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Saudi Arabia Revives 15-Year-Old Ban On 'Zionism-Promoting' Pokemon (timesofisrael.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Clerics in Saudi Arabia have renewed a 15-year-old ban on Pokemon, following the release of the highly popular augmented reality version of the game, Pokemon Go. According to Reuters, the General Secretariat of the Council of Senior Religious Scholars reaffirmed a 2001 ban on the game. The Times of Israel reports: "While fatwa no. 21,758 makes no mention of the latest iteration of [the] game, it does list many sinful aspects of Pokemon. Firstly, the game is seen as a form of gambling, which itself is forbidden. Secondly, it encourages belief in Darwin's theory of evolution, and thirdly, the fatwa says, the symbols used in the game promote the Shinto religion of Japan, Christianity, Freemasonry and 'global Zionism.'" The ruling says: "The symbols and logos of devious religions and organizations are used [including] the six-pointed star: You rarely find a card that does not contain such a star. It is associated with Judaism, the logo and sign of the State of Israel, and the first symbol of the Masonry organizations in the world." Pokemon Go has been such a success that it has already doubled Nintendo's stock price after launching just two weeks ago.
Even more irony: if the Palestinians hadn't promised rivers of blood even earlier and agreed to what the Jews offered, Israelis wouldn't even have the area of land decided on by the UN: they would have less than 30% in the very northern tip, just south of Lebanon.*
Of course, they probably all would have been murdered just a little later.
And to rub salt in the wound: most of the lands in Israel have ancient titles stretching back into the Ottomon period. For a very long time Jews couldn't hold it, but leading into the end of the Ottomon Empire they began allowing Jews to buy the titles from the mostly Egyptian (but Muslim) landlords who held them. Most of the "dispossessed" Palestinians were not, in fact, in possession of the land, ever, either as native residents, a government, or people in any way, and were merely renters (they had been desert nomads). The Jews who were either in or moving into Israel? They began pooling all their resources to buy the land and houses from their legal owners, and when the time became suitable (e.g. having kids) they moved-in, having to ask their renters to go.
So Palestinians really are the occupiers, not titleholders. A bunch of Jews are: with Ottoman and Egyptian seals on the old docs to prove it. But their government *did* offer to surrender that land if they would be peaceable dwelt with and allowed to have their own tiny state in the very most northern tip--and the idiots cried "there will be rivers of blood" instead, and so got what was theirs: nothing.
* Lebanon too, by the way, was created (in that case by France) to keep an endlessly targeted group (Assyrian Christians) of Islam-mandated bloodthirst out of their grips, but they swarmed and outbred them, and back around 2005 the president was giving a veiled speech which basically begged Israel "for the love of God help and bomb our southern cities to kill Hamas."
That's the old Vatican. I wouldn't be surprised if the current Pope has a replica wand and Time-Turner.
Galileo's ideas took 200 years or so to catch on. Assuming the same for Darwin, we should be seeing some movement in the next 30-40 years.
It happened that there were three monkeys in a cage. Suspended at the top if the cage was a bunch of bananas. There was a ladder from the floor of the cage up to the bananas. One of the monkeys, who was both clever and agile and also liked bananas, decided to head up the ladder to grab a banana.
Imagine his surprise (not to mention that of the other two monkeys) when suddenly a fire hose washed down the cage, blasting all three monkeys over to one side. Cold and shivering, the three monkeys regrouped and thought about what had happened.
Monkeys don’t have a real long memory and, after awhile, a second monkey thought again about the bananas and headed up the ladder. Same thing—a fire hose washed all three monkeys over to the side of the cage. They picked themselves up, shook themselves off and hoped the sun would come out to warm them up.
After another couple of hours, the third monkey couldn’t resist and he went for it. Sure enough, same result—fire hose and cold, wet, miserable monkeys.
Finally, all three monkeys became convinced that going for the bananas was a bad idea, and went on with the rest of their lives.
Then the zookeeper drafted one of the monkeys for another exhibit and replaced him with a new monkey. The new monkey arrived, looked up at the bananas, looked over at the ladder and couldn’t figure out why the other monkeys hadn’t gone for the bananas. He headed for the ladder and got about 1 rung up when the remaining "experienced" monkeys tackled him, dragged him to the floor and pummeled him into submission. He quickly concluded that climbing the ladder wasn’t a good idea.
A week later, the zookeeper replaced the second monkey. Monkeys are somewhat single-minded. The new monkey spied the bananas, headed for the ladder, and the remaining two monkeys tackled him and pummeled him into submission.
Finally the third monkey was replaced and, you guessed it, the same thing happened. So life went on among the monkeys and after some time the first of the "new" monkeys was replaced with yet another monkey. Sure enough, the new guy saw the bananas, went for the ladder and his two peers then tackled him and beat him into submission.
Why was that? None of these monkeys knew anything about the fire hose. None of them had ever gotten wet for having climbed the ladder in the quest for bananas. Yet the monkeys had been fully culturalized to know that it was a bad idea. And you could likely go on individually replacing monkeys one at a time forever and expect the same result.
The Parable of the Monkeys can be readily applied to just about every organizational community structure in the human sphere. We can laugh at the silly monkeys, but humans are the only creatures on Earth capable of amassing and arming themselves to fight and die by the tens and hundreds of thousands because another human claims yet another human is building firehoses to keep all the bananas for himself.