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News Briefs 10-02-2006

Ancient Egypt is the big story, with an update due later today. Excrement has just hit multiple fans in Washington. Jameske, Tox and Rico inspired a closer look at a few of our modern myths – religion, politics, culture. So if any of these topics – or a little off-color language – typically disturb your soul, you might want to avoid the second half of today’s news. Also, you may need to log in (enter ‘dailygrail’ and ‘article’) at the nytimes and washpost.

Quote of the Day:

There are racists, bigots and criminals in all countries, and it is the duty of the respectful and reasonable to reach out to each other. Let us hope that, instead of emboldening the bigots, this sorry affair will bring all open-minded, tolerant and reasonable people from the Arab, Muslim, Norwegian, Danish and European communities together, to unite in a continued struggle of reason against prejudice, open-mindedness against bigotry, and humanity against racism.

Arab and Muslim youth in their apology for the recent violence.

  1. Apology accepted
    Hrmm, funny how Akkari doesn’t mention that several of the dozen cartoons paraded in front of Islamic leaders were drawn by the Danish Islamic groups. But I won’t be cynical, because the Arab and Muslim youth groups did highlight that bigots and morons exist in all religions and colours, so I applaud them for that evolutionary leap forward. Apology accepted. Now, since Denmark apologised weeks ago, I hope we can all hug each other and get on with life. That’s my last word on the … er, what were we talking about? I’ve forgotten already. **wink wink nudge nudge **

    But the political links, Kat? I’m like Cayce Pollard in William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, only I’m allergic to politics and not just brand-names. Ugh, get it off me! It burns, it burnssssss! 😉

    Right, time to read about Zahi’s adventures in the Valley of the Kings, and get the goss on that ancient Russian UFO manuscript — now that’s the stuff I love to read! Do you think Zahi will let me into Egypt if I draw a caricature of him? Perhaps a cartoon for Sub Rosa, Greg? That’ll up the subscriptions.

    Ta,

    Rick

    1. You can avoid that burning allergic reaction!
      >>But the political links, Kat? I’m like Cayce Pollard in William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, only I’m allergic to politics and not just brand-names. Ugh, get it off me! It burns, it burnssssss! 😉

      Tsk, tsk. Rico, Rico, Rico! The political links aren’t the problem. The problem is, you ignored my advice! For anyone who hasn’t bothered to read the intro to today’s news, here it is once more: So if any of these topics – or a little off-color language – typically disturb your soul [or, by inference, any other part of you], you might want to avoid the second half of today’s news.

      It’s very simple, really… When you come across the first headline that even whiffs of politics, you just make a conscious choice to scroll_down_really_fast until you get to either today’s comments section or Greg’s last post. And like magic, you’ll instantly avoid everything that might cause you an upset stomach, hives, gas, cognitive dissonance, a guilty conscience, heart palpatations, voter-regret, and possibly a host of other adverse reactions.

      Ta to you too, 😉

      Kat

  2. Da Vinci and Denmark
    I remember the Last Temptation of CHrist thing. The CHristians then showed that they had elements just as irrational and violent as the Muslims today burning embassies, etc. over the cartoon controversy. Tsk tsk.

    1. True enough…
      then again, you don’t often hear about individual christian fundamentalists strapping on an explosive belt and going to blow up themselves and a bus-load of school-children. Collectively they do things like elect Geo W. Bush but individually they’re kind of quaint, if you can get past the reptilian smarminess.

      1. Except
        Except for the ones that build cyanide bombs for themselves and their rightwing white christian nutcase friends – y’know, like in Texas? The only terrorist WMD ever found in the USA by the way.

        Or the ones that blow up the Olympics, or the ones that shoot doctors, or the ones arrested trying to get to the mosque in Jerusalem on New Years 2000 with automatic weapons and grenades…

        Gods, the smarminess of the “I’m a bigot but I don’t kill anyone” crowd pisses me off.

        1. Response
          Speaking as someone who views all organized religions with the same comtempt and disgust, let me tell you what pisses me off: People who respond to a comment on an abomination such as suicide bombing by bringing up isolated instances of some other group’s behavior, intentionally or otherwise drawing some sort of moral equivalency between the two groups.

          There is in the Muslim world no wide-spread movement to halt behavior such as the indiscriminate murder of friend and foe by means of people immolating themselves with explosives, in fact, quite the opposite… whether one looks at the Palestinians or the Iraqi nightmare, one sees behavior that simply could not go on and on without the tacit approval of large numbers of people.

          To be sure, the American occupation of Iraq is killing people in even greater numbers, but at least in the US and in the Western world in general there are organized voices speaking against the US and their imposing democracy upon Iraq. Moreover, those people are free to speak, which fact by itself serves to distinguish the Western world from the Muslim, for, in the Muslim world in general, freedom, of speech or anything else, is a pretty much alien concept.

          One might do well to encourage the voices of dissent in the Western world because they offer the only hope of limiting the damage created by the US. What a pity there are no similar voices to encourage in the Muslim world.

          Good evening

  3. Reply to Cernig
    I’m rather desperately trying to remember where I was when this was going on (probably being tortured by some un-David Bowie-like alien who fell to Earth), because I completely missed this news about an American nutcase with HALF A MILLION rounds of ammunition – not to mention a cyanide bomb! Oddly enough, this is the first time I’ve heard anything about it since then too.

    Oh, wait, I get it… Our self-serving Ministry of Magic tried to hush it all up:

    “But outside Tyler, Texas, the case is almost unknown. In the past nine months, there have been two government press releases and a handful of local stories, but no press conference and no coverage in the national newspapers.

    …it points up just how political the terror war is. “There is no value for the Bush administration to highlighting domestic terrorism right now,” says Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. “But there are significant political benefits to highlighting foreign terrorists, especially when trying to whip up support for war.”

    Looks like we owe a debt of thanks to the incompetence of some unnamed domestic delivery service on this one, ehh?…

    “The case began in the fall of 2002 when a package bound for New Jersey was misdelivered to a New York address. The family inadvertently opened the package and found fake identification badges, including Department of Defense and United Nations IDs. The FBI eventually tracked the package back to Mr. Krar in Noonday, Texas.”

    Hang on — I didn’t hear about this other case either:

    “…a case he calls one of “the major terrorist plots of the 1990s” in which militia from around the country converged in central Texas allegedly to attack a military base. They were arrested at a campground near Fort Hood on the morning of July 4, 1997, with a large collection of weapons and explosives. “There was virtually no media coverage of that incident either,” says Pitcavage.”

    It looks like there were a few places we could have read about this at the time: CBS 11 TV ran this story on Nov. 26th (well worth a read, since it contains info not in the csmonitor’s version), and csmonitor.com ran the article Dec. 29, 2003. Or maybe we should all just check out News from Babylon from time to time, since it ran re-posts of both, here and here.

    Especially in light of Friday’s political articles, you’ll get a laugh out of reading what the top stories in Washington were in July, ’97, and here are a few more headlines, to refresh your memory of what the national press thought was important for us to know.

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