Bushs Media Slip-Ups Reach Niagara Falls. Via Frank.

I've more or less quit blogging about the Iraq war, but sometimes things are so absurd I just have to note them:

• Thudfactor quotes: "One senior intelligence official in Washington has noted that Iraqis fatally shot through the back of the head are considered victims of sectarian attacks, while those shot in the front are deemed victims of ordinary crime." And if you get shot in the knees, it must be the Mafia? Buckshot to the face? Must be Cheney.

• President Bush grants himself retroactive immunity from any future war crime prosecution concerning the use of torture etc. (Via Keywords.) He's also put the Democrats on double-secret probation. And, he's rubber and you're glue.

"They don't think like us" is the latest essay about Arab Culture that's making the internet rounds. Sort of like The World's Most Toxic Value System from a few years back.

• The 6 Most Over-Hyped Threats to America (And What Should Scare You Instead)
• America's Top Seven Most Hated Substances
• I was trying to find an "eight" to round out this list but could only find The Eight Most Disturbing Criminal Justice Stories of 2003 and Eight of America's Most Outstanding Young Gastroenterologists Earn Recognition as 2006 American Gastroenterological Association Foundation Research Scholars.

It occurred to me, on the eve of this 232nd anniversary of the founding of our republic, that most of the independence days of which I knew were in the summer. As this group consisted of exactly 3 countries (USA, Canada, and France), I decided to make a survey that could more easily fool a listener into thinking it was authoritative. My extensive research took me to the first result in Google from searching for “national independence days”, some obscure children's site named Kids Turn Central. Dot com!

Turns out your most popular month for uprisings is September. Back to school, time to kill some aristocrats. June is right behind, with a higher percentage of nations in temperate climates. I guess for us, July is just too hot to take the yoke of oppression any more.

The listing of independence days or national holidays seems to be basically accurate, based on spot-checking against the CIA World Factbook. (Though you never know with those spooks. They could be sowing disinformation about Burkina Faso’s national holiday.) It’s probably not exhaustive, since it comprises only 120 nations, but I’ll assume it’s representative.

What could go wrong!

Is no broadcast racist safe?
There are so many jokes that go with this story, where to begin?
I'll start with this one: Hamas, watch out, Mossad is a bunch of wimps compared to the law firm of Lipshitz, Fein, and Schwartz.

Who knew that Ahmadinejad read Andy Borowitz?

Borowitz on March 20

President of Iran Declares War on Sparta Vows to Nuke 300 Warriors

In what foreign policy experts believe to be a direct response to the hit movie “300,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today declared war on Sparta.

Even for the mercurial Mr. Ahmadinejad, the move struck many diplomatic insiders as extraordinary, since the consensus in the international community is that the city-state of Sparta no longer exists.

But according to a close associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president’s thoughts turned to war after seeing a matinee showing of “300” this past Saturday at the Tehran Cineplex 12....

The NY Times today:

'300' Irks Iranian President

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, obliquely attacked the hit Warner Brothers film “300” in a televised speech to mark the Iranian New Year on Wednesday, Variety.com reported. While not mentioning the film, about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., by name, he accused Western powers of “trying to tamper with history by making a film and by making Iran’s image look savage.” Last week, his cultural adviser, Javad Shangari, declared the film “part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological warfare aimed against Iranian culture.” Warner Brothers said, “The studio developed this film purely as a fictional work with the sole purpose of entertaining audiences; it is not meant to disparage an ethnicity or culture or make any sort of political statement.”

It seems that Ishbadiddle is blocked in China. You can use The Great Firewall of China to test any site's availability. More about Chinese Internet censorship here.

Tufte Alert! The Gapminder World 2006, beta will chart just about any demographic data vs. other demographic data, for all nation-states or a subset, on log scales with bubbles (scaled to national population or any other data). Kewl. Via WhatsAPundit.

Felix writes on guanxi, vegetarianism, environmentalism, eating wild animals, cultural relativism, and the perils of going out to eat with your boyfriend's business associates in China: Not eating wild snakes.

The situation in Darfur is complex and confusing. The government in Khartoum uses that to its advantage, hiding it's actions in the fog, much in the same way the Khmer Rouge and other genocidal actors did in times past.

One way to follow events, surprisingly enough, is in Jan Pronk's blog. Pronk is the UN special envoy to the Sudan and he's very outspoken for a man in such a position. The government has just kicked him out of the country for comments that he made in the blog, so I don't know how useful it will be from here on in, but I plan to go back and read his last year of posts. I can't believe I had no idea such a thing existed!

Tony Blair has received a public warning from the country's most senior military commander that the British presence in Iraq is threatening disaster there and in the UK.

General Sir Richard Dannatt, who took over as Chief of Staff six weeks ago, has warned the commitment to Iraq "exacerbates" problems faced by the UK in other parts of the world. He urged Mr Blair to give up his ambition to see a liberal democracy established in Iraq and settle for a "lower ambition", warning that British troops were not invited into Iraq and the time when they were welcome has passed. [Link]

This is a lot less important in the UK than it would have been in the US, but I think it may be the final nail in the coffin for Blair's Iraq policy, and possibly for Blair in general. I think we might see UK troops transfered to Afghanistan soon ...

Guy drops his iPod in the airline toilet. Airplane gets diverted because of "a suspicious device." Guy has to explain just why he's going to Canada to meet someone he only knows through World of Warcraft:

I played WoW, I became a terrorist (story!)

They asked me why I was visiting Canada. I was to visit a friend I met on World of Warcraft, Cara. They took down her name and what I could remember of her address. They asked me how we met.

"In an online game."
"What online game?"
"Umm ... World of Warcraft," I responded meekly.
"What kind of game is this?"
"It's a fantasy game ... it takes place online."
"Fantasy ... like it's got wizards and warlocks?"
"Well, it's got warlocks." (And they need to be nerfed.)

They asked me to describe my relation to Cara. I told them that people meet up in the game and go on adventures together, and that Cara and I were in a guild together that I was the leader of. They confused the concept of a guild with the game, however, and I had them believing that I was the Lord and Leader of all of WoW until I was able to correct them, and explain to them what a guild was.

So, when they put the pieces together; namely, that I was visiting a female person that I had met over a computer game, their next line of questioning went down an obvious path.

WoW + War on Terror, you know this story was getting blogged here. Just remember not to use the acronym "RPG" since they're more likely to think Rocket Propelled Grenade than Role Playing Game....

I said I wasn't going to read about the Terrible News Of The World, and really I'm not (must CNN be showing continuously at the car wash?) but everyone who's the least bit worried (yup, me too) should watch zefrank's take: "A small number of people can incapacitate a society by leveraging our inability to understand risk."

Of course, I'll see you your rational behavior and raise you a copy of Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds.

Via Cynical C.

There was the pig thing. And the open mic performance. And now he's tried to massage German Chancellor Angela Merkel. No, that's not a metaphor. Liebes-Attacke auf Merkel!

If I were in the family, I'd think seriously about staging some sort of intervention. What the heck is going on?

Boing Boing, Pajamas Media, and Talking Points Memo all link to his Sepia Mutiny post on why the mainstream American political blogs have mostly ignored the 7/11 bombings in Mumbai. A nice post, Ennis, and good to see the issue getting some attention.

In the meantime, I need to rewrite my own essay dealing with the bombing since it's largely incoherent and seems to say something other than what I want it to. Not sure I'll get to it today, though. I will say that I'm personally not dealing with this very well. I've had a buildup of PTSD triggers, and this isn't helping muchly. But I'll muddle through. Roll the rock up the hill, etc.

Blissful ignorance would be so much easier.

I've been thinking about history and History.

history with a small h is the brownian motion of capital and ideas and people. It's your grandpa's story about how his dad helped manage a vaudeville theater. It's the book you picked off the shelf in the used book store, and you read it, and it changed who you are. It's the small series of events that led to you getting your job. It's the story of how you met your wife.

Then there's History, the Great and Grand History, the Events that Will Be Recorded. The ones that will end up in the big shabby textbook, given to you at the start of the semester with the names of the students who had it before you inscribed on the inside cover, and their doodles and marks and scrawls throughout, until the book is too old, its recent history section too far in the past, and the thing is sent out to pulp.

Most of us live our lives in history, but occasionally the Events of History interrupt us. There are three such Events that have changed my own history.

The first is the Cold War. The Eighties Version. The Reagan Version. The Day After Version. The one where synthpop stars sang bad songs about how they'd very much like for the world to be not destroyed, please and thank you. The one where Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov saved us all from annihilation, and none of us knew it.

I started working for SANE, because it seemed the only sane thing to do. I was fourteen. I thought I could do something about politics.

The second is the L.A. riots in 1992. I was in the last days of my senior year of college. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. My political science studies, my work for various members of Congress, had all soured me on the political idealism of my earlier youth. Perhaps I should go into publishing, where I had some experience, and making books is a good thing, right?

"Have you heard? Los Angeles is burning." Sometimes History's herald is a fellow student whose name you will never remember, later. And over the next few days, watching a city tear into itself, I resolved that whatever small thing I could do, I would do it. And, ever since, I have been.

The third is 9/11.

I'm still figuring out that Event.

I started thinking about History's interruptions after reading an article in the New Yorker about how close we came to foiling the 9/11 attacks. (The article isn't online but you can read an interview with the author Lawrence Wright here.) And how infighting between agencies kept us from doing so. I've been reading intelligence history from WWII, so trust me, this is nothing new. But I was gripped by a profound sense that my small thing wasn't worth a damn. What can one person ever do? What damn difference does it make?

I am gripped by this sense, because it seems that if there's anyone who could have stopped the attacks it was Paul O'Neill and Ali Soufa of the FBI. If you were to describe them -- the brash FBI commander who didn't play by the rules, and the young Muslim FBI agent who argued theology in Arabic with the terrorists he was interrogating -- you'd say that they were too perfect, made-for-TV. The fact that O'Neill, having left the FBI for a job as head of security for the World Trade Center, died on 9/11 further adds to the strangeness of this history, a history that seems like fiction.

I am gripped by this fear that my own small thing I'm doing to repair the world is fruitless. Because it easy to believe that we can change our history. It is hard to think that we can change our History.

One of the marvels of history is how haphazard it seems; a series of accidents lead up to where we are. I could have picked a different college and never met my wife. I could have picked a different book off the shelf. I could have taken a different train.

But History carries with it the myth of its own Inevitability. Events happen, and afterward we explain the Forces that led up to them: this ideology, that economic trend, this political movement, that technology. Even O'Neill and Soufa can't stand up to History. That's what I'm thinking about when I'm reading the article.

Later that day, they announce the arrest of a group that was thinking of bombing the Holland Tunnel. My family and I live on an island.

Today 172 people died in a series of terrorist bombings on a train in India. Seven explosions.

My first thought is to all of our Indian and South Asian friends -- both those we know by face and those we've met through this blog -- I hope and pray that your families are all right. Hope and prayer seem like thin paper stretched over sticks of balsa wood. In a world on fire.

Whom were you trying to target? The working class men who struggle for an inch of space in local trains? The working women who knit and cut vegetables in trains on their way home? Young, dreamy students discussing exams and love? The babies accompanying their mothers, smiling back at the women around them? Darkness is fast falling. Its raining like it will not stop. Will the rains wash away the blood?

I start reading what the bloggers are writing, the firsthand accounts and the anguish and the recriminations, and then I just can't anymore.

So tonight I sit down and think about History. I put on Joni Mitchell's Blue, because nothing else will do right now.

There's some other music, actually, that I'm thinking of, a composition by Steve Reich, called Different Trains. Reich weaves taped interviews about World War II into his music. "During the war years, Reich made train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he pondered the fact that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States at that time, he might have been travelling in very different trains."

172 people could have travelled on a very different train. I could have taken a very different train. We get on trains every day, thinking they will take us where we always go. But then History arrives instead.

There is something terrifying in the idea of a History we cannot change. It is why I reject the myth of the inevitability of History. And yet there is a demon, a devil of History, who whispers in our ears that the myth is true, that we are ceaselesly borne forwards and cannot change what happens to us. We are on the train and there is no stopping it.

Some researchers in South America have recently found that a people called the Aymara point in front of them when talking about the past, and behind them when talking about the future. This reminded more than one commenter of Walter Benjamin's angel of history:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

It seems to me that there is something quite natural about the Aymara's perception of the past before them and the future behind them. We can see the past, as we can see what is before us. The future is as invisible as the back of your head. Where your eyes don't go.

The angel of history is terrifying because as he looks backwards into the past, he can do nothing. The devil of history, or more properly, of History, is more terrifying still because he looks forwards into the future we cannot see:

The devil of History looks forward. His back is always toward us and we cannot see his face. He sees the glaciers melting, hears knives being sharpened in the dark. Species turn into fossils, empires will fall. Newer and clever machines are built. Humanity remains stubborn and beautiful and cruel. All this, he says, is in your future.

You, who cannot see the future, clutch at the devil whose back is always to you. It's not set in stone! you cry. You cannot know.

He laughs as events hurtle past you both. Look at the past, he says. Look at its follies and murders and grand disasters. Do you really think the future can be better?

But we can change it! You are angry. It's not too late. Someone is always the first to suddenly stand up from their soft chair. We can all do something.

You think you can stand against History? The devil mocks you. History will take no more notice of you than a tank takes notice of a pebble caught up in its treads as it grinds its way toward a distant battle. Tend to your clever machines. Write words that will not last. Only my words will last. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

You don't believe the devil. The devil is there to trick you, to make you give up. Perhaps his unseen eyes are blind. But you have no better answers to his prophecies and proclamations and predictions.

There is a great wind coming from the future. The devil's back is to you. So you turn your back on him. Hope and prayer are thin paper stretched over sticks of balsa wood. A sure knot, and the string is reeled. It goes from the kite to your hand, to the vessels that lead from your hand to your heart.

There is a great wind coming from the future. It bears your kite aloft. This is your banner. Your call to arms. Perhaps others will see it; perhaps not. Perhaps you can change something, prove the devil wrong; perhaps not. Perhaps nothing will come of your attempt and the devil's History will arrive. Then again, perhaps not.

There is a great wind coming from the future. Here you stand, with a kite of paper in a world on fire. You can do no other. May God help us all.

Felix has a great post up on Fast-Food and Glocalization: Shantou and the "Faking" of Brands. Yes, "Glocalization" is a word. Go read.

We've reported on the African 419 scams before; this guy fights back by scamming the scammers. His latest, in which he tricks a scammer into carving several statues, including a replica of a Commodore 64, and shipping them to the UK, is really a masterpiece of con. You almost feel sorry for the carver/scammer -- until you realize that he's a thief and a liar and would steal your grandma's life savings. Justice is served.

Oh, and in this episode, he gets a scammer to copy all of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by hand.

No, not the French jet -- an actual mirage that lasted for four hours. Cool.

German 'Robin Hoods' give poor a taste of the high life

A GANG of anarchist Robin Hood-style thieves, who dress as superheroes and steal expensive food from exclusive restaurants and delicatessens to give to the poor, are being hunted by police in the German city of Hamburg.

-- Via Boing Boing

Over at Savage Minds, Prof. Michael Wesch outlines his philosophy of "anti-teaching" and describes a really interesting sounding global simulation using cereal boxes, the above-mentioned stuffed animals, and play money. (Continued here.)

I remember playing an international relations sim at PGSIS but this looks better thought out and a lot more fun. Shades of Eschaton....

Via The Map Room.

Stefanella's Drive-Thru: Burn Baby Burn:

"He tells me that because of the occupation the magazine doesn't run stories on dance companies based in Israel."