Somebodies a-scawad! This fine example of letting the terrorists win comes to you courtesy of Democratic Senator Mark Dayton.
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For the week ending 11Oct04:
Spotlight Sinai: At least thirty are dead and well over 100 injured following three bombings at two resort hotels in the Egyptian Sinai near the Israeli border. Most of the victims were Israelis on vacation. A previously unknown group, Jama'a Al-Islamiya Al-Alamiya (World Islamist Group) claimed responsibility, but our old pals Al Qaida are now the most likely suspects according to US, Israeli and Egyptian security forces, with possible connections to Palestinian groups or domestic Egyptian Islamic terrorists (the ones who did the Luxor hit back in the late nineties.) Names that have surfaced in the discussion include bin Laden's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri and Jordanian cum-Iraqi Al Qaida terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi.
It seems that the Islamic terrorist world is linking arms and standing shoulder to shoulder to fight both the Little Satan and the Great Satan. One could almost think this great coming together - this laying down of internal disputes to fight the common enemy - was a noble thing if it didnt involve the surprise bombing of innocents. I think that the terrorists are going to continue to have a serious public relations problem. Maybe a little nonviolent resistance would get them sympathy from people outside the Chomskyite left.
Spotlight Iraq: Briton Kenneth Bigly was unsurprisingly beheaded by yet another group of Islamic funlovers. It seems as though Bigley made a last ditch effort to escape but didnt make it out. Several Turks were also beheaded this week, showing that Islamic fundamentalism is essentially nihilistic, and will attack anything that looks at it funny.
Spotlight Spain: In what is described as a fit of cannibalism (as opposed to the chronic, continuing cannibalism) British ex-robber Paul Durant killed, dismembered and ate British tourist Karen Durrell. Said Durant,
"Before I killed Karen I told her I had come to Spain where I was going to kill and eat pedophiles. My mental stage was breaking down at this stage. I believed God had delivered her to me "
As laudable as his desire to end paedophilia is, we can only conclude that his mission was tragically unsuccessful.
Spotlight Hanoi: Distressed that former colonial subjects the Vietnamese are no longer speaking French, French President Jacques Chirac has declared that the worlds cultures are in danger of being choked by the American cultural hegemony. Likening this to an ecological holocaust, Chirac warned that the loss of global cultural diversity would be a catastrophe. Therefore, he argued, the French are right to stand up to the brutish Americans, and continue to consume American movies, jeans, cigarettes, music, cars and TV in huge quantities. To counteract the threat of a French cultural resurgence, we should expand the successful EuroDisney program, and build a Disneyworld in every single fucking French City, town, hamlet and village.
[wik] All of this puts France below Singapore which while only the size of a piece of snot, is worth significantly more than a heaping pile of shit.
Spotlight Egypt: Back to the surreal and twisted world of the Religion of Peace, an Egyptian Intellectual has accused former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu of planning the 9/11 attacks. Sadly, these confused ravings are more common than many in the western media will ever admit.
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Derrida is Derri-dead. But what does that mean?
Dead in the strict meaning of "without life" would seem to be a simple enough construct, but in actual fact the notion is so ramified, so resplendently qualified, as to render the word nearly meaningless. Is Derrida, in fact, truly Derri-dead, in this age where someone who ostensibly no longer exists in a current moment can still act upon the world through his detritus (e.g. images, video, writings)? (See Buckethead's just-prior post for a happily coincidental example of this very phenomenon. Christopher Reeve will live again and again, in a wheelchair and not, as himself and as not-himself, indefinitely. And yet you can't just call him up to chat.) The notion of physical death (thanatos), though in a very important sense concrete, is countered-- indeed one could argue has always been countered by-- the accidental or intentional memorials to one's existence which independently of (partially unbounded by) personal chronology signal the fact of that existence without having to prove its currency.
As Derrida wrote in another context,
historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing; to the possibility of writing in general, beyond those particular forms of writing in the name of which we have long spoken of peoples without writing and without history. Before being the object of a history of an historical science writing opens the field of history of historical becoming.
Is writing in itself a narcissistic bid for immortality, a process of tethering oneself to history, to attempt to endow oneself (or, at least, one's publicly imagined self) with historiocity? Indeed, Derrida wrote. Writing is inescapably an immediatist art, as each new reader encounters the author in their own now rather in the author's then. Therefore, beyond Derrida's own carefully nuanced probings of the deepest meanings of language (a construct that, though endowed irrefutuably with concrete meaning, threatens to dissolve into the purest solipsism under close scrutiny), can we detect a secret, naughty bid to build an edifice for himself out of the very medium he spent his life deconstructing? Or am I just shining you on?
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For some reason known only to the now-deceased html gnomes charged with properly posting the text of this post, only the picture and the title survived. Which made my post seem rather cruel. Which was not my intent. Here, as best I can reconstruct it, is the original post:
Superman is dead. Christopher Reeve died Sunday at the age of fifty-two from complications arising from an infected bedsore. The superman movies seem dated, hokey and schmaltzy now - but that is not so much the fault of the movies but the penalty of viewing the past through our green-hued spectacles of jaded hindsight. We are unable to watch Superman without remembering what came after - the brilliant gothic epic that was Batman, the snazzy special effects of the X-Men movies, and the host of lesser superhero movies that would never have seen the dark of a movie theater but for Superman. Like its comic book forerunner, the movie superman paved the way for what came after. Other superhero movies might be more clever, better drawn, more whatever, but Superman is always first.
Christopher Reeve made that movie a success. Superman in the early eighties was a clean cut, muscular, cheerful, diffident and even (dare we say) a bit fey. Reeves gave us a Superman with no ironic overtones, no sarcastic asides, no incestuous self-referential humor, no gloomy cityscapes no five o'clock shadow; in short, none of the things that we now absolutely require in order to suspend our disbelief. We can't watch movies like this anymore. But we should.
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Well, the first issue of Undecided Voter magazine has just hit the newstands.
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Please note some modifications to the roster at left. Erstwhile loghorrean Steven den Beste has temporarily retired from posting. Minister Buckethead, at least, will miss him. Should he return to blogging, his name shall once more grace our site.
Also retiring is Tacitus, a formerly top-shelf site which has slumped of late as its principals have migrated their most compelling work to the new conservative site redstate.org.
In the interest of balance, former CalPundit Kevin Drum's new enterprise at the Washington Monthly has also been liquidated.
Finally, please welcome new addition Obsidian Wings, a group site featuring high-octane discussion and intelligent writing. Kindly visit them, comment, and drag even more traffic our way. The more bandwith we devour, the more powerful we become. Your compliance is appreciated. Indeed, it is compulsory.
That is all.
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Bill Gertz of the Washington Times is reporting that Saddam Hussein used the UN oil-for-food program to skim billions of dollars and directed $1.78 billion to French businessmen, officials and journalists in order to get the French to oppose American policy.
Here's a juicy bit:
The report named former French Interior Minister Charles Pascua as getting a voucher for 11 million barrels of oil, and Patrick Maugein, who received a voucher for 13 million barrels of oil. The report said Mr. Maugein, the chief executive officer of the SOCO oil company, was a "conduit" to Mr. Chirac.
The report mentioned is the report of the CIA's Iraq survey group, the basis of Gertz' article. For comparison, French oil companies Total and SOCAP each got vouchers in the neighborhood of 100 million barrels of oil.
The corruption extends beyond France. Russia and China also featured prominently on the list. Those who have most vociferously opposed the war in Iraq might be shocked and embarrassed that the actions of their allies in the governments of France and Russia were not motivated by simon-pure pacificism and upright morals. (Why they might imagine this in the first place is another question altogether, given those nation's history.) If America's primary non-Iraqi opponents in the war in Iraq had not been bought off on the cheap and had remained neutral or even provided minimal support; would world opinion have swung so dramatically against the United States? Would those in the US who opposed the war been so confident if they had not been able to point at France, Germany and Russia?
Ironic that the most damage Saddam did in the war, he did before the war started. Of course, any apparent correlation between those who received billions of dollars from Saddam and those nation's anti-US policies might be merely accidental.
[wik] For more info on the Oil For Food Scandal, go here.
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EARTH FIRST!
We'll strip mine the outer planets later
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Loyal reader #0009, Mapgirl, informs us that someone has taken the novel step of complaining about "that time of the month." I will admit that - for all my inherent inability to really, you know, empathize with this problem given my status as a triped - I found this to be truly effing hilarious. After a slow start, our essayist really warms to her subject:
I have long maintained that we should put pictures of gorgeous men on the packaging. Really butch guys on the heavy-absorbency products, and femme guys on the pantiliners. For the ever-more-popular "teen" size, we could get pictures of the boy band du jour. So you could have pictures of N'Sync and Justin Timberlake on your black thong-cut pantiliners (yes, such things exist).
You know if guys had periods, the packages would be slathered with pictures of Carmen Electra, and would frequently include a free bikini magazine or offers for $50 rebates on Coleman grills. What do girls get? Fucking pastel colors and super-quiet pouches. Such is our shame. I really think hip advertising is the key to breaking this taboo.
My husband thinks they should take it one step further and create cartoon characters, like Tony the Tiger or Cap'n Crunch. I suggested they should use caricatures of real-life people . . . like a cartoon Bloody Mary holding her severed head. His suggestion was the best. Bloody Bill Anderson, that grim figure of the American West.
I can just see the commercials now.
"When you're ridin' the rag . . . ride with the best! Dancin' girls and preachers' daughters alike agree: use Bloody Bill's Pads! Available in two delightful scents: poison sumac and gunpowder. Now with blood gutters!"
"Cork that revoltin' wound with Bloody Bill brand Tampons! Individual packages come with cotton batting, gauze, and a 60-second length of dynamite fuse. Free ramrod with each purchase."
"Monthly Curse got you feelin' a mite insecure? Get the assurance you need with Bloody Bill's Roll-your-Own Tampons! I left a trail of blood clear across Kansas, but you don't got to!"
But we will never see the subject approached with such humor.
Not for the squeamish, but well worth the read.
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