Album Meme

Fun:

Your Debut Album

1 - Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Random quotations: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

If you want to do this again, you'll hit refresh to generate new quotes, because clicking the quotes link again will just give you the same quotes over and over again.

3 - Go to flickr's "explore the last seven days" http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. Feel free to crop it to a square, and make sure it won't stretch the image.

Put it all together, that's your debut album. Feel free to crop it to a square, and make sure it's not too big. Just choose a font and make the album cover if you wish.

Mine:
Band Name: Black Friar of the Flame
Album Title: The Work of Becoming Yourself
Pic:

Jihad

I found an interesting article from Fark of all places, about a current philosophical shift in radical Islam. One of the original authors linking violence to Islam, Dr. Fadl, who is basically the guy that gave Al Jihad and Al Qaeda its holy justification in a couple eloquent and widely-read books, has lately had a change of heart and is now preaching peace (of a sort). Now, this guy has been jailed and most likely tortured in Middle-Eastern prisons for a while, so there's some question as to the inspiration for his conversion. However, it is making waves with Egyptian terror groups, and causing Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's #2, to stridently try to defend Al Qaeda's dedication to violence, even though (and perhaps because) Dr. Fadl was once his buddy.

What is really interesting about this article is the in-depth analysis of all the people involved. Who was a friend of who, where they met, what they agreed about, what they later fell-out about. Entire terrorist organizations were allied, splintered, and became rivals due to creative differences, ego, and snubs. In a sense, the history and personalities vaguely remind me of the whole Iran-Contra thing of the Reagan years, boosted with fundamentalist literalism to affect an entire volatile region of the planet.

Anyway, as the Fark poster said, "It's from the New Yorker, so you'll be reading a while" and it's true. Between kids, work, and life, it took me three days to get through it. But, I think it's an amazing piece of work because it is so thorough and not split into either the "fundamentalist sand farmers" camp or the "US/Europe brought it on ourselves" camp. In fact, the government of Egypt probably had much more to do with the start of Al Qaeda than the US government did. Like most things in life, there is no easy answer, no sound bites, no 15-minute solution. Complex personalities, deep (and often veering) philosophical thought, politics, sects, medicine, ego, successes, failures, freedom, oppression, innocents, and fiends, all wrap together into this mess. If you have the time, it's worth the read, just to get a broader view than what is normally provided by media or government.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/02/080602fa_fact_wright?currentPage=all