One Difference Between the United States and Israel
Ynetnews is claiming that Israeli soldiers who play Dungeons & Dragons are considered "detached from reality" and given a low security clearance.
Jeff Patterson, who sent me the story, comments that "this is a far cry from the old Marines ads where a knight slays a magma beast."
Posted by Jesse Walker
After years of campaigning against Hezbollah, the radical Shiite Muslim party in Lebanon, as a terrorist pariah, the Bush administration is grudgingly going along with efforts by France and the United Nations to steer the party into the Lebanese political mainstream, administration officials say.The shift coincides with Syria presenting a timetable for the complete withdrawal of its troops and intelligence services from Lebanon.
The administration's shift was described by American, European and United Nations officials as a reluctant recognition that Hezbollah, besides having a militia and sponsoring attacks on Israelis, is an enormous political force in Lebanon that could block Western efforts to get Syria to withdraw its troops.
JEDEIDET YABOUS, Syria (AP) -- President Bashar Assad reiterated his commitment to withdrawing all Syrian troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon, a U.N. envoy said Saturday, indicating that he had received a timetable for the pullout. Meanwhile, a convoy of Syrian troops returned home to a rousing welcome.
The long convoy of vehicles carrying Syrian soldiers returned home amid a heavy snowfall early Saturday to the cheers of Syrian well-wishers, who chanted "Syria! Syria!" handed out flowers and threw rice.
U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larsen did not give any details about timing after meeting with Assad in the northern city of Aleppo but said he would discuss the matter at the United Nations next week.
I tend to think that John Kerry would have done essentially the same things had he been in office since January (if you can find examples of leading Kerry foreign policy advisors condemning Bush's recent initiatives with regard to Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon I'd be interested in hearing it).Michael Young does an effective job of tackling Flynt Leverett, formerly of the NSC and the Kerry campaign, who had an op-ed in the New York Times about Syria.
Educated at Eton and Oxford, Mr. Benenson was a passionate advocate for human rights in fascist Spain, British-ruled Cyprus and repressive South Africa. He was almost 40, a bowler-topped barrister on the London Underground in 1961, when he read a news item about two Lisbon students sentenced to seven years in prison for toasting freedom in Portugal, then under the dictatorship of António Salazar....
In what he called "The Forgotten Prisoners" and "An Appeal for Amnesty," which appeared on the front page of The Observer, a British newspaper, he wrote about the two students and four other people who had been jailed in other nations because of their beliefs.
In its early years, Mr. Benenson ran the organization, provided most of the money, traveled widely to investigate cases and promoted its causes in journals and newspapers. He stepped down as the leader in 1966 after an independent investigation did not support his claim that the group was being infiltrated by British intelligence.
But he continued to have an active interest in the organization's affairs, helped to found and support similar groups and observed Amnesty International's 25th anniversary by lighting a symbolic candle outside St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the church off Trafalgar Square where he had first envisioned the organization. Its logo is a candle wrapped in barbed wire.
Peter Benenson was born in London on July 31, 1921, the son of a British army colonel. He was tutored privately by the poet W. H. Auden and began his first campaign at Eton - for better food. At 16 he organized fund-raising for orphans of the Spanish Civil War, and later raised money to get two Jews out of Nazi Germany.
After service with the Ministry of Information in World War II, he became a lawyer, was an official observer at the trials of trade unionists in Franco's Spain, advised lawyers for defendants accused of resistance to British rule in Cyprus and prodded London to send observers to Hungary during the 1956 uprising and to racially divided South Africa during a treason trial.
Before Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas we tried to cover the America's Cup yacht race in Rhode Island for Scanlan's (who were just about to go bust and get on to Richard Nixon's blacklist) from a three-masted schooner. There was a rock band on board for distraction; booze and, for Hunter, whatever he was gobbling at the time. I was seasick and Hunter was fine. I asked him what he was taking and he gave me one. It was psilocybin [magic mushroom], a psychedelic hallucinogen, my first and only drug trip apart from Librium. I was the artist from England so I had a job to do. He handed me two spray-paint canisters. "What do I do with these?"One of my favorite bits from the book and film versions of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the scene where Thompson is out of his gourd in a casino:
"You're the artist, Ralph. Do what you want, but you must do it on the side of one of those multimillion-dollar yachts, moored hardly 50 yards away from where we are."
"How about fuck the Pope?" I said, now seeing in my mind red snarling dogs attacking a musician singing at a piano dressed as a nun at a shore-bound bar. "Are you a Catholic, Ralph?"
"No," I replied, "it's just the first thing that came to mind."
So that was the plan and we made it to the boats and I stood up in the little dinghy with the spray cans and shook them as one does. They made a clicking sound and alerted a guard. "We must flee, Ralph! There'll be pigs everywhere. We have failed." He pulled fiercely on the oars and fell backwards with legs in the air. He righted himself and started rowing again. We made it back to our boat and while I was gabbling insanely, he was writing down all the gibberish that I uttered. I was now a basket case and we had to get back to shore and flee. Hunter shot off two distress flares into the harbour and we hailed a boat just coming in. The flares set fire to one of the boats, causing an emergency fire rescue as we got to dry land. There's more and I won't go on, but I guess that was the genesis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Such a wild game was possible, but it needed all the genius and application of Hunter S Thompson to make it live.
The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos . . . but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space."And then he wonders "What would Horatio Alger do in this situation?"
Note that if there is a disagreement among the Shiite religious parties on who should be prime minister, they say they will take it to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who will resolve it. Sistani would certainly choose Jaafari, an old-time Dawa operative from Karbala close to the ayatollah.Bush just wanted to remove Saddam, period.
Interestingly, Sistani would informally be playing a role here similar to that played by the monarch in the UK. Sistani as Elizabeth II. It certainly wasn't what Bush had been going for with this Iraq adventure.
A bad economy means scarce jobs and low incomes, which in turn have led to emotional and social frustration among Iran's largely young population. As a result, different forms of fortunetelling and the desire to connect with the supernatural to seek help from a divinity are growing. Many of those seeking guidance are women.Oh and Peter Stormare, a Coen brothers regular, played a good Devil, almost as good as De Niro in Angel Heart.
Bookstores are filled with books on Chinese and Indian astrology and different forms of fortunetelling. Newspapers and journals have dedicated more space to horoscopes and articles about how to find a soul mate.
"These types of books have increased by at least five times since the beginning of the revolution," said Abolhassan Azarang, a researcher at Iran's Encyclopedia.
"Political and social deadlocks have forced a special class of society to turn to these kinds of beliefs," he added.
In December, the police arrested a woman accused of making a fortune by promising to solve the problems of more than 5,000 women by giving them spells. The woman, whose identity was not revealed, told her customers that she was clairvoyant and had learned the skill in India.
One of the complainants against her was a woman who had paid five million rials, about $630, in return for a spell that would magically put an end to her husband's marriage to a second wife.
I think this is more than just instinct on my part, the reaction of a lot of Democrats and liberals to the September 11th events was obviously in common with everyone else, revulsion, disgust, hatred, and so forth. But when they consider politically I think a lot of them couldn't say this, but they thought that's the end of our agenda for a little while. We're not going to be talking very much about welfare and gay marriage. We're going to be living in law and order times. Now the instinct is to think well, that must favor the right wing. Surely, that creates a climate for the conservatives--law and order and warfare and mobilization and so forth. In fact, the Second World War probably was a tremendous asset to the Democratic Left and presumably when the Right was so opposed to going into it because they know there's a relationship between social mobilization and warfare. But the Left is too dumb to see this in this case. And then some of them are crackpotted enough to think that if it comes out like that, maybe it was all fixed to come out like this.Terry Eagleton, who first infected me with leftist thought when I was but a wee lad, would probably wretch after reading Toibin's review. He had reviewed Toibin a few times when Toibin came on the scene and obviously thought he's a great talent. Eagleton, though, has been squandering his talent lately, as Norman Geras has been documenting.
Or in the case of Social Security, suppose you are a struggling young African American working for minimum wage. You urgently want to own stocks, so you can start building a nest egg for your family. But you have no money to invest, because Social Security taxes have sucked up anything you could have set aside from your small earnings. So you manage to borrow some money, and you invest it in stocks. That's a loan. That's speculation. And that's what the opponents of personal accounts would prefer for America.They would? I would prefer Clinton's out-of-left-field, briefly-floated, shock-inducing trial balloon of socializing the means of production via government investment of Social Security funds in the stock market, rather than this private account thing. Probably most people don't have the time, knowledge or connections to successfully invest in the stock market. What the privatizers desire is for some of the poor and middle class to invest their payroll taxes and later receive less retirement benefits than they would under the current system, because they "invested poorly." After spending a boatload of taxes transitioning to the private account system. But there will be less workers per retiree in the future? What about the record productivity gains over the past decades? It all went to Capital? You don't say.