Would that even be legal tender?

Lord German: My guess, and it is purely a guess, is that the Scottish Government will take the money, convert it by putting a bit of Alex Salmond paste on top of it, and make it into a Scottish system. [Hansard]

(no subject)

I am (potentially) filled with admiration for this paper, Conspiracy Theories. If it's meant to be taken entirely at face value then I'm not impressed at all, but if it's doing what I think it is then it's genius:

In it, Sunstein says that domestic and foreign conspiracy theories pose “real risks to the government's anti-terrorist policies” and argues that the government should be “cognitively infiltrating” groups that purvey these theories. Sunstein proposes having the government send undercover operatives and paid “independent” contractors onto online message boards and websites—and into some real-life groups—in order to undermine the theories.

There's no evidence that such a program is currently being undertaken by the Obama administration, but the paper set the conspiracy world aflame. “Cognitive infiltration” has become the latest buzz phrase in conspiracy circles. [Paraphrase taken from article in Slate]

That second paragraphlet right there is why, until I'm persuaded otherwise, I choose to believe this is a work of genius. Wild conspiracy theories only become a pain for governments when entire swathes of the population begin to believe them. If that possibility looms (and in the States it looms on a regular basis^[1]), there isn't a lot they can do to combat the media clout of a Henry Ford or a bunch of Kochs, but anything they can do to target the nonsense at its source is a bonus. And in such a febrile environment, where everyone already suspects everyone else of working for the enemy (whoever they consider the enemy to be), what more elegant and efficient solution than simply proclaiming definitively that some of them are on your payroll? A couple of droplets of that added to the pool, and as the water starts to froth and bubble you can wander off and deal with something more important. So I am in awe—unless the administration really is wasting its money paying people to stooge for it on conspiracy forums. Although that's as good a way as any of tackling youth unemployment.

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^[1] Obviously nowhere is as given to wild conspiracy theories as the Middle East, but that's at least partly because everyone in authority there tries to stoke them:

Fayrouz, a paragon of the highest forms of Arab music and poetry, had boycotted Egypt for a decade in line with the Arab decision to ostracise the country for signing a peace treaty with Israel. So the July 1989 Cairo concert was the first chance for Israeli Arabs to hear a beloved diva whose songs were the unofficial anthems of Palestinian suffering. Some 27 buses carrying 1,000 devotees rolled across the border from Israel for the event. When the Egyptian ta authorities noticed the hoards arriving, they doubled the tax bill for the three-night extravaganza. To pay it, the Syrian/Saudi producer from the wily Khashoggi clan just printed and sold thousands of tickets, all stamped “Front Section”. Naturally the rich Egyptians who paid about $95 per ticket, a princely sum, figured they could swan into their front-row seats at the very last second, so their chauffeured Mercedeses all pulled up at once at 11pm, when the concert was scheduled to start.

The crowd soon overflowed the limited seating...The bedlam continued for hours, with all possible exits and any open space eventually crammed with chairs. A fire would have left a gruesome toll, but I thought a riot seemed a more imminent danger. Around 1am, with patrons still pouring in and no seats available, the concert promoter emerged on stage and announced that he could reveal the source of the confusion. There was a Zionist conspiracy afoot to undermine the concert! I laughed at this canard used to blame practically any unfortunate occurrence, including the weather.

Neil MacFarquhar, The Media Relations Department of Hezbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday

Your faiths tonight

A round-up of things I have learnt recently:

In the confusing array of obscure Muslim sects, the Druzes were among the most obscure. They were a schism of a schism of a schism. Their roots led back to Shi’ite Islam, but the tie was tenuous. So secretive was the Druze religion that even most Druzes didn’t know the details of its teachings. Women and children were told almost nothing. Of the men, only about 10 per cent, al-uqal (the initiated) were allowed to study the ancient manuscripts. The rest, al-juhal (the ignorant, were not even expected to pray.

To say that the religion was obscure was no slight. The Druzes themselves admitted as much. The Druze Faith by Dr Sami Makarem, a Druze professor at the American University of Beirut, was on of the only books ever produced with the blessing of the religious authorities that provided a ray of enlightenment for the ignorant ones. It summed up the religion this way: “Druzism is an esoteric faith. To understand it one needs to be acquainted with Arabic esoteric terminology and with the way esoteric beliefs were written. The latter include deliberate disarrangement of arguments, brevity, and the introduction of trivial subjects while discussing issues of utmost importance.” A real incentive to delay further.

Lawrence Pintak, Seeds of Hate

EDIT: Obviously the Druze still exist now. Lawrence is setting the scene in 1982.

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An Easter tradition called “strike the Jew”, whereby members of the Toulouse Jewish community would be batted around a public square by Christians, was ended in the middle of the twelfth century, after hefty payments had been made to count and capitouls. The clergy protested, but the ban held.

Stephen O’Shea, The Perfect Heresy

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The former chief mufti, Shaikh Abdullah bin Baz... was a hugely influential figure in the [Saudi] kingdom. In 1982 he won recognition of the King Faisal award for international services to Islam. The same year he published a book entitled The Motion of the Sun and Moon, and the Stationarity of the Earth which held to the pre-Copernican, geocentric cosmology according to which earth is the centre of the universe and the sun moves around it. The cosmology is consistent with Quranic references to the “seven heavens” which modern scholars would see as referring to the Ptolemaic cosmology that held sway before the discoveries of Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo...

In an earlier article the venerable shaikh had threatened all who challenged his pre-Copernican views with a fatwa of takfir, pronouncing them infidels. He did not repeat this fatwa in his 1982 book, which was just as well, as it would have anathematized Prince Sultan bin Salman bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, the son of the mayor of Riyadh and grandson of the kingdom’s founder. Prince Sultan is the Muslim world’s only officially certified astronaut. “Carried aloft in NASA’s space shuttle, [he] could certainly have commented on the Shaikh’s thesis if he had not been preoccupied with the urgent task of determining the direction of [Mecca] for his prayers.”

Malise Ruthven, A Fury for God

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The only clear guiding principle [of Hinduism] is ambiguity. If there is a central verse in Hinduism's most important text, the Rig Veda, it is the Creation Hymn. It reads, in part,

Who really knows, and who can swear,
How creation came, when or where!
Even gods came after creation's day,
Who really knows, who can truly say
When and how did creation start?
Did He do it? Or did He not?
Only He, up there, knows, maybe;
Or perhaps not even He.

Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World