Today's link round-up

[sabotabby]

First, the serious stuff:
Chris Clarke (will my e-crush on him never cease?) has a heartbreaking and brutal post about Haïti. You should read it.

Also on Pandagon, Ilyka has a post about an out-of-control high school in Louisiana where the black students can't so much as catch a bit of shade without the white students threatening to lynch them.

krinndnz linked to the recently declassified PowerPoint slides of the Pentagon's *ahem* plan to invade Iraq. I can't make sense of them, and I bet half the people at the Pentagon couldn't either, because the whole point of PowerPoint is to confuse. Actually, the entire post is pretty right-on.

Then the fun stuff:

Also from krinndnz, two blogs for your edification and amusement: Literally, A Web Log and the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. I have not looked at the latter in enough detail to ascertain whether "Good" Burger in Toronto is in there, but I hope so.

dania_audax has a link to a comic that nearly cost me a keyboard this morning: Who Is Your Savior?

Finally, in the Funny or Sad? category, we have this story from fengi. I'll just quote from the same bit, because...wow:

Al Hurra television, the U.S. government's $63 million-a-year effort at public diplomacy broadcasting in the Middle East, is run by executives and officials who cannot speak Arabic, according to a senior official who oversees the program.

That might explain why critics say the service has recently been caught broadcasting terrorist messages, including an hour-long tirade on the importance of anti-Jewish violence, among other questionable pieces.

Facing tough questions before a congressional panel last week, Broadcasting Board of Governors member Joaquin Blaya admitted none of the senior news managers at the network spoke Arabic when the terrorist messages made it onto the air courtesy of U.S. taxpayer funds. Nor did Blaya himself or any of the other officials at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the network.
...
Blaya conceded that the top officials in the network's chain of command could not understand what was being said on al Hurra broadcasts...the network's news division also had no assignment desk, he said. That left decisions over al Hurra's content in the hands of its reporters and producers, who are, according to Blaya, hastily-hired Arabic-speaking journalists with insufficient understanding of Western journalistic practices or the network's pro-Western mission.

Comments

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I worked one summer in Jena, LA. It's a scary place. There was a riot while I was there because a black football player was dating a white cheerleader. That said, by La Salle county standards, Jena is quite liberal. There are towns nearby which are much, much worse.

[collie13.livejournal.com]

Heehee! Yes, the Jesus fanfic comment almost caused me to splort my drink on my screen. Almost. Heroic self-control for the win! ;)

[esizzle.livejournal.com]

For the Funny or Sad? category, I vote for funny. The only thing funnier (and sadder) than the article itself were the user comments on the abctelevision source link, e.g. "I am not sure that America could made bigger fools of on a regular basis if we tried." My personal favourite in this is that a tv station called 'the free' actively fires its reporters for something they said. It's like nobody even tries anymore.

[seaya.livejournal.com]

http://busconductor.livejournal.com/91085.html

Please to be helping me with this one.

It looks really interesting, but it's in Russian. Heh.

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

Off topic: The current evil cat-themed plot line begins here ...

ego

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Eeee! Linkage! *handwave* Gracias.


Also, that link about Al Hurra - good lawd. That's just the kind of QA we've come to expect from the last 20 years of the US government's Arab outreach, innit. It's yet more hideous symbolism, and we already export truckloads of bad symbolism to the region (for instance, The Map).

[lopukhov.livejournal.com]

I have to say the last story is my favourite!