AN INTERESTING NEW LINK:

Molly has been gradually saving up the "new links" that she has been adding to this site for one incredibly long and boring post, but one of the new ones under 'Other Interesting Links' deserves mention before I finally get to the big task. Molly has added the website of Al Jazeera's English language service to her set of links. Not that I have any truck with their ideology. In sheer kookiness it may surpass that of the Bush Administration's supporters despite their best efforts to present a rational take on things, something that the right wing media in the USA often doesn't attempt. Why Molly has added this item is to counterbalance one ideology with another. Aside from flights of fancy what is interesting is that Al Jazeera will report on factual matters that get little or no coverage in Canada, let alone the more censored US media. One of the headlines today, for instance is 'US Troops Kill Afghan Police'. This "oops" may be reported tomorrow in the Globe and Mail, but it is doubtful if it will be reported anywhere in the USA. Their report on the recent condemnation of certain US allies in the Middle East by a department of the US government is another case in point. The matter was for not doing enough to stop human trafficking and modern slavery. Al Jazeera hardly had to get on an ideological high horse in this case. They merely reported the facts, and the facts were damning enough. The US list of states implicated in slavery is weighted towards enemies of the USA, sometimes dramatically so. North Korea, for instance, certainly engages in state slavery in its prison camps, but "human trafficking"...come on now. Molly suspects that a lot of starving North Koreans in this "workers' paradise" would be quite happy to be "trafficked". It's better than eating dried grass. Some items are even more egregious. Cuba is mentioned. Molly doubts that Cuba is engaged in "human trafficking " at all and hasn't been for decades. It's prison population is certainly coerced to supply slave labour but probably at a rate 1/10th of that of the USA per capita,let alone in absolute numbers. Once more Molly has NO admiration for the Cuban dictatorship, but for the USA (the homeland of the prison industrial complex) to harp on about Cuban slavery is more than slightly bizarre. Then there's the inclusion of Venezuela, a regime that Molly has less admiration for than a lot of her anarchist comrades do. But including this regime as implicated in "modern slavery" is really a joke of cosmic proportions. So on and so forth.

Anyways, feel free to drop in at Al Jazeera now and then to see exactly how some of the nonsense propagated by the American press is viewed in the Muslim world. The discovery of truth is not exactly the same as an adversarial contest, but seeing an opposite opinion always helps.

Besides...Molly wants to open a contest here. One of the stranger aspects of Al Jazeera is that they give the time of their editions in two versions, Greenwich Mean Time and 'Mecca Time'. Now if any of Molly's readers can remember the C&W song 'Living on Tulsa Time' she invites them to add verses to the song that begins:

"Living on Mecca Time,

Living on Mecca Time..."

Molly has a brain cramp tonight so she can't work it up herself. Any takers ?