Catholic Church furthers Hypocrisy

[Source: Boing Boing ...]

In the sixth century, Pope Gregory handed down a list of “seven cardinal vices.” Now the Vatican has issued an additional seven “social sins.”

You offend God not only by stealing, taking the Lord’s name in vain or coveting your neighbor’s wife, but also by wrecking the environment, carrying out morally debatable experiments that manipulate DNA or harm embryos,” said [Bishop Gianfranco] Girotti, who is responsible for the body that oversees confessions.

The seven social sins are:

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control

2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research

3. Drug abuse

4. Polluting the environment

5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor

6. Excessive wealth

7. Creating poverty

The original deadly sins:

1. Pride

2. Envy

3. Gluttony

4. Lust

5. Anger

6. Greed

7. Sloth

One of the best comments for this posting was by Takuan

AH those crazy kids at the world’s largest real estate operation! How about the child raping huh? Or the targeting of the poor for recruits and the increasing of the ranks of the poor by opposing family planning? All those vatican art treasures gathering dust when they could be sold for food for the hungry. Aboriginal people everywhere still badly wounded from having the native beat out of them. All those nuns,monks and priests with blighted lives from having their natural sexuality crushed in the name of subjugation to church power. Gay people everywhere, murdered by church sanction and still being made to fight for basic human rights. Cultural treasures lost to the bonfires of the church in South America, The Inquisition, the retarding of science, the wilfull delay of medical advances, the overweening hypocrisy , the brutality, the greed, the ignorance……

How dare they show their faces much less preach about “sin”?

Well said!

I am Disappointment

I’ve just finished watching “I am Legend”, a movie which has outstanding moments and great disappointments. Will Smith plays Robert Neville a military doctor who thinks he is the last man on earth after a virus wipes out most of the Earth’s population and turns the other large percentage into mindless killing machines with a high UV problem not even extra-strength sunblock can help.  A large part of the beginning story involves his relationship with his dog and how the edges of a normal human canine interaction have become a little blurred around the edges (after he is the last human as far as he knows) and the isolation is not doing nice things with his mind. That was good, a little contrived in parts, but the slipping edges of sanity was well portrayed.

The other part I thought had great potential was when Neville realised these creatures were not stupid at all and seemed organised and had the ability to do awesome things like try and trap him the way he had trapped on of their own.

Then 3 things happened which flushed the movie down the toilet.

[****** SPOILERS BELOW *********]

1. The dog dies. WTF! Ever since fracking Bambi the animal dies in almost every movie and I think it sucks. It doesn’t add pathos or emotional weight to the movie, it’s a cheap appeal to sentimentality and it really bugs me. That being said it is my personal preference that the dog or pet should be hallowed ground and untouchable by the director – the other 2 items were what actually ruined the movie for me.

2. The end scene sees the zombies once again acting like complete savages and only hint at all the earlier build-up of these creatures having mutated into something more than mindless eating machines.  Why go to the effort of building our expectations that these creatures are something more sinister than run-of-the-mill drooling biting zombies if that’s how you’re going to portray them in the finale anyway?

3. The entire story was about a medical disaster [virus gets out of hand in the human population] and then it’s like someone lets a creationist church group with red crayons run around in the script as a warning against man’s tinkering in God’s playground. It turns into this puerile mess where the lady who saves him at one point in the story is actually on a mission from God [the Christian version] and is being sent by the big-almighty to a safe colony in Vermont.  On the way the celestial-he gets her to pop round to Will’s house for the cure for humanity; then Will gets to die to save them … what a hero! BARF! VOMIT! come on!

One of the best lines I’ve read comes from John Beifuss’ crit of the movie where he says:

In the infantile prioritizing that occurs when Hollywood wants to be ‘inspirational,’ the hero’s Everyman crisis of religious faith is supposed to be as important to audiences as his struggle to save humanity from extinction.

The damn religious stuff only came like a stinky curve-ball in the last few minutes, someone thought ‘this is a story about the trials of a man in an empty apocalyptic  world … jee that sounds like Noah or a case in need of serious religious reflection let’s be sure to throw a sprinkling of God in here somewhere.’

…… blah!

A Doctor’s ’stuff you’ Attitude

I am so very very weary of poor service delivery and rude assholes. My little boy has been running a fever since last night, he’s feeling absolutely miserable and first thing this morning I phone the doctor to make an appointment – the first one I could get was 1pm. I have sat with him now for 4 hours looking after and entertaining him while he burns up red faced on the couch and finally the time arrived for us to go. I dressed him and bundled him into the car and got him upstairs to the receptions rooms.

The doctor’s are short staffed over this period which I understand; instead of the usual friendly receptionist there sits Mr. muscles with the spray on shirt, the crew cut and heaps of attitude. He looks me dead pan and informs me that 2 other patients have ‘just arrived’ (clearly not needing to make appointments) and the wait is now 40 minutes. When I asked whether this was good service and whether he was incapable of picking up a telephone to let me know that there is now a huge wait he told me that there is nothing to do, I must ‘deal with it’ as that’s just the way it is.

i.e. Fuck you, you need something we have so shut up and sit down; I almost popped a blood vessel and felt like embedding a couple of knuckles in Mr. Muscles’ attitude; thankfully sanity prevailed and he got a highly contemptuous tongue lashing mostly lost on his vacuous simian intellect.

People mess with your sick kids, I tell you it brings out something primal in you.

Service delivery and human decency are a commodity which are in increasingly short supply.

Photoblog moving to Ipernity

I have to say that Yahoo (Flickr) has really peeved me.  All my blog postings that include links to pictures that are still public have mysteriously all turned into little white blocks with ‘Not Available’ in them.  Click on the picture and you will be taken to the picture in question.  This all happened mysteriously when I moved my pictures to Ipernity photo sharing and although I doubt the 2 are related it has given me the much needed impetus to consolidate.  I love wordpress but the having to post your picture, write a post, get the picture link, insert into said post slog has to end.

Ipernity gives me the ability to blog, upload video, photos and a host of other wonderful functionality and it for this reason I will move the photoblog to:

http://www.ipernity.com/blog/stuartforsyth

Non photography related posts will still appear here from time to time.

Home Affairs Hell

I had to shake my head in dismay listening to the esteemed Mapisa- Ngakula tell etv news that people at home affairs wouldn’t be fired for gross incompetence as it wasn’t a nice thing to do; nice to have that level of job security! … really and it’s a sure fire way of motivating the hoards of current hopelessly incompetent employees to take their jobs seriously … right!

I tried recently to get passports for my wife, son and myself. It took close to six months.

I had to re-visit the grubby hole that is the Randburg home-affairs 3 times because their machine apparently couldn’t read my fingerprints – in case you missed it that was 3 times of standing in queues, being accosted by the pushy hoards at the gates wanting to watch my car and sell me photographs and all sorts of other un-identified things and putting up with completely disinterested clerks who on numerous occasions tried to tell me there was problems with the system so that the problem didn’t need to be rectified on their shift.

Eventually it took me phoning the minister’s office to get the cell phone number of a senior official at Randburg (don’t try the landline – it never gets answered) and pester him daily to follow up on my passport for things to happen.

I recall with sadness a very nice Indian gentleman standing in the queue with a vacant expression on his face; he had been waiting for over a year for his passport.

Way to go Ngakula, thanks for the quality customer service … keep on rewarding incompetence and build another government department to be proud of.

People ARE NOT resources!

I was required to fill in my details for a tender document today. The manner I was asked was a little unceremonious I’ll be the first to agree, a mere one line email saying ‘Please fill in and forward back asap.’ – like when I signed up for my job my private information became the property of the company; so yes, mild annoyance there.  I guess it was really the manner that it was requested that annoyed me on an already irritation filled day – I don’t mind sharing my details when required but I’d like to be asked.

What got my goat however was when I opened the word file I was supposed to fill in and saw “Resource full name:“.  I have to wonder when did people become resources? I am tired of this corporate de-humanising of people to things.  Would it have been so hard to put “Person full name” – are we likely to be adding the name of something that is not a person?

As a noun, the word resource is defined as an ‘Available source of wealth; a new or reserve supply that can be drawn upon when needed’; the name itself implies something transient, something that is in a way disposable. Too often have I seen people being seen by those wealthy and fortunate individuals in lofty positions of power and/or ineptitude refer to people as resources as though they were a meeting room or a projector. This de-humanising aspect of people is one of the reasons I didn’t go into the medical field when I finished my degree; I couldn’t reconcile working with people who saw the sick as bits of polony and a means to their 2^nd yacht.

I worked for one particular plonker once who even saw his wife as a resource and used to ‘joke’ when he’d had a few beers that he’d tricked her into signing a clause in their marriage contract that if she ever decided to leave him, she would be penniless – super-nice guy!

So for all you employers out there take heed; here are a few pointers about your resources you may have forgotten.

1. People are not resources, they are people – they have names, desires, fears and a plethora of human emotion that make them among the most complex organisms on the planet.
2. People have lives outside of the office – they have problems like sick children, debt and ill health; get used to it – there is more to everyone’s life than your bottom line or 3^rd holiday home.
3. People are more motivated when they aren’t referred to as resources and treated as such.
4. Be grateful your resources choose to work for you, without them you would all be just another ‘resource’.

Thankfully the company I work for is really good at not treating us like resources; but I’ve worked for some real prats in my time and hence the need for this rant.

Now where did I put my guillotine?

Home Affairs; An African Tale

A recent experience with the department of home affairs left me tearing out what little hair I have left with frustration. We’ve all seen the news reports of the levels of corruption and incompetence rife in the department of home affairs. We’ve heard the esteemed Minister of Home Affairs Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula tell us that no jobs would be lost due to gross incompetence because firing someone who couldn’t do their job wasn’t very nice (http://markofinsanity.tumblr.com/post/128713). However all this was merely academic until I needed to check if my passport was ready. I thought it would be a traumatic event so I made notes as I went; here is the full transcript and timestamp as the events unfolded:

How to get information on your passport; African style

Started the process at 12:12

I used the number listed on my passport slip to phone Randburg Home Affairs.

• 12:12 – phoned Randburg, engaged
• 12:13 – phoned, Randburg engaged

Then I went to the home affairs website, and yip the number was correct, phoned for a 3^rd time – number engaged. Went back to the website and looked up the central Pretoria number.

12:15 – called Pretoria, I was placed immediately on hold and then a very rude man listened to half my request before cutting me off and transferring me to a number that just rang and then cut off.

• 12:18 phoned Randburg, fax tone
• 12:19 Phoned Pretoria number again; put on hold for 10 minutes; phone put down.
• 12:28 Phoned Randburg; got through and into an automated queuing system that terminated in a phone ringing and then cutting off.
• 12:29 Phoned Randburg, different option in the queuing system, rang, cut off.
• 12:30 Phoned Randburg, different option in the queuing system, rang, cut off.
• 12:32 Phoned Randburg, different option in the queuing system, rang, cut off at 12:34.
• 12:34 Phoned Randburg, different option in the queuing system, rang, cut off at 12:37.
• 12:38 Phoned Randburg, different option in the queuing system, rang, cut off at 12:39.
• 12:39 Phoned Randburg, different option in the queuing system, rang, cut off at 12:40.
• 12:40 Phoned Randburg, option to wait for an operator, rang, cut off at 12:42.
• 12:42 Phoned Randburg, option to wait for an operator, rang, cut off at 12:43.
• 12.44 phoned Pretoria – phone was picked up and immediately put down/cut off
• 12.45 phoned Pretoria – phone was picked up and immediately put down/cut off

12.47 Back to the website looking for another number

12:47 Got hold of a Mr. Raynold Ndema, Gave me 2 numbers to try

12:48 Got hold of Happy, gave me a number to call

12:50 Got hold of Cosana – he didn’t know how I came to be at his extension as he was in budget control but gave me 4 numbers to try.

12.53 Got hold of Tebogo – disinterested in my request and cut me off saying she was still busy on the other line and then proceeded to chat and laugh in the background for 6 minutes. Caught her checking the line to see if I was still there; I was. Turned out she was the right person; I’d obviously just caught her in the middle of a social session.

13:01 Was informed that one passport was already at Randburg, the other passport hadn’t been attended to and my passport had a smudge on the fingerprints and I had to go back to home affairs to have more fingerprints taken.

Date of passport application: 28 December 2006
Date of this ordeal: 14 March 2007
Number of phone calls from the cell phone number on my application: 0

In the end I had to drive back to home affairs to take more fingerprints. I met a very nice Indian gentleman with a vacant expression in his eyes – the date of his passport application was January 2006; he had been back and forth between Randburg and Pretoria ever since trying to track down his passport.

I was promised that someone would get back to me with information about my application. That was last week and I’m still waiting.

Digg Podcast ruined by … dude … dude!

I have subscribed to a number of very good podcasts: the skeptic’s guide to the universe, Tech Nation, TWIT, The naked scientist  and more recently Diggnation.  I am a fan of the website and the content on Diggnation is good, as is the easy rapport the cast have with one another, but I can’t stand the abominable idiotic adolescent language.  Every sentence is  ”Dude …. Dude… ” or  ”totally sweet”  heavily peppered with the most overused conjunction in the English language: “like”.  I can’t stand it, this level of semi-literate and inane language is like a dentist’s drill; speaking in this way highlights the verbal remnants – the grammatical drool if you will – of a sub-standard vocabulary and a lazy mind.  The time for “like dude that was totally sweet” is over, please stop it! – language is beautiful, a proper grasp of it is wonderful and the podcast need not lose its sense of humour by speaking well.

This is closely followed by my other source of irritation; the SMS generation where every email is a mess of un-decipherable hieroglyphics like “gr8 c u l8er dude J “

STOP RAPING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE!

I may have to unsubscribe from Diggnation; Being long past puberty I am obviously not included in their target audience.

What was James Cameron thinking?

Cameron’s documentary, aired recently on Discovery, is not only embarrassing from a scientific point of view; it reeks of Dan Brown and conspiracy theory. Cameron and an Israeli archaeologist claim to have found the lost tomb of Jesus outside Jerusalem containing ossuary’s (small stone caskets) holding the bones of Jesus and his parents.

On closer examination of the facts Cameron seems merely out for the ratings in the hope that the gullible public will cash in on this story before the real embarrassment begins or he is truly and completely deluded. Cameron defied all the laws of the scientific method when he cherry picked his experts with a vested interest in the claim and then failed to subject his findings to the peer review process before his announcement; a process where experts could examine the data and perhaps point out flaws in his over-enthusiastic claims. Then Cameron drops a media bomb-shell: ‘I’ve found Jesus, let the debate begin’ and waits eagerly for the tinkle of falling gold coin to begin.

So here are some points to ponder:

1. He found the tomb of people called Jesus, Mary and Joseph containing authentic looking ossuary’s disregarding similar claims recently about the tomb of Jesus’ brother where the ossuary’s were clearly fakes and the inscriptions made very recently with a little Calcium carbonate dissolved in some hot water.
2. In the area of the burial chamber the odds of finding the combinations of those 3 names together is around 600:1, all those names were incredibly popular.
3. According to this data Jesus wasn’t a messiah, he was an average Joe who lived with his folks and was buried with them in a very average middle class tomb.
4. Jesus clearly wasn’t immortal and his ascent to heaven never occurred as per the legend – old and dusty boxes of bones don’t fit well with the resurrection myth.
5. The findings never went for peer-review and now there is a lot of scientific dismissal of the claims and some anger by real scholars.

Real scholars are angry with Cameron, they feel that the data and the entire process was manhandled and real scientific method held up to ridicule. These are men and women who dedicate their lives to trying to understand real historical facts, many of them spending decades understanding the intricacies of civilizations that lived millennia ago. Cameron has ensured that future finds of historic significance in the area will be weighed against his less than ideal standards.

LOST the Plot?

Up until the end of season 2, LOST was a cracker of a show. The survival of this band of airplane crash survivors intrigued me, as did this seeming semi-sentient island and the bizarre overtures of Jekyll and Hyde style scientific research centers. The Dharma initiative, run by the mysterious Hanso foundation, was part of an appeal that left the viewer wondering who these shadowy people were and why the interest in the island and survivors.

Season 2 peaked with the hatch implosion and the abduction of Jake, Kate and Sawyer by the “others”. It ended well – season 3 should have wrapped up the show; there was so much story line potential.

season 3 however has been a complete and utter let-down. The producers of LOST, no doubt happy with the prospect of lining their pockets ad-infinitum have put together the most asinine drivel. ‘The others’ live on another island close by and regularly hold book club. Sawyer and Kate are forced to live in rusty abandoned bear cages (except for when Kate wants to climb out for a little Sawyer nookie) and they presumably live on bear treats (yet do not end up looking like bedraggled survivor contestants) – why anyone would have built bear cages on this other island in the middle of no-where is both unanswered and dumb – perhaps they were for the tropical polar bears (right ….). The only character I ended up liking – Mr. Eko – got killed by a big black finger of billowy smoke and every question is now only answered by more questions. The producers feel that if they pose enough questions and kill off a couple of characters every season you’ll remain interested.

Wrong guys – your show has become deadly boring and season 3 is an utter disappointment.

LOST and the decline of Western civilization

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times recently wrote:

Anyone who thinks it’s a good sign that “Lost” is back has not spent enough time at the Web site of James Randi, a skeptical scholar of the pseudoscientific and the supernatural. A fan recently posed this question online at randi.org: “Is a fascination and increased belief in the supernatural a sign of social decline?”

By itself, “Lost” may not be a harbinger of the decline of Western civilization. But alongside “Heroes,” as well as “Medium,” “Ghost Whisperer” and “Raines,” [let's not forget Supernatural or the X Files] a new NBC drama that begins in March and stars Jeff Goldblum as a detective who solves murders by appearing to commune with dead victims, the collapse looks pretty darn nigh.

“Lost,” on ABC tonight, is the most intriguing of all the series that traffic in the supernatural, mostly because it defies its own illogical reasoning. As the third season resumes after a three-month hiatus, nothing about the fate of the plane wreck survivors marooned on a paranormal island (or is it an archipelago?) makes much sense. But the real mystery of “Lost” is not the Dharma Initiative, the Others or why some characters are named after British philosophers (John Locke, Edmund Burke). It’s whether the writers actually have a cohesive story line that ties together all the unexplained subplots.

I am afraid I have to agree with her.

Enough with the ads already!

As if advertising on TV is not bad enough, having to sit through tampon, constipation and acne advertisements while I eat my supper.  Now I get forced to watch some large corporates million dollar flash crap every time I visit a website to read an article.  I have had it with two companies now, SAP and Microsoft … surprise surprise.

The SAP one has some badly drawn outline of a head which turns into some crusty bastard with a beard drolling on about how SAP revolutionised his business – yawn!  The Microsoft ad goes on about the technological wonders of the harbinger of doom that is Windows Vista, double yawn!

In both these cases I had to wait for the animations to load and play before I was offered the article. Even better than that, the articles belonged to sites with the psychotic paging at the bottom – you know the ones where you get 5 lines to read and then at the bottom you have the following ‘Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 …. ‘. Any sane person immediately hits the printer friendly button that happily does away with both the advertising and the paging.

I lump this forced viewing of advertising in the same irritation bucket as spam – my time is my own, if I am interested in the kuk you are selling then the discrete Google like text links are sufficient to make me click you.

More Windows Happiness

It looks as if I have a fun day ahead of me. I got to work this morning to discover a failed Windows Update which leaves me unable to log in and work. So it appears that another day is to be lost to the botched and terrible operating system that is XP. A colleague of mine had this same problem 2 weeks ago – it appears to be a problem with a certain type of Intel processor and a partial windows update that fails and leaves your system badly broken. See the happiness I have below.

Thank God I have this machine dual booted with uBuntu – at least I can get on and back up my work.

Record Companies Sue Soccer Mom’s Kids

Five record companies are suing the children of a New Jersey soccer mom who refused to pay them blood money when she was accused of downloading music. Patti Santangelo is a “computer illiterate parent” whom the record companies accused of downloading infringing music and from whom they demanded $7500. Santangelo had never downloaded anything, so she refused. The record companies sued her. She defended herself. Now Warner Music, EMI, Sony BMG and Vivendi Universal are suing her children, alleging that they are the infringers.

It’s apparently a publicity stunt, as the record companies leaked the news of the suit before they served the children with papers.
Source: Boing Boing

Anyone else see this as silly?  It’s like trying to hold a serial killer’s parents accountable for their child’s crime – when are parents held accountable for the actions of their children?  Can legal action of this nature be brought against minors? 

Stupid publicity stunts like this do not garner support for the fight against piracy, they just piss regular people like you and me off, I’m left feeling “Warner, EMI, Sony … get a life!!”.

See an earlier post where Piracy Stats Don’t Add Up.

Australian IT – Piracy stats don’t add up

Article by Simon Hayes

A confidential briefing for the Attorney-General’s Department, prepared by the Australian Institute of Criminology, lashes the music and software sectors.

PIRACY statistics are labelled “self-serving hyperbole” in a draft government report.

The draft of the institute’s intellectual property crime report, sighted by The Australian shows that copyright owners “failed to explain” how they reached financial loss statistics used in lobbying activities and court cases. Figures for 2005 from the global Business Software Association showing $361 million a year of lost sales in Australia are “unverified and epistemologically unreliable”, the report says.

…snip…

The study, which says some of the statistics used by copyright owners are “absurd”, will be redrafted after senior researchers disagreed with its conclusions. Researcher Alex Malik, working for the AIC under a commission from the Attorney-General’s Department and IP Australia, was particularly critical of the use of statistics in court. “Of greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law,” the draft reads.

…snip…

Many copyright holders claimed links between piracy and organised crime, but AIC researcher had found nothing to support that view. “Either there is no evidence of any links between piracy and organised crime or it is simply beyond the capacity of rights holders to identify these links,” he wrote, adding that he was concerned about the way piracy figures were being used. “It is inappropriate for courts and policy makers to accept at face value currently unsubstantiated statistics.

http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,20713160,00.html

More Visual Studio Woes

 There is grumbling in the office, low and muttered cussing, sharp exhalations of breath followed by a string of expletives to make a drunken sailor blush.  This is a daily occurence brought on by the terrible dev tools that Microsoft gives us.  Visual Studio is the worst – their 2003 IDE is almost unusable and their 2005 one is not much better.  You are working away, deep in concentration, a solution almost at hand when your pc freezes and you get the following very helpful message:

See the first line, “You chose to end…”, bolloks I chose nothing of the sort – however the phrasing of this little gem leaves you feeling a little guilty – what could I have done to have this happen.

This error message is given in the form of a little popup finger of happiness to all our developers daily, thanks so much Microsoft for all your quality control and wonderfully intuitive and responsive applications. 

It is little wonder we are all looking to jump ship to Sun and Java.

Media Player 11 is useless

In another short sighted move by Microsoft, the new version of Windows Media Player does not support m4a files.  The fact that many people, including myself have a whole lot of m4a files is obviously of little concern, buried deep within the bowls of the knowledge center is the following disclaimer:

iTunes. The Player can’t play iTunes music files with .aac or .m4p (protected AAC) file name extensions. The iTunes Jukebox from Apple Computer is required to play these files.

My other favourite codec for music is also not supported, the .ogg

Ogg Vorbis. You can play files with .ogg or .ogm file name extensions in the Player if you install DirectShow-compatible filters, which you can download from the WMPlugins.com Web site. Note that these filters only allow you to play the files using the Player; you won’t be able to add them to your library.

I am not really surprised by this, instead of playing nicely they just won’t support the “competition”, they will bundle media player with Vista and like IE7 probably force compliance by pushing it through the windows update process.  All this in the hope that people will give up in frustration and just use their products, never mind the millions of people with legally purchased music that they cannot now listen to without browsing to the file and double clicking it (I mean music libraries are for sissies.).

Gee Microsoft, thanks a bunch, good luck competing with apple …. not!

The Muslim’s Right to Rape

 

A Muslim sheik told followers at a public meeting in Bankstown that women who were raped had incited men’s lust by dressing immodestly and only had themselves to blame.

Sydney-born Sheik Faiz Mohamad, 34, a former boxer who teaches at the Global Islamic Youth Centre in Liverpool, made the comments during a lecture for more than 1000 people at Bankstown Town Hall.

The Sun-Herald has a recording of the March 18 speech in which Sheik Faiz said: “A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world. Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world . . .

“Strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses, miniskirts, tight jeans: all this to tease man and appeal to his carnal nature.”

He compared a woman dressed in such a way to a sheep. “Would you put this sheep that you adore in the middle of hungry wolves? No . . . It would be devoured. It’s the same situation here. You’re putting this precious girl in front of lustful, satanic eyes of hungry wolves. What is the consequence? Catastrophic devastation, sexual harassment, perversion, promiscuity.”

more …

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 …

Sanction Iceland, Norway and Japan

Iceland has decided to resume commercial whaling, in defiance of the 20-year-old international whaling moratorium. The country joins Norway in openly hunting the great whales for profit. In recent years it has been killing a small number of animals annually but saying it was hunting them for “scientific” reasons, as does Japan.

Iceland’s current permits include 200 minke whales from 2003-07, of which 161 have been caught, leaving 39 for 2007. It will now allow whalers to harpoon a commercial quota of 30 minke whales and nine fin whales in the year to the end of August 2007.

<…snip…>

But the Icelanders took a robust view of their decision yesterday. “The Icelandic economy is overwhelmingly dependent on the utilisation of living marine resources in the ocean around the country,” the Icelandic Fisheries Ministry said in a statement. “We are ready to start hunts immediately,” said Kristjan Loftsson, head of the Icelandic whaling company that received the hunt permit.

Yeah, commercial gain is a good reason to let greedy countries like Iceland, Norway and Japan hunt the whales to extinction, why should our grandkids see whales when they can make a quick buck now …. bastards!

article…

What Does it take for Peace?

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said he did not exclude the possibility that Pyongyang would detonate another nuclear device, a step Washington’s top official on North Korea warned would be considered a “belligerent act”.

Defiant in the face of sanctions backed by even its closest ally, China, Pyongyang said it had withstood international pressure before.

Official media quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying: “It is quite nonsensical to expect the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to yield to the pressure and threat of someone at this time when it has become a nuclear weapons state. The republic wants peace but is not afraid of war.”

The average man just wants to live peacefully, little (and large) militia countries with nuclear weapons threatening the safety of the entire globe should under ideal circumstances be dealt with by an “empowered” global peacekeeping force (quite unlike the impotent shell that is the United Nations).

In my opinion, screw Bush, screw Osama and screw Pyongyang – kindly and quietly take your curtain call and leave the rest of us alone to get on with our lives without fear of nuclear holocaust and terrorism.  The life worth living doesn’t give a damn about your religious outrage or your political aspirations.