Perhaps thousands

"After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations."

Peaceful Iranian protestors in Cyprus attacked and detained by Cypriot police!

Cypriot police on order by their government disperse and arrest a small peaceful protest by Iranian exiles against the terrorist Islamic Republic - economic ties with a murderous terrorist regime is worth more to the cypriot government than human life and they make it clear with this visible public action of theirs which they do not try to conceal. Iranians inside Iran are being attacked and tortured inside their own country now Cyprus has to add to the flames and attack us abroad as well?! Is there nowhere we can be free?! Shame on the government of Cyprus and the Cypriot police! If any cypriots reads this and have more insights to this particular action please share your comments.

Booking Around

Congratulations to recent Bowdoin College graduate Frances M. on the launch of her blog, Booking Around. Check it out. Clever insights abound...

Dubai miracle? Are you kidding me?

"These days, despite defiant protestations of resilience, no one seems to know when the sweet breeze will return. The UAE is still in the doldrums. For the first time since the seven Gulf statelets joined together as a union in 1971, people are beginning to mutter—rather quietly, for sure— whether there may be something amiss with the autocratic, opaque system that hitherto seemed to work so well behind closed doors. “Nobody really knows what any of the statistics are,” says a Western analyst. “We haven’t seen the half of it yet,” says a Western banker, referring to the debt and the possible defaults. It is notable that almost nobody in business or government is prepared to talk publicly. Cohorts of public-relations people surround the bigwigs and shield them from scrutiny."

Zionist Vandals

"Thousands of books drenched in cooking oil – that is the latest exploit of the Zionist fanatics who regularly attack property and people in Paris and get away with it." (thanks, I forgot who)

This is Zionism

"“In Jerusalem, you have a lot of nationalists who do not accept the very existence of Arabs,” said Sammy Smooha, an Israeli political sociologist at the University of Haifa. “Arabic signs give them the feeling of binationalism, that the Jews have no exclusive monopoly on the town.” Achituv and others on his team contend that Israeli authorities have been uninterested in dealing with the defacing of the Arabic signs." (thanks May)

King PlayStation G

"Prince Ali is a huge Ali G fan and apparently regards himself as “the real Ali G”. He defused the situation." (thanks Ala'a)

The Plot

"As more details emerged, however, the less the four defendants sounded like men with the skills to plan a sophisticated terror plot. They were small-time crooks, felons with long criminal records whose previous activities revolved around smoking marijuana and playing video games. One defendant, Laguerre Payen, was arrested in a crack house surrounded by bottles of his own urine; his lawyer describes him as "mildly retarded." It seemed fairly astounding that, for a full calendar year, such a group could remain interested in and plan anything more complex than a backyard barbecue, let alone a multipronged paramilitary assault, as the indictment against them alleged. But what the indictment didn't say, and what the initial news reports didn't fill in, was the extent to which the fifth man in the plot, an unnamed FBI informant, had provided the glue to hold the Newburgh 4 together." (thanks Molly)

Get out NOW

"The Israeli group –— the National Federation of Israel Journalists — was ousted June 7 in a unanimous vote of the international union’s executive committee. The vote immediately raised the specter of another effort by international unions to boycott Israel for political reasons; recently, a number of academic unions around the world have voted to boycott Israeli professors." (thanks Laleh)

Soy Puro Americano

The lads took me to Chimayo yesterday. That's a photo of El Santuario de Chimayo.

In a room behind the altar is a pocito, a little well full of mud. Sacred mud. Miraculous mud. Curing mud.

So they say, anyway. I don't hold with mud, myself, but people come from all over the world to get a little jar of the damp earth. No, really.

There's a pole shed nearby packed with the artifacts of the saved and cured. Crutches and wheelchairs and walkers and braces and slings and every kind of medical mangle you can think of. All flotsam and jetsam jettisoned by the believers who came here and were cured or believe they were cured by the Black Christ, Our Lord of Esquipulas.

So, what the hell, you know? Couldn't hurt. The lads think I look a little peaked and don't see the difference between doctors pouring bags of chemicals into me or pilgrims smearing mud on me. They could have a point. Even though I don't believe in mud.

But it was good just to get out of the damned house. And its a beautiful drive. Through the Sangre de Cristos. Down el Camino Real.

And Chimayo is famous for its retablos; panels, sometimes screens, usually hammered out of tin, with images of the saints, the Madonna, scenes from the Scriptures, that sort of thing. I collect retablos as art so its fun to look around the marketplace to see what is on offer in the way of santos and pietas.

And there's some great dining and drinking between here and Chimayo. Every village has a cantina and in the high summer, the doors are propped open and the juke is blowing up.
Presently, I'm restricted to iced tea but I don't mind.

OK, that's bullshit. I do mind. Sipping from a jarful of steeped leaves while lounging in the placita is not my idea of the good life.

Still its life, within the meaning of the act. The sun is warm on my face. The rough legged hawk floats over the portero. Volcanic peaks rocket up from the shimmering desert. My friends are near and solicitous to the point of embarassment.

I bite the crusty sopapilla. Honey runs down my chin.

We are seated at a long trestle. A beautiful woman, the owner of the cantina, sits with us, mashing avocados and chopping chimayo chiles for our guacamole. She wipes my chin like I'm an old man.

She touches the bandana covering my unhaired head and tells me that her chiles will grow the hair back stiff and black. She tells me her chiles will stiffen anything.

I believe in her chiles.

Sovereignty...my potato

"An Iraqi truck driver who failed to stop when signaled on a main highway north of Baghdad was shot and killed early Friday by an American soldier, a spokesman for the United States military said." Wait. I thought that US soldiers had surrendered "sovereignty" to Iraqis THREE TIMES ALREADY. (thanks Olivia)

Sarah Palin says she resigned as governor "so that I could get out there and fight without the shackles..."

"... for our state and for our country, to fight for what is right, and to support the people who have more freedom than I do evidently to be able to cast those votes and administer the policies and the laws that we need to protect our Constitution... I’m going to be freer now to fight for what’s right."

Ha ha. That's why I like being an independent blogger, so I can identify. But I still think she's running for President... and talk about shackles!

Wait. I can't lie. I have to back off from that identification. I have no sense of fighting for what's right here. I'm just talking about things that interest me, expression for it's own sake. If the occasion to distinguish right from wrong arises in the natural course of things, it will be in the mix. But it's not a fight. It's a conversation.

La Vache is not laughing

Husni Mubarak's propaganda apparatus denies rumors that Mubarak is showing signs of aging. (Al-Quds Al-`Arabi)

Flash

Ms. Lebanon revealed that her pet project is water. No mention of juices.

March 14 intellectuals

"La censure au Liban est rare et elle est combattue par les intellectuels et les jeunes, qui rejettent toute forme d'obscurantisme, surtout quand il émane d'instances religieuses ou du Hezbollah, accusé de vouloir "iraniser" le pays. Récemment, quand on a voulu interdire le film Persépolis (de Marjane Satrapi), il y a eu un tollé et une intervention du ministre de la culture lui-même, ce qui a obligé la sûreté générale à revenir sur sa décision. Il fallait donc un événement pour bien montrer que Beyrouth est autre chose que la guerre." Notice that March 14 intellectuals only talk of one direction of censorship: those same intellectuals did not say one word when the Maronite Patriarchate (who has an impressive hat collection) issued a formal decree earlier this year threatening with the resort to "Great Excommunication" against any one who criticize the Patriarhate. Those intellectuals are not opposed to censorship when it is at the behest of the Saudi embassy in Lebanon or when the Maronite Patriarch (who has an impressive hat collection) banned the Da Vinci Code. Spare me the selective liberal poseurs of March 14. (thanks JB)

Don't Squander This Opportunity

I wanted to expand on something I said in my last post about the recent Inspector General's report so that nobody misses the point. Many people in the blogosphere and the mainstream press are now using the occasion of the release of the Inspector General's report to resume their pursuit of John Yoo and their denunciations of Dick Cheney. If that is all that comes out of this story it will have been a failure.

What should come out of this story is a recognition that Congress has legitimated a new set of intelligence practices that can affect American citizens as well as people overseas. Congress needs to beef up its oversight concerning how the Obama Administration is implementing the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

The mere fact that Obama is now in the White House is not a justification for rejoicing or for thinking that we have dodged a bullet and forestalled a threat to our civil liberties. Presidents by their nature like to have power because they feel they need it to keep the country safe. Obama is no exception to this rule. The U.S. Congress, frightened and manipulated by George Bush, Dick Cheney and conservative demagogues, gave their blessing to lots of new surveillance powers with only vague limits. Whether those powers will be used well or badly will depend on Congressional oversight and executive branch implementation. That is where we should be focusing our attention now. If we do not use the release of this report to focus attention on these matters-- the implementation of this powerful and important new surveillance statute-- it will have been a lost opportunity.

The Obama Administration is continuing a long term bipartisan project of constructing our National Surveillance State. If we don't pay attention to how that state is being constructed, and what checks and balances are built into its contours, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Paid Zionist propaganda

"The Foreign Ministry unveiled a new plan this week: Paying talkbackers to post pro-Israel responses on websites worldwide. A total of NIS 600,000 (roughly $150,000) will be earmarked to the establishment of an “Internet warfare” squad." (thanks Tarik)

There is colonial feminism: O, White Man. Save her.

Look at this woman writing about women in the newspaper of the Abu Dhabi's ruling family. Basically, it is along the lines of: O, White Man. Come and save me. O, White Man. Where are your armies to bomb me and save me? And notice that she is writing in English. If she really wants to make change, why would she be writing in the English language mouthpice of the House of Nahyan in UAE? And then she gets scientific: "Indeed women all over Asia and the Middle East are harassed constantly." Notice that she has no qualms in saying "women all over" the region of brown and black people and then adds a scientic statement that is based on empirical research: that women are "harassed constantly." What does constantly mean? Non-stop? Every hour? And she in this silly article clearly operates from an epistimological distinction between East and West: in the West--according to her--there are no such things are harassment, and just as Nawal Saadawi did in that lousy little book called The Hidden Face of Eve, she relates matters of sexism and harrassment to the peculiar conditions of the East. Of course, she manages to pay tribute to the UAE's ruling families: "The Emirates is the most female-friendly country in the Middle East." She then manages to sound racist and classist at the same time: she blames the poor Asian workers for harrassment because as is well known the White Man in the West does not harrass or abuse or murder women, although the rates of abuse and murder of women are much higher, say, in the US than in the countries she is talking about. "Many of the labourers in the Emirates have also had little exposure to the outside world because they are from small towns. When they move here, it is often their first contact with the rich and developed world. They have a natural curiosity about the way westerners live because they have snatched glimpses of it in films. European and North American expatriates have a lifestyle labourers can never hope to attain, and wandering around a mall on a hot Friday afternoon is an opportunity to experience that which embodies all the wealth, glamour and power of the West: the mobile phones, the high-definition televisions, men in clean, pressed suits, women in skimpy clothes."

King PlayStation can be pious: beware

King PlayStation and Queen Youtube are performing `Umrah (mini-Haj) with the new Crown Prince of Jordan. Is it me or the King seems to be one of those who steals his towels from hotels? If images of Arab rulers' piety do not make you all atheists, you need to look again. (AFP)

Poetry at noon ...

... Saturday Verse: Kenneth Koch (1925-2002).