Category: Everything Else

*Sigh*

This is what we went to war for?

Nearly five years after the ouster of the fundamentalist Taliban regime, President Hamid Karzai plans to breathe new life into a strict Islamic institution that many Afghans were happy to see die: the Amr Bilmaruf va Nahi az Mankar, or literally, “Do the good, don’t do the bad.”

Last month, Karzai’s Cabinet approved a proposal to re-establish the agency also known as the Department for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue, whose police under the Taliban beat and imprisoned Afghans for violating Shariah law. For many, the revival of religious cops raises painful memories of ruffians zipping around Kabul in Datsun pickups mainly in search of women and girls who refused to wear the head-to-toe burqa, donned high heels, wore nail polish or walked down city streets without a male relative. Men were cited for sporting short beards, drinking alcohol, working during prayer time, playing chess or listening to nonreligious music.

Update 6:55PM:

Lest it be thought that I am suggesting that idiocy is confined to just one part of the world, how’s this for stupid?

British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny – refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed.

The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic.

Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action.

It’s bad enough that we’re all treated like potential terrorists every time we get onto an airplane, but now racist passengers also get a say in who gets to fly?

Priorities

Apparently, despite this week’s unpleasantness, the Bush administration has its security priorities in order …. NOT:

While the British terror suspects were hatching their plot, the Bush administration was quietly seeking permission to divert $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new homeland explosives detection technology.

Congressional leaders rejected the idea, the latest in a series of steps by the
Homeland Security Department that has left lawmakers and some of the department’s own experts questioning the commitment to create better anti-terror technologies.

And this is not an isolated incident:

For more than four years, officials inside Homeland Security also have debated whether to deploy smaller trace explosive detectors

Kevin’s Law: I Like It

Kevin Drum has a new law (a la Godwin):

If you’re forced to rely on random blog commenters to make a point about the prevalence of some form or another of disagreeable behavior, you’ve pretty much made exactly the opposite point.

Two Kinds of Crazy

There’s two kinds of crazy in this world. Good crazy, and bad crazy.

This would be an example of the first kind (hat tip, Jason, and click through for the big version):

Who on earth thought this up and then spent the time to put it together? You’ve got to be a little bit crazy — the good kind. The world needs more of this.

And then, there’s the other kind of crazy. (No, I am not going to take a swipe at Ann Coulter, other people are doing a great job of that already). Who would have thought that a nominally neutral news station like CNN would broadcast something like this?

For the second time in three days, CNN featured a segment on the potential coming of the Apocalypse, as indicated by current conflicts in the Middle East. The July 26 edition of CNN’s Live From … featured a nine-minute segment in which anchor Kyra Phillips discussed the Apocalypse and the Middle East with Christian authors Jerry Jenkins and Joel C. Rosenberg — who share the view that the Rapture is nigh. At one point in the discussion, Phillips asked Rosenberg whether she needed “to start taking care of unfinished business and telling people that I love them and I’m sorry for all the evil things I’ve done,” to which Rosenberg replied: “Well, that would be a good start.”

There’s a large number of TV stations where this issue gets discussed regularly. But none of them (until recently) have been CNN, and that’s how it should be. The possible coming of the Apocalypse is NOT news, it’s a religious belief. It is in a completely different category from the rest of the news of the day and should be treated as such. It’s crazy to think otherwise. The bad kind of crazy.

Disclaimer: Yes, I am being very flip about the use of the word crazy in this post. Consider it a lame attempt to be funny and smash two very different topics into one unified blog post. Mental illness is a serious issue, I know. Don’t get your hate on.