+ Via God is NOT an asshole: U.S. has most prisoners in world due to tough laws.

A U.S. Justice Department report released on November 30 showed that a record 7 million people -- or one in every 32 American adults -- were behind bars, on probation or on parole at the end of last year. Of the total, 2.2 million were in prison or jail.

According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College in London, more people are behind bars in the United States than in any other country. China ranks second with 1.5 million prisoners, followed by Russia with 870,000.

The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 people in the highest, followed by 611 in Russia and 547 for St. Kitts and Nevis. In contrast, the incarceration rates in many Western industrial nations range around 100 per 100,000 people.

(...)

"The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. We rank first in the world in locking up our fellow citizens," said Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, which supports alternatives in the war on drugs.

"We now imprison more people for drug law violations than all of western Europe, with a much larger population, incarcerates for all offenses."

+ Blågula frågor intervjuar Pierre Durrani (!): Blågul islam?

+ Mohamed Omar om Tage Lindbom: Modern anti-modernist.

+ Islamic Feminism: Oxymoron or reality? Barcelona Conference 2006.

How can Islam and despotism coexist when despotism is the ultimate idolatry? What is despotism other than the displacement of God, and the denial of the supernal promise of humanity? While God has emdowed us with the tools to think and speak, the despot confiscates the gifts of divinity. The unwavering mark of the despot is censorship, whether it slays the intellect or supresses its speech. Whether the despot censors in the name of God, or seeks to prevent the triumph of Satan, censoring the word, by its nature, is an act of blasphemy. Censorship preempts the possibilities of creation, perjures the testimony, with which we have been charged, and voids the very logic of human accountability.
    But censorship is the ailment of the despot, festering in a slough of cowardliness and fear. Seeking to escape the challenges of thought, the despot barricades himself in a stockade of arrogance that only shields his fears. But regardless of the fanfares of power and might, the despot is cowardly and weak. Any coward can fire a gun, or any tyrant can pluck out the tongues of those who dare to speak, but it takes a bravery of the sublime to confront ideas with ideas. It is impossible for a Muslim who has truly surrendered to the truth of God to refuse to confront thought with thought, and to indulge in the cowardly act of censoring speech. Light cannot exist if we ban the night, and if people cannot deny they cannot believe. Can there be heaven without its hell, and without hardship can there be ease?
    Among the mythology preserved in our Muslim history is a story that claims: "Moses, peace be upon him, asked God to ban people from speaking lies about him (Moses). God answered that He would not censor people from speaking lies about Himself so how could He ban people from speaking about anyone else!" But no wonder! Wasn't the Devil ejected from the realm of God, and specificially put on this earth to speak? If the Lord allowed the Devil the freedom to speak, and say nothing but lies, how to we imagine that we can deny humans the right to speech?

-Ur "The Search for Beauty in Islam : A Conference of the Books" av Khaled abou el Fadl, s.269

+ In the case of the Moscow bombings, curiosity kills.

THE series of bomb attacks on apartment blocks in September 1999 claimed 300 lives and brought terror to the streets of Moscow and two other Russian cities.

Unknown terrorists had rented rooms on the ground floor of the apartment blocks and filled them with explosives that destroyed the buildings. Hundreds of dead and injured were plucked from the rubble as the attacks continued over many days and more than 30,000 Moscow buildings were searched as panic took hold.

The Kremlin pointed the finger at rebels in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. It used the blasts to justify a new wave of "anti-terrorist" operations and, a few weeks later, troops were sent back into Chechnya for a second time.

But doubts have persisted about the Kremlin's official version of events. Sceptics have argued that Chechen rebels had nothing to gain from planting the bombs. The Chechens had won the first war in 1996 and had already gained de facto independence.

The new war, however, benefited one man: Vladimir Putin, now Russian President. At the time he had only recently been appointed prime minister and was a little known figure among Russian voters.

In the space of a few months, as he took military action against Chechen separatists, his popularity shot up from 2 per cent to 70 per cent, mainly as a result of the image the war created. He was a man of action determined to go after Chechen terrorists.

As a result, critics of the Kremlin in Russia and the West have for years claimed that the Federal Security Service (FSB), the former KGB, played a role in the bombings.

This is an allegation that is vehemently denied by the Russian authorities. Putin has called it "immoral".

But whatever the truth about who planted the bombs, one incident in particular has raised suspicion over the role played by the FSB.

On the night of September 22, 1999, when tensions were at their height, a passer-by in the city of Ryazan, 180km southeast of Moscow, saw people unloading bags from a car boot into the basement of an apartment block.

The police were called and raided the building. They announced they had found a detonator and bags containing hexogen, the same explosive used in the other bombings. The Russian interior minister proudly announced that a terrorist attack had been foiled.

But only an hour later the Kremlin did an about-turn. Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB and a close Putin ally, went on air to say that the suspicious powder discovered in Ryazan was in fact just sugar. The incident, he claimed, had been part of an FSB civil defence exercise.

The "sugar" was later blown up, preventing any further tests. The FSB went on to claim that the bomb expert who had identified the hexogen had made a mistake because his hands were tainted with the explosive. The bizarre incident led many to suspect that the FSB had planned to blow up the building and could also have been behind the other blasts, thus discrediting the Chechens.

In his book Blowing Up Russia, Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy who died from poisoning in London last month, set out to prove that theory.

Alexander Goldfarb, a close ally of the exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky who had helped Litvinenko to flee to Britain, believes this is why he was killed.

Others who have sought to investigate the bombings have been silenced, too. Many conspiracy theorists believe investigating the bombing is a dangerous business.

In 2003, Sergei Yushenkov, a liberal member of parliament, was gunned down in Moscow in a case that remains unsolved. Yushenkov had set up an independent commission to investigate the bombings.

Later that year, Yuri Shchekochikhin, another MP on the commission, died in mysterious circumstances and is believed to have been poisoned.

Shchekochikhin was also an editor at Novaya Gazeta, the independent newspaper where fierce Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya worked until she too was shot dead in October this year.

Shchekochikhin was taken ill suddenly and developed awful symptoms: his skin peeled, he was covered in boils, his hair fell out and he suffered respiratory failure. His colleagues were unable to investigate his death because they were told that the autopsy results were secret and would not be released even to his relatives.

Some friends and colleagues suspect he was silenced because of his work on the bombings, although his other journalistic work - notably his probe into a financial scandal involving the father of an FSB deputy director - may also have made him a target.

In August 2004, Mikhail Trepashkin, who like Litvinenko was a former FSB officer who became close to Berezovsky, was arrested while investigating the bombings on behalf of the commission. He was thrown in jail on trumped-up charges of passing on state secrets to Britain.

Trepashkin had claimed Vladimir Romanovich, who rented the basement in one of the bombed buildings, was an FSB agent. Romanovich was hit and killed by a car in Cyprus a few months after the bombings.

Meanwhile, Otto Latsis, another commission member and editor of the liberal Russky Kuryer newspaper, was beaten unconscious shortly after Trepashkin's arrest.

Then there is the case of Politkovskaya, who wrote extensively about Chechnya, the bombings and crimes committed by the security forces. Two years before her murder, she was poisoned on her way to cover the Beslan school siege.

Conspiracy theorists believe the cases are linked and the FSB is determined to silence anyone who seeks to prove its complicity in the bombings.

Others, however, including many who believe the Chechens did not plant the bombs, say Litvinenko's death has caused far more damage to Russia's image than all his claims put together. Why should the Kremlin do such a counter-productive thing?

Similar arguments are put forward by those who do not believe the state was involved in Politkovskaya's murder. It may also be that Yushenkov was a victim of politics and Yuri Shchekochikhin was killed by criminals.

But on both sides of the fence, one thing is agreed: the truth about the 1999 bombings will never come out.

+ Och apropå Litvinenko så finns det nu indikationer om att han konverterat till islam just innan han blev mördades: A close friend of Litvinenko has suggested that he had converted to Islam. "He was read to from the Koran the day before he died and told his wife that he wanted to be buried in accordance with Muslim tradition," Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen leader and neighbour of Litvinenko said.

+ Scientists Levitate Small Animals. (!!!)

+ The Fantastic in Art & Fiction. En fantastisk onlineutställning.

+ Och efter att ha försummat Tim Bouchers fantastiska blogg har jag nu hittat tillbaks, och Tim skriver fortfarande de mest fantastiska och tankeväckande blogginläggen på internet. Några exempel:

Voices In Our Heads.

In the beginning was Ford...

Papal Magick Tricks.

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