM on May-8-05

FDA to ban gay sperm donors. The agency says that such men collectively are more likely to be HIV-positive than other men.
comment posted at 2:19 PM on May-7-05

A Florida court has blocked a thirteen year old girl's abortion. The judge's ruling comes in spite of Florida state law which specifically does not require a minor to seek parental consent before an abortion.
comment posted at 12:24 PM on Apr-30-05

L I V E W R O N G : is right. The purveyors, or perpetrators, of LIVEWRONG suggest you represent what you want, when you want, how you want. Buy a bracelet. It is what it is. The creators of the LIVEWRONG armband do not oppose any person, pet, or living thing that have cancer, nor do we oppose any charity that supports a cure for cancer.
comment posted at 9:32 PM on Apr-26-05

Prime Minister Paul Martin addresses the sponsorship scandal with a televised speech to the Canadian people. The Opposition is calling for Liberal blood. Here's some political fun from North of the Border. Will the Gomery Inquiry reveal the Liberals as a crooked party or did they just get caught for something every party does? This is stuff I though only happened to other countries...boy, was I wrong!
comment posted at 9:05 PM on Apr-21-05

He was fond of reading Proust and Dostoevsky. He studied the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit, painted landscapes in oil, and flirted with Marxism. His mannerisms -- such as saying "Gee!" when pondering some scientific marvel -- were contagious. And when the US government decided to incinerate hundreds of thousands of fishermen, housewives, cooks, potters, and Zen monks as a decisive blow for peace in 1945, he told the commanding officers on the mission, "Don't let them detonate it too high . . . or the target won't get as much damage." He was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the mild-mannered destroyer of worlds who led the Manhattan Project, portrayed in a new biography called American Prometheus.
comment posted at 6:03 PM on Apr-13-05
comment posted at 9:31 PM on Apr-13-05