Tiny little dots and other points of interest

Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe calls UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown "a little tiny dot on this world",

Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch:Did the Elites Want MLK Dead

via the Christian Science Monitor: Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim:The Islamic state is a dead end.
I don't know too much about this guy, but he seems more serious than, say, Irshad Manji who, in her eagerness to cozy up to characters like Glenn Beck, often strikes me as a sort of Muslim Uncle Tom.

also: Turkish scholars aim to modernize Islam's Hadith


Avedon Carol: "Back in 1967, someone named Arthur Miller (no relation) wrote an article on the dangers of giant national data bases to personal privacy, published in The Atlantic. It was a real find for a poster at Modern Mechanix - as Cory Doctorow agrees, it got everything right, and could easily have been written today."

Think Progress:"Pentagon employee erases mention of homosexuality on dead soldier’s Wikipedia page."

(Andrew Sullivan writes: “I can see why outing someone who is alive and closeted is unethical; inning someone who is dead and was out is a function of utterly misplaced sensitivity, rooted in well-intentioned but incontrovertible homophobia.”)

Mitch Ratcliffe, ZD Net: Creeping totalitarianism: The NSA, personal data and you


And, oh yeah: Bush insists he wasn't out of the loop viz-a-viz approving the torture memos.

"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged."
-- Justice William O. Douglas, Supreme Court justice