+ Via Angry Arab: According to Woodward, insurgent attacks against coalition troops occur, on average, every 15 minutes, a shocking fact the administration has kept secret. "It’s getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week. That's more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces," says Woodward.

+ The Suspicious Looking Device is a bright orange box with a countdown timer on the top. If you touch it, it lets out a loud siren and then scoots away on a set of hidden wheels. Its entire purpose is to look suspicious -- it has no other function.

+ Upptäckte precis att Future-Hi har ett rätt fint bibliotek här med intervjuer, texter, essäer och annat. Se t ex A Psychedelic Trip into Architecture.

+ Posthuman Blues har några frågetecken angående de nya bilderna från Mars.

+ Day the East End said 'No pasaran' to Blackshirts.

They built barricades from paving stones, timber and overturned lorries. Women threw the contents of chamber pots on to the heads of policemen and children hurled marbles under their horses and burst bags of pepper in front of their noses.

Next Wednesday marks the 70th anniversary of the day that Jews, communists, trade unionists, Labour party members, Irish Catholic dockers and the people of the East End of London united in defiance of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and refused to let them march through their streets.

+ Israel has violated the UN-drawn border it shares with Lebanon, the spokesman for the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon says.

...meanwhile in the Aftonbladet-galaxen: Natten mot söndagen började Israel dra tillbaka sina sista soldater från Libanon, i enlighet med FN-resolutionen som satte stopp för Libanonkriget.

+ Läskigt nytt inlägg på Rigorous Intuition: Born in Time (Part One).

Consider for a moment the familiar JFK and Abraham Lincoln coincidences, how their stories seem to enfold, and unfold, one another. Such details as Lincoln's election to congress in 1846, JFK's exactly 100 years later, and each entering the presidency 14 years after that; Lincoln's having a secretary named Kennedy, and Kennedy's a secretary Lincoln, and each being succeeded by a man named Johnson; both were shot in the head on a Friday, Lincoln by a man with three names born in 1839 who fled a theatre to a warehouse, while Kennedy's alleged three-named gunman, born in 1939, fled a warehouse to a theatre; "Kennedy" and "Lincoln" each contain seven letters, and John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, 15 - you know the list, and how it goes on.

... As I slipped in and out of consciousness at my desk, I finally surrendered and crawled to my bed. In a flash I saw Muslims rushing in long corridors, and meeting behind closed doors. They all gathered in an enormous lobby in the Biltmore Hotel, and everyone was yelling "brother, sister, brother, sister" everywhere I turned. Each one took the podium and extolled and thanked the other for being a leader and servant of the movement, and spoke at length about the importance of grassroot efforts, and Islam as a revolution against injustice and poverty wherever it may be. Every CEO of a company, medical doctor, politican, and non-Muslim in attendance was given an award for leading Muslims right into their grand destiny.

Suddenly, the Pokemans invaded the Biltmore Hotel, firing laser beams, maiming and burning everything in sight. In response, the Council of the Highest Learned and Enlightened Muslim Masters of the Universe thoroughly condemned the attack, and met to deliberate over the extent of the Zionist conspiracy. In another part of the land, the Israeli army was razing houses to the ground, and killing soccer players to save the free world from the terror of bombs. But the Council of the Highest Learned and Enlightened Muslim Masters of the Universe announced that, after engaging in a thourough review of the balance of dangers, it decided to confront the Pokeman evil. They issued volleys of fatwas that incinerated the Pokeman, and thoroughly defeated the Zionist conspiracy against Islam.

At that moment, the Buddha statues met in the heart of the night and conspired to sow the seeds for a great big civil strife. They decided to brainwash Muslims into spilling their brothers' blood, and to starve millions of refugees. But the undeniable power of jihad rose again, and a vicious battle defeated the infidel statues and scattered their remains across the lands.

It was then that we noticed that women were flocking to the graveyards, where their lure and seductions were raising the dead. But the council met again, and decided that since women are already dead in our consciousness, the dead should be banned from visiting the dead. However, before we could rest, the news arrived urgently. In a mosque in Toledo, the Zionists have conspired to tear down the curtains separating the women, and zombie-eyed females emerged from their coffins in a stampede firing seductions at unsuspecting men. For this, the Council decided to reconvene, but it could not agree on whether the Biltmore or the Bonaventure was a better place to meet.

The meeting on the fate of the Aqsa Mosque had to be postponed as well because we unconvered that the direction of the Qiblah was most definitely wrong. But the Qiblah meeting, itself, had to be postponed as well because Sharon had threatened to bring pigs to the Holy Mosque. After meeting in Washington D.C., the Council uncovered that Sharon's plot was far more sinister and profound than we had imagined previously. He had conspired to feed lard to every Muslim cow, and the Council, thank God, dealt with the problem by issuing a harshly worded condemnation of the anti-Islamic conspiracies. To thoroughly neutralize all the dangers, we decided to issue a new book on halal meat.

Before we could catch our breath, Indian troops invaded a village in Kashmir and raped every Muslim woman they could find. But we consoled ourselves because we responded by divorcing heretics from their wives. Tired and worn out, we decided to relax in a massive convention that will serve spicy Tikka and nice Biryani. We need to eat well and sleep for tomorrow, we have a long and arduous day confronting the world conspiracies of Pinky and the Brain...

Ur "A Conference of the Books" av Khaled Abou el Fadl

+ Two Strange Deaths in European Wiretapping Scandal. European investigators are tracking the mysterious deaths of two security experts who had uncovered extensive spyware in their telecommunications firms.

+ I dagens program av Agenda (ligger uppe) intervjuas de tre killarna som ligger bakom Loose Change.

+ Via God is NOT an asshole:

The contemporary World War on Drugs is nothing more nor less than the modern manifestation of the millennial struggle between state power and individual freedom; between the proselytizers of purely symbolic simulacra of religion - propagandists of what Blake called "pale religious lechery" - and the practitioners of the real thing - for religion is an experience, not merely a "social activity with mild ethical rules." This War on Drugs originally started as a War on Religious Experiences, and it is nothing new...

—Jonathan Ott

+ Biologists at the University of Manchester want help in cracking their "miracle" discovery of three fish inside a sealed egg.

+ Daniel Pinchbeck and the New Psychedelic Elite. How a cynical son of beatnik parents combined drugs, the devil and the apocalypse into a modern movement.

Man, this compound of opposites, is a dialectical being, a binary miracle of God. In his essence and life-destiny, he is an "infinite direction", either toward clay or toward God. (...)

This movement is from clay toward God, but where is God? God is in infinity. Man, then, can never attain a final resting place and take up residence in God. The distance between clay and God is the distance that man travels in his search for perfection; but he travels unceasingly, in ascent and upward striving to Him Who is infinite, unbounded and unlimited. Thus the movement of man is from infinite lowliness toward infinite exaltation, and the destination is God, the spirit of God, eternity; it is impossible for him to ever stop.

How disgraceful, then, are all fixed standards. Who can ever fix a standard? Man is a "choice", a struggle, a constant becoming. He is an infinite migration, a migration within himself, from clay to God; he is a migrant within his own soul.

The path that has been laid down from clay to God is called "religion". Now we all know that religion (madhhab) means path, not aim; it is a road, a means. All the misfortunes that are observable in religious societies arise from the fact that religion has changed its spirit and direction; its role has changed so that religion has become an aim in itself. If you turn the road into an aim or destination - work on it, adorn it, even worship it generation after generation for hundreds of years, love it and become infatuated with it so that every time its name is mentioned or your eye glimpses it you burst into tears; if you go to war with anyone who looks askance at it, spend all your time and money on decorating, repairing and leveling it, never leave it for even a minute to go in pursuit of your worldly affairs, constantly walk on it, talk about it, and rub its dust into your eyes as if it were some cure - if you do all of this, generation after generation, for hundreds of years, what will you become? You will become lost! Yes, this straight, true and correct road will deflect you and hold you back from your aim and destination. And to
be lost in this fashion after having found the road is worse than never to have found the road in the first place.

You have heard that this true, straight path, this smooth and sacred highway, had led thousands of men to their destination. But you it has detained for a whole lifetime, so that in effect you have become like those who have chosen the wrong path which leads themastray and into misguidance.

Why? Because you have made the path a place of recreation; you have turned the highway into some sort of sacred park or clubhouse. (...) Religion as a whole, the principles and ordinances of the law, the personages important in religion - they have all become aims in themselves, and are no longer capable of directing you to the true aim and destination. Now prayer is a means; the Qur'an describes it as a means for preventing abomination and evil. But now the words and motions of prayer have become ends in themselves, so that while our knowledge of prayer has become more complex, more sensitive, more technical, the actual effectiveness of our prayer has decreased.

In my view, it is not fortuitious that all the names and expressions used in the vocabulary of Islam to designate the different aspects and dimensions of religion have the meaning of road. The word din (religion) itself has the meaning of road, in addition to the other significances that have been proposed for it, such as sacred wisdom and so forth. Other terms also have the same meaning: silk: a narrow mountain path; shari'at: the path leading down to a river, enabling the thirsty to take water; tariqa: a broad path or road leading from one town to another or one land to another; madhhab: a highway; sirat: a road leading to a place of worship; umma: a group of people moving toward a common destination under a single leader and along a single road.

Religion is, therefore, a road or a path, leading from clay to God and conveying man from vileness, stagnation and ignorance, from the lowly life of clay and satanic character, toward exaltation, motion, vision, the life of the spirit and divine character. If it succeeds in doing so, then it is religion in truth. But if it does not, then either you have chosen the wrong path, or you are making wrong use of the right path. In either case, the result will be the same. We see there is no difference here between Muslim and non-Muslim; neither of them attains the goal of the path.

Here someone might say, "Non-Muslims are in fact better situated than Muslims in today's world." This is true. If somebody advances with determination on an incorrect path, he may attain his goal more quickly than somebody who does not know how to make correct use of the right path. If somebody chooses a roundabout, twisting road but walks swiftly along it, he will sooner or later reach his goal. As for the people who are supposedly on the right path, either they are not walking correctly, or they are shuffling along. Maybe they are even sitting down and discussing the merits of the road. Or maybe they are simply walking around in circles, gazing admiringly on themselves; this is an even worse possibility. There are a thousand and one proofs for the correctness and the truth of the path thave have chosen, and a thousand and one examples of men before them who have traversed this path and attained the destination. But despite all the signs and proofs, all his certainty and assurance, they have no awareness of their backwardness, no self-doubt, no concern to do something in order to change themselves, to see where the fault lies. Thus it is that the worshippers of cows have outpaced the worshippers of God, and our pious believers are not even aware of it.


Dr. Ali Shariati, "Anthropology: The Creation of Man and the Contradiction of God and Iblis, or Spirit and Clay" ur "The Sociology of Islam" (Mizan Press, 1979), s. 93-95

+ Kolla in den nya nättidningen Kulturen, som siktar på att bli en papperstidning om ett par månader. Artiklar som Baul - om Bengalens sjungande mystiker lovar gott inför framtiden.

+ Israeliska armén rånar palestinska banker.

+ According to a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll carried out in July, more than one-third of Americans suspect U.S. officials helped in the September 11 attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could later go to war.

+ Ludicrous Diversion. Intressant dokumentär om 7/7-bomberna i London och förändringarna som skett i Storbritanniens lagar sedan dess.

+ Police in the United States made a record number of arrests in 2005 according to the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report. The 786,545 people arrested for marijuana violations made up 42.6 percent of all drug arrests, and more arrests the total number for all violent crimes combined, including murder, manslaughter, and rape, robbery and assault.

+ Study: One in Four Classical Lovers Like Cannabis; Opera Fans Prefer Mushrooms.

+ OMEGAPROJEKTET lever, men jag kommer inte kunna posta på ett par veckor. Jag återkommer, insh'allah.