Rick's Rants

If you’re quick (posted for a week or so), the NYTimes has some important history of the how the demonstrations against the Danish cartoon publication built:

At Mecca Meeting, Cartoon Outrage Crystallized – New York Times

This fills in some of the details of how the publication of a set of cartoons in September lead to riots [...]

An extremely useful post on Daily Kos provides a lot of background on the development and current state of political Islam. It’s a good antidate to the monolithic vision of Islam that prevails in most of the coverage in American media

Daily Kos: Islam as a Modern Political Movement

The Shehada

La ilaha ill’Allah, Muhammad rasul Allah, = [...]

White phosphorus burns at the touch, clinging to the surfaces it touches, melting flesh.

Independent Online Edition > Middle East
Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the [...]

Kat Manker-Seale put together a nice list of gender resources:

Hey everyone,
There is so much emphasis on the gender binary system in America and
in Unitarian Universalist Communities. The gender binary system is so strong in America, even
if it is growing weaker. Below is information on definitions
relating to sexuality and gender identity, gender-neutral or epicene
pronouns, [...]

Maureen Dowd pointed out this gem from the NYT letter pages:

To the Editor:

So the new pope thinks that the Western world is afflicted by relativism. When conservatives object to certain moral views, the fashion these days is to call those views relativist. But that is a misnomer.

Moral relativism is the idea that the truth of [...]

Jeanne at Body and Soul takes a trip to a California mission with her 4th grader. She muses about the fact these missions were forced labor camps in which as many as 25% of California’s native population was killed. She notes that the gloss of that period in the schoolbooks and pamphlets is uncannily similar [...]

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Rail Gun of Quiet Reflection.

Get yours.