Art and Music

Era- "Sinfoni Deo

Era - Kilimandjaro

Era- Come into my World

Happy Birthday Jamaica!

The National Anthem

Ah, yes, the surge is working, trumpets the American media. Are you surprised that they are wrong?

From Juan Cole whose blog is called Informed Comment, I get this link:



The Guardian's Ghaith Abdul-Ahad went back to Baghdad to see the effects of last year's troop escalation ("surge"). He argues that the US military's blast walls and forcible division of the city into isolated micro-neighborhoods are the cause of the reduction in deaths, not extra troops.

Baghdad, 5 years on (part 1): City of walls

The Iraqi journalist visited his country to assess its condition five years after rteh war had started. The rest of his videos are below:

Baghdad, 5 years on (part 2): killing fields

Baghdad 5 years on (part 3): Iraq's lost generation

Funny how in 1994, Cheney commented that invading iraq would create a quagmire.

Listening to this interview after watching the above videos? I...no words. Just...now words. How many additional dead Americans was Saddam worth, says Cheney in 1994. Good question. I wish that he had also asked, "how many dead Iraqis" as well.

In which the cat is set among the pigeons...

What is a rational US Foreign Policy? Part One

A taste of the Transcript

AHMAD: I think the most basic assumption of US foreign policy which has prevailed among Democratic and Republican administrations alike is that the United States is and must remain the world's most powerful preeminent country. This applies even to the allies, such as the EU or Japan or something, that the US superiority must be maintained even over them.

JAY: I think it's even actually been stated in US foreign policy documents that there needs to be one superpower in the world, and action should even be taken to stop the emergence of any other superpower.

AHMAD: Absolutely. It is in the official documents and it is in the writings of the most influential people who have been involved in foreign policy formulation. It's as true of the neoconservatives as of Brzezinski, for example. It is an absolutely consensual position.

JAY: Our rubric of our conversation was a rational policy. So your suggesting that there be a single-superpower-dominated world is irrational. Well, what would be rational? What would be a good starting point for a principle for US foreign policy?

AHMAD: The starting point for a rational foreign policy should be that the United States is one sovereign country among many others and has no imperial preemptive right to intervene in the affairs of other nations any more than other nations have the right to intervene.

JAY: So no more chanting we're number one.

AHMAD: No more chanting we are number one. And this I think has to be done very methodically from top down, because years and years and decades of chanting this has sort of seared this notion into the souls of a lot of Americans that this is how it is and this is how it must be.

JAY: It's very difficult. I grew up both in Canada and the United States, and the idea that as Americans we are the best in the world goes to sort of the core of a national psychology.

AHMAD: What's very interesting is that there is a tie between "we are the best" and "we are the most powerful." And because we are the best, we have the right to intervene in the affairs of other nations to make them act according to our priorities and our principles, and in doing so we have the right to use the power that we have, so that there is a kind of a peculiar kind of Protestant tie here between power and virtue.

More

What woufd a rational US foreigbn policy look like With Aijaz Ahmad

From the Real News website:

Based in New Delhi, Aijaz Ahmad is The Real News Network's Senior News Analyst; Senior Editorial Consultant, and political commentator for the Indian newsmagazine, Frontline. He has taught Political Science, and has written widely on South Asia and the Middle East.

Aijaz Ahmad: What would a rational American foreign policy look like? Pt 2: Why does US need military bases around the world?

Aijaz Ahmad: What would a rational American foreign policy look like? Pt 3: Is the US 'encircling' China?

Not so sure I agree that China is so benign, due to Tibet and Taiwan and the manipulation of African countries, Sudan, for instance. Also, what the hell is China gonna do with its burgeoning population? But, good points raised.

WHUT?

From Smart Bitches, Trashy Books comes the following:

You Still Can't Write About Muhammad

Starting in 2002, Spokane, Wash., journalist Sherry Jones toiled weekends on a racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad. Ms. Jones learned Arabic, studied scholarly works about Aisha's life, and came to admire her protagonist as a woman of courage. When Random House bought her novel last year in a $100,000, two-book deal, she was ecstatic. This past spring, she began plans for an eight-city book tour after the Aug. 12 publication date of "The Jewel of Medina" -- a tale of lust, love and intrigue in the prophet's harem.

...

It's not going to happen: In May, Random House abruptly called off publication of the book. The series of events that torpedoed this novel are a window into how quickly fear stunts intelligent discourse about the Muslim world.

Random House feared the book would become a new "Satanic Verses," the Salman Rushdie novel of 1988 that led to death threats, riots and the murder of the book's Japanese translator, among other horrors. In an interview about Ms. Jones's novel, Thomas Perry, deputy publisher at Random House Publishing Group, said that it "disturbs us that we feel we cannot publish it right now." He said that after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received "from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment."

...

This time, the instigator of the trouble wasn't a radical Muslim cleric, but an American academic. In April, looking for endorsements, Random House sent galleys to writers and scholars, including Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas in Austin. Ms. Jones put her on the list because she read Ms. Spellberg's book, "Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of 'A'isha Bint Abi Bakr."

But Ms. Spellberg wasn't a fan of Ms. Jones's book. On April 30, Shahed Amanullah, a guest lecturer in Ms. Spellberg's classes and the editor of a popular Muslim Web site, got a frantic call from her. "She was upset," Mr. Amanullah recalls. He says Ms. Spellberg told him the novel "made fun of Muslims and their history," and asked him to warn Muslims.

In an interview, Ms. Spellberg told me the novel is a "very ugly, stupid piece of work." The novel, for example, includes a scene on the night when Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha: "the pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I hardly felt the scorpion's sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life." Says Ms. Spellberg: "I walked through a metal detector to see 'Last Temptation of Christ,'" the controversial 1980s film adaptation of a novel that depicted a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. "I don't have a problem with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate misinterpretation of history. You can't play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography."

More


Maybe I am missing something, but if Jesus, Christianity's Son of GOD had a relationship with Mary Magdalene and thats fine, what's wrong with writing about the Prophet of God having sex with his own wife? Obviously there is more to this that meets the eye. I would love to read this book to see precisely what's going on. And I am sorry, but threatening violence on people for publishing a damn book is not fucking on. I don't care HOW fucking offensive the book is. Maybe the incident was blown out of proportion by the Random House. But I would love to know also why the hell did Shahed Amanullah decide to raise controversy about the book, when he hadn't read the damn thing yet. HTF is that responsible, exactly? More of the story please, including the damn book itself. ANd again, I am probably missing a whole lot of context.

(no subject)

Aijaz Ahmad: What would a rational American foreign policy look like? Pt 4:Who can and who can't have nuclear weapons?

Because even Beyonce is not beautiful enough

L'Oreal caught whitening her skin colour through photoshop. The whiter and lighter the better, yes? Fuck them to hell.