This was formerly known as Booz Allen Hamilton’s Beirut office … it is (was) strategically located right above the Danish embassy in Beirut.

A friend sent me these pictures (and others) some time ago, accompanied with the above caption. I felt I had plenty to say about them at the time, but (since I had to wait -God knows for how long- for the permission to put them on; naturally) I’ve cooled off… which, after all, might be the best thing to say here — this whole f’ing thing is obviously retarded, and a lot of people need to chill!

Incidently, I’m reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, where he quotes this passage from Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, first published in London in 1841:

History in her solemn page informs us that the crusaders were but ignorant and savage men, that their motives were those of bigotry unmitigated, and that their pathway was one of blood and tears. Romance, on the other hand, dilates upon their piety and heroism, and portrays, in her most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves, and the great services rendered to Christianity.

This, of course, was Mackay’s take on the particular instance of The Crusades, but as his book’s title implies, this statement has a wider range of application. He goes on:

Now what was the grand results of all these struggles? Europe expended millions of her treasures, and the blood of two million of her people; and a handful of quarrelsome knights retained possession of Palestine for about one hundred years!

How dismal are the returns on the investment? Ah. What’s it all worth?

Meanwhile, I am receiving emails urging me to sign a petition, or boycott a product. “Defend the Prophet,” they say. As if this is the way to do it; as if we could; as if it is not too late…

Kurt Vonnegut relates this conversation with Harrison Starr, the movie maker, when he mentioned he was writing a book:

… he raised his eyebrows and inquired, “Is it an anti-war book?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’”
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.

Time to step out of the glacier’s path, my friends. Time to survive. Hold your culture in your heart, and keep your head above water. Remember The Pianist?

source: egypt2006.com

A golden-mantled tree
kangaroo — gallery

by Lewis Black on TDS

This is not about the -much talked about- sightings of (the awesome) Egyptian ladies at soccer games during the Cup of African Nations, nor the related phenomenon of the ostensible nationalism that swept Egypt during the championship and the subsequent euphoria resulting from the Egyptian team clinching the cup — as much cautious optimism as that inspired!

Rather, this is about the recent discovery of a myriad of new species in the rain forests of Foja Mountains in New Guinea.

I remember first hearing about this story, and feeling hopeful but in a very subdued tone. I remember thinking how odd these feelings were. First, I was puzzled as to why this discovery inspires any kind of hope at all -like a fresh start of sorts- given that it has at best a dismal effect on my day-to-day life. It seems like Klinkenborg was wondering about the same thing. He offers this:

It is something like a sigh of relief, a sigh that measures the bleakness of living in the midst of a mass extinction that we ourselves are causing.

and …

It’s tempting to say that what really moves us in the news of this expedition is simple possibility, the feeling that discovery is still alive, that the Earth has not been entirely trampled or paved.

Then you read things like:

What was amazing was the lack of wariness of all the animals. In the wild, all species tend to be shy of humans, but that is learnt behaviour because they have encountered mankind.

and …

One good thing about the discoveries is that their mist-shrouded “lost world” is very remote and can be reached only by helicopter. The place is not much use for agriculture and with any luck will escape the worst excesses of eco-tourism.

… and you understand the source of caution in your reaction — there is always lingering doubt (supported by plenty of historical evidence) that we, as a species are going to destroy every cubic inch of our environment, and subsequently ourselves. And every time one of these spots is ruined, or one of those species is driven to extinction, you kinda feel like a little kid who’d just broken a vase, and God going: “See, this is why we never get to have nice stuff on this planet.” Of course, you want to blame it on your brother, but you’re part of it since you’ve agreed to play.

“When the cultural and intellectual history of our time is written, Robert Bly will be recognized as the catalyst for a sweeping cultural revolution,” according to the psychologist Robert Moore; and literary critic Charles Molesworth suggests that some of Bly’s importance and complication lies in the fact that he “writes religious meditations for a public that is no longer ostensibly religious.”

Listen to an interview with Bly on Minnesota Public Radio.

Listen to the reading given by Robert Bly at Unity Temple, in Oak Park, Illinois, on October 22, 2005.

Listen to Bly and Donald Hall on Literary Friendships, a program hosted by Garrison Keillor on American Public Media.

Stealing sugar from the castle
Robert Bly

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder’s plan of the castle of sugar.
Just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the dark hall is also a joy.

I am a lagger, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
to read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don’t mind you saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

“You’re a theif!” the judge said. “Let’s see
Your hands!” I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

From rickygervais.com:

Ricky Gervais and his team were … awarded the Guinness World Record for the most downloaded podcast, gaining an average of 261,670 downloads per episode of ‘The Ricky Gervais Show’ during its first month.

عيرتني بالشيب و هو وقار
يا ليتها عيرت بما هو عار

(إستماع: عيرتني بصوت ناظم الغزالي)

Oniszczak envisions: Forget biotech – the future is quantum; a conversation in 2106.

via the quantum pontiff.

James Copnall of BBC News:

Mubarak also brandished the Cup himself, as if he - and not Egypt’s footballers - had provided the heroics on the pitch.

Data source: Foreign trade statistics, US Census Bureau.

Note: The Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZ) agreement officially kicked off between the United States, Egypt, and Israel in January of 2005.

(My) transcript of K.C.Cole’s latest perspective:

How do we know what we know? In science, that’s always a central question, which is why it surprises me that there isn’t more of “how do we know?” in the so called debate over evolution. Human evolution is pretty disturbing, of course; embarrasing parents are hard enough to deal with — who wants fish, fungi, and slime-molds stinking up the family tree. It doesn’t help that our whole existence seems to be an accident — the end result of a long chain of small changes, brought about purely by chance. Stray cosmic rays tweaking the DNA of ancient critters, in ways that made them better at hiding, or eating, or getting about, and therefore having more offspring. This process even produced the big brains and loud mouths that let us argue -incessantly, it seems- over how it all came to be. “A likely story,” some of you were saying, how do I know it’s true? In the same way I know, the person sitting next to me on the bus isn’t a giant banana — not just because he doesn’t look like a banana, but because he doesn’t smell like a banana, or sound like a banana, or act like a banana; and no one else on the bus thinks he’s a banana either. In other words, I have multiple lines of evidence, and all of them agree. The other people on the bus are conducting the same experiment, and they agree too. It’s the same reason I believe an even more unlikely creation saga, the big bang; no one was around to see the universe explode into being some 13 billion years ago, yet the theory is widely accepted, because so many different lines of evidence clearly point in the same direction; the shape of the universe, the motions of the galaxies, the composition of matter. And so it is with evolution: it’s not just the story of ever-increasing complexity written in the fossil record; it’s the way wings and eyes have evolved in different places, over and over again; the way devevloping embryos of rabbits and humans look virtually the same; we grow tails and gill-slits for heaven’sakes; the way our genes match-up; more than 99% the same with chimps, 50% with fungi; we even see evolution in action right infront of our noses, if we didn’t , we wouldn’t be worried about drug-resistant strains of bacteria, not to mention bird-flu. That’s why even the most devoutly religious scientist takes evolution on evidence, not on faith. Ignoring evidence can get you into trouble; you just might find yoruself sitting on the bus, someday, chatting up a banana.