Internet filter plan may extend further, says Broadband Minister | Herald Sun

Internet filter plan may extend further, says Broadband Minister | Herald Sun: “The Government’s internet censorship plan may extend to filter more web activity than first thought, the Broadband Minister said today.

In a post on his department’s blog, Senator Stephen Conroy today said technology that could filter data sent directly between computers would be tested as part of the upcoming live filtering trial.

‘Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial,’ Senator Conroy said.

Peer-to-peer file-sharing technology is the most common way for web users to share video, picture and music files between computers over the internet. “

What does Australia have in common with Iran and China?

George Bush says Muslims are Atheists

A very interesting article by Autine Cline shows just how far men will go to segregate their Gods.  It is inconsequential that the roots of all 3 monotheistic religions have their roots firmly entrenched in the same bloody soil; even Christians can’t agree over the fine points of their faith so it comes as little surprise that some Christians, while at war with the noun ‘terror’ and bombing whole countries back to the stone age, haven’t a clue as to what drives terrorists to commit their acts of violence.

As part of the Chanukah celebrations [please someone enlighten me] at the White House, President George W. Bush reportedly described Muslim terrorists as atheists:

Bush said that despite declarations of piety from Muslim radicals now fighting the United States, he doubted that they believed in God. “ ‘Terrorists’ can’t be God-believing people,’ ” Richard Joel, president of Yeshiva University, quoted Bush as saying.

Unfortunately for George, if he bothered to replace his advisers with anybody with a bit of common sense, he would learn that the radicals believe a little too much in God.  It is a desire to fight for Islam against the infidels of the west, a desire to go to heaven and hand-pick friends and family members [who could be right sods] to join you and a perverse anger at economic western success that should not be the right of the unbelievers that drive people to fly planes into buildings or to detonate themselves as vessels of immolation in God’s ‘righteous and just’ cause.  Another interesting point about George’s statement is that is apparently OK for God-fearing people to kill what amount now to 655,000 Iraqis (and counting) with impunity  – the old quotation that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter is a cliche for a reason.

Remember that fabulous old article from 2003:

A few weeks ago, George W. Bush noted during an interview that while he glances at newspaper headlines, he “rarely” reads the actual articles because “A lot of times there’s opinions mixed in with news.” So where does he get his info? Bush said he prefers to be briefed by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. “The best way to get the news,” he explained, “is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”

Let me reiterate the point in case you glossed over it – George gets all his worldly information from his ‘objective’ advisers.  How this man ever got elected is really beyond me – this shows a level of gross ignorance that borders on the obscene.  Perhaps George should open a book [the old testament doesn't count] from time to time.

As Cline rightly wondered, will George be penning in well know atheists like Harris and Dawkins under Osama?  Somehow it wouldn’t surprise me.

Diabetes Breakthrough in Sight

In a discovery that has stunned even those behind it, scientists at a Toronto hospital say they have proof the body’s nervous system helps trigger diabetes, opening the door to a potential near-cure of the disease that affects millions of Canadians. Diabetic mice became healthy virtually overnight after researchers injected a substance to counteract the effect of malfunctioning pain neurons in the pancreas. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Dr. Michael Salter, a pain expert at the Hospital for Sick Children and one of the scientists. “Mice with diabetes suddenly didn’t have diabetes any more.”

The researchers caution they have yet to confirm their findings in people, but say they expect results from human studies within a year or so. Any treatment that may emerge to help at least some patients would likely be years away from hitting the market. But the excitement of the team from Sick Kids, whose work is being published today in the journal Cell, is almost palpable. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Dr. Hans Michael Dosch, an immunologist at the hospital and a leader of the studies. “In my career, this is unique.” Their conclusions upset conventional wisdom that Type 1 diabetes, the most serious form of the illness that typically first appears in childhood, was solely caused by auto-immune responses — the body’s immune system turning on itself.

They also conclude that there are far more similarities than previously thought between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and that nerves likely play a role in other chronic inflammatory conditions, such as asthma and Crohn’s disease. The “paradigm-changing” study opens “a novel, exciting door to address one of the diseases with large societal impact,” said Dr. Christian Stohler, a leading U.S. pain specialist and dean of dentistry at the University of Maryland, who has reviewed the work.

Article…

Kasparov plays a dangerous game to keep Putin in check

As the world’s greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov employed his
formidable intellect to outwit rivals before seizing on a weakness to
crush them. The Russian grandmaster is now applying those skills to a
new game of strategy aimed at defeating his toughest opponent of all —
President Putin. At stake, he argues, is the fate of Russian democracy.
Mr Kasparov has devoted himself to politics since retiring from
professional chess last year. He regards Mr Putin as a dictator whose
authoritarian rule threatens to return Russia to a dark past.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2507556,00.html

New Radiation Weapon Ready to Roll in Iraq

"It feels like the skin is being ripped from your face, but the military says it’s perfectly safe."

The crowd is getting ugly. Soldiers roll up in a Hummer. Suddenly, the whole right half of your body is screaming in agony. You feel like you’ve been dipped in molten lava. You almost faint from shock and pain, but instead you stumble backwards — and then start running. To your surprise, everyone else is running too. In a few seconds, the street is completely empty. You’ve just been hit with a new nonlethal weapon that has been certified for use in Iraq — even though critics argue there may be unforeseen effects. According to documents obtained for Wired News under federal sunshine laws, the Air Force’s Active Denial System, or ADS, has been certified safe after lengthy tests by military scientists in the lab and in war games. The ADS shoots a beam of millimeters waves, which are longer in wavelength than x-rays but shorter than microwaves — 94 GHz (= 3 mm wavelength) compared to 2.45 GHz (= 12 cm wavelength) in a standard microwave oven.

..snip..

The ADS was developed in complete secrecy for 10 years at a cost of $40 million [of your taxpayers dollars]. Its existence was revealed in 2001 by news reports, but most details of ADS human testing remain classified. There has been no independent checking of the military’s claims. The ADS technology is ready to deploy, and the Army requested ADS-armed Strykers for Iraq last year. But the military is well aware that any adverse publicity could finish the program, and it does not want to risk distressed victims wailing about evil new weapons on CNN.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72134-0.html?tw=rss.index

The Worlds Top Polluted Places – 2006

This website is a horrifying expose of humanities callousness towards the environment that sustains us.  Invariably a product of industrialization and man’s ever-present greed.  Particularly noteworthy is how many of these places are in Russia and China.  Lovely stuff.  Brings to mind one of my favourite childhood books, The Lorax by Dr. Suess (which was banned in the US for a time) – if you have a child, read this book to them, plant a mental seed that they may, perhaps, not be as greedy and arrogant as our generation.

Website here …

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…

De-Humanizing the Victims of Crime

Here are a couple of media clippings taken from recent headlines around the world.

The body of a 21-year-old woman, whose neck had been cut and her genitals cut off, has been found in a veld in Bloemfontein, southern Free State police said on Sunday. “She was brutally, brutally murdered and then dumped in the veld. Her throat was cut open and her head was
almost hanging off. Her private parts were also cut out,” said police spokeswoman Sergeant Thandi Mbambo. The woman’s body was found by a security guard around 7.50am on Sunday in a veld near Taelo Moloisia in Phase Two, Bloemfontein.

Or this one:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Five U.S. soldiers were charged in a rape and multiple murder case that has outraged Iraqis, as documents obtained by Reuters on Sunday showed the rape victim was aged 14, and not over 20 as U.S. officials have said.

We all feel the bile rise at the mention of “the girl” who was raped in Iraq by 5 soldiers and then murdered along with her family but how many of us know her name?

Whenever crimes are committed the media falls back to the focused comfort of statistics and nameless generic labels. “x children killed in Gaza”, “y families killed in Tel Aviv bomb blast”, “z women and children raped and killed by Sudanese militia”. Somehow the numbers distance ourselves from the events, it allows us to go on eating our meals during the news and then put out children to bed with stories and fairytales of a better world. I live in a country where crime is rampant and I am tired of being fed statistics – these are tales of tragedy, of pain and loss and they should hurt.

The nameless raped 14 year old statistic of war was called Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi. She was born on August 19, 1991. Her birth certificate was given to Reuters recently showing a beautiful baby girl of 18 months. When she was six years old, Abeer sister was killed by “several gunshot wounds”

…..

A soldier cited in U.S. court documents as the first witness told investigators Green and three others drank alcohol and discussed rape. They then told the soldier to keep watch on the radio as they set off for the house, some in civilian clothes.
Two soldiers who said they went to the house accused Green of killing the parents and child before he and the other soldier in the home raped Abeer. Green then shot her too, they said. – Reuters
Abeer leaves behind two brothers who were not butchered that day, thankfully (or not) they were out the day their sister was raped and shot along with their mother, father and toddler. Her brothers are 10 and 13 years old respectively.

I want to cry and to rage against stories like these, to beat my fists against the stupidity and cruelty that we so readily impart on our fellow man. Somehow I take small consolation that the horror and pain I feel is an important reminder of an underlying humanity that is so easily mixed with a darkness in the human condition, and it gives me some hope.

These are people who have suffered under trauma that most of us can never comprehend. At the very least let’s give them names, and think about them a little more than checks on a statistics sheet.

It is the final bit of dignity we can impart on today’s atrocities.

Blogging, Carbon and Alien Rain

Back in the Blogger days I used a wonderful tool called w.bloggar to post to my blog. When I moved over to WordPress I tried a number of other tools, the closest I got was Quamana but this morning, to my delight, I noticed that w.Bloggar posts to WordPress blogs – no contest – welcome back w.Bloggar.

This week we are off on holiday for two weeks, I cannot wait and need this time really really badly. I often hear friends and colleagues boast about the number of years since their last holiday but I’m afraid I am not made of such stern stuff – I have a beach-ometer that slowly ticks down between holidays and a Grumpy-ometer that slowly ticks up. Both these wonderful internal devices are very much in the red at the moment and are in dire need of a reset.

In excellent news, Microsoft has denied that it will put back-doors into its new Vista OS. Governments have been asking for a way around the authentication and encryption to allow law enforcement agencies ways to get access to peoples data on seized computers.

Carbon nanotubules are back in the news, not for space elevators this time, but for super-flexible screens. Carbon nanotubules are made from rolled sheets of tightly bound carbon which are very light, incredibly strong and have excellent conductive properties. It seems that carbon nanotubules are going to revolutionise materials in the coming decades, much the same way the advent of plastic did years ago.

In other strange news, on 25 July 2001 blood red rain fell over the Kerala district of Southern India. Initial explanations implied that the cloudy red substance was atmospheric dust. Recent analysis of samples of this liquid show that it is not dust at all and researchers are puzzled as to what exactly it is. There is speculation that the rain was made up of bacteria-like organisms but it is unlike anything we know about. Hours before the first red rain, a loud sonic boom shook Kerala and it is believed to have been caused by an incoming meteorite that broke apart shedding these molecules as it went. If this is true then the red rain may have contained the first traces of extraterrestrial life ever discovered.

Bush officials are readying an intelligence briefing for the U.N. security council on Tehran’s weapons program but get this:

It will rely mainly on circumstantial evidence, much of it from documents found on a laptop purportedly purloined from an Iranian nuclear engineer and obtained by the CIA in 2004. U.S. officials insist the material is strong but concede they have no smoking gun.

You really would have thought America had learned it’s humiliating lesson from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction!

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.

Supply of Weapons Undermine Debt Relief in Africa

In an unprecedented show of honesty U.N. advisor Dennis McNamara got to the heart of a lot of the conflict in Africa. The West fuels unrest in African countries by supplying them with weapons, ever wonder where the little kids get the rocket launchers? Guns are a huge problem and allow minority groups to sow terror and unrest in a country while their mineral and oil reserves are being plundered by other Western countries.

Children are drawn into these conflicts fighting, from an inhumanly early age, and are left with no education and no real skills when the conflict ends. Conflict is their job, without it, and having no means for sustainable skills such as farming, they have nothing.Debt relief is only a short term solution; it is the “feeding the man with fish” scenario as opposed to “teaching the man to fish”.

As long as people in African countries are staring down the barrels of their rapists and despots, only so much can be done.

Suffer the Children, he Destitute and the Homeless.

There is a conservative estimate regarding the number of street children that scrounge out an existence in India, eighteen million is the number, victims of poverty these children will have very little choice but to perpetuate the cycle of poverty. With numbers like this it is very easy for nations, including one’s own, to dehumanise the situation, toting the numbers in a journal of human misery.Speak to a street child though and under all the layers of grime and disillusionment they are little kids who have the same aspirations for love and success, a need to be sheltered and count for something. In South Africa we have a similar situation, thousands of children orphaned every month by poverty, neglect and AIDS. They become very easy targets for the sociopaths, the gangsters and the paedophiles.

Organisations like cotlands try to help but the inflow increases monthly and with very little government assistance they have to eke out a living on the few donations they receive. The brave people of these organisations suffer financial hardship and an emotional battering every day to bring a little something special to these children.

If you don’t already donate to organisations like this I implore you to give up one DVD rental a month and send a little help, you’d be surprised how far it will go.

And if bird flu hits Africa?

This is a real concern for everyone living in Africa. The WHO says that that African countries need to strengthen their laboratory facilities….WTF – we are talking about countries without bare minium food or shelter requirements, people at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in fact there is no pyramid just an empty dusty hole in the ground. Is WHO really that out of touch with reality and if so will they prove effective should the coming pandemic hit?

As avian influenza continues to spread from poultry to humans in Asia and Europe, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that Africa is at great risk of a pandemic, and urgently needs to strengthen its laboratory facilities to identify avian influenza in humans and animals.

International experts, including the UN’s avian flu coordinator David Nabarro, have expressed concern in recent days that migratory birds or travellers may carry the virus to Africa from Turkey or other affected areas.

Given these risks, UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) deputy director-general David Harcharik said this week that African nations deserve special attention when it comes to improving preparedness for a pandemic. “In Turkey, the virus has already reached the crossroads of Asia, Europe and Africa, and there is a real risk of further spread,” he said at a meeting in Beijing.

The Scientist : And if bird flu hits Africa.

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…

India to lose 10 million women

This article follows in the wake of a story on Boing Boing entitled “They Burn Themselves” where Layla Ali, ZEEN program director describes Kurdish woman setting themselves on fire to highlight the awful violence inflicted on Kurdish women by men.

Here new scientist looks at how, over 20 years, 10 million females have been lost to India because of ultrasound techniques. It saddens me when life saving technology gets misused and twisted into some perverted scion of its former potential. Can anyone say “Manhattan Project”?

This bias and brutality leveled towards woman has to stop – at some point sanity must prevail.

A New Year of Presidential Homophobia

Aaaah nothing like a little presidential homophobia to start off the new year. Well done Mr. Bush they are guaranteed their place in Hell – what a plonker!.

President George W. Bush (1/5/06):

We need intelligence officers who, when somebody says something in Arabic or Farsi or Urdu knows what they’re talking about. That’s what we need.

Unless those intelligence officers are gay, of course. In which case, we don’t need it:

Nine Army linguists, including six trained to speak Arabic, have been dismissed from the military because they are gay.

The soldiers’ dismissals come at a time when the military is facing a critical shortage of translators and interpreters for the war on terrorism.

Seven of the soldiers were discharged after telling superiors they are gay, and the two others got in trouble when they were caught together after curfew…[…] Six were specializing in Arabic, two were studying Korean and one was studying Mandarin Chinese. All were at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, the military’s primary language training center.

Arabic. Korean. Mandarin Chinese. This probably isn’t harming national security though.

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.

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