Feta means "slice' in Greek.

[Tripp]

Let me know and I'll try to hook you up with my cousins out there... DJ John Kelley who still works at the G4 network I think.   And his little brother Thomas who works for some news agency.

Wow.  I'm jealous of all this networking.

Does anyone know anybody in Akron?...other than me, that is.

no

[matthew]

1: A couple of days ago Savannah's trailer on Facebook killed my iMac. I got half way in and the computer froze up, apparently for good (well, I hope not...I have to bring it to the shop tomorrow morning). I am currently phoneless, internetless, bedless and computerless (I now write this from my parents place - I had to bus back to their house to finish the clean up). The move to the new apartment has been one disaster after another.

2: Jennifer's Body was B A D

3. I loved some of the Reatards stuff...I dug a lot of the Lost Sounds (have pretty much every stitch of it on mp3)... loved Blood Visions and pretty much every single related to it...only heard the first batch of the second wave of Jay Reatard's seven inchers and never got around to the new album. Saw him three times...the last was at Pop Montreal at the end of September. His set was both self-indulgent and phoned-in. The combination was difficult to digest and we spent a good deal of the walk home trying to make sense of what was wrong with him; was he unaware of how bad it sounded or did he just not care? The news of his death saddened me more than I expected. I really loved Blood Visions (horrible cover art, though).

4. We move the last of the furniture tomorrow. Hopefully things work better from now on.

[matthew]

Back to the Captain Bringtown (all apologies to Tripp), Al-Qaeda Inc: Head Office Has Gone Missing.

"Most, although not all, terrorism experts believe that there is now no al-Qaeda “central,” the pre-9/11 organization. The bin Laden cadre has been isolated militarily and many of its original leaders have been killed or captured."

What? "now no al-Qaeda"? NOW? Who ever believed that al-Qaeda was a top-down hierarchical institution? Not a single scholar, historian or journalist I have followed has EVER described "al-Qaeda" as having anything resembling any sort of true institutional organization. I mean, unless you believed everything you ever heard on CNN/MSNBC/Fox/CBC/CTV/Global, there is no reason anyone should have ever believed that claptrap.

"al-Qaeda" was never a real group...only a loose band of groups sharing ideological alliances ...sometimes looking for finances or logistical support depending what project or mission they might be on. al-Qaeda became a brand after 9-11 and Bush/Cheney did a good deal of the marketing for them (they were so successful that many groups have since adopted the name for their own jihadist organizations). Bush's actions in Iraq may qualify him as a founding member of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Obama is now doing great promotional work for the brand in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

[matthew]

oh, I just continued to read past the line which I responded to above...it appears the author touches on all of what I wrote...

[Moetown]

Hi Matthew!

[matthew]

killed my iMac

... computer froze up, apparently for good (well, I hope not...I have to bring it to the shop tomorrow morning).

...

 Hopefully things work better from now on.

...

I dragged my computer all the way to a mall in Dorval where the specialized Mac dealer I usually take my computer is located only to discover that, after nearly three decades of computer service there, the shop is just suddenly gone. Poof...no sign, no warning, nothing...just an empty store.

My guts are churning with anxiety...building in the direction of rage... this weekend will evaporate just like the last four or five and I will find myself back at work for five days (40-43 hrs there plus 15 hrs commuting) having achieved very little and having no leisure time whatsoever.

I wish I were in Haiti.

 

[matthew]

Which is another way of saying that al-qaeda doesn't really exist.  But it doesn't really matter. It's a useful fiction.

Have you ever seen that CBS (or ABC or one of those networks) footage of bin Laden being interviewed in Afghanistan back in the mid-90s? In the footage he is surrounded by a security detail of frightening, black-masked jihadi types wherever he walks, but it later turned out that those men had nothing at all to do with bin Laden or the farcical "al-Qaeda organization" - they were Pakistani or North African muj who happened to be training nearby that bin Laden paid to pose with him in the news spot.

He is (or more likely "was" - he is almost certainly dead) credible enough - you do not need a great number of people to carry out terrorism. Neither do you require an entire nation to operate in (this nonsense about the dangers of Afghanistan falling back into the hands of the Taliban and then being used to launch further attacks on America is preposterous. The Taliban would likely never allow al-Qaeda to imperil its rule again (bin Laden was already in Afghanistan - after fleeing the Sudan in 1996 - BEFORE the Taliban took control at the end of the civil war. At first they allowed for him to remain undisturbed, but following the al-Qaeda embassy attacks in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, the Taliban tried to help both Clinton and Bush liquidate him in decapitation strikes). 

[Just Some Girl]

Way to not read the whole article, Matthew.

There were in fact some journalists (right-wing, mostly) who thought there was a top-down al-Qaeda, and probably still do, despite the lack of any evidence to one centralized leader. These are people who are never going to "get it."

* * *

In other Matthew responses... Hope everything goes better for you post-move. Exciting times, be glad of it!

[Doctor Rock]

You are posting in the wrong thread!   

[Doctor Rock]

And now so am I...

Damn you! 

[matthew]

...I didn't get a chance to finish my thoughts earlier...and now i can't remember what i wa going to say before the parenthetical bit about the taliban's attempts at ridding themselves of bin laden's heat.

basically it was something about how being in possession of an entire nation has never been required in order to carry out  terrorist attacks. al-qaeda could launch attacks from my apartment...or from beijing or washington or istanbul...

enh, tommorow we hope to get out to see that movie with the blue pussycats that was made for three times the generous amount in aid that obama pledged to haiti.