yellow

As you probably know, Whittington apologized to Cheney and his family(!) when he spoke on Friday. For making the VP feel so bad when he shot him. It would've been a nice touch if he apologized for his complexion, and being so dang tall.
(It was difficult to find a photo of Whittington with the unnamed man behind him. This one is courtesy the Washinton Times.) When I saw them on CNN, I noticed that as Whittington spoke and paused, the young man would smile and nod at most of the pauses, as if he was his minder, sent along to make sure Frank doesn't deviate from the script. If Konrad Lorenz was alive, he'd say that the reason you apologize when the other party has injured you is because you still have reason to be fearful, no?


1."Food for thought"

Avedon says:

"I was over at The Corpuscle looking at the post on online values ("Lots of discussion lately about how big multinational corporations have to cave in to local ordinances in order to do business inside repressive regimes"), and I keep wondering why big multinational corporations don't have to cave in to local ordinances in order to do business inside places that don't like pollution, corruption, and fraud."

2.from the Martini Republic:Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi
February 17th, 2006

Unfazed by inherent ironies, a Muslim cleric who objects to the portrayal of [the prophet] with a bomb in a turban sets a bounty on the head of the cartoonist.
Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi, prayer leader at the historic Mohabat Khan mosque in the conservative northwestern city of Peshawar, announced the mosque and the Jamia Ashrafia religious school he leads would give a $25,000 reward and a car for killing the cartoonist who drew the prophet caricatures - considered blasphemous by Muslims.

2b.Zeynep Toufe says that most of the persons killed in danish cartoon riots have been the protestors themselves.


2+2b=...2c? It occurs to in that, while in many muslim countries the clergy are whipped up into a lather by the government, and they in turn get the populace upset, because the gov't wants the populace distracted from local problems and have their dissatisfaction focused on the west instead. (I dimly recall reading that in the early 20th century, American politicians were said to "twist the lion's tail" and bad-mouth the Brits for similar effects.)... But now, in the US, we have an administration that seems to take its marching orders from the clergy, at least if they are sufficiently wacky, then the free press takes their orders from the government, then the populace gets upset. I imagine I'm oversimplifying.


2d. I went to Walgreens the other day, and couldn't help but look at the "Royal Dansk" cookies, as I wondered if a Dentonite or two might've bought out their stock as a screwy sort of anti-them solidarity. They had lots of cookies, but the familiar blue tin didn't look right. They were still 2.99, but had shrunk from 16 ounces to 12. Scandalous. As a consequence for their cost-cutting perfidity, I've decided to boycott Danish cookies. Well, because of that, and because I need to lose weight. Ok, mainly because I need to lose weight.