One of the resident conspiracy kooks on Portland Indymedia waved off Bin Laden’s latest video as an obvious fraud.
Unlike most suppositions that escape a conspiracy kook’s keyboard, I found that, after viewing the whole thing, at first I couldn’t be sure it was not a fake. I mean, the guy’s beard is the wrong color. Yes, there is such a thing as hair dye, but what about the horrible video that has long frame freezes? Was the whole thing patched together somehow, by someone who got tired of doing all the difficult editing required to make Osama’a mouth correspond with his words?
On second thought, flaky video equipment explains it all better. Why go through all the painful effort of faking the video only to abandon most of the effort? Why take pains making the video look OK (for a minority of the statement) when you can’t even be bothered to get a fake beard of the correct color?
Unless I come up with something I neglected to observe and/or consider, I think the “it’s a fake” claim has to be thrown into the trash bin along with approximately 99.9% of the rest of the stuff the conspiracy kooks type.
And yes, some (but only some) of what he said sounds at least quasi-leftist in nature. This is a big surprise, why, exactly? Politicized Islam was nurtured in no small part by the active suppression (at the hands of Western imperialists) of leftism in the Islamic world. Leftists, after all, had an inconvenient habit of nationalizing the holdings of foreign oil companies.
It’s no surprise that a replacement ideology (as poor a replacement as it may be) uses similar rhetoric in its attempts to appeal to the same demographic. Hitler’s paintings indicate a belief on the part of the artist that the sky is blue with white clouds. Just because I happen to agree doesn’t make me a Nazi.
One of my interests is antique electronics. Some years ago at a flea market, I found an 1960s Zenith vacuum tube clock-radio for sale for only a few dollars. It appeared to be in reasonably good shape, so quite naturally I snapped it up.
Naturally, it did require the standard set of checks and replacement of failure-prone components before it was ready for daily use. Having done that, however, it was a real treat to be able to awaken to the sounds of a Real Radio (real radios are the ones get warm and glow in the dark).
Imagine my disappointment when, shortly before work drew me to Seattle for a little over a year, the clock part of the radio started failing. It was a dread rotor problem: the “rotor” is a component of the small electric motor that operates the clock movement, one that is sealed, unrepairable, and prone to fail after a number of years. These rotors were designed to be easily replaced, but the company that made both clock and rotor went out of business about fifteen years ago, rendered obsolete by the advent of the digital clock and the cheap quartz movement. The demand for the repair of old electric clocks has long ago consumed the stock of replacement rotors that existed when the manufacturer folded.
I recently had an idea: see if the clock in the radio I almost never use has the same type of rotor as the one I'd like to resume using daily. It does. Although I may be tempting fate by crowing about it right after putting the set back together, the surgery appears to have been a success. A few days should tell for sure (the things tend to act up after ten or more hours of on time).
Sure, the misdeeds of the dictators in Myanmar/Burma are crimes. Indeed, they are worthy of criticism.
But please. If a US-government-approved dictator had announced price increases (borne of subsidy reductions) that had provoked a wave of protests, those protesting would have been tut-tutted as ignorant leftists who know nothing of the working of (and are insufficiently appreciative of the virtues of) a market economy. The crackdown would have been portrayed as, while not completely inexcusable, more a regrettable outcome of a well-intentioned effort to save that nation’s society from chaos (and its economy from the menace of “socialism”) than anything else.
The Mexican authorities used plenty of violence against protesters in Oaxaca last year and it got very little coverage in the establishment media. They even killed a foreign journalist in the process. And nobody even thought about appointing a United Nations commission to investigate.
While on the subject of sanctimonious sermonizing, that that gasbag-with-a-doctorate, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, bears mentioning as well. In contrast to his harsh criticism of Ahmadinejad, he positively fawned over a “friendly” dictator in the not-too-distant past.
We seem to be having an early fall this year. The summer weather ended father abruptly after the first week of September, and today the first mean-it rain of the season fell. Some of the vine maples up nearby Balch Canyon have already gotten the message and started to turn shades of yellow and orange.
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