YELLOW-BELLIED LILY LIVERED US MEDIA COWARDS I
The New York Times had an editorial Tuesday, February 7, on the controversy triggered by publication in a Danish newspaper of 12 caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. "The New York Times and much of the rest of the nation's news media have reported on the cartoons but refrained from showing them," the editors said. "That seems a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols..." The very next day, Wednesday, February 8, the Times published, gratuitously, an image of the Virgin Mary in elephant dung. And the New York Times was one of many newspapers which in 1989 published a photograph of Christ on a crucifix submerged in a vat of urine. Washington Post executive editor Len Downie told Editor & Publisher he wouldn't publish the Danish cartoons because of "general good taste." Had Mr. Downie developed his good taste a week earlier, the Post might not have published a cartoon of a quadruple amputee soldier so vile all six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote a letter to the editor protesting it. Most in the news media don't mind offending people who express their outrage by writing letters to the editor. But when the offended threaten to cut off the editor's head, editors become more "culturally sensitive."
YELLOW-BELLIED LILY-LIVERED US MEDIA COWARDS II
In Czechoslovakia under communism it was common to see signs reading "Workers of the world, unite" in the windows of fruit and vegetable stores. Vaclav Havel, in his book, "Living In Truth," discerned the significance of those signs. As elaborated by Stanley Hauerwas, professor of Theological Ethics at Duke School of Divinity, Mr. Havel knew the shopkeeper does not believe the sign. He puts it up because it was "delivered from the headquarters along with the onions." The grocer thinks nothing is at stake because he understands that no one really believes the slogan. The real message, according to Mr. Havel, is "I'm behaving myself... I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." But Mr. Havel shrewdly points out that even a modest shopkeeper would be ashamed to put up a sign that literally read, "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient." He is, after all, a human being with some sense of dignity. I would argue that this Czechoslovakian parable of the self-deceiving green grocer goes a long way to explaining the decision of most American news outlets not to republish the Danish cartoons currently stirring up so much of Islam.
THE BUSINESS OF PIRATING
Sophisticated net surfers will have noticed that, despite my proclamations that "It can't be done," there is a plethora of commercial movies - the kind you buy on DVD - that are available for download on the various "pirate" services, of which Kazaa is (was) the most well known. Actually, when I say "can't," I mean "shouldn't" - but there is technology, both hardware and software that allows intrepid souls to "rip" (copy) DVDs off the disk and onto their computers. You don't have to be police lineup material to use the methods described below to copy DVDs. Maybe you want to make backups or copies of a wedding or Bar-mitzvah DVD to send to family and friends abroad. So how do they - and we - do it?
INSTILLING DOUBT
As we discussed last week in The Cartoon Religion, Moslems have made a colossal blunder in exposing a fatal weakness of their religion to the world: that it melts under the heat of ridicule. The ongoing crisis has now exposed an even graver weakness: that it crumbles under the scrutiny of doubt. Islam is a mechanistic religion (an awful pun could be made here about it being Mecca-nistic, but let’s not go there). It is a shame religion. It is a religion of appearance rather than substance. Everything is about outward appearance, humiliation and shame, robotically and unthinkingly repeating the same exact word-for-word prayers five times a day at precisely the same times. The Koran is not a book to be read, it is a chant to be robotically recited in order to put one into an unthinking trance. As such it is an impersonal religion, an un-individual religion in which the Moslem believer has no personal relationship with God – as the Christian believer does. This is the great gulf between Christianity and Islam.
THE DEMOCRATS’ DISASTROUS DEFINING MOMENT
During an election campaign, political operatives are fond of seeking to induce in their opponent a negative "defining moment." That is to say a highly publicized moment when their opponent portrays everything that is wrong with him. In 2004 John Kerry provided that moment when he said he voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it. Surely, at the State of the Union address the Democratic Party provided such a moment when, as has already been well commented on by others, they wildly applauded President Bush's statement that Congress failed to pass Social Security reform last year. As the party of reactionary inertia — as the party that not only doesn't have any solutions to today's dangers and problems, but denies that such problems exist — the Democrats on the floor of the House Tuesday night demonstrated a flawless, intuitive sense of its new, disfunctional self. The Democrats' wild applause on behalf of doing nothing was more than a merely tactical political blunder. It displayed a deeper truth about them.
Chapter Twenty: THE LEGEND IN CUBA
The Jade Steps Chapter Twenty: The Legend in Cuba “Señor Aguilar!” Malinali shouted with a bright smile. She had spotted him sitting under a large ceiba tree at the edge of Tlaxcala’s market eating his mid-day meal. He returned her smile. “Doña Marina!” he called back. “Would you care to join me?” She sat down next to him. “It seems so long since I saw you last,” she said. “Yes – well, you learned Spanish so fast, while I have been slow at learning Nahuatl, that there was little need to help you translating for Captain Cortez,” came his reply. “What I really needed to do was learn to be a soldier again after being a Mayan slave for those long eight years. So I have been with the soldiers.” “Would you like to learn Nahuatl?” she asked. “I can teach you.” Aguilar considered it for a moment, then answered, “I would like that – Nahuatl is very different from Mayan, but I should try. If I can find the time, that is, for a soldier is kept very busy.” “You don’t look very busy to me,” came a nearby voice. “Bernal!” both Malinali and Aguilar exclaimed at the same time. “Do I understand that now Doña Marina is going to be your teacher instead of the other way around?” Bernal asked Aguilar with a grin. Aguilar shook his head. “I’m afraid so.” They chatted happily for a while, then Malinali had a thought. “Bernal, I have a question for you.” Her eyes had a mischievous twinkle. “Why are Captain Cortez and Diego Velasquez – the governor, as you call him, of your island of Cuba – enemies?”
THE SEARCH FOR DARK MATTER, Part One
This is Dennis “The Wizard” Turner’s initial Science column for To The Point. In addition to his weekly column on computers, we hope this is the first of many. ---JW Dark matter is usually thought of as something ‘out there.’ But we will never truly understand it unless we can bring down to earth. If we could see dark matter, the Milky Way galaxy would look like a much different place. The familiar spiral disk, where most of the stars reside, would be shrouded by a dense haze of dark matter particles. Astronomers think the dark haze is 10 times as massive as the disk and nearly 10 times as big in diameter.
TAKING DIRECTIONS
Like everything else in life, Web searches have become more complicated. There are now some 11 billion pages to choose from at Google - but they're pikers compared to Yahoo, which claims to index some 20 billion, nearly twice as many! Of course, search engine technology is better now than in the past - but still, it can be a bit daunting when you're presented with 150,000 pages for your perusal. Often, what you're looking for is in the first 10 or 20 choices on the list, but not always; and just as often, the best choice, with the "real" information that you need, is on page 716 of the search, which you'll never bother looking at. Do enough Web searches, you start to feel like you're drowning in a sea of blah blah. So how about a Web search engine for right brainers that will free you from Internet blah blah? Instead of a jungle of Web sites you have to ferret through in order to find what you're looking for, it would be so much easier if you had a "map" where you could narrow down your search without having to click through dozens of pages of results. Well, here it is – and it’s free…
THE MOTHER OF ALL COVERUPS: Saddam Did Have WMD
Last week a man who had been deputy chief of Saddam Hussein's air force claimed Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war began. Special Republican Guard brigades loaded yellow barrels with the skull and crossbones sign on each barrel onto two airliners from which the seats had been removed, Georges Sada said. There were 56 flights in all. Mr. Sada's is only the most recent of a series of accounts by people in a position to speak with authority who say (some of) Saddam's chemical and biological weapons wound up in Syria.
THE NEW YORK TIMES LOVED STALIN, THE WASHINGTON POST LOVES AHMADINEJAD
It’s only fair that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be subject to a fawning puff piece the Washington Post. After all, Stalin’s greatest p.r. agent was a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist at the New York Times. Stalin’s guy was Walter Duranty, and Ahmadinejad’s is Karl Vick, who began his long wet kiss Wednesday with:
On the afternoon of Jan. 4, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reached for the phone and got Latin America on the line. In quick succession, he chatted with President Fidel Castro of Cuba, rang up President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and, sensing yet another kindred spirit, reached out to Evo Morales, the young firebrand who had just been elected president of Bolivia.I suppose it would be bad form to point out that the three Latinos are united in their hatred of the United States, or that Castro and Chavez are distinctly anti-democratic. And indeed, Vick does not annoy his readers by mentioning either fact. Instead he calls them “relatively poor, disempowered nonaligned nations” who “glory in defying the West.”