Sunday, 12 September 2010

It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV.

Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day. The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster. And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four commercial jetliners. They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and Dulles in D.C. and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully-loaded fuel tanks -- which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan's World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that. The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper. Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying. We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them. This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force. Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy. OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing. The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators. The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don't say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.

@'ESPN'

Saturday, 11 September 2010

♪♫ The Pop Group - We Are All Prostitutes (Bologna 090910)

Why Americans believe Obama is a Muslim

A study that examined the psychological effects of smear campaigns finds there’s more than ignorance that motivates Americans to believe U.S. President Barack Obama is a Muslim.

The research suggests people are most likely to accept such falsehoods, both consciously and unconsciously, when subtle clues remind them of ways in which Obama is different from them, whether because of race, social class, or other ideological differences.

The findings are published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

These judgments are irrational, argues by Michigan State University psychologist Spee Kosloff. He also suggests they are fueled by an “irresponsible” media culture that allows political pundits and “talking heads” to perpetuate the lies.

“Careless or biased media outlets are largely responsible for the propagation of these falsehoods, which catch on like wildfire,” says Kosloff, visiting assistant professor of psychology. “And then social differences can motivate acceptance of these lies.”

A Pew Research Center poll in August 2010 found that 18 percent of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim—up from 11 percent in March 2009—even though he’s a practicing Christian. Kosloff notes that the poll was conducted before Obama’s recent comments supporting the right for Muslims to build a mosque near New York’s Ground Zero.

Kosloff and colleagues launched their study prior to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, as the candidates were being bombarded with smear campaigns. It’s the first comprehensive experimental study of the psychological factors that motivate Americans to believe the lies.

In four separate experiments (three before the election and one after), the researchers looked at both conscious and unconscious acceptance of political smears by mostly white, non-Muslim college students.

For the conscious trials, the participants were shown false blog reports arguing that Obama is a Muslim or a socialist or that John McCain is senile. The unconscious trials involved gauging how rapidly subjects could identify smear-relevant words such as “Muslim” or “turban” after Obama’s name was presented subliminally.

Among the results:

On average, participants who supported McCain said there is a 56 percent likelihood Obama is a Muslim. But when they were asked to fill out a demographic card asking for their own race, the likelihood jumped to 77 percent. Kosloff says this shows that simply thinking about a social category that differentiated participants from Obama was enough to get them to believe the smear.
Participants undecided about the candidates said there is a 43 percent chance McCain is senile—a number that increased to 73 percent when they simply listed their own age on a card.
Undecided participants said there is a 25 percent chance Obama is a socialist—a number that jumped to 62 percent when they considered race. “Even though being a socialist has nothing to do with race,” Kosloff adds, “irrationally they tied the two together.”

Kosloff says the increase in belief that Obama is Muslim likely reflects a growing disenchantment with his presidency—a sense that people feel Obama is not on their side.

“When people are unsatisfied with the president—whether it’s the way he’s handling the economy, health care or Afghanistan—our research suggests that this only fuels their readiness to accept untrue rumors,” Kosloff says.

“As his job rating goes down, suggesting that people feel like he’s not ideologically on their side, we see an increase in this irrational belief that he’s a Muslim,” he adds. “Unfortunately, in America, many people dislike Muslims so they’ll label Obama as Muslim when they feel different from him.”

The study was done with researchers from the University of Arizona, the University of British Columbia, and Leiden University in the Netherlands.

@'Futurity'

Al Qaeda's Post-9/11 Surge

Inside America's Mosques

The ninth anniversary of 9/11 is almost upon us, and the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in the United States is as fraught as ever. Witness Florida pastor Terry Jones, whose planned "International Burn a Koran Day" held the nation shocked and riveted for weeks until he finally agreed to cancel the event.

In this environment of heightened intolerance, people focus on symbols, and no symbol is more representative of Islam than the mosque. But most outsiders have no idea what actually goes on inside mosques. Some have let their imaginations -- and their mouths -- run wild in depicting these places of worship as nurseries of homegrown terrorist plots against America, as the recent controversy over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York revealed.

But the conversation about mosques doesn't need to be so ugly. Long before the latest controversies erupted, I, along with a team of young American researchers, traveled throughout the country studying U.S. mosques for the book Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam. From fall 2008 until fall 2009 we visited over 75 cities and over 100 of the estimated 1,200 mosques in the United States, some of which are little more than a room or two. And we were reminded that Muslims in America are as diverse as Americans overall. There is no one pattern that can describe them all, and any generalities fail to cover the whole picture.

For one thing, only about a third of American Muslims come from the Middle East: The rest are made up mostly of African-Americans and South Asians. While these are the main categories, there are Muslims from all over the world in the United States. There are some mosques with a predominately Bosnian congregation, for example, while others are dominated by West Africans or Turks. There are also a small but growing number of white and Latino converts. And all these groups differ markedly in historical background, lifestyle, attitudes, and values. Muslim life is also affected by location. New York's Muslims remain traumatized by 9/11 and the hostility they've faced as a result. By contrast, West Coast Muslims seem much more confident and relaxed.

In addition to ethnic and regional differences, mosques are divided again on the basis of sect and interpretation, although we found they fit into five categories, which we defined as modernist, literalist, mystic, African-American, and contested. The following is a list of eight representative mosques -- including the one that hopes to become Park51, the Islamic center in downtown Manhattan -- case studies across the broad diversity of American Muslim culture...

Continue reading

Akbar Ahmed @'Foreign Policy'

Underworld - Always Loved A Film (Solo Remix)

One girl, one guy, one tub

People enjoy a chocolate bath in a beauty salon called After the Rain, in Geneva, Switzerland

@'The Telegraph'

Myanmar election: An outrage or an opportunity?

The military junta in Myanmar recently announced that the country’s first election in 20 years will be held Nov. 7.

This is the country formerly known as Burma, that went to the polls in 1990 and voted overwhelmingly for the National League for Democracy (NLD), only to have the results thrown out by the junta.

This is the military junta that has kept Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for most of the past 20 years and made her one of today’s leading global symbols of the struggle for democracy and human rights.

This is the junta — led by Senior Gen. Than Shwe — that has presided over the world’s longest continuing civil war (since 1949), that brutally suppressed monk-led demonstrations (in 2007), that was slow in responding to the worst natural disaster in the country’s history (Cyclone Nargis in 2008), and that allowed the country to sink to the bottom rank of the world’s countries by most social and economic indicators.

And Than Shwe is the dictator who has been impervious to the sanctions imposed by the United States and other democratic countries, as well as to pleas from the United Nations to bring an end to decades of flagrant human rights abuses.

Why then is the junta holding an election now?...

Contiue reading

Lex Rieffel and David Steinberg @'Global Post'