What had happened if George Bush had acted decisively on intelligence reports about an imminent al-Qaeda attack before 9/11? Read Easterbrokk's Alternate History for a quite plausible scenario.
On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner.
Reaction was swift and furious. Florida Senator Bob Graham said Bush had "brought shame to the United States with his paranoid delusions about so-called terror networks." British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused the United States of "an inexcusable act of conquest in plain violation of international law." White House chief counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke immediately resigned in protest of "a disgusting exercise in over-kill."
When dozens of U.S. soldiers were slain in gun battles with fighters in the Afghan mountains, public opinion polls showed the nation overwhelmingly opposed to Bush's action. Political leaders of both parties called on Bush to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan immediately. "We are supposed to believe that attacking people in caves in some place called Tora Bora is worth the life of even one single U.S. soldier?" former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey asked.
The most bizarre moment of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ was the devil carrying an ugly baby with the face of a 60 year old. What was up with that? A lot of people have asked Gibson to explain it, and he sort of does:
But what about the ugly baby?
"Again," said Gibson, "it's evil distorting what's good. What is more tender and beautiful than a mother and a child? So the Devil takes that and distorts it just a little bit. Instead of a normal mother and child you have an androgynous figure holding a 40-year-old 'baby' with hair on his back. It is weird, it is shocking, it's almost too much—just like turning Jesus over to continue scourging him on his chest is shocking and almost too much, which is the exact moment when this appearance of the Devil and the baby takes place."
All right. So it was not the young antichrist, and it was not a mocking of Catholic madonna-and-child iconography.
I still think it didn't work very well, just like the children-turned-monsters attacking Judas detracted from the movie. But it was weird; I'll give him that.
PS: On a different note, Passion is an extremely unlikely box office hit in the Middle East. Christians in e.g. Lebanon are of course liking the movie for the same reason Christians elsewhere like it. Many Muslims, however, reportedly like it because it puts the Jews in a bad light.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat recently viewed the film with Catholic leaders. Afterwards an aide said, "The Palestinians are still daily being exposed to the kind of pain Jesus was exposed to during his crucifixion."
Just take a look at your bank account, Yasser, and it may be a little bit harder to put on that martyr mask.
The wildly anticipated part two of Quentin Tarantino's latest epic, Kill Bill Vol. 2, has finally arrived. Here is one of the raving reviews I found. I am really, really looking forward to this movie.
It will not be in Bergen cinema before April 23. Patience, my precious.
Center for American Progress, a propaganda outlet somewhat to the left of Castro, has an ambitiously named "Claim vs Fact" page purporting to show that Condi Rice's testimony at the 9/11 hearings are full of lies.
It looks rather impressive, and is quite popular in the leftist part of the blogosphere today, since people rarely check lies they like to hear. But CointelPro Tool has gone through the claims, and exposes the page as a mix of bad source criticism, outright misquotations and not a few direct falsehoods.
If commanding a guy in a chicken cosume to do stupid things is your thing, check out subservientchicken.com. It is more than mildly disturbing. What is the page about?
Somewhat surprisingly, Bush's bioethics panel may have come up with a workable compromise for cloning.
Procreation should be limited the same way: to a sperm and an egg.
By spelling it out in a report last week, the President's Council on Bioethics has offered liberals and conservatives a potential way out in their contentious debate over human cloning and research.
We remember that Bush took a lot of well-deserved flak some time back for uniforming the bioethics panel by filling it with conservatives. Reaching a distinction between reproductive cloning of humans, which most oppose at least on this stage, and cloning research, is certainly a more productive contribution than people expected from them at this stage.
In her livejournal (!), a US female military intelligence specialist expresses her anger at CPA commanders failing to provide evacuation, air support or reinforcements for troops and civilians caught in an ambush by al-Sadr's militia. Very strong stuff!
Obviously, her words raise some concerns about how the war is conducted on the operational level. It also provides insight on what great courage and skill are displayed by the men and women risking their lives to rebuild Iraq.
French researchers have found what they say is evidence of the earliest domestic cats, much earlier than anticipated. A buried cat in a neolithic grave on Shillourokambos on Cyprus is giving weight to the claim that domestication of cats had begun 9,500 years ago. That is much earlier than previously known evidence from Egypt, dating to 2000-1900 BC.
"The cat we found in the grave may have been pre-domesticated - something in between savage and domestic. Alternatively, it's possible it was really domestic," Professor Jean Guilaine of the CNRS Centre d'Anthropologie in Toulouse, France told BBC News Online.
Let's get real. All so-called domestic cats are somewhere between savage and domestic. Closer to the former, in my experience.
Picture: Artistic representation of very primitive domestic cat.
A Pennsylvania church, maybe inspired by Gibson's Passion of the Christ, decided to do a "family friendly" version of Christ's torture and crucifiction by having actors whipping and crucifying the Easter Bunny. They also were breaking eggs because, you know, you can't make omelette without or something to that effect.
However, children and a parents were not overly amused.
People who attended Saturday’s performance at Glassport’s memorial stadium quoted performers as saying, “There is no Easter bunny,” and described the show as being a demonstration of how Jesus was crucified.
Melissa Salzmann, who took her 4-year-old son J.T., said the program was inappropriate for young children. “He was crying and asking me why the bunny was being whipped,” Salzmann said.
Exactly what fine theological point was being conveyed through beating up on the poor Easter Bunny is somewhat unclear, though. And there is more:
Performers broke eggs meant for an Easter egg hunt and also portrayed a drunken man and a self-mutilating woman, said Jennifer Norelli-Burke, another parent who saw the show in Glassport, southeast of Pittsburgh.
“It was very disturbing,” Norelli-Burke said. “I could not believe what I saw. It wasn’t anything I was expecting.”
I can believe that! Orthodox theology isn't what it used to be.
French researchers have found what they say is 
