For anything other than gloating about the Steelers’ loss. There is a thread for that already.
* Progress in Iraq? This comment at Kevin Drum’s provides a handy resource.
* Don’t eat fresh spinach. Like most agricultural E. coli outbreaks this one will eventually be traced to poop getting in the food stream. Which spinach grower is using uncertified fertilizer? We will find out soon. It is also worth pointing out that much of America’s cheap produce comes from countries which use human waste in agriculture on a routine basis.
* Fast feet.
* Pakistan releases all of its Taliban/al Qaeda detainees, including the killers of Nicholas Berg. This deserves a post of its own but that will wait until I see the story picked up by a source whose credibility I can verify.
* Creationism abroad. We already knew that stupid is contagious…
* Willie Nelson busted. For what? Guess.
Keith
What I want to know is how Willie & friends got off with just a citation for a pound and a half of marijuana. I know they can easily make a case that was for personal consumption (and seriously, if a bunch of senior citizens are smoking weed and doing shrooms, more power to them, as they are adults & it obviously isn’t hurting them), but that much is still a felony in every state I can think of (barring maybe Alaska)
Ryan S.
Let me add some ominous news from Thialand. Here and Here
ET
Color me stunned, Willy got caught with some drugs.
p.lukasiak
as amazing as the “Fast Feet” video was, what was far more interesting is that Russian news correspondents have adopted Kurt Cobain’s circa 1991 fashion choices for their on air wardrobe….
capelza
Grungski…
Heh, though, we still dress like that in these parts! Looks down at the flannel boxers with salmons all over them and the plaid shirt over the Ray Troll t-shirts and ponders if she should go change.
capelza
Forgot…Creationism. This kind of stuff makes me want to cry. I’m still sadly bemused by the poll that showed that only Turkey believes less in evolution than we do.
I wonder if the anti-science/religious wackos that want to run this country dudes and dudettes ever ponder that they are closer to the “enemy” than the rest of the “west” and what that means.
Paul L.
I wonder how they are going get rid of the contaminated/recalled spinach?
Do they bury, burn or cook and can it?
Punchy
Coups are sooo 1991 Soviet Union. Don’t they know that if they REALLY want to change gov’ts, what they need aren’t guns and tanks but Diebold voting machines?
Send ’em Katherine Harris and they’ll have a new leader in 2 weeks.
scs
One story that did not get much play is that the Rights won in Sweden recently, the mecca of left-wing, big government policies. So constantly I have heard from the left “ohhhh, what will the Euro’s think of us?”. Or, “we have lost of the good will of our allies (from Europe) because of Bush’s policies.” But I think the proof is in the pudding. Since Bush and his supposed ally-scaring policies, we have had center to right governments suddenly elected all over Europe, and Iraq war supporters reelected. Angela Merkel in Germany, Sweden, Tony Blair, John Howard in Australia. It seems to me that immitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and perhaps the people of Europe are not so against the Bush policies as we are led to believe by the media.
ImJohnGalt
Only in scs’s fevered imagination is the party *literally* named “The Moderate Party” a conservative party in the mold of the Republicans.
What was the main thrust of their platform?
“We want to let you know that we won’t be doing anything dramatically different.”
Warning: That link may expire after two weeks.
ImJohnGalt
Oh, and:
“With 99.7 per cent of districts counted, the four-party opposition alliance led by Fredrik Reinfeldt had 48.1 per cent of the votes, compared with 46.2 per cent for the Social Democrats and their two supporting parties.”
Mandate, bitches!
Oh, but wait, what’s this?
“The results showed the Moderates with 26.1 per cent, a strong gain from 2002 when it won only 15 per cent of the vote. After taking over the party leadership in 2003, Mr. Reinfeldt, 41, steered the party toward the centre by toning down its conservative polices”
“Some voters said they had grown weary of the Social Democratic government, which replaced a centre-right coalition in 1994.”
Sound familiar? Anti-incumbency seems to be happening all over. First Canada, then Sweden. Can America be next?
scs
Baby steps, John Galt, baby steps.
chopper
yeah, like spain. oh, wait.
scs
I just watched a couple of Muslims debate on TV news in front of a live audience and the audience was asking the debaters why moderate Muslims don’t speak out more against the Muslim violence. After watching them, I thought we need to stop this line of questioning, it’s just not working. Everytime we try to bring that up to a harder-line Muslim, all you get is ‘well the West is invading our lands and persecuting Muslims’, so while they give lip-service to the idea that the violence must stop, they obviously believe the West deserves it on some level.
What we need to do instead is try and get Muslims to drop this persecution complex they love to indulge in by debating them on THAT issue. Let’s ask them – “so HOW exactly are you being persecuted?”, and let them spell it out. I had such a debate online once with some random Egyptian who was a self-professed anti-Westerner, and when I actually countered his persecution complex, he had NOTHING to argue back. He crumbled. That means his thinking was not very deep on the subject, probably because it was just a lot of brain-washing and not much more. Time to put some Muslims on TV and have them debate it out – “Are Muslims really being persecuted, or are they persecuting others?”
The Other Steve
Shit used to fertilize is called Manure. It comes in either a solid form(generally mixed with straw, comes from the floors of hog sheds and such) spread by what is technically called a “manure spreader”, or in a liquid form which is sprayed.(this type usually comes from dairy farms with concrete floors as they spray them clean)
I’m not sure it matters if it was human or not, as far as E Coli goes.
But it is somewhat surprising, as generally it’s something you lay down first thing and till it into the field. The impression I get from this story is that the E coli was on the leaves of the plant… not in the plant. Which means, they sprayed it on the plants after they’d been growing.
Which just seems wrong.
The Other Steve
Did you know someone thought feeding Chicken Shit to cows was a good idea?
Welcome to America, where you can’t trust the food chain.
The Other Steve
Can we do this with Republicans too?
I hate persecutees, especially when I’m supposedly persecuting them and don’t get any of the joy and benefits from my role as a persecutor.
scs
We do it almost everynight in the media. I think it’s good to air the grievances, because if you don’t air it out on the air, then you have people taking out the bombs. We need debate to figure out what are legimate grievances and what are excuses.
ImJohnGalt
Two points:
Firstly, moderate Muslims do speak out, but who wants to interview them?
Secondly, does every Christian have to speak out when an abortion clinic gets bombed? Or when, say, Oklahoma city bombings take place? Why is it the moderate Muslims’ extra responsibility to condemn actions by a group who practices a fundamentalism that bears only passing similarity to the religion that the more moderate Muslims practice?
It’s not like Christians everywhere are condemning the wars [“blessed are the meek”, remember?] that the so-called Christians in the Administration have started.
Tim F.
Um, the Swedish right is Dennis Kucinich. The Swedish left falls off of the American political scale and keeps going for a while.
scs
Still, it’s a change in a new (right) direction. Let’s not try to underplay it, shall we?
scs
Well I think there comes a point when critical mass is reached, in terms of scale and horror. And I’m pretty sure modern day Muslims have reached it. That’s why I think they need to speak out.
scs
To clarify actually, I think Muslims should speak out only if they agree the violence should stop. It is obvious to me watching many Muslims leaders on TV speak that they don’t really believe the violence should stop, they think the West deserves it. In that case, they should just be honest and cheer it on, and not pretend they want it to stop. Then we can start a real debate.
chopper
as long as you keep asking hard-line muslims why moderate muslims don’t speak out, you’re likely to get a hard-liner’s answer. that’s like asking rush limbaugh why the left doesn’t support the war in iraq and expecting a serious answer.
if you want to know why moderate muslims don’t (in your opinion) speak out, you should probably ask them.
scs
He wasn’t super-hard-line, he was slightly harder-line. He wasn’t Al Qaeda, just some Arab journalist. He was probably reflective of a large chunk of Arab mainstream thinking. I think the idea of this vast pool of Muslim moderates, who don’t approve of the violence is overblown. Let’s be honest, many mainstream Muslims APPROVE of the violence, if not in actual deed, at least on the level of “they had it coming”. Surveys support this. Let’s deal with reality.
Mr Furious
Oh Bilge water! I forgot! I canna believe ’tis already been a voyage since Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Evil Jim Rackham be me name an’ I be here t’ tell ye that ye be havin’ t’ Talk Like a Buccanneer oince a voyage, an’ today be th’ tide. Get started now, ye horn swogglin’ scurvy cur – or taste me cold steel…!
Excellent sea dog translation t’anks t’ this place.
Find ou’ yer pirate name here.
SeesThroughIt
I was gonna suggest fundie Christians (who have raised utterly unfounded bitching about “persecution” to the most annoying of art forms), but tomayto tomahto, I suppose.
RSA
From scs:
It’s only fair to mention that Blair became Prime Minister well before Bush was elected, and that it’s clear he’s on his way out, with his unpopularity largely due to his support for the war in Iraq. Polls over the summer showed Howard’s approval rating below 50% in Australia, Merkel’s under 40% in Germany. If you’re looking for trends, I think that to some extent these track Bush’s.
I think that this is largely a matter of perspective: many Muslims may think of Iraqis as freedom fighters against foreign invaders. I mean, consider the results of this poll of Iraqis:
chopper
i’m not saying ‘hard-line=al qaeda’. i’m saying if you want to know what the moderates are thinking, ask a frickin moderate. not a hard-line or a ‘harder-line’ or what semantic whatever you want to get into.
i wouldn’t go by that assumption unless you think he actually represents the muslim mainstream.
make whatever stupid assumptions you want, it’s a free country.
PeterJ
Foreign affairs was a non-issue in the Swedish election. That the right-center won has nothing to do with the GWOT(r), George W Bush, Iraq, The EU or anything outside of Sweden (except maybe how the Social Democrats mishandled helping Swedes after the tsunami in Thailand 2004).
What was important was unemployment, an issue that tradionally has been “owned” by the Social Democrats that have been in power for 65 of the last 74 years. This election they gave this issue away to the right-center coalition by instead of telling the voters how more jobs would be created they promised more money to the unemployed.
Finally, the newly elected right-center coalition won’t be a Bush ally any more than the former goverment was.
Tsulagi
MARRIAGE IS UNDER ATTACK!
ACLU WANTS TO BAN XMAS AND TAKE YOUR BIBLE!
GAY AGENDA LEADS TO ANIMAL SEX ORGIES!
(Oh, been there, done that on the last one for Repub winger Neal Horsley, but I didn’t know he was gay)
Yep
Pb
I see that you all have already identified the obvious comparison here, but…
Priceless.
Pb
Regarding progress in Iraq: if we’re going to throw away billions upon billions over there, couldn’t we at least do a few things that might actually help fix the major Iraqi infrastructure problems? Like, you know, locally employing the Iraqis to fix up their own communities? Maybe instead of giving them guns, we could try to give them ways to produce pure water and electricity, at a community or household level? For instance, I was looking into photovoltaic roofing recently, and I found that while it isn’t necessarily cost-effective–much like the Iraq debacle–it does provide a nice buffer against power black-outs. And I hear that Iraq can get quite sunny.
p.lukasiak
To clarify actually, I think Muslims should speak out only if they agree the violence should stop.
I agree. Most Muslims agree. and they do speak out about it.
But what they condemn is not just the violence perpetrated by radical Islamists, but also the violence perpetrated by the United States. And that isn’t what you want to hear….nor is it the kind of balanced rational perspective that the US media is interested in presenting.
scs
Well that’s why we need more debate. Is violence perptrated by the United States and US citizens on par creating wordwide terror and fear among ordinary citizens as Muslim terrorists have done in the recent future. We need rational minds to figure this out.
And as to comparing Muslim persecution to Christian persecution is a little apples to oranges, but I think Christians can come up with many examples to back up their small-scale claims. Do the claims match the facts is the only relevant question.
scs
Sorry meant recent past above. Not BAck to the Future.
BlogReeder
…couldn’t we at least do a few things that might actually help fix the major Iraqi infrastructure problems? Like, you know, locally employing the Iraqis to fix up their own communities?
Where did that come from?
RSA
There’s certainly reasonable disagreement on this. Here’s one data point:
One way to think of this is that many people throughout the world think that the solution the U.S. is taking to terrorism is worse than the problem (if we conflate terrorism with Iran’s actions). Comparing war deaths with terror, as in scs’s formulation, is problematic, but there you go.
Punchy
Gotta suck not knowing how many actual troops you actually have in Iraq.
I’m sure the real number is classified…ya know…for national security reasons.
The Other Steve
It’s interesting that in 2005, the Conservative Party in Britain campaigned on a platform of “We won’t be Bush’s labradoodle”, and gained seats.
The only reason they didn’t gain more seats, is that they have a reputation of scaring small children.
The Other Steve
I hope we’re sending enough food. Cause 7,000 meals short is going to cause a problem.