Brutal new 'war on terror' weapon sucks air out of lungs

A new 'super-weapon' being supplied to British soldiers in Afghanistan employs technology based on the "thermobaric" principle which uses heat and pressure to kill people targeted across a wide air by sucking the air out of lungs and rupturing internal organs.

Duly Consider: Is this really the kind of thing we of the "moral high-ground" want to pursue?

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Daily Show: Three Generations of “America to the Rescue”

In perhaps the most brilliant segment on “The Daily Show” I’ve ever seen, last night Jon ran through the last three decades of United States intervention in the Middle East to show how incoherent, "ass-backwards" and counter-productive it has been.




Duly Consider: Is America really in the business of rescuing others or do we just want to maximize military industrial complex profits by stoking the fire?

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See No Solution, Hear No Solution, Speak No Solution!

These are extraordinary books by extraordinarily qualified authors. The most prolific researchers on Islam today, they still can't get a date with George W. Bush.

The conversant yet transcendent styles are accessible to all reading levels and should be required for all Americans who pretend to actually care about solving the problems that face us in the middle east.

Reza Azlan pens this pervasive book and just as it is complete, Vali Nasr finishes one more definitive book on the Shia Revival entitled the same, as a window the size of your living room into the problems and solutions for Iraq and surrounding Islamic nations. It is clear that our current administration has zero interest in actually ending this war, as their goal is not peace in the middle east, but profit from war.

Though it is clear the Islamic world sees no other way to get to heaven but by Allah, they certainly are not in agreement on what Allah looks like or how he wants his people to proceed. As the Shia and Sunni are much like Catholics and Protestants are to the Christian world, they are far too worried about how they will get along to worry about trying to convert the US or anyone else outside of the Middle East. Sure, they believe we will come around to their way of thinking but not by war but by revelation by their true God, Allah.

According to author Reza Azlan, if the US pulled out of Iraq immediately, the first thing that both the Shia and Sunni would agree on would be the elimination of Al Quaeda and the second would be to guarantee peace and stability to Iraq, as they care more about sustaining peace there than anyone in the US government. What is stopping us from following that advice? Well, maybe it has something to do with the absolute closed eyes and ears of the Whitehouse to anything that would stop the flow of money out of average American's hands into the Military Industrial Complex. This war is all about maintaining palatial Imperial Life in the Emerald City for the occupiers of this war torn country. But... that's another book.

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker
Aslan, a young Iranian emigrant, lucidly charts the growth of Islam from Muhammad's model community in Medina—depicted as a center of egalitarian social reform—through the chaotic contest to define the faith after the Prophet's death. Within generations, seven hundred thousand hadith—accounts of Muhammad's words and deeds—were in circulation, many "fabricated by individuals who sought to legitimize their own particular beliefs." Out of this muddle was born the primacy of the ulema, Islam's clerical establishment. The ulema, in Aslan's view, foreclosed Koranic interpretation, detoured from the Medinan ideal, and obscured Islam under a thicket of legalistic decrees. Fifteen centuries after Muhammad, Islam has reached the age at which Christianity underwent its reformation; Islam's renewal, Aslan attests, "is already here." However, both modernizers and their "fundamentalist" opposites call themselves reformers, and the victory of the former is not assured.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From Booklist
Aslan's introduction to the history of Islam, which also devotes several chapters to the place of Islam in the contemporary world, tackles its subject with serious and well-informed scholarship. But, miracle of miracles, it's actually pretty fun to read. Beginning with an exploration of the religious climate in the years before the Prophet's Revelation, Aslan traces the story of Islam from the Prophet's life and the so-called golden age of the first four caliphs all the way through European colonization and subsequent independence. Aslan sees religion as a story, and he tells it that way, bringing each successive century to life with the kind of vivid details and like-you-were-there, present-tense narration that makes popular history popular. Even so, the depth and breadth here will probably be a bit heavy for some, who might better enjoy Karen Armstrong's shorter, if less authoritative, Islam (2000). That said, this is an excellent overview that doubles as an impassioned call to reform. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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