Berkeley propaganda class
Okay, well maybe it's not advertised as such, but according to Happy Fun Pundit, UC Berkeley is offering a class entitled "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" in its English department. HFP dissects the course description, and I particularly like this comment:

"My personal favorite line out of this pile of steaming crapulence is this one: '[Israel] has systematically displaced, killed, and maimed millions of Palestinian people'. First of all, it's a lie. But it's a common propaganda tactic to include one lesser, but widespread charge with much more serious (but rare) ones in order to blur the distinction between them while skating the truth. Consider this statement: 'Under George Bush, millions of Americans have gone to work, eaten dinner, and have been executed by the American government'. Not exactly a picture of the truth, is it? And yet, only under a very strict parsing of the sentence can we call it a lie."

HPF concludes with an original poem that I believe is highly worthy of consideration for inclusion in the course reader.

Don't miss this flag parody
Tom Bell spoofs the new EU barcode flag with four creations of his own that better reflect Euro-reality.

"The Globaloney of International Law"
I couldn't have said it better myself.

Making light of an extremely bad situation
Mark Steyn's latest piece is disturbingly funny. I would've laughed harder, except it's so true.

Duck!
Warning: politically incorrect humor. Larry Miller's new appellation for the Palestinians: "Adjacent Jew-Haters." What do they want?

"Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more thing. No, they don't. They could've had their own country any time in the last thirty years, especially two years ago at Camp David. But if you have your own country, you have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way to make a living. That's no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region want: Israel. They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course--that's where the real fun is--but mostly they want Israel."

Sometimes, the comedian says it better than any political analyst from CNN could.

Derbyshire, flying falafels, and the wretched state of the Palestinians
Consider this another introductory piece to my coming post on AC Douglas' post.

Hiatus
My posting will be more infrequent and irregular this weekend due to the fact that I am graduating from USC tomorrow, partying hard (cue lame-ass Andrew W.K. song) for the next few days after that, have family in town visiting with whom I must interact (while drunk and sober, presumably), and need to move stuff home. However, I am working on a couple long responses--one to AC Douglas, the other to OxBlog's Josh Chafetz--which I will post upon completion. The one concerning Chafetz, btw, is going to be an open letter (it started as a bitch-ass long email and I'm going to convert it so it's bloggable).

Middle East solutions
Blogger after commentator after armchair pundit have written responses to the situation in the Middle East, proposing their own solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them miss what I think is the key aspect of the whole problem. Yes Arafat is a terrorist and must go, but he's just a symptom of the problem. Read my article from April 2001 and tell me I am wrong for believing that what we are witnessing is a conflict that at its roots is grounded in the destabilizing effects of modernization. Islam and Arab culture must come to terms with Western values before there will be true peaceful coexistence between Israel and her neighbors.

Please note, this is not an exercise in self-aggrandizement here; I plan on responding to AC Douglas' thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when I have a bit more time, and what I say in my article is a major precursor to that. If you're interested though, the reason I don't post much original thought and analysis on the conflict is because most of my articles from last spring (when I was living in Israel) dealt with that subject. My personal favorite is the "No Peace for the Middle East", which netted me scores of letters to the editor from pissed-off Muslims on campus (thanks to the USC Muslim Student Association coordinating a letter-writing campaign). Also check out the media angle.

Remember crop circles?
How about pipe bomb smiley faces instead? At least the psycho has a sense of humor.

"An exercise in bias"
cut on the bias has an excellent dissection of the Zen TV Experiment all wrapped into a discussion of Adam Curry's The Big Lie and media bias in general. She says,

"This is a crucial point in understanding how media bias occurs; it's not that it is explicit, but rather that many times it is implicit in the structure, the word usage, the story selection, the photo selection - an admission made tangentially by the NY Times in this apology...."

"One of the difficulties in combating media bias is that the practitioners can rarely see their own practice of it."

"I do agree with Curry and Adbusters that the point is not to turn off all media and all outside voices. The point is to be a conscious and logical consumer of information, using your own internal hermeneutic to arrive at The Big Truth through wide reading, an open mind and a refusal to 'connect the dots' without support for doing so other than juxtaposition or isolation of detail."

Read my links under Essentials over on the left for yourself, and come to your own conclusions. I agree with Curry and cut on the bias that unreflective consumption of TV media is ultimately harmful. That's why you're better off getting your news from newspapers, magazines, e-zines, online publications, and blogs. Even then, it's important to always keep in mind that nobody is unbiased, nobody is objective; every writer has his/her own perspective and that is going to feed into the story somehow. Know that going in and you'll gain a better comprehension of the world around you. If you access your news sources with a critical eye/mind, you will gain in understanding and wisdom, won't be deceived into swallowing programmed truths and ways of seeing the world, and will develop your own views coherently. Then you can act on your convictions--political, religious, whatever--with the confidence that is necessary to persevere in the intense public battle over ideas.

Former Clinton adviser gets it
Dick Morris correctly diagnoses the Jewish political calculus in America and explains to Jews that their best friends are conservatives (specifically hawks and evangelicals). This is obvious and has been pointed out before, but when Dick Morris actually knows what he is talking about, it is a good sign.

Hey neighbor, trim your bush!
Some Santa Cruz residents are angry about this tree that looks like a penis. You be the judge.

Goldberg on Fortuyn
The NRO editor writes in the Washington Times,

"One can disagree with Fortuyn's view of Islam or Muslim immigrants or the threat either pose to Dutch culture. But you can't say that he was an enemy of tolerance; instead, he was a martyr to it."

This, simply, is why labeling Fortuyn a far-rightist and comparing him to fascists and Le Pen just doesn't fit the facts.

Bush shows leadership in dumping ICC
In contrast, his critics exhibit intellectual dishonesty and advocate "followership" of other countries' flawed policy.

Don't blame the Europeans
Most of them are peace-loving, tolerant people. The problem, says John O'Sullivan, is the minority comprised of influential public intellectuals and immigrants from Muslim lands.

Argh
The truth:

"So, to all the college students out there I say: Enjoy the Carnival while you can. Before you know it, it's back to the old grind of parents, siblings, burger-joints, or babysitting, and, in short, summer."

More fact-checking on Fortuyn coverage
Patrick Ruffini takes Brian Williams to task for his skewed coverage of Fortuyn's assassination.

To the EU: Don't adopt that flag just yet
It won't accomplish what you want it to.

Attention visitors following links from Andrew Sullivan, Instapundit, and other websites
You can find the post they are referring to here. Thanks for reading, and (in my best pretend southern drawl) "Y'all come back now, y'hear?"

Ick, ick, ick!!!
All hail the new logo for the European Union!

It looks terrible, it has more in common with a barcode than a flag or national symbol, and worse, its unveiling at this time serves to make one wonder if the EU has its priorities straight. After all, shouldn't securing free speech and violence-free politics come before designing chic (read: lame) new symbols of undemocratic authority?