INTERNATIONAL ROCK CITY

NOT GOOD

Taiwan's President is psycho.

SULLY WAKES UP, SORT OF, 3 YEARS TOO LATE

Yet another piece of blatant evidence that the Bush Admin lied to get us into Iraq and pro-war blind Andrew Sullivan has now lost a "notch" of confidence that there was no deliberate misleading of the American people.

Yep, a "notch".

UPDATE:

Matthew Yglesias took notice of this too. He adds:

To be perfectly fair, it's hardly all that unusual for an administration to deliberately mislead the public about matters of war and peace. Fundamentally, if invading Iraq had proven to be a good idea I doubt there would be all that much concern about the president's honesty.

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Right, but is there really any substantial or consequential concern anyway? Has the President of the United States been held accountable for this atrocity against the American people, the people of Iraq, and people everywhere? Why is there no outrage from all the pro-war idiots who allowed themselves to be duped? Afraid of being labeled a "liberal"? I mean what the fuck???? Clinton got his dick sucked and he was impeached. Bush slaughtered tens of thousands of people and he was re-elected. If he did it to protect us, why did he have to lie about it? And how much safer do you feel?

Anyone?

DEATH

I have a brief lull at work so I randomly googled "Death". Very goth-rock of me, I realize. Anyway, Google brought up the "Death Clock" where one can type in their info and get an idea of when they can expect to bite it. I won't participate - I'm not that goth-rock. Moving on, there turned up a few sites on the after-life and science. Here's a quote I found on this page:

"The modern tradition of equating death with an ensuing nothingness can be abandoned. For there is no reason to believe that human death severs the quality of the oneness in the universe." - Larry Dossey, MD

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Isn't that nice?

ABSURD.

One can only laugh - and then not sleep for the next three years. The guy who evoked 9/11, like, 700 times during the RNC, was unaware of this transaction. It's almost as if the Bush Administration is trying to humiliate its supporters.

UPDATE:

Yes, they are humiliated!

INTEL GOES TO GAZA

I think this is great. Slice:

In Gaza, where the World Bank estimates the poverty rate to be approximately 60%, the training offered at the 'Intel IT Center of Excellence' is vital to sparking economic growth and providing jobs to support needy families.

Said Dr. Gubser, 'The best way to sustain peace in the region is to give people a sense of hope in the future, which means offering dignity, freedom, and an opportunity to improve one's life. This Center is fulfilling those needs with professional IT jobs in the difficult Gaza environment. It signals progress and fosters hope.'

PERHAPS YOU'D PREFER...

A question worth posing not only to the Leftist anti-anti Islamists but also to the religious-right of all faiths in the West who insist open homosexuals and gay relationships remain marginalized...

is this okay with you?

Slice:

In some areas, homosexual sex is even tacitly accepted -- though still officially illegal -- as long as it doesn't threaten traditional marriage. In the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), which shares many tribal and cultural links with neighboring Afghanistan, the ethnic Pashtun men who dominate the region are renowned for taking young boys as lovers. No one has been executed for sodomy in Pakistan's recent history, but across the border in Afghanistan, the Taliban (who are also overwhelmingly Pashtun) executed three men for sodomy in 1998 by bulldozing a brick wall over them, burying two of them alive. (The third survived, which meant, according to Taliban law, that he was innocent, so he was taken to a hospital for treatment.)

STRANGE DAY

My Grandparents on my Dad's side both died on February the 13th, on a Friday, at noon. Dad wrote a sweet and sad memoriam on his blog...

I'M WITH SULLY

Killing homosexuals is now part of the Muslim mainstream, and I'm with Sully:

Slice:

The world has been terrorized for decades now by murderers who specifically cite Muhammad as their inspiration. It is completely legitimate speech to point that out. Not to point it out - to remain silent in the face of it - is an act of denial.The reason that so many Muslims are offended is not just because any depiction of Muhammad is taboo; but because the conflation of Islam and murder is now firmly fixed in the global consciousness. I can understand why the repetition of that fact should upset many peace-loving Muslims. But that is not the fault of cartoonists. It's the fault of the Muslim terrorists, and the failure of mainstream Muslims to condemn them sufficiently, ostracize them completely, and prevent them effectively from further mayhem. At this point, in my judgment, further appeasement of these religious terrorists is counter-productive - and actually enables the extremists in their simultaneous intimidation of moderate Muslims.

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I would like to add that I believe the US fabrication of the "axis of evil", the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent torture of innocent Iraqis and others, Israeli expansionists and Ariel Sharon's "visit" to the Temple Mount, Muslim segregation around the world, the oil industry and US support for tyrannical regimes in the Arab world and beyond, and Russia's war in Chechnya have much to do with the mainstream-ing of violent Islam. And those of us who have opposed these western policies must find ways to rectify them. But that does not excuse Islamist violence, hatred, and fascism. And as a homosexual who found my way to San Francisco and feels very deeply for those less fortunate around the world, I will forever rally against it.

You want my sympathy by hanging children? You want your powerlessness recognized by blowing up innocent children as a policy?

Fuck you.

TREASON

Juan Cole adds to what I've suspected to be the Bush Administration intentions towards Iran ever since the declaration of Iran as part of the "Axis of Evil".

Slice:

So between disrupting the work of Plame Wilson's unit at the CIA and letting the Iranians know about the broken codes, the pro-war party managed to make Iran's actual progress on nuclear research opaque to the US government. It was necessary that it be opaque if there was to be a war. Iran is actually a decade or two away from having a bomb even if everything went well. But US intelligence agencies must be less confident they know what is going on in Iran now than before the Neocons destroyed so much of the effort against Iranian proliferation. It was the US withdrawal of inspectors from Ira[q] in 1998 that created the uncertainties that allowed Bush to invade Iraq. For warmongers, good intelligence on the enemy's capabilities is undesirable if that intelligence would get in the way of launching a war.

* * * *

It's nothing short of treason, the real kind, not the Ann Coulter kind whereby exposing treason from the Bush Administration would be treason. We could have stopped Iran, we could have supported the reformists, but instead Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rove wanted war. And they're likely to get it.

MAKING YOUR BED

Now help me out here, is it because of Western imperialism, the war in Iraq, or Chechnya that the Chief Russian Mufti has called on Muslims to kill gays?

Slice:

"Muslims’ protests can be even worse than these notorious rallies abroad over the scandalous cartoons," Tajuddin, of Russia’s Central Spiritual Governance for Muslims, told ;the Interfax news agency.

"The parade should not be allowed, and if they still come out into the streets, then they should be bashed."

He also said that the powerful Russian Orthodox Church would likely join in protests.

“All normal people are going to join it — Muslims and Orthodox alike,” he told Interfax.

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Well, now that doesn't make sense, does it?

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"Remind me: Why should I respect bigotry, backed by violence?"

-Andrew Sullivan

Um, because Israel, or something...