Follow God or vanish, Ahmadinejad tells West

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has warned Western leaders to follow the path of God or “vanish from the face of the earth”. “These oppressive countries are angry with us … a nation that on the other side of the globe has risen up and proved the shallowness of their power,” Ahmadinejad said in a speech in the northern town of Ramsar, the semi-official news agency Mehr reported Wednesday. “They are angry with our nation. But we tell them ’so be it and die from this anger’. Rest assured that if you do not respond to the divine call, you will die soon and vanish from the face of the earth,” he said.

Mmmh embrace the Abrahamic Sky God and his millennia of oppression, fear and disdain of woman – I think not.
Still scary there are individuals in positions of power who think like this.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/12/06/061206101357.8mjamnal.html

Jacob Zuma Moral Degeneration Handbook

The Official UN Nuclear Club

President Bush Pardens himself from any wrong-doing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyzmeYfNp2g

Interview on CNN – new legislation being passed containing a provision that will pardon President Bush and all members of his administration of any possible crimes connected to the torture and mistreatment of detainees dated back to Sept 11 2001.

Bush and the boys cannot be charged with war crimes if they manage to slip this through before the democrats take over – nice to be the President and be able to make up the rules as you go.

The Expensive Tastes of Kim Jong II

 

My personal physician allows me one meagre glass a day ….

IN THE EARLY 1990s, Kim Jong Il became the world’s leading purchaser of Hennessy Paradis, a cognac legendary for its complexity and finesse. Paradis usually retails for a few hundred dollars a bottle, though in Kim’s case bulk discounts may have applied: The North Korean leader–who, according to a former personal chef, has “an exceptionally discriminating palate”–was said to be spending $700,000 to $800,000 a year on it.

Such a liquor tab fits the sort of pathological decadence described by defectors and national leaders who have spent time with Kim. The same former chef reports being sent on shopping trips to Denmark for pork, Czechoslovakia for beer, and Uzbekistan for caviar.

A former Russian presidential envoy has described a 2001 state visit in which Kim traveled across the country in a private train stocked with crates of Bordeaux, flat-screen televisions, and a retinue of female performers. Live lobsters were flown in to await the train’s chefs at points along the route.

more …

The Kanga, Part 1

The following is a poem written by Zimbabwean Bella Matambanadzo, featured on http://www.kubatana.net/ it is a response to the Jacob Zuma rape trial where he was acquitted and the victim was forced to leave the country for fear of reprisal.

The Kanga: Part 1
Isabella Matambanadzo
August 04, 2006

The girl lay under bedding of felt-soft yellow sheets. The corners were neatly turned down in a nurse’s envelope.

He takes it out
Already dripping

Face up, she felt the leaves of the garden of flowers running in neat rows across her single bed tickling her bare, chubby feet.

Holds it with both hands
As if it will break

She didn’t squeal with delight as girls her age are meant to. She kept very, very still. She did not want to make a mess of her new hair.

His pants, belt around waistband, drop
Plonk.
Upon brown laced up shoes.

Her mother had spent the Sunday afternoon melting her tough curls with a Vaseline and a hot comb, etching out fantastically even cornrows. She was careful.

He calls his mothers name in a grunt
No surprise he is back in the thing that pushed him out.

The smell always reached her first. Filling the follicles of her nostrils and bursting past her tonsils into her mouth. A mucky mingling of heavy mucus and swallowed tears that she pushed back into her stomach.

He pulls it back into checkered underpants, hands apart this time tucks the shirt tails in.
Funny thing, that. How they can always fuck with their shoes and socks on.

That smell. And then there it was. The sound of metal turning hinges. Unrolling wood against a green carpet into puffs of dust dragged to life by turned up trouser ends.

And funnier still how Judges can get away with telling you
that you are the sick one, need help. 

Iraq Soldiers Sick To Death of Depleted Uranium

NEW YORK — It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange juice to wash down all the pills — morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant, an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction. Valium for his nerves.

Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more before the day is done.

Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.

There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure what it is. He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince anyone caring for him that the military’s new favorite weapon has made him terrifyingly sick.

In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has many caretakers. An internist, a neurologist, a pain-management specialist, a psychologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a dermatologist. He cannot function without his stupefying arsenal of medications, but they exact a high price.

“I’m just a zombie walking around,” he says.

Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon’s arsenal of it — thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The United States has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.

more …

Iraq’s Heavy Toll

In a rather one-sided view of the Iraq war, we look at the financial cost and strain this prolonged war is placing on America. Notwithstanding loss of life on both sides, horrendous disabilities and mental stresses – the pure financial cost of the war for the American people marches on to a tune of $200 million ($200,000,000) each and every day. The full cost of the war has been estimated to fall between two new outliers, the lower amount is $400 billion, the upper is $2 trillion. It’s nice to know that with the conditions of human suffering throughout the world, the American tax payers money is being put to good use.

Here are some interesting ideas:

II. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, the men’s weapons will grow dull and their ardour will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.

III. Again if a campaign is protracted, the resources of state will not be equal to the strain.

IV. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardour damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must come.

V. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been associated with long delays.

VI. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.

When: 544-496 BC

Who: Sun Wu (Sun Tzu)

I guess the Art of War never made it to the White House recommended reading list.

The Old Boy’s Club, Iranians Need Not Apply

Oh this is exciting news indeed (drip drip….), all dollied up and given the lovely face of healthy competition – you’d almost believe they were competing to make the first new soda vending machine in 20 years and not something that could wipe humanity off the planet. Mr. Bush you a goddamn psychotic hypocrite – make sure you have the best set of irons at the country club but ensure that sanctions prevent other “non-wasps” (like them eye-ranians) from joining.

Bealzibub is surely warming a little spot in hell for you!

“The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay area and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are competing to design the nation’s first new nuclear bomb in two decades.

Scientists at both facilities are working around the clock on plans that will be presented to the Nuclear Weapons Council, a federal panel that oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons. The council will choose a winner later this year.”I have had people working nights and weekends,” said Joseph Martz, the head of the Los Alamos design team. “I have to tell them to go home. I can’t keep them out of the office.”

Congress approved the new bomb, known as the reliable replacement warhead, with bipartisan support in 2005 as part of a defense spending bill. The weapon would, by law, have the same explosive power as existing warheads. Proponents of the project say the U.S. would lose its so-called “strategic deterrent” unless it replaces its aging arsenal of about 6,000 bombs, which will become potentially unreliable within 15 years. A new, more reliable weapon, they say, would help the nation reduce its stockpile.”

Is Sorry Enough?

“NAIROBI (Reuters) – An apology by South Africa’s former deputy president for having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman will not make up for the harm done to efforts to fight AIDS there, a top UN official said on Wednesday.

“I don’t think anything can compensate for the damage he has done,” said Stephen Lewis, the United Nations Secretary General’s Special envoy for AIDS in Africa.

Zuma, one of South Africa’s most popular politicians, was on Monday acquitted of raping an HIV positive family friend.
He stunned observers and outraged AIDS activists during the trial when he said he took a shower after sex to minimize the risk of contracting HIV. He later apologized for having sex without a condom and said he would preach safe sex.

“The outlandish and unacceptable male behavior, which he demonstrated through his testimony on HIV, were appallingly uninformed in a country that is wrestling with the highest number of infections in the world,” Lewis told a news conference in Nairobi.
The trial judge slammed Zuma’s behavior as “unacceptable” for a man who had once led the country’s anti-AIDS efforts.”
Link…

Parenting, LEGO Carbonite and Ancient Egypt

This is a call for sympathy; please hear it, being a parent is HARD! Forget the 7 years masters’ degree or the 5 day a week job these all pale into insignificance next to being a parent. Yesterday I had an argument with my five year old, he didn’t want to wear his Harry Potter warm top and wouldn’t tell me why and wouldn’t go into the class room because he didn’t want to show his friends! When did 5 year olds become fashion experts? So while the time ticked by and I became later and later for work and the blood pressure was rising tsunami like he folded his arms and simply said no!

Then when we wanted him to eat his carrots last ,night he told us no again, on enquiring why? He responded that they had done an eye test that morning at school and his eyes were fine! This is karma revisited on me for being such a huge Calvin and Hobbes fan. I think we may be in trouble in his teenage years!

Being a huge fan of archaeology, I never cease getting a thrill out of some fabulous archaeological find. Evidence has been found that the Egyptions had a seafaring nation as far back as 4000 years ago. Remains of ancient seafaring ships have been found in man made caves along with ancient cargo boxes. The timbers have been dated to around 2000BC when the Egyptions sailed the seas in search of riches.

George Lucas (aka: Mr. Star Wars) and other movie moguls are of the opinion that the big buck blockbuster era is over and I have to agree with him. I yawned my way through most of the the Star Wars prequels and came out feeling as if my senses had been assaulted with a high voltage power cable however a movie like Phonebooth, low budget and tense with a riveting story had me glued to my seat. In the past you had to rely on your story to captivate your audience, you just didn’t have the special effects – these days however if you have a good CGI team then you can churn out the most ridiculous crap and call it a movie. Let’s hope he’s right.

It seems that all the hype about bird flu may not be crying wolf after all. Austrian officials say they have detected the lethal H5N1 strain in several cats. This at least indicates that this particularly nasty bug can jump the species barrier after all. Cats are able to pass disease to humans already, the most notable and nasty being toxoplasma gondii recently purported to be linked to forms of shizophrenia in survivors of the disease.

Those of you, like me, who are huge fans of lego – check out the top 10 strange lego creations – I must get the ‘Han Solo frozen in Carbonite’ for my wall

I watched the news last night, something I try to avoid as it gives me chronic indigestion, and saw more video footage of Zuma prancing around like some tarentismic halfwit to hoards of indignant supporters there to show comraderie for this swine accused of raping a woman who saw him as an uncle and family friend.

While the throngs tried to push a music blaring taxi through the police barricade the other gathering – the important one – the one that was there protesting abuse to women – had to stand quietly down the street away from the courthouse lest they were pelted with stones from the Zuma supporters. Excuse my French but “WHAT THE #$%#$@!!”. Read how our beloved ex-deputy president forced himself upon this poor woman not bothering with anything as un-manly as a condom.

Abu Ghraib pictures don’t get the reaction of cartoons.

As new pictures surface detailing human abuse in Abu Ghraib I have to wonder, where are the hoards of protesting masses? Is everybody having a lie-in after the cartoon explosion? Come on people, where is the sense of righteous outrage at violations of human beings on a most horrific level?

Once again this shows just how silly we all are, are we really that desensitized to media violence, is it really all that blase’ already relegated to yesterday’s news?

Double standards at Play with Cartoons.

The world has gone crazy, no let me refrain, it has gone completely bloody bonkers, fruity loop and down the rabbit hole. The latest furore over Danish cartoons satirising the prophet Mohammed is unbelievable, I agree the cartoons were in awfully bad taste, but it has sparked an unbelievable mess which is completely out of control.

People are calling for the MURDER (hello…sanity check please) of anyone who disrespects Islam and Iran, in retaliation for said outrage, is cancelling business deals worth millions with Denmark and is calling for cartoons about the holocaust which it would like to publish. How exactly that little choice titbit of anti-Semitism crept in is anyone’s guess.

I wonder though what the effect would be if Westerners started burning down embassies to Muslim countries calling for freedom from oppression for Muslim women, a call to ban the stoning of human beings and a challenge for the rights to have freedom of religion in Muslim countries.

There is an interesting double standard at play here and western countries better watch out. Freedom of expression, again however distasteful, is a fundamental right that has been fought for over many centuries.

Loss of sanity and barbarous behaviour should not, under any circumstances, be tolerated.

The Sad Perversion of Religeon

This is not the first time religion has been misinterpreted nor will it be the last. I very much doubt the sense of outrage we are seeing has much left to do with the publication of the cartoon; it was in my opinion merely a trigger. It has allowed fundamentalists to fan the flames of whatever political agenda’s they are following, to stir up religious fervor and dissent and to focus it for their own ends. Religious war, an abhorrent contradiction in terms, is just too easy — the holy deity / prophet you are fighting for is not around to instill common sense and rational thought, the common man is often not educated too the level of the religious zealot and thus swallows any deliberate misinterpretation without question. No culture or religion is immune, from the bloody rituals and games of the Aztecs to the burning of witches and enemies of the Church, Europe and America have been through this process, albeit many years ago.

Should the cartoonist have published the article, probably not — common sense dictates that level of bad taste in a politically and religiously volatile world arena is just plain stupid. Should the cartoonist have the right to publish the cartoon, I believe so.

If this were handled differently, the swathed militants holding banners to execute critics of Islam would have had a lot more sympathy and a lot more support. Instead they come across as irrational, militant and beyond reason and that loses them any sympathy they may have garnered from a more tempered approach.

Mohammed was a man of immense vision and intellect, he was a gifted statesman and a mediator — on many fronts he smoothed relations between rival cities like Medina and Mecca that were close to war. He tried to bring the Arabs, Christians and Jews together in understanding the worship of the one monotheistic God.

He emphasized the importance of Abraham and his son Ishmael and initially declared that the Ka’aba in Mecca was a shrine built by Abraham in honour of Monotheism, in other words for all faiths of the one God.

He was a superb example of the evolution of the human spirit. He preached tolerance and practiced his faith through his actions and it is in this vain that I firmly believe the gun toting, hysteria that has inflamed the world brings more shame to his name than any stupid cartoon ever could.

Uproar over Google’s Internet Censorship

It’s been done before by Microsoft, but then we expect them to play dirty don’t we.

There has been a massive outcry against Google’s unethical partnership with the Chinese government. People around the world, online and off, are shocked that a company claiming to be for the free flow of information and operating while not doing evil would hypocritically push Chinese propaganda and censor the truth.

Google says, in a very defensive statement that it could be worse, although filtering searches is wrong, failing to offer the Google search at all is worse. This twisted logic is nothing more than choosing one of two bad choices – Refusing to censor searches is the right thing to do. For the average Chinese user, basic searches for recipes and “safe” government approved topics will be allowed, but anything that might threaten the totalitarian state and bring about political reform is wrong and can be severely punished. You can email Andrew McLaughlin (Mr. defensive at Google) and tell him what you think about it all.

Read more here…

Genocide in Darfur while the world does nothing, yet again.

[The attackers] took a knife and cut my mother’s throat and threw her into the well. Then they took my oldest sister and began to rape her, one by one. My father was kneeling, crying and begging them for mercy. After that they killed my brother and finally my father. They threw all the bodies in the well.

This is an account from one of the “lucky” survivors of the current Darfur massacre – a Sudanese government initiated program against the black non-Arab members of the country. The world responds much as they have in the past, when massacre and genocide are being committed on an appalling scale, with complacency and a strong sense of outrage. It is the same old tune revisited every time, it happened in Rwanda, in Cambodia and Armenia and now in Sudan. Violent atrocities and sexual terrorism are the order with men only good for the slaughter and women only good for rape and disfigurement.

Under the first tree, I found a man who had been shot in the neck and the jaw; his brother, shot only in the foot, had carried him for forty-nine days to get to this oasis. Under the next tree was a widow whose parents had been killed and stuffed in the village well to poison the local water supply; then the Janjaweed had tracked down the rest of her family and killed her husband. Under the third tree was a four-year-old orphan girl carrying her one-year-old baby sister on her back; their parents had been killed. Under the fourth tree was a woman whose husband and children had been killed in front of her, and then she was gang-raped and left naked and mutilated in the desert.

Those were the people I met under just four adjacent trees. And in every direction, as far as I could see, were more trees and more victims—all with similar stories.

Read this article…

Bruce Willis and Genocide

Watched the deeply disturbing “Tears of the Sun” over the weekend. Although the movie had some of the usual bad Hollywood cliches the movie did serve to bring some of the atrocities of the African (Rwanda/Congo….) genocide madness into the public forum. Without giving too much away – Bruce Willis is sent into Nigeria (undergoing a coup at the time of the movie) to evacuate a doctor and some missionaries from a rural mission village. The doctor goes on condition that the able-bodied locals go too – the missionaries and the sick stay and get slaughtered. The rebels start chasing this rag-tag group of sorry souls as the last surviving son of the now dead president is among the group. The movie is hectic in parts, and although I have read about some of the atrocities committed during these genocides, seeing it is another thing.There are so many great books and movies that show us that some of the most amazing lights of humanity can be found in the darkest and most terrible places – here are a few and I’ll add to this list as time goes on:

Books:
The Bone Woman – Clea Koff (Rwanda & Bosnia)
Fools Rush In – Bill Carter (Bosnia)
Journey into Darkness: Genocide in Rwanda – Thomas Odom (Rwanda)

Movies:
Hotel Rwanda – review

Below

some recent headlines:

Rwandan guilty of tourist murders

A former Rwandan soldier has been convicted of the murder of eight western “gorilla tourists” and a game warden in a Ugandan park in 1999.

Jean Paul Bizimana, 31, was among Rwandan rebels who abducted 14 tourists and their guide as they tracked rare mountain gorillas, the judge said.

Nine of them were brutally killed with clubs and machetes. The tourists were from the US, the UK and New Zealand.

BBC NEWS | Africa | Rwandan guilty of tourist murders.

The burning Bush, classic!

Bwa-hahahahahaha

 

America, the beloved police state

In order to protect the American People from the threat of the agents of terror, President George Bush has stooped to a new pre-Cambrian level. The N.S.A. has been given free reign to snoop into your private life with no need for a warrant – this includes wire-taps, email scanning and other lovely intrusive gestures. I wonder how long it will take for the army to whip out their jack-boots and start putting little yellow stars on peoples lapels.

TIME.com: Has Bush Gone Too Far?

Microsoft has also jumped off the ethical bandwagon and is currently whoring itself to the Chinese Government, it seems that the neverending influx of green-backs is more important than peoples rights to freedom of expression, a cornerstone of the – until recently – free America.

See Microsoft takes down Chinese blogger