The Middle East Quagmire

By now you have probably heard about Hamza Ali al-Khateeb. He was the 13-year-old Syrian boy who tagged along at an antigovernment protest in the town of Saida on April 29. He was arrested that day, and the police returned his mutilated body to his family a month later. While in custody, he had apparently been burned, beaten, lacerated and given electroshocks. His jaw and kneecaps were shattered. He was shot in both arms. When his father saw the state of Hamza’s body, he passed out.

-- Daivd Brooks for The New York Times

Brooks rises to the height of his craft and his moral vision, giving us a blistering overview of the Middle East and the state of peace negotiations, getting to the source of our futility.

( column )

The Middle East Quagmire

By now you have probably heard about Hamza Ali al-Khateeb. He was the 13-year-old Syrian boy who tagged along at an antigovernment protest in the town of Saida on April 29. He was arrested that day, and the police returned his mutilated body to his family a month later. While in custody, he had apparently been burned, beaten, lacerated and given electroshocks. His jaw and kneecaps were shattered. He was shot in both arms. When his father saw the state of Hamza’s body, he passed out.

-- Daivd Brooks for The New York Times

Brooks rises to the height of his craft and his moral vision, giving us a blistering overview of the Middle East and the state of peace negotiations, getting to the source of our futility.

( column )

Pic of the Day

Looks like a promising movie...



except we know that this is more tease than not, and that the sexiest thing about the movie will be this poster. No doubt she won't give an 'F', or even a boobie flash.

Pic of the Day

Looks like a promising movie...



except we know that this is more tease than not, and that the sexiest thing about the movie will be this poster. No doubt she won't give an 'F', or even a boobie flash.

Texas: Best for Business

The conservative organ National Review is touting Texas for its tort reform:

Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas state legislature want the rest of the country to hear this message loud and clear: The Lone Star State is open for business.

In a unanimous vote last week, the Texas senate adopted ‘loser pays’ tort-reform legislation, which says that a plaintiff must pay the winning party’s legal fees if their complaint is judged to be groundless. On Wednesday, the Texas house concurred. Governor Perry, who had championed the legislation from its inception, signed it Monday night.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized, “This Texas upgrade will build on reforms in 2003 and 2005 that have vastly improved the legal climate in what has not coincidentally become the country’s best state for job creation. Texas rewrote everything from class-action certification to product liability” — and I would add the state’s medical-malpractice reforms to that list.

No wonder the nation’s CEOs list Texas as the best state for business.

Yeah, but Texas is also in the bottom when it comes to health care and education and the environment. Texas is great for business in the same way that the Third World is: no regulation and no taxes. Texas may be the best state for business, but it is among the worst in which to raise a family, unless of course you are as rich as a CEO.

Texas: Best for Business

The conservative organ National Review is touting Texas for its tort reform:

Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas state legislature want the rest of the country to hear this message loud and clear: The Lone Star State is open for business.

In a unanimous vote last week, the Texas senate adopted ‘loser pays’ tort-reform legislation, which says that a plaintiff must pay the winning party’s legal fees if their complaint is judged to be groundless. On Wednesday, the Texas house concurred. Governor Perry, who had championed the legislation from its inception, signed it Monday night.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized, “This Texas upgrade will build on reforms in 2003 and 2005 that have vastly improved the legal climate in what has not coincidentally become the country’s best state for job creation. Texas rewrote everything from class-action certification to product liability” — and I would add the state’s medical-malpractice reforms to that list.

No wonder the nation’s CEOs list Texas as the best state for business.

Yeah, but Texas is also in the bottom when it comes to health care and education and the environment. Texas is great for business in the same way that the Third World is: no regulation and no taxes. Texas may be the best state for business, but it is among the worst in which to raise a family, unless of course you are as rich as a CEO.

The Evil That Men Do

The War on Terror has taken a new, nasty turn. British intelligence agents are trying to give terrorists some cavities. Surely, this goes against the Geneva convention or some international accords. Don't they understand? If we lose our humanity, the terrrorists have truly won:

British intelligence has hacked into an al-Qaeda online magazine and replaced bomb-making instructions with a recipe for cupcakes.

The cyber-warfare operation was launched by MI6 and GCHQ in an attempt to disrupt efforts by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular to recruit “lone-wolf” terrorists with a new English-language magazine, the Daily Telegraph understands.

When followers tried to download the 67-page colour magazine, instead of instructions about how to “Make a bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom” by “The AQ Chef” they were greeted with garbled computer code.

The code, which had been inserted into the original magazine by the British intelligence hackers, was actually a web page of recipes for “The Best Cupcakes in America” published by the Ellen DeGeneres chat show.

I like one LJer's comment, "I saw the headline about fighting terrorists with cupcakes and thought it couldn't get any better. Then I realized they were fighting terrorists with ELLEN DEGENEReS cupcakes. And the world was suddenly beautiful." I think that says it all.

(Source: Telegraph/LJ)

The Evil That Men Do

The War on Terror has taken a new, nasty turn. British intelligence agents are trying to give terrorists some cavities. Surely, this goes against the Geneva convention or some international accords. Don't they understand? If we lose our humanity, the terrrorists have truly won:

British intelligence has hacked into an al-Qaeda online magazine and replaced bomb-making instructions with a recipe for cupcakes.

The cyber-warfare operation was launched by MI6 and GCHQ in an attempt to disrupt efforts by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular to recruit “lone-wolf” terrorists with a new English-language magazine, the Daily Telegraph understands.

When followers tried to download the 67-page colour magazine, instead of instructions about how to “Make a bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom” by “The AQ Chef” they were greeted with garbled computer code.

The code, which had been inserted into the original magazine by the British intelligence hackers, was actually a web page of recipes for “The Best Cupcakes in America” published by the Ellen DeGeneres chat show.

I like one LJer's comment, "I saw the headline about fighting terrorists with cupcakes and thought it couldn't get any better. Then I realized they were fighting terrorists with ELLEN DEGENEReS cupcakes. And the world was suddenly beautiful." I think that says it all.

(Source: Telegraph/LJ)

1984 (1,1) Emmanuel Goldstein

Winston has opened his pretty diary, fidgeting over what he should write on the creamy page. He ruminates over that morning’s two-minute hate session at his job in the Ministry of Truth. Orwell will sketch for us the other three key figures in the novel. The first one we take up, Emmanuel Goldstein, is more of a specter in the background than an active character, but in Big Brother’s paradise, he is Satan, the clever serpent in the weeds:

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience.... Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counterrevolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The program of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity.

…

It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard - a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheeplike quality.

Reading this Jewish reference today, my own political correctness alarm went off. I seem to come across such anti-Semitism too often in higher literature. I only recently finished the big biography of Dostoevsky, and it was not too many months ago when we were taking a deeper look at Thomas Mann. However, it did not take me a whole minute before I was able to appreciate that Orwell was probably just letting more of that World War Two experience seep into his novel, the way Hitler and the Nazis scapegoated the Jews for their dark purposes, and one should remember that in this story, down is often up and up is often down.

I wonder if Orwell also had Trotsky in mind for his Goldstein. For all that we will see of Goldstein, he may have suffered Trotsky’s gruesome fate. If so, Big Brother was obviously not content to let him rest in peace.

1984 (1,1) Emmanuel Goldstein

Winston has opened his pretty diary, fidgeting over what he should write on the creamy page. He ruminates over that morning’s two-minute hate session at his job in the Ministry of Truth. Orwell will sketch for us the other three key figures in the novel. The first one we take up, Emmanuel Goldstein, is more of a specter in the background than an active character, but in Big Brother’s paradise, he is Satan, the clever serpent in the weeds:

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience.... Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counterrevolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The program of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity.

…

It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard - a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheeplike quality.

Reading this Jewish reference today, my own political correctness alarm went off. I seem to come across such anti-Semitism too often in higher literature. I only recently finished the big biography of Dostoevsky, and it was not too many months ago when we were taking a deeper look at Thomas Mann. However, it did not take me a whole minute before I was able to appreciate that Orwell was probably just letting more of that World War Two experience seep into his novel, the way Hitler and the Nazis scapegoated the Jews for their dark purposes, and one should remember that in this story, down is often up and up is often down.

I wonder if Orwell also had Trotsky in mind for his Goldstein. For all that we will see of Goldstein, he may have suffered Trotsky’s gruesome fate. If so, Big Brother was obviously not content to let him rest in peace.