Chomsky talks about the latests Wikileak (and other stuff)

Democracy Now! have spoken with Noam Chomsky on a range of topics related to the cables leaked by Wikileaks. It covers a range of topics, notably the nature of the cables consistently supporting USA biases. If they are legitimate Chomsky points out that while Arab leaders, who are dictators to a man, may see eye to eye with the US in wanting to attack Iran the actual Arab populace not only view Israel and America as far bigger threats a majority, 57% actually view the prospect of a nuclear Iran positively. For some reason Arabs think only Israel having nukes in the region is dangerous.

A lot of other excellent points are made and he draws inferences and connections between various things that are obvious when he says them but very unlikely to occurred to most of us.

Please watch it: Part 1 and Part 2

thanks jonny

As an interesting post script the wikileaks twitter highlighted a cable from the leaks describing Prince Andrew. He seems like an absolute fucking idiot.

The wheezings of a Behemoth

A narrowly focused look at a couple of, admittedly major, problems facing the Catholic church with a bit of analysis. This sounds dismissive but unless the article was a several inch thick book with 8pt writing it would not be able to achieve even a shallow overview of the state of an organisation as large as the Catholic church and its' context in nearly every country on earth. Still though the article is good, it just is what it is. Most interesting is Benedict's belief that smaller congregations could be useful for the catholic church, this is an odd aspiration for an organisation that has dominated western christendom for millenia, was the inheritor of the influence of the Roman Empire and has been accurately described as the world's first corporation. A bit like Steve Ballmer hoping MS's waning power will allow them to focus on making the best possible iPhone apps. then again...

A nice accompaniment to this piece is something jonny linked me, showing that aside from the big problems that are causing Western European congregations to wither away Catholicism also faces the problem of its' consistent dickishness.

So American Dad can be pretty cool.

In between the fart jokes Seth Macfarlane does get some pretty good political jabs in, such as the Saudi episode and now this song:



Maybe he deserved being able to touch Eliza Dushku, who knows?

Colombia understands the true spirit of football.

11 kg of Cocaine has been seized in the form of the world cup. I'm willing to be most footballers would try a lot harder to win the world cup if this was the prize.