Don’t give your body over to lamenting cruel destiny; Don’t dedicate your soul to grief at recollections of the dead. Don’t throw away your heart save on the locks of your beloved’s hair. Keep a full wine glass in your hand– don’t waste a minute of your life. Translated by Juan Cole from Omar Khayyam’s […]
Romney: Kayak & Shark (Political Cartoon)
Top Five Reasons Israel is Losing the Public Relations Battle
Right wing Israeli officials are concerned about attempts to ‘delegitimize” Israel, and fund former officials and intellectuals to attempt to combat this perceived trend. But it seems obvious that Israel is gradually sinking in the perception of the outside world, and there are concrete reasons for this change. Most of them derive from the train […]
Omar Khayyam: “The elders and the newborns”
The elders and the newborns trace the footsteps of each other, and it is the way of this world that no one can live forever here. They have departed and we’re on our way, and they arrive again, and go again. Translated by Juan Cole from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, Arberry 1949, 5
Did Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood just Blink?
Some members of the Egyptian parliament met briefly on Tuesday, in defiance of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and in accordance with the call of President Muhammad Morsi to convene. Morsi over-ruled the SCAF junta’s dissolution of the parliament elected late last fall, which is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and other […]
Video on Syrian Gov’t Torture Centers (Human Rights Watch)
Syria’s torture centers, as revealed by Human Rights Watch:
Infosys Building planned for Kuwait
States with Highest Religiosity most Opposed to Obamacare
I once read an article in a sociology of religion journal. Sociologists placed a person who seemed to have fallen off his bike, and was bleeding a little (ketchup) and dazed, on the sidewalk outside a church a little before services were to begin. Members of the congregation passed the person, and not one stopped […]
Morsi and Brotherhood isolated vs. Military, Courts, Secularists
The reaction to Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi’s call to reinstate the dissolved parliament was largely negative on Monday and Tuesday morning, except among supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and among small leftist youth groups. Given that the Carter Center and other bodies concerned with human rights had denounced the dissolution of parliament roundly, I am […]
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