Link Banana

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog is odd. It’s also pretty awesome. Act I went online Tuesday, Act II just went online, and Act III should be up on Saturday. Oh, and if you’re looking for a longer explanation of the project, I suggest this write up from the LA Times’s Web Scout blog.

Or so reports the (*cough* always reliable *cough*) LA Times, citing an undisclosed CIA source:

CIA officials will tell Congress on Thursday that North Korea had been helping Syria build a plutonium-based nuclear reactor, a U.S. official said, a disclosure that could touch off new resistance to the administration’s plan to ease sanctions on Pyongyang.

The CIA officials will tell lawmakers that they believe the reactor would have been capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons but was destroyed before it could do so, the U.S. official said, apparently referring to a suspicious installation in Syria that was bombed last year by Israeli warplanes.

I should also note that The New Yorker’s Seymor Hersh did his best to debunk this story a few months ago.

(via Kevin Drum)

We’ve all heard this at least once in the last decade, but Rabih Alameddine’s exploratation of Arabic words in English deserve a hearing. The bit most likely to be controversial:

We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads — rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is “Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim”: In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same. […]

In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

Michael Eric Dyson makes some interesting points in this LA Times Op-Ed. Pointing to some of Dr. King’s controversial statements made after 1965 to mostly black audiences, he says that Revered Wright is clearly a descendent of King’s split opinion on race.

Perhaps nothing might surprise — or shock — white Americans more than to discover that King said in 1967: “I am sorry to have to say that the vast majority of white Americans are racist, either consciously or unconsciously.” In a sermon to his congregation in 1968, King openly questioned whether blacks should celebrate the nation’s 1976 bicentennial. “You know why?” King asked. “Because it [the Declaration of Independence] has never had any real meaning in terms of implementation in our lives.” 

Daniel Miessler’s mildly arrogant “What Every American Should Know About the Middle East” got a lot of attention recently. Sounding more intellectual but covering roughly the same ground, John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed make this point:

What about Muslim sympathy for terrorism? Many charge that Islam encourages violence more than other faiths, but studies show that Muslims around the world are at least as likely as Americans to condemn attacks on civilians. Polls show that 6% of the American public thinks attacks in which civilians are targets are “completely justified.” In Saudi Arabia, this figure is 4%. In Lebanon and Iran, it’s 2%.

Carol Williams assembled — through the shards of information made public — what a day is like for prisoners at Guantanamo. There are several interesting bits, but this really caught my eye.

More than 2,000 books and magazines in 18 languages are stocked for the prisoners, each vetted for its potential to incite. The “Harry Potter” series had been the most popular selection before a recent influx of nature and music books.

At the new Camp 7 facility for high-value detainees — which jailers have dubbed “the platinum camp” — the book most in demand now is “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” a nearly 20-year-old treatise by Stephen R. Covey.

(via brijit)

Also of note: Raymond Bonner’s “Forever Guantanamo” rife with outrage about torture and having surprisingly little to say about the place itself.

Yesterday, it was revealed that the LA Times’s story about Sean “P. Diddy” Colmes being linked to the 1994 assault of Tupac Shakur was based on documents that were probably forged. Though I edited my original post about it, I didn’t think it merited a new one. Thanks to Vulture, it now does. By combining the story with it’s implications for everyone’s new favorite show, The Wire, they found something rather interesting to say.

Simon’s critics — Vulture included — complained that he had a too-cynical view of modern newspapers, and that a slippery rat like Templeton would have been flushed out. In fact, one critic wrote that “life at The Wire’s Baltimore Sun seems oddly cut-and-dried, which is surprising given the series’ usual fondness for shades of gray. Hard-nosed editors in the trenches: good; upper management with their eyes on the (Pulitzer) prize: bad. Given the standards the show has set, it’s a bit disappointing.” Wait, which paper was that again—oh yes, the L.A. Times.

So while the Times eats crow, Simon should be crowing, right? Well, yes and no. After all, Philips’s shoddy story got busted just days later by online watchdogs — as, we suspect, Scott Templeton’s would have, had he existed in real life. So Simon got the beginning of the fable right, but not the ending. Templeton wouldn’t have bagged a Pulitzer. He’d have been shamed by The Smoking Gun.

Megan Stack has an interesting story in today’s LA Times about Shabtai von Kalmanovic, a Russia oligarch who’s spending a lot of money to get underpaid WNBA players to play for a team and a league that no one seems to care about. [Insert obvious crack about the WNBA here.]

Nobody is making money off Spartak. On the contrary, it’s better described as an extravagance than a business: Kalmanovic has to pay Russian television to air the games, and they often end up being broadcast in the middle of the night. Nobody even bothers to sell tickets to the games. Too much bureaucracy, Kalmanovic says. The spectators are mostly schoolchildren, soldiers and locals looking for a free night of entertainment.

(via brijit)

I don’t know how I missed this. Apparently the LA Times ran a story this morning that said, essentially, they’ve got more evidence that Sean ‘P Diddy’ Colmes knew in advance about the 1994 shooting and assault of Tupac Shakur. I didn’t see it ‘til this story showed up on my radar. Whether the Times is right or not, it’s interesting to see the story coming up again 14 years later. And it’s a reminder of this fact:

On Sept. 7, 1996, Shakur was fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting on the Las Vegas Strip. Six months later, the Notorious B.I.G. was shot dead in Los Angeles, also in a drive-by. No one has been charged in either slaying.

EDIT (3/26/2008): The Smoking Gun is calling the “new documents” forgeries. The Times promises to investigate. (via DF)

March 16th is the the fourtieth anniversary of one of most notorious massacres in America’s history. Ed Ruggerio wants to make sure that we’ve learned the right lessons from it.

This March 16 we should remember that we can still “lose” wars by forgetting that we aren’t always the good guys. We lose them when we can’t muster the courage to confront our own worst selves. We lose them when we stick our veterans into simple categories: well-adjusted or crazy. We lose wars when we sanitize them; when we create myths that lack the obscenity and evil of the real thing.

And when we “lose” a war this way, it makes it easier to start the next one.

Timothy Garton Ash wrote a pretty interesting Op-Ed in this morning’s LA Times. Though ostensibly about Britishness, he’s also got an important point that’s relevant here:

The more diverse your society becomes, the more important it is to spell out what you all have in common. In any nation defined by civic rather than ethnic belonging, citizenship is the key term, and in Britain, unlike in France or the United States, our explicit notions of citizenship are underdeveloped.

Aaron David Miller’s Op-Ed in today’s Los Angeles Times says something I do wish more people understood:

To be called an Israel hater for speaking out against Israeli actions when they are wrong and counterproductive — actions such as building settlements and bypass roads or confiscating land — or to be called an anti-Semite for suggesting alternative ways of thinking when the status quo is leading nowhere is not only absurd, it’s dangerous.

In the end, American Jews who impose a litmus test of boundless commitment to every single Israeli action hurt not only their community but the United States as well. Israel is a tiny country living in a dangerous neighborhood. The U.S. and Israel need a special relationship based on confidence and trust to further their mutual interests — but that does not mean we need an exclusive relationship in which America acquiesces to everything that Israel or its supporters in the United States think is wise. This is a critical distinction. One can only hope that, next time around, we are fortunate enough to get a president and Middle East advisors who understand it.

You should probably know that I generally find Joel Stein funny and charming. Having admitted to that, his latest column is excellent.

Still, I can’t help but feel incredibly embarrassed about my feelings. In the “Yes We Can” music video that will.i.am made of Obama’s Jan. 8 speech, I spotted Eric Christian Olsen, a very smart actor I know. (His line is “Yes we can.”) I called to see if he had gone all bobby-soxer for Obama, or if he was just shrewdly taking a part in a project that upped his Q rating.

Turns out Olsen not only contributed money, he volunteered in Iowa and California and made hundreds of calls. He also sent out a mass e-mail to his friends that contained these lines: “Nothing is more fundamentally powerful than how I felt when I met him. I stood, my hand embraced in his, and … I felt something … something that I can only describe as an overpowering sense of Hope.” That’s the gayest e-mail I’ve ever read, and I get notes from guys who’ve seen me on E!

This isn’t the first time this has been done — Wired did it about a year ago — but the LA Times has some selections of six words stories from this book. If you weren’t aware, all such efforts are derived from Ernest Hemingway’s “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” Jancee Dunn’s is the best, if only for the novel use of acronyms.

ABCs MTV SATs THC IRA NPR.

(via Brijit)

Paul Watson offers a pathos-laden look into a music school in Burma. It’s interesting, even if not revelatory.

You can feel it walking up the front path, in the breeze of notes from four upright pianos, a baby grand, guitars and traditional instruments that drifts from the rehearsal rooms, where jazz legends such as Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie look down from photocopied portraits taped to the walls.

When the school opened, neighbors told the students they wouldn’t last long. They were still going strong last year, and a few foreign visitors began dropping by, so intelligence agents started showing up. They reminded the students that Myanmar’s security laws hold them responsible for anything their foreign guests do, and if the outsiders strayed into politics, the locals would go to jail.

(via brijit)

In the LA Times, Bruce Wallace takes a look at the (unexpectedly liberal) Pakistani media through interesting eyes:

Most Pakistanis know Saleem, 28, as Begum Nawazish Ali, a middle-aged widow who welcomes viewers into her drawing room on Saturday nights for a little gossip with the guests on “The Late Show with Begum Nawazish Ali.” Ensconced in the set’s chintz and candlelight, the Begum, who hasn’t lost the spark for sex, swaps fashion tips with female guests, flirts shamelessly with the men (even with a mullah on one night), and gets in frequent shots at politicians, including President Bush, for whom she carries a bit of a torch.

(via brijit)

After an appearance on The A Daily Show made him look silly to more people than will probably ever read his book, Liberal Fascism, Mr. Goldberg strikes back in a Los Angeles Times column.

Largely left on the cutting-room floor were some important points that might have made my book seem a bit more nuanced. When he railed about conservatives and gay marriage, I pointed out that in my book, I’m sympathetic to it. When he took shots at Republicans, I noted that I criticize the likes of President Bush and Pat Buchanan for being “right-wing progressives.”