Links

He pointed out the Garden of Gethsemane, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque shimmering across the valley below us. He told me the Israelis are excavating under the mosque looking for remains of their original temple. But he thinks that they are undermining the foundations of the golden-domed mosque, the site where Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven. “If the mosque collapses,” he said quietly, “there will be a world war.” —“Letter from Gaza: inside the Nasser hospital,” Christopher Bulstrode, Prospect

Edward Covey was a member of a profession whose job was to tame unruly slaves. Frederick Douglass was one of those men who was sent to him, a Nigger Breaker, to be disciplined. Douglass turned the tables on him and thrashed him. I argue that this is the aim of the media, and other institutions that are opposed to Obama. In fact, Senator DeMint, from South Carolina, a state that has an active secessionist faction, used the verb, “break,” when describing the intentions of the Republican Party toward Obama. Moreover, with the firing, and buyouts of the hundreds of minority journalists, black institutions, blacks in general, black celebrities and even the president are being judged by a mostly white media jury and a handful of acceptable right wing blacks, a few of whom are farther to the right than the white right. —“Return of the Nigger Breaker,” Ishmael Reed interviewed by Jill Nelson, Counterpunch

To assess how much malicious code is being injected into users’ browsers by adult websites, Wondracek et al. custom-built an automated web crawler to download the content of almost a half million URLs spread across thousands of adult websites. Incredibly, 3.23% of those pages “were found to trigger malicious behavior such as code execution, registry changes, or executable downloads,” five times the prevalence of malware discovered by previous research on the subject. —“How the Internet Porn Business Works,” Christopher Mims, Technology Review