Veggie Van Gogh

"Veggie Van Gogh is transportation, warehouse, and living quarters for Carol and Jan, gypsy artisans who criss-cross North America, peddling their wares at arts & crafts festivals, powered by waste vegetable oil ...

"How do you haul art around to festivals and live somewhat comfortably "on the road" without exhorbitant [sic] hotel fees? Even more importantly, how do you do that in an environmentally sustainable manner? ...

"For two years, we used a tiny Scamp travel trailer, pulled by a gas-hog step van, dubbed Van d'Art. Then I did my taxes, and discovered that I spent more on gasoline than I earned -- that truck was digging me deeper in debt! ...

"Veggie Van Gogh runs on waste vegetable oil (WVO) that we harvest for free from restaurants along the way! It has VASTLY reduced pollutants, comes from American farmers instead of conquered Middle East nations, and has a pleasant, french-fry odor while driving, unlike the stench that comes from most other diesel vehicles ..."
Source: Bytesmiths

Happy birthday! We are throwing you out of Britain!


From Lisa:

[This kind of thing is becoming all to common around the world and, unbeknownst to the majority of Americans, in the United States. -v]

Happy birthday. We are throwing you out of Britain
By James Blake and Terry Kirby

His mother was shot dead for her political beliefs.
So was his father. He was looked after by foster parents
in London until he turned 18. Then he was locked up so
that he can be 'dumped' abroad. Soon we'll be doing this
to 16-year-olds...

He could be any teenager, relaxing in a London park, wearing his favourite football shirt, but last night Blerim Mlloja was in a detention centre awaiting deportation to Albania, a country he considers foreign and where he believes his life would be in danger.

Two weeks ago, Mr Mlloja, not long turned 18, took a day off school, put on his smartest clothes and went to the Home Office's immigration directorate in Croydon. He thought it was one of his routine, regular meeting with officials.

His foster mother, Mary Watts, who has looked after him for three years, waved him off from their home in south London. She had no reason to worry. Instead, he never came back, and Mrs Watts, sick with worry, has not seen him since.

For, as the Government trumpeted its apparent success yesterday in reducing the number of asylum-seekers applying to stay in this country, the tale of Mr Mlloja highlights the reality faced by many young people living here. Unaccompanied child asylum-seekers deemed at risk are often accepted at first but once they turn 18 they are sent back. Soon, in a pilot scheme, the age limit is likely to be dropped to 16 for asylum-seekers from Albania, a country deemed to be safe.

While yesterday's figures did show a reduction in the number of asylum applications, they also showed that the number of failed claimants being deported is falling. That helps to fuel the political and media furore, and, in turn, means the Home Office is intensifying its efforts to remove easy targets, such as Mr Mlloja.

Clive Efford, the Labour MP for Eltham, who has taken up the case, said: "Outside the current climate of hysteria over immigration, Blerim might have been looked on more sympathetically. To say he can build a life here, to be taken into the heart of a foster family and then told 'you're 18 now — so you must go' is unfair. It doesn't take into account the individual cases".

When he arrived at the immigration offices Mr Mlloja was arrested by officials and sent to a detention centre near Heathrow, pending deportation. He has been held there while Mrs Watts and lawyers fight a desperate rearguard action. They argue that Mr Mlloja, both of whose parents were shot dead in separate incidents, knows no other home. They fear his life would be in danger if he was "dumped" back on the streets of Albania. He was beaten up by police before managing to reach this country three years ago.

Mrs Watts, aged 66, of Eltham, said yesterday: "This is his home and we are his family now. He's got no one, and nowhere else to go. He is settled here and has an English girlfriend. He should not be made to leave.

"It was very cruel the way they took him. It's like he was kidnapped. They tricked us and they didn't even phone me to tell me." [That's the big, stinking dead fish in this story... WHY would it be necessary to "disappear" someone like that for a "legal" proceeding?! –L.]

Mr Mlloja's mother was shot dead in Tirana, the Albanian capital, when Blerim was three years old. She was involved in the anti-Communist uprisings. His father, a bodyguard for a leading democratic politician, put his son into a children's home. When he was 12, one of his father's friends came to tell him he too had been killed. He was murdered alongside the politician he was protecting.

After that, Blerim was arrested twice and beaten up by officers who wanted information about his parents. His father's friend helped him to escape to Britain at the age of 15.

While living with Mrs Watts in Eltham for the past three years, he has been attending a local school and was among a number of local teenage asylum-seekers who took part in a film, funded by Channel 4, called Birthday Boy. It addresses the precise predicament he finds himself in now.

The film was shown last autumn, around the time the Home Office rejected his application to stay in this country after he turned 18. Because of a mix-up, his solicitor failed to lodge an appeal, allowing the Home Office to detain him once his birthday passed on 1 December. Although Mr Mlloja has spent the last two weeks believing deportation was imminent, his lawyers succeeded yesterday in their application for a judicial review of the case, delaying deportation for a few weeks. But he remains in custody and, despite the glimmer of hope, few have succeeded in overturning the Home Office's decision.

Since arriving in Britain, Mr Mlloja has had regular sessions with John Barcroft, a child psychiatrist. Dr Barcroft wrote a report for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, arguing that he should not be deported for health reasons.

Dr Barcroft said: "It's quite crazy to keep people in this country and then ship them back as soon as they turn 18. He grew up in a children's home where he was not allowed to go out and was under constant threat. Everyone should have some sort of childhood. Here, at last, he's found someone who can parent him."

Mrs Watts said: "I was just given him to look after — as a son and he calls me 'mum' now. I was never told that he'd be taken from me. He's such a lovely boy and there is a big bond between us. He's got a home here with brothers and sisters and they all love him too.'

"He has been reluctant to make too many plans but his experience with the film encouraged him to think he might have a future as an actor."

Mr Mlloja is forbidden to have visitors at Colnbrook detention centre, but he is allowed to use the phone. He said: "It is like a prison here. I keep getting panic attacks. I've seen people try to kill themselves and I have thought about it too. And it's so cold, I keep asking the officers for extra blankets, but they tell me no."

<">SOURCE

Ancient city discovered in India

After tsunami, ruins found

"MAHABALIPURAM - Indian archaeologists have found what they believe are undersea 'stone structures' that could be the remains of an ancient port city off India's southern coast, officials say.

"The archaeologists learnt of the structures after locals reported spotting a temple and several sculptures when the sea pulled back briefly just before deadly tsunamis smashed into the coastline December 26."
Source: Khaleej Times Online

Pic: Archeologists investigate an ancient artifact uncovered by the tsunami at Mahabalipuram, India. (AP photo)

USA forces Iraq in GMOs

By David Wilson

"Seems the total Americanisation of Iraq is the goal; latest news is that the Interim Administrator Paul Bremer has left imposing legislation on the new Iraqi Government, and specifically Order 81, on Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and plant variety. This Order 81 overrides all other laws in Iraq, and all original Patent laws of 1970, which in accordance with Iraqi constitution prohibited private ownership of biological resources, and undermines Iraq's food security.

"Iraq is home to the oldest agricultural traditions in the world. Previously they seed-saved and exchanged plant materials between farms and farming communities. This new law deprives these traditional farmers all this. Under the NEW US Order 81, they are not allowed to seed-save or exchange plant materials and they are only allowed to purchase from transactional agribusiness corporations. This US Order 81 introduces under law, a system of private monopoly rights over seeds and will force Iraqi farmers to rely on big US corporations to buy their yearly crop seeds for planting ..."
Source: CROPO, Official Journal of the Coffs Regional Organic Producers’ Organisation Inc, Issue 129; PO Box 363, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 2450, Australia; Website

Turning crap into ex-crap

I wanted to be a Leap Year Day Baby but my mother went and had me exactly a year late. Typical. With my birthday just around the hump, I have been thinking about what I would like to get as a present.

For Christmas some woman gave me a bunch of little plastic tubes of men's toiletries that I suppose she got for free for spending a few thousand dollars on female cosmetics. One of the 15ml tubes is called Nivea for Men Double Action Face Wash, Vitamin Enriched. That means "soap". In fact, it's not even soap, it's detergent. You could wash your dishes with it if you could bear eating off plates that smell like Belsen.

The list of "vitamins" on the back of the tube is so long they've had to print it in about minus 6-point type, and I can't read it even with my glasses on, but I think I can make out a couple of words: "Phenoxyethonol", and "Methyldibromo Glutomonitrite", or something like that. I only read that after I'd used it once because I'm a cheapskate and the stuff was free. Of course, the whole box and dice, every damn tube, is now in my garbage bin but now I feel guilty about polluting the city's landfill. One of the tubes is something called "Shower gel" and it says it "Turns water into care". Harrr!! Who writes their shtick? And it does that with a half-life of only 50,000 years. The shower gel, too, has a list of about 50 Frankenstein vitamins on the back in minus 6-point type. I'm turning detergent into garbage. I'm turning crap into ex-crap. Bye-bye, gel.

Do people really buy stuff like this? I suppose they must. I'm scared what shite I might get for my birthday again this year. One person, over the years, has given me seven (count 'em, seven!) watches. I guess because they notice that I never wear a watch, that would be the perfect gift for me. Or they somehow noticed I have a vast watch collection in a box under my bed so they know exactly what to get me.

This site has a list of bad Christmas presents, but I couldn't find a list of bad birthday prezzies. I should write one some day, cause I know a bit about it.

Last year I got one great Chrissie prezzie though, and that was from Baz le Tuff. Le Tuff and Mister Peg, two old frinds of mine, give good gift. He gave me a glass ashtray on which he got someone to engrave on the bottom a picture of Whiteman walking with the Yeti. Anything Robert Crumb is good, and Whiteman and Yeti particularly so. I'd like an Angelfood McSpade ashtray too. You can never have too many ashtrays, and you can never get enough Angelfood McSpade. A Snoid biscuit tin would be nice, and I really need a Flakey Foont that nods its head. Le Tuff, are you reading this? I know he is. He does a lot, but he never leaves comments. Aloof. A lurker. I wish I could be cool like that. I always leave comments on people's blogs, can't help myself. I like getting the click-back I guess. Mr le Tuff doeesn't have anything to click back to, at least, nothing he will allow the world to see. I think it might be a legal consideration.

When people ask me what I want for my birthday, I say I want them to give the money to Amnesty International or Worldwide Fund for Nature. Sometimes that works and you get something really good.

Committee to Protect Bloggers

Blogger.com has a few recommended blogs this week. Committee to Protect Bloggers looks like a great idea, and I dips me lid to the people who got it together. I've put their Atom feed on my beaut Sharpreader.

Things I Hate About My Flatmate is funny, and real. Radio Free Nepal is a must-read. All Things Dunkin' Donuts is ... well, it's so embarrassing it makes you want to take an iron bar to the Blogger.com clown who wasted space with it when there is so much excellent and important blogging out there. Out here. Out everywhere.

Medical tourism

Tourism is one of the creepiest things that the relatively rich do to the abjectly poor. Here's another angle on it:

"Singapore, Dubai, Chennai and Mumbai, and there’s one at Munich International Airport, all places that are stopovers for a new species of sick person, the international patient. That’s the technical term for medical tourists. Sick people are taking a ticket out of the UK, US and Canada to avoid long waiting lists and the high costs of surgery. There’s a cheaper deal elsewhere.

"This new globalised medical business is spawning new words; there’s medicities, for example, and silver economy.

"Dubai has a health care city, and one of the new hospital corporations of Asia have a slogan that doesn’t beat about the bush:

"... first world service at third world cost."
Full documentary, audio & transcript

Spam reporting addresses

It's handy to know where you can report spam and fraudulent emails, such as an EBay phishing spam I got this morning. SpamLinks provides international addresses. I can't vouch for how up-to-date it is, but it seems pretty good.

The Internet Under Attack?


SHUTTER CONTROL: GROUND ZERO
By Mathew Maavak

When I typed out “Internet origins, wikipedia” into Google on Feb 22 (1.25pm Malaysian time), this is what I saw:

Power corrupts. Power failure corrupts absolutely. We're currently recovering servers from a power failure in our colocation facility. This means backing up 170gb of database on several servers and running recovery. Back soon...

Where's my Wikipedia?

That page should have added that “Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. Information denial is the future wave!”

I needn’t quite need Wikipedia to know the origins of the Internet. To put a long story short, it started off as the defense project ARPANET which later included key US academia, some of whom may have stories to share, “if they prefer to.”

This was an excellent military tool, one that could allegedly withstand the devastations of a future nuclear attack. Then came the Internet and the world wide web, a liberating medium for anyone, anywhere with a PC, modem and phone line.

Nothing is given away for free, especially when it involves “liberty”. Those who designed this liberating medium knew that any machine, any vaccine, any electronically-contrived tool has a function creep.

If you need to effectuate global hegemony, what better and cheaper way than to string up peoples and nations electronically? People would benefit tremendously, and so would an age-old plan called Novus Ordo Seclorum - "A new order of the ages" The date of origin: 1782. I had to pull up a greenback to check up those Latin words as Wikipedia, that quick portal for double-checking facts, including spelling, was again showing the above message, for a different search.

The Internet was under attack.

All the symbols I saw on that dollar bill, and its exegesis belong to the Masonic religion. I couldn’t find a single Christian symbol in this supposedly Christian, evangelistic country. And how does freemasonry paint Christianity, Judaism and Islam? Biblical figures like Yahweh was the Midianite God of “storms and wars,” who was “fearful” of Moses who in fact was a “death dealing fanatic” and Jesus was the product of a “magical mating” between “Yahweh and Mary.” [1] The quotes, and there are plenty, are taken from a work of speculative delusions at its deranged best, written in a dream world of hallucinatory scholarship. It was, in essence, an attack on all three monotheistic faiths, something carried out with brutal force in Iraq and to a lesser extent, in multiple realms everywhere. Novus Ordo Seclorum can be best accomplished when pseudo-Christianity is used to fight Judaism and Islam, and later incite a three-cornered fight between all three.

Does this have anything to do with the Internet? Look at the Eye on that Great Seal. It cannot be “All Seeing” unless all people can be seen and heard. And the Internet is the best choice, among a growing menu of electronic, panoptic tools.

From a liberating medium, it has gone on to be the perfect surveillance and control mechanism. Your emails and chats (personal) can be monitored, your online purchases (finances) logged, and your psychological profile noted. This hydra is going berserk.

Choking Democracy, dissent and filtration

[Emphasis added. -v]

CONTINUE

An ode to bloggers? ;o)

From Lisa:

From Quote-a-Day:

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

--"Think Different", Apple Computers Advertisement

Warning: artistic aliens at work



Sydney, Australia: "It appeared overnight, but no one knows where it came from. It's 60 metres long and 30 metres wide, but no one knows what it means.

"The image of a man, a dollar note, a wave and a tombstone appeared on Reg Bartley Oval in Rushcutters Bay about four weeks ago, residents say. And it has been puzzling them since. 'It must have been done in the middle of the night because I noticed it first thing in the morning,' said a resident, James Potts."
Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Picture: Peter Rae

How to Kill a Country

Australia' recent Free Trade Agreement with USA

By Linda Weiss and co-authored by Elizabeth Thurbon and John Mathews

"Thanks to the manipulation of debate surrounding the trade agreement with the US, which came into effect on January 1st, few Australians realise the enormity of the changes that are being demanded of us under the deal – and just how destructive they will be. We are not referring to the poor market access that Australian business and exports received (damaging enough in itself). We are talking about the dismantling and replacement of Australian institutions with something foreign, which will work against our economic prosperity and to the advantage of the foreign power.

"These institutions include:

• Our rigorous Quarantine procedures that safeguard agricultural producers from devastating exotic pests and diseases and give Australians a competitive advantage in world markets;
• Our PBS that protects the health system against soaring prescription costs and makes medicines affordable for all Australians
• Our IP laws that encourage local innovators in IT and biotech, for example, without extravagant protection of monopolies;
• Our system of government purchasing programs that support an Australian IT industry, in particular, and return tax dollars to Australian residents.

"The most important changes target these very arrangements that secure our competitive advantage in world markets, preserve our economic security, and safeguard social wellbeing.

"The evidence – for anyone willing to consider it – is compelling. As we show in our new book, How to Kill a Country, all of these institutional arrangements, and more, are placed under peril by the FTA.

"Take the case of agriculture. Once we allow our core ‘clean and green’ label for our agricultural exports to be compromised by lowering our Quarantine standards to accommodate imports from disease-prone areas — as occurred throughout 2004 in dress rehearsal for the FTA’s entry into force—then this distinctive advantage is lost forever; it cannot be retrieved. This is a loss of national competitiveness ..."
Source: Perspective

Linda Weiss is Professor of Government and International Relations at the
University of Sydney’s School of Economics & Political Science; Elizabeth
Thurbon is a Lecturer at UNSW’s School of Politics and International Relations; John Mathews is Professor of Strategic Management at Macquarie Graduate School of Management.

The Australian Interest
[Website was founded by Linda Weiss and Elizabeth Thurbon]

1838 Spring-Heeled Jack strikes again

"Jane Alsop (18) was in her home on Bearhind Lane in the district of Bow, when she heard a wrapping on the door. Answering the door, a black cloaked man exclaimed 'I'm a policeman. For Gods sake, bring me a light, for we have caught Spring-heeled Jack in the lane' ..."

This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with many more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date (or your birthday) when you're there.

A bit of subtle artistic license says it all


From Lisa:

Police look at a defaced poster of U.S. President George W. Bush, while environmental activists protest against Essso's [sic] alleged lobbying of the U.S. President to refuse to abide by the Kyoto Protocol. With the pact on climate change set to take effect, the Bush administration still rejects it as too costly for the US economy and based on questionable scientific hypotheses.

(AFP/File/Gerry Penny)

Troops for Iraq: Aussie gov't breaks promise

Opposition Leader almost opposes

First, a potted history of Aussie politics in the past four months. In October, the Howard Liberal Government was returned with an increased majority. Despite its name, the Liberal Party is the major conservative party, and the main progressive party opposing it is the Labor Party.

At the October 9 election, Labor was led by the moderately progressive but rather unimpressive Mark Latham, who got terrible press and failed badly, to be replaced by Kim Beazley, who is right-wing Labor and so fond of military matters he is known as 'Bomber' Beazley. He seems to like nothing more than a photo-op sitting atop a tank, and is probably a childhood war afficionado and military hobbyist who never grew up.

John Howard is very right-wing even for a Lib. One of his core promises to the Australian voters last year was that Australia would not increase by hundreds, though it might by tens, troops in Iraq.

Today, Howard announced that Australia would be sending 450 more troops to Iraq, hugely increasing our role there. Not only that, but these will be combat troops as opposed to the previous main roles of Aussie soldiers in non-combat positions. The Australians will take on the roles previously held by the Dutch, who have sensibly decided to get the hell out. Howard was asked by the PMs of both Japan and the UK if he would send Aussies in -- because neither Tokyo nor London can take much more political flak over Iraq from their own voters. Thanks to the Australian Labor Party's complete stuff-up of recent political events, Howard has such a huge electoral majority in both Reps and Senate, he doesn't care. We look forward to many more such unilateral, reactionary decisions from 'Little Johnny'.

As this report shows, Bomber gave a half-arsed response. If you heard him in the media you would note from his voice that his opposition to Howard's outrageous decision was not at all passionate, in contrast to Sen. Bob Brown of the Greens Party.

Day of Ishtar, Babylonia

Goddess of Love and Battle from the region of Mesopotamia (Greek for 'between the rivers', ie, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers), the area now known as Iraq, and from Assyria. Ishtar is the counterpart of the Phoenician Astarte.

Her name is said the be associated with the word 'Easter', because of her associations, like Easter, with springtime and fertility. The meaning of the name is not known, though it is possible that the underlying stem is the same as that of Assur, which would thus make her the ‘leading one’ or ‘chief’. She was known as Inanna in Sumerian mythology ...

This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with many more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date (or your birthday) when you're there.

ALL Americans Should be Ashamed


How The US Murdered a City
Fallujah: The Truth at Last

Doctor Salam Ismael took aid to Fallujah last month.
This is a report of his visit.

02/17/05 - - IT WAS the smell that first hit me, a smell that is difficult to describe, and one that will never leave me. It was the smell of death. Hundreds of corpses were decomposing in the houses, gardens and streets of Fallujah. Bodies were rotting where they had fallen-bodies of men, women and children, many half-eaten by wild dogs.

A wave of hate had wiped out two-thirds of the town, destroying houses and mosques, schools and clinics. This was the terrible and frightening power of the US military assault.

The accounts I heard over the next few days will live with me forever. You may think you know what happened in Fallujah. But the truth is worse than you could possibly have imagined.

[Emphasis added. -v]

CONTINUE

* Ø * Ø * Ø *

Legacy of Fallujah

This amateur video was shot on the first day of one of the biggest festivals in the Muslim year. But instead of buying new clothes for their children and visiting family and friends, the men of Falluja are digging graves.

Watch the video

Nobel laureate rings energy alarm bell

"Richard Smalley, a Rice University professor who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1996, is calling on the United States to mount a multibillion-dollar campaign to fund research into alternative energy or else face the consequences.

"'It may be a greater challenge for us than the Cold War ... to make it possible for 10 billion people to live the lifestyle you are used to in a way that doesn't cause unacceptable impacts on the environment,' he told an audience of scientists at the International Electron Devices Meeting taking place in San Francisco this week. 'There is no escaping the problem. The consequences will be terrorism, pestilence, famine.' "
Source: CNET News.com via GhostChild

Baz le Tuff heals the Gesarene Demoniac (actual photo).
(Click thumbnail to enlarge)

Great site for info on religions

This one's a real bookmarker: Adherents.com for information about religions. Quite a goldmine. I also often refer to ReligiousTolerance.org which is different but also very good. Thanks, London Almaniac Sylvia for sending the former.

New blog: Turtles All the Way Down

Turtles All the Way Down is my new blog about ... about ... well, hard to explain unless you're an Australian and familiar with the frustratin' ways of Auntie ABC. Enjoy.

US gov't warned about its 'news' vids

"WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 - The comptroller general has issued a blanket warning that reminds federal agencies they may not produce newscasts promoting administration policies without clearly stating that the government itself is the source.

"Twice in the last two years, agencies of the federal government have been caught distributing prepackaged television programs that used paid spokesmen acting as newscasters and, in violation of federal law, failed to disclose the administration's role in developing and financing them.

"And those were not isolated incidents, David M. Walker, the comptroller general, said in a letter dated Thursday that put all agency heads on notice about the practice.

"In fact, it has become increasingly common for federal agencies to adopt the public relations tactic of producing 'video news releases' that look indistinguishable from authentic newscasts and, as ready-made and cost-free reports, are sometimes picked up by local news programs. It is illegal for the government to produce or distribute such publicity material domestically without disclosing its own role."
Source: New York Times [Ta Baz 'Bob Woodward' le Tuff.]

Forest activist Dorothy Stang's murder

"When Sister Dorothy Stang was murdered last weekend, it was just another day in the lives of the perpetrators. This is perhaps the most prominent activist to be murdered in the Amazon since Chico Mendez in 1988.

"She spent decades fighting efforts by loggers and large landholders who continued to steal land and clear large areas of the Amazon rainforest. Shot to death Saturday in northern Brazil by thugs, doubtless hired by the very loggers and Latifunda who accused Stang of inciting violence in the region and supplying weapons and ammunition to local people.

"Her assasination ought come as no surprise in an region still plagued with routine land-related killings, intimidation tactics and use of enslaved peoples as a workforce. Human Rights advocates who worked with Sister Dorothy remain skeptical that the Brazilian government will be able to do anything to change this. Para is the Amazon state with the highest murder rate related to land disputes. According to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a Catholic organisation campaigning for landless people and the poor, 1,237 rural workers died in Brazil from 1985 to 2001, and 40 percent of these occurred in Para ..."
Source: Short Takes: Will Brady's Ruminations
Remembering Sister Dorothy Stang
Dorothy Stang, 74, defended the land
Funeral held for rainforest advocate Stang (NPR, audio linked)

Death of Chico Mendez, in the Book of Days

Greenhouse gases 'do warm oceans'

"Scientists say they have 'compelling' evidence that ocean warming over the past 40 years can be linked to the industrial release of carbon dioxide.

"US researchers compared the rise in ocean temperatures with predictions from climate models and found human activity was the most likely cause.

"In coming decades, the warming will have a dramatic impact on regional water supplies, they predict.

"Details of the study were released at a major science meeting in Washington DC.

"The conference is the annual gathering of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)."
Source: BBC

Image: "Warming oceans should contribute to sea-level rise"

CIA up to its old tricks?

"An Iraqi whose corpse was photographed with grinning U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib died under CIA interrogation while in a position condemned by human rights groups as torture suspended by his wrists, with his hands cuffed behind his back, according to reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

"The death of the prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, became known last year when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke. The U.S. military said back then that the death had been ruled a homicide. But the exact circumstances under which the man died were not disclosed at the time.

"The prisoner died in a position known as 'Palestinian hanging,' the documents reviewed by The AP show. It is unclear whether that position was approved by the Bush administration for use in CIA interrogations."
Source: Boston Globe
Found it at Ghost Child

More claims Australians interrogated Iraqis

"A former head of the Iraq Survey Group has contradicted the Federal Government, saying he is 'almost positive' Australians were involved in the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners.
The Howard Government has consistently said no Australians interrogated Iraqi detainees.
Today Prime Minister John Howard tried to turn the political heat back on to the Opposition.
'This exercise we've had over the past few days has been a nit-picking attempt to damage the political reputation of the Minister for Defence,' Mr Howard said.
But David Kay, who led the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, has told ABC TV's Lateline that Australians were involved in interrogations.
'I'm almost positive they were engaged in areas where interrogations might have been going on,' he said.
Mr Kay does not agree with the Government's distinction between an interview and an interrogation.
'Anyone that was in a room with a prisoner was engaged in interrogation,' he said.
'You weren't playing bridge and so you had to play by the rules that were established for interrogation.
'If I was talking to someone [I] would have said I've had an interview, I've had a discussion.
'I didn't often use the word interrogation but that's what it was.'
DFAT 'in dark'
A former intelligence officer and member of the Iraq Survey Group, Rod Barton, has previously said that he did interrogate prisoners.
Between March and June last year, Mr Barton repeatedly told senior defence officials that he had interviewed prisoners in Iraq and relayed concerns about possible abuse of detainees.
He recommended an end to Australia's involvement.
Source: ABC News Online

Blessed are the whatmakers?

From Pharisee Nation, by John Dear

"Last September, I spoke to some 2,000 students during their annual lecture at a Baptist college in Pennsylvania. After a short prayer service for peace centered on the Beatitudes, I took the stage and got right to the point. 'Now let me get this straight,' I said. 'Jesus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers," which means he does not say, "Blessed are the warmakers," which means, the warmakers are not blessed, which means warmakers are cursed, which means, if you want to follow the nonviolent Jesus you have to work for peace, which means, we all have to resist this horrific, evil war on the people of Iraq.'

"With that, the place exploded, and 500 students stormed out. The rest of them then started chanting, 'Bush! Bush! Bush!'

"So much for my speech. Not to mention the Beatitudes.

I was not at all surprised that George W. Bush was reelected president. As I travel the country speaking out against war, injustice and nuclear weapons, I see many people consciously siding with the culture of war, choosing the path of violence, supporting corporate greed, rampant militarism, and global domination. I see many others swept up in the raging current of patriotism. Since most of these people, beginning with the president, claim to be Christian, I am ashamed and appalled that they support war and systemic injustice, that they do it in the name of God, and that they feign fidelity to the nonviolent Jesus who gave his life resisting institutionalized injustice."
Source: Nick Lewis: The Blog

Uncle Sam Wants You!

USA pumping up military recruitment

"Given that US troops will no doubt be needed in Iraq for years to come, it's no wonder the Bush Administration, nervous about the political implications of a draft, is working overtime to come up with alternative forms of recruitment. The ubiquitous uses of patriotic propaganda include Hollywood films, TV shows, video games, Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, federally mandated acts requiring student contact info, and signing bonuses. With 1,000 new military recruiters coming on board this year, don't be surprised to see enlistment documents at the bottom of your Cracker Jack box."
Source: Marca Bradt, Utne Short Takes
Read full article by Am Johal at Worldpress.org

Kali Yuga: Evil Age begins

February 17, 3102 BCE It is a Hindu belief that the Kali Yuga, or Evil Age, began on this day, which was established by the Indian astronomer Aryabhata of Kusumpara. It is remarkable that Aryabhata lived in the 6th century CE concurrently with the Roman Dionysius (or, Dennis) Exiguus, the creator of the calendar we use today in the West. Kali Yuga is considered the last and most sinful of the four ages of man and is supposed to continue for 432,000 years. Then the world is supposed be destroyed by the goddess Kali. The cycle then begins again with Krita Yuga, the Golden Age of Truth.

The two astronomers, Dionysius and Aryabhata, both experienced on May 31, 531 CE, one in Rome and the other in India, a celestial conjunction that repeats itself every 3,600 years, and drew similar conclusions. Because of this common sidereal event, and the observations of these two astronomers, the Indian and Western calendars have many congruencies.

This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with many more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date (or your birthday) when you're there.

Today is Kyoto Protocol Day

Only two countries' governments oppose the Kyoto Protocol, an amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty on global warming. These two are the Howard government of Australia and the Bush government of the USA.

The whole document

Galton, the ox, Google and the wisdom of crowds

February 16, 1822 Sir Francis Galton (d. 1911), English explorer, statistician, anthropologist, advocate of eugenics (i.e. the discredited notion of improving the physical and mental makeup of the human species by selected parenthood; he coined the term), and investigator of the human mind.

He was born into the remarkable Darwin - Wedgwood family and was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin and Charles Darwin’s half first cousin. It was Galton who gave statistics the concept of regression toward the mean.

Galton was an elitist, a believer in the power of a better class of people, noting “the stupidity and wrong-headedness of many men and women being so great as to be scarcely credible.” It will come as no surprise to the astute Almaniac that many of Galton's ideas have been used by the right wing of politics.

Galton and the ox
Some of his research seemed to show what James Suowiecki (in his book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations) interprets as the superiority of group-think over experts. At one of England’s many fairs, he noticed a wagering competition in which people had to guess on the weight of an ox. In effect, it was like one of those “how many jelly beans in the jar” competitions. Eight hundred people wrote their guesses on slips of paper; some were butchers and farmers, while others were casual guessers.

Averaging the estimates, Galton expected the result to be nowhere near the mark, because so few of the guessers were professionals in the meat business. To his surprise, however, the crowd had come within one pound of the ox’s weight. The group as a whole had guessed that the ox would weigh 1,197 pounds, and the ox’s actual weight was 1,198 pounds.

Suowiecki extrapolates from this and other information that in order to predict winners political opinion pollsters would do better to ask people who they think will win an election, rather than who they want to win, because there is a group wisdom. In fact, bookmakers are better predictors than pollsters, because bettors tend to bet on what they think a result will actually be.

“Under the right circumstances,” Surowiecki argues, “groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.”

Suowiecki points out that this ‘wisdom of crowds’ that Galton stumbled upon at the fair is basically how Google ranks pages ...

This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with many more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date (or your birthday) when you're there.

McLibel activists cleared by Euro court

It seems to have been going forever, and in its 21 years has spawned books, films and countless articles, but the McLibel case is at last closed:

"Two Britons found to have libelled the US fast food chain McDonald's after the longest court case in English legal history did not have a fair trial, the European Court of Human Rights ruled.

"Helen Steel and David Morris, whose 1984 pamphlet accused McDonald's of starving the Third World, destroying rainforests and selling unhealthy food, were also deprived of free speech by the 1997 ruling, it said.

"The Strasbourg-based court, ordered Britain to pay the pair a total of 35,000 euro ($A57,684.38) and offer them a retrial. Britain has three months to appeal the decision.

"Morris, a single father, hailed the ruling as a 'total victory' in comments to reporters outside a McDonald's restaurant in central London where activists began handing out the leaflets at the centre of the libel case 20 years ago.

"It is only the end of the legal battle. It is not the end of the battle for the public to be able to criticise powerful organisations in our society," said Steel."
Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Tides as green energy

I hasten to note that I'm very skeptical about tidal energy due to the huge infrastructure required and the consequent environmental impact. But it's worth reading some of the latest:

"thpr writes "The Electric Power Research Institute and its partners have completed their Offshore Wave Power Feasibility Demonstration Project [PDF file - PW], which defined potential wave energy projects off the shores of the United States. This is building off of work already done in Scotland (and elsewhere). San Francisco, New York and other areas are considering trial installations of the technology. It is interesting to note (table 1 in the report) that the energy density (kW/m^2) that can be achieved is much higher than wind or solar. In addition, harnessing 24% of available wave energy near the US at 50% efficiency is equal to all of the hydropower currently generated in the US (~7% of total electricity production)."
Source: Slashdot

Jon Frum Day, Tanna Island, Vanuatu



Jon Frum, a cargo cult, is a syncretic sect centred on Sulphur Bay on Tanna Island, Vanuatu, and found in some neighbouring islands. A white American named Jon, or John, Frum is also the name of the messenger of this movement; who on his return, will provide the Frum faithful with promised goods, or cargo.

An estimated 90 per cent of the population of Vanuatu is affiliated with a Christian denomination, the largest being Presbyterian, followed by Roman Catholic and Anglican. Jon Frum forms a small minority.

Some Frum members say that Jon Frum is a benevolent deity who lives in the crater of Tanna's highest mountain, Yasur, with his several thousand strong army, or else he is the 'king of America' ...

This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with many more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date (or your birthday) when you're there.

First Aussie blog conference all about $$

"The blogging phenomenon will go corporate in February, when Australia’s first blogging conference will focus on how blogs can evolve into a channel for corporate communications.

"The conference, to be staged in a yet-to-be-determined Melbourne venue on 25 February, is the brainchild of Mick Stanic, a former executive producer with the Singleton Ogilvy advertising agency."
Source: ZDNet Australia via Michael Corkill with thanks.

History's largest protest: 12 million

2003 Grimly determined to invade Iraq and thus secure fossil fuels to drive Western consumerism, the leaders of the 'Free World' plugged their ears when global protests against war on Iraq occurred in more than 600 cities worldwide. Estimates from 10 million - 15 million made this the largest day of protest in the history of humankind.

So says the 2004 Guinness Book of Records which cites this day’s activities as the largest mass protest movement in history. However, other estimates have it that more than 12 million people worldwide marched in demonstrations against America’s illegal, unprovoked and pre-emptive impending invasion of Iraq.

In Rome one to three million people were on the streets in one of the Italian capital's largest ever mass demonstrations. In London, estimates of the number of marchers varied from 750,000 (by the police) to over 1.5 million (by the organisers, the Stop the War Coalition) and was the largest demonstration in the city's history.

In Berlin there were half a million in the largest demonstration for some decades. There were also protest marches all over France as well as in many other European cities, drawing attendance figures in the tens of thousands per city. In Ireland, one hundred thousand turned out in Dublin, for a parade that was originally expected to draw one fifth that number ...

This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with many more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date (or your birthday) when you're there.

"Iraq attack not solution": UNSCOM head warned

On this day, two years ago

… I believe that there is a very real prospect now that the United States of America will attack Iraq without the approval of the UN Security Council. That is contrary to international law, it should not happen, and I believe the consequences of such an action could be possibly catastrophic. I also finally believe that war is almost certain not to be the solution to any of the problems that are posed by Saddam Hussein, and they are real problems. The smaller reason, not so small for we Australians, is, I don't know how to put this as simply as possible.... Let me just say that I'm sick to death of the lies that we're being told about this by the Prime Minister of Australia. I heard him again this morning on a national television interview, and it was shocking …
International law is important here, and we mustn't commit the terrible mistake and folly in our pursuit of a criminal, by ourselves breaking the law. Because then it brings the whole system into disrepute and that is what I fear we face if the Americans go it alone here. We will trash 50 years of post World War II international law and replace it with the rule that might is right, and that's what we've been trying to get away from.
Richard Butler, former director of UN weapons inspection in Iraq (UNSCOM), recorded on the day he marched in the anti-war rally in Sydney, Australia, February 15, 2003 [emphasis added]

Wilson's Almanac on radio

Readers living in my neck of the South Pacific might be interested to know that there are now two radio stations on which your almanackist is appearing regularly.

Here's the schedule:

Radio 2BBB-FM: Wilson's Almanac Book of Days
Fri Sat Sun 7.45AM
Mon-Thur 9.45AM

ABC Afternoon Show with Mike Corkill: 'Blogging Around'
Tues 2.45PM

Google Maps? Try MultiMap.com instead

Google has launched Google Maps in Beta stage. It's a valiant effort, but not the best free map site around. Perhaps it will improve in the next version.

MultiMap, to my mind, is a much better service. For starters, Google Maps only has one country out of 191 (guess which), and nothing on the home page that tells you that. Apart from being incredibly Americocentric, it's a time-waster as the Rest of Us try to get up some little places like Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and so on, and they just won't come. It would be OK if they just told the readers that they only have one country so far.

MultiMap immediately loaded Australia plus a separate map of the other countries when I opened the homepage, presumably reading my IP addy and concluding where I came from.

From there I can quickly go to any part of the world. Being as fixated on my own location as the Googlers are, I tried my own vicinity and within three or four clicks I was able to zoom in on Sandy Beach, right down to my own street. You can also search the world by town name or postcode, and the gifs are saveable, which is a great feature. And no ads. Cool. Top marks to MultiMap.

Orange is the season's colour

Habib torture claims: transcript

Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib appeared on TV this week with his allegations of having been tortured by various agencies with the full knowledge of Australian officials, in Camp X-Ray and elsewhere.

"Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib says an Australian official stood by and watched as he was tortured in Pakistan.

"His claims of abuse and mistreatment have prompted the Opposition to call for a full investigation into whether Australian officials were somehow involved.

"Government officials will be quizzed about Mr Habib's treatment when they front a Senate estimates hearing later this morning.

"Mr Habib was freed from Guantanamo Bay, without charge, last month."

MAMDOUH HABIB: When they strip me, I don't know they put something in my bottom. I don't know what it is, and they put me nappies and they tied me up and they make photograph for me, in front of me, and they make video.

KIM LANDERS: From there he was taken to Egypt where he says he was tortured daily for six months.

MAMDOUH HABIB: With electric shock, beatings, they drugs.

KIM LANDERS: And there was no respite during the next two-and-a-half years he was held without charge at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where he says he was sexually humiliated by a female interrogator.

MAMDOUH HABIB: It's very rude actually. She put her hand in her privates, she take stuff of the blood and she threw it in my face.

KIM LANDERS: The 49 year-old claims Australian officials knew about some of the abuse.

At a military airport in Pakistan, he was twice visited by an Australian official.

MAMDOUH HABIB: Australian, he was watching me when I been beaten.

KIM LANDERS: And in Egypt another mystery Australian spoke to his American interrogators.

MAMDOUH HABIB: I have no idea. But if I see him, I will know him.

KIM LANDERS: Claims these officials did nothing while an Australian citizen was tortured have shocked the Opposition's Shadow Attorney General, Nicola Roxon.

NICOLA ROXON: The allegation that any Australians were involved in this sort of torture I think is quite explosive. There is a serious question to be asked. Did they or the US jeopardise the case against Mr Habib by letting torture be used as part of his interrogation?"

Source

No sign of a fair go for David yet
Fair Go for David (Note: Aussie David Hicks, also held in Amerika's Gitmo for years without charge, is still stuck in limbo.)

Google news: australians guantanamo

Valentine's Day origins and folklore

This year for Valentine's Day, why not dump the sentimental cards and the dozen red roses, and do something really traditional, something that harks back to the origins of this ancient commemoration?

If you want to get right into the ancient spirit of Valentine's Day, try these party tricks. First, go with your friends to a local cave and sacrifice some goats and a dog. Find two young men of good breeding and smear their foreheads with your bloody knife, then wipe the blood off with wool soaked in milk. The youths must laugh during this.

Next, your whole party should run licentiously around town wearing the skins of said goats, and infertile townsfolk will come out on the streets to be belted by you with straps of goat-skin. This will help them have children.

At some appropriate juncture of your evening, arrange to have the names of all the females written on billets, put in a container and drawn out one at a time by the males. This will enable the sexes to pair off as lovers.

Yes, the modern practice of celebrating Valentine's Day most likely has its roots in the ancient Roman celebration of the Lupercalia, when all these weird customs were indulged in ...

This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with many more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date (or your birthday) when you're there.

This guy isn't a salesman

And he hates hype

"Look, I hate those massive overlong letters, where 'salesmen' try 500 different ways of persuading you to part with your cash. I'm not a 'salesman' and I never will be. I like the truth too much, and I can't stand hype."
mini site profits (caution, it's more than 2,600 words long)

Valentine's Eve love spells

In olde England, Valentine's Eve, February 13, was one of a number of nights throughout the year on which prognostications would be made in order to discover when one would find a lover, and who that lover would be. An English practice of the mid-eighteenth century was for a girl to gather five bay-leaves. One was pinned to each of the four corners of the girl's pillow, and one in the middle. If she dreamed of her sweetheart she would be married before the year was out.

To make it more sure, and the dream presumably more vivid, the girl would hard-boil an egg, take out the yolk, fill it with salt, and eat it shell and all at bedtime, without speaking or drinking after it. I tried it last year but I think it only works for females

This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with many more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date (or your birthday) when you're there.

"Americans tortured me in Gitmo" - Aussie

"Mamdouh Habib still has a bruise on his lower back. He says it is a sign of the beatings he endured in a prison in Egypt. Interrogators there put out cigarettes on his chest, he says, and he lifts his shirt to show the marks. He says he got the dark spot on his forehead when Americans hit his head against the floor at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

"After being arrested in Pakistan in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, he was held as a terror suspect by the Americans for 40 months. Back home now, Mr. Habib alleges that at every step of his detention - from Pakistan, to Egypt, to Afghanistan, to Guantánamo - he endured physical and psychological abuse.

"The physical abuse, he said, ranged from a kick 'that nearly killed me' to electric shocks administered through a wired helmet that he said interrogators told him could detect whether he was lying ...

"Mr. Habib said any confessions he made were a result of torture and were not genuine.

"'Whatever they wanted me to sign,' he said, 'I signed to survive.'"
Source: New York Times

* Ø * Ø * Ø *

"Freed Australian terror suspect Mamdouh Habib cried during a television interview while describing his torture and revealed he made a secret pact with fellow detainee David Hicks."
Source: The Herald-Sun

Photo: Regis Martin for The New York Times. "Mamdouh Habib, shown back in Australia with his wife, Maha, and two of their four children, Ahmed and Hajer, after his 40 months in custody."

Who bombed the Sydney Hilton?

February 13, 1978 A bomb exploded outside the Hilton Hotel, Sydney, killing two garbage men and a police officer. Inside the hotel were heads of government from a number of Commonwealth countries. Corrupt police began a campaign of framing members of the Ananda Marga cult for the crime, and eventually the ‘Ananda Marga Three’ were released from prison and compensated.

It is usually called 'Australia's first outbreak of terrorism', but was it really? To this day the identity of the person or persons responsible remains a mystery. Were Australia's security police responsible?

Read on

Paranoia grips the U.S. capital

By Eric Margolis

"This week, former military intelligence analyst William Arkin revealed a hitherto unknown directive, with the Orwellian name 'JCS Conplan 0300-97,' authorizing the Pentagon to employ special, ultra-secret 'anti-terrorist' military units on American soil for what the author claims are 'extra-legal missions.'

"In other words, using U.S. soldiers to kill or arrest Americans, acts that have been illegal since the U.S. Civil War."
Source: Toronto Sun

Google might host Wikipedia

By Matt Hines

"Wiki Media Foundation, the group behind the Wikipedia online encyclopedia project, said Friday that search giant Google has volunteered to host some of its content on company servers.

"In a notice posted to the nonprofit organization's Web site, the group, also known as Wikimedia, said its board of directors is currently considering the terms of Google's offer and plans to meet with the search company sometime in March.

"The group was quick to point out that any relationship established with Google would not require it to begin advertising on its Web site.

"Google representatives refused to confirm a deal with Wikimedia but indicated that the company plans continued support for the effort and its various projects."
Source: Tech News on ZDNet via Baz le Tuff, with thanx.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia Unusual Articles page

Post Surgery, Granny D Speaks Again

Political Activist Recovers Voice

"CONCORD, N.H. [USA] -- Leave it to Granny D to have the last word. After undergoing throat surgery last week, there was concern the 95-year-old former U.S. Senate candidate might not speak again.

"But Doris 'Granny D' Haddock has no intention of losing her famous voice.

"'I'm feeling very very optimistic,' she said from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. 'I think I can lick this thing and I'm certainly going to try.'

"Haddock's voice is raspy and she has difficulty speaking because of a breathing tube in her throat, but her genteel New England tones were still apparent in a brief interview Friday with The Associated Press.

"'Four days ago she didn't speak at all, three days ago it was like a real ugly Darth Vader and yesterday she started articulating enough so that you could understand everything she said,' said her son, Jim Haddock."
Source: TheChamplainChannel.com - WNNE

Granny D, in the Book of Days

Mandela's curious background

Fifteen years ago today, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, a political prisoner for 27 years, was freed from Victor Verster prison outside Cape Town, South Africa. Expected by the waiting media to drive past them in a car, Mandela surprised everyone by walking out, hand in hand with his wife, Winnie Mandela.

It was the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and the South African regime of apartheid no longer had to fear the geo-strategic threat from the USSR which had been focused for years on Southern Africa as a whole, as confirmed by KGB and other documents available in recent years. Thus Mandela, who had rejected the non-violent strategies for national liberation developed in South Africa by Mahatma Gandhi, was considered to be no longer a threat.

African National Congress: background
The ANC was formed in Bloemfontein, SA by non-Communists in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress. A concerted effort directed from Moscow had by 1931 converted the ANC to a Marxist-Leninist front dominated for decades by open leaders of the Moscow-aligned South African Communist Party, as directed by Lenin in 1920 at the Second Congress of the Communist International, or Comintern. (In 1921, Lenin stated that the Comintern regarded South Africa as "one of its frontlines".)

In 1927, leaders of the Comintern directed that the SACP "must determinedly and consistently put forward the creation of an independent native republic" in South Africa. The ANC, still non-Communist, now had to be converted into a "militant nationalist revolutionary organization". Using Lenin's express methods of the manipulation of social forces and infiltration of popular organizations, first, the Marxist-Leninists captured the leadership offices of the ANC Youth League, then those of the ANC itself.

When Mandela made decisions as an ANC leader, he did so as part of a Moscow-directed team, with 27 SACP (South African Communist Party) members out of an ANC National Executive of 35. The ANC and the SACP were so intertwined that they proclaimed themselves as "two equal pillars of the revolution".

Mandela's beliefs
The charismatic leader Mandela was an enthusiastic supporter of the Soviet dictatorship that Mikhail Gorbachev later alleged had killed tens of millions of its own citizens. In 1962, long after most Communists of East and West had removed Stalin from their hagiography, and by which time evidence abounded of the USSR being the most comprehensive dictatorship in history, Mandela wrote that applying "the great qualities of revolutionary geniuses like Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin" would transform South Africa into a veritable paradise:

"Under a Communist Party government" he wrote, "South Africa will become a land of milk and honey".

Under Mandela's auspices, the ANC developed terrorist tactics that included the infamous 'necklacing' of opponents and informers: this involved placing a petrol-drenched car tyre around the neck of a living victim, and setting fire to it.

On June 12, 1964, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in terrorism. Contrary to ANC/SACP/pop-star propaganda and popular opinion of the time, in later years Mandela spent much of his imprisonment in comfortable, if not luxurious, quarters, fitted with telephone, fax and other communications devices that enabled him to organise against those who provided them. He spent 27 years in prison, although he could have gained freedom at any time by denouncing violence, the fascist government's condition of his continued incarceration. On December 7, 1988 he was moved into a luxury home in the grounds of Pollsmore Prison and after his release from this government-provided house, he moved into a very luxurious home in one of the Johannesburg’s wealthiest suburbs, although conducting media interviews from a small house he rented in Soweto.

On May 10, 1994, Nelson Mandela was inaugurated President of South Africa.

This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with many more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date (or your birthday) when you're there.

Some "Jeff Gannon" highlights

... no longer available on the Talon News website

"Following Jeff Gannon's February 8 resignation as Talon News Washington bureau chief and White House correspondent, Talon News -- which appears to be more of a Republican political advocacy group than a media outlet -- removed all archived news stories from its website. Despite Gannon's claim that he is not 'someone who takes a strong position and speaks in support of that issue,' a Media Matters for America review of Gannon's catalogue of work for Talon (still available as cached documents via Google) showed that Gannon often used his news articles as a platform to defend the Bush administration and attack its opponents."
Source: Media Matters for America

Google News talon gannon

Rachael Kohn's 'Spirit of (Some) Things'

"The Spirit of Things is an adventure into religion and spirituality. It explores contemporary values and beliefs as expressed through ritual, art, music, and sacred texts."
Source: The Spirit of Things, ABC Radio National, Australia

In coming programs, Rachael Kohn will be presenting a wide variety of religious programs for the Australian audience:

Neo-Paganism in Australia: Why some people of the Jewish faith are turning to Nature-based religions
Religion and Humour: Laugh with the Stand-Up Rabbi
Aboriginal spirituality: Is there a connection between the Dreamtime and the Torah?
Ancient religions of Peru: Morty Feinstein's personal encounter with an Incan deity
The Still, Small Voice Within: Memoirs from the Holocaust
Catholic theology in turmoil: A view from Jerusalem
Buddhism and Sacred Texts: The Kabbalah

Campbell + the curse of the Blackberry

My favourite funny story of the week, so far, is from the UK. (Campbell was embroiled in the row involving the BBC's reporting of Blair's dossier on weapons of mass destruction. Jeremy Paxman is a seasoned presenter with the Beeb.) Beware the Send button!

"Alastair Campbell was at the centre of attacks on Labour's campaigning style after accidentally sending BBC journalists an email which expressed his disdain for the corporation in even stronger language than usual.

"The former Downing Street communications chief inflamed the row about aggressive election tactics by mistakenly sending the message to BBC's Newsnight programme on Monday. The programme had been looking into his role as the initiator of controversial Labour campaign posters depicting the Tory leader, Michael Howard, as a flying pig that were alleged by some to be anti-semitic.

"The message, from his portable Blackberry emailer, had been intended for a colleague. It read: 'Fuck off and cover something important you twats!' In a second email to the BBC he blamed his mistake on the fact he was 'not very good at this email Blackberry malarkey', adding: 'Campbell swears shock. Final sentence of earlier email probably a bit colourful and personal considering we have never actually met but I'm sure you share the same sense of humour as your star presenter Mr P[axman]'."

Continue at The Guardian

Pentagon to broadcast to U.S. homes

[It's not long since we heard that they were considering a policy of disinformation, even with US allies, if it served their interests ...]

"The U.S. military is to beam its own news coverage to millions of Americans.

"Moving on from its phase of embedding journalists, or as some would say, 'a policy of restricting and contolling the flow of information,' the Pentagon will now produce and disseminate the news itself. It will be beamed to the public at no charge. The service will emanate from what is known as the Pentagon Channel, an internal public relations television unit within the Department of Defense. It was set up nine months ago.

"The government-run TV service will be channeled to the public through EchoStar Communication's Dish Network which will offer the Pentagon Channel to its more than 11 million viewers on a no-cost basis. Programming will appear on the network's public interest channels and will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
Source and full text

'Torture jet' flies back to Scotland

"A CIA jet which takes terror suspects to countries where torture is routinely used during interrogation has again landed at Glasgow airport en route to Baghdad. The Boeing 737, which has changed its identity several times, landed in Glasgow at 6am on Monday and took off for Iraq at 8.39am.

"As it was a 'private' flight, no details of the purpose of the journey or the passengers and crew are available.

"The Herald has revealed how a Gulfstream jet, owned by a CIA front company, used Prestwick airport on numerous occasions in the wake of the September 11 attacks and refuelled there last summer. The Gulfstream visited Glasgow airport nine times in 2003 and on five occasions stayed for one or two nights.

"The Boeing 737 is also understood to be owned by a CIA front company. It has visited Glasgow on several occasions, sometimes staying overnight. The jet has also used RAF Northolt, where the Royal Flight is stationed.

"Both aircraft are understood to carry out rendition flights: transporting prisoners to countries where they may be tortured, against international law, for information to assist the battle against terrorism.

"The 737 is owned by a company called Keeler and Tate Management LLC of Reno, Nevada. Investigations in America suggest it is a CIA front company.

"The aircraft always depart from Washington and have flown to 50 destinations outside the US including the Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba, as well as Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Afghanistan and Libya. They have been nicknamed the Guantanamo Bay Express."

Continues here

Not so happy new year

"Beijing -- China, which puts more people to death than the rest of the world combined, has executed at least 650 in the two months leading up to the Lunar New Year, rights group Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

"The executions reached a fearful crescendo in the last two weeks before the holiday, when 200 people were put to death, according to the London-based organisation, which based its data on official Chinese media reports.

"'The true figure is certainly much higher, as China refuses to publish full details of all the people it executes', Amnesty said in a statement on China's 'horrific New Year'.

"China usually executes large numbers of convicted criminals before major public holidays in order to warn pickpockets, con artists and others who might try to take advantage of large crowds gathering in public spaces."
Source

View all AI documents on China
More about the death penalty

Doris 'Granny D' Haddock listed in fair condition

"Political activist Doris 'Granny D' Haddock, who ran for the U.S. Senate last year and gained national attention by walking across the country to promote campaign finance reform, continues to recover from windpipe surgery.

"The 95-year-old Democrat went into Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center last week. Her condition yesterday was listed as fair.

"A family spokesman had said she was expected to recover but the long-term prospects of whether she would regain use of her well-known New England-tinged voice was uncertain."
Source: Concord Monitor Online

Granny D in the Book of Days

Sharpreader RSS/Atom feedreader

As my friends know, I like RSS but haven't been happy using feedreaders. I like this one, mainly due to the subtle popup near my Taskbar each time a new item comes in. It fades away slowly enough for you to have a squiz at it and see if you want to click the link.

Also, "Handles all RSS versions, ATOM, modules like dublin core, content:encoding, xhtml:body, etc. "
SharpReader RSS Aggregator

And here are some good feeds to read in it plus lots of resources, if you're new to feed reading. And here are some more.

Govt MP calls for release of asylum seekers

"The row over why a mentally-ill Australian woman was detained in an immigration detention centre has intensified with one federal Coalition MP calling for the release of other asylum seekers into the community."
Source: ABC Oz

[As the headline notes, this guy isn't in the Opposition, but a Government member, which makes the story quite remarkable. Slowly but slowly, Australia is waking up to the fact that its government runs concentration camps for unwanted people of colour fleeing tyranny. Apparently even some Aussie politicians also have souls, and possibly a little moral rectitude, though they are reported to be very few in number.]

Outsourcing torture

By Jane Mayer

The secret history of America’s "extraordinary rendition" program

"On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that 'torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.' Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush’s statement. Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that 'you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.'"
Source: New Yorker (Thanx Chris Keeley of intervention.org)

Inflammatory Breast Cancer site gets boost

The Tell J-9 page, which has important information about IBC (Inflammatory Breast Cancer) has had a boost from a very kind webmaster called Fogie, of Fogie's Follies, Frolics & Funnies.

Fogie runs an adswap service for e-list owners, and does it extremely well, too. I'm a member, and so is J-9, and Adswaps really helps our circulation (contact Fogie if you're interested in advancing your list like a rocket!).

Anyway, I asked Fogie if he could :Tell J-9" to people on his list, namely other ezine and newsletter moderators, and he did so, and word is really snowballing. In just a few days, about 20 people have "Told J-9".

Check out Fogie, willya, and please ... Tell J-9.

Announcing an interactive game forum

Kalliope is hard to explain, but easy to play. In a nutshell, the Kill the President narrative poem has code and clues in it and Kalliope is a new forum for discovering their meaning. Check it out.

Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day) (moveable feast, February 8 in 2005)

Tomorrow (Ash Wednesday, also moveable, is February 9 in 2005) begins the 6-week period of fasting in the Christian world, known as Lent, the forty days' fast preceding Easter. Today is known to the French as Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), as it is the day that all foods may be eaten. Pancakes were popular as families ate the last of the eggs and butter that they were allowed before Lent.

The name ‘Shrove’ comes from the archaic English word ‘to shrive’, which means to confess or hear confessions of sin, a practice that was customary in the church on this day.

The custom of eating pancakes at Shrove Tuesday was popular in many parts of Europe, including many parts distant from Britain, such as the Zemaitija province of Lithuania where it was an important celebration. Pancakes were popular as families ate the last of the eggs and butter that they were allowed before Lent.

To the Germans it is known as Fasnacht. The word has also come to mean a diamond-shaped foodstuff that's eaten on the occasion: a yeast-raised potato pastry that's deep-fried like a doughnut. They were originally made and served on Shrove Tuesday to use up the fat that was forbidden during Lent ...

Read more at our Pancake Day page, in the Scriptorium, and have a great Pancake Day!

Never mind sloth, lust and gluttony ...

but look out if you're a cruel, bigoted adulterer.

"Stay in bed all day, gorge yourself on chocolate and lust as much as you want -- it's not going to land you in hell.

"Most people believe the seven deadly sins are out of date, and that traditional transgressions such as sloth, gluttony and lust should not stop you passing through the pearly gates.

"Cruelty is considered the worst sin anyone can commit nowadays, followed by adultery, bigotry, dishonesty, hypocrisy and selfishness. Of the seven deadly sins enumerated in their present form by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, only greed is still viewed as a reliable passport to eternal damnation."

Seven deadly sins: 1 Pride 2 Envy 3 Anger 4 Sloth 5 Greed 6 Gluttony 7 Lust

New sins: 1 Cruelty 2 Adultery 3 Bigotry 4 Dishonesty 5 Hypocrisy 6 Greed 7 Selfishness

Full text: The Guardian

It's a tough job

But it depends on who you're writing for. :)

"Writing the annual St Patrick's Day greeting to the Taoiseach was one of the most boring tasks for a US president's speechwriter, President George W. Bush's recently-retired speechwriter and special adviser has said.
Seán O'Driscoll, in New York, reports.

"Mr Matthew Scully, who retired in August as senior speechwriter and special adviser to President Bush, said that the annual address to the Taoiseach while accepting a bowl of shamrock was almost as dreaded as the state of the union address."

Source: Irish Times (subscription)

Unqualified medics 'did amputations'

"UNQUALIFIED US military medics stationed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison reportedly carried out amputations and recycled used chest tubes.

"A Time magazine report today said staff also lacked medical supplies to treat inmates and that a medic was ordered, by one account, to cover up a homicide inside the jail.

"Although the prison just outside Baghdad was jammed with as many as 7000 detainees -- some of whom displayed serious mental illnesses -- no US doctor was in residence for most of 2003 following the US-led invasion of Iraq.

"The report said 'with straitjackets unavailable, tethers -- like the leash held by Private Lynndie England -- were put to use at Abu Ghraib to control unruly or mentally disturbed detainees, sometimes with the concurrence of a doctor'."

Read on here

Beneficial Effects of Sunlight on Cancer

"We all know that too much sunlight can cause skin cancer. However studies have now suggested that sunlight may be beneficial in some cancers. It may reduce the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and may also play a role in melanoma survival.

"Professor Bruce Armstrong, Head of the School of Public Health at Sydney University, talks about these studies.

"Also on the program: Associate Professor Rebecca Mason, Head of the Department of Physiology at Sydney University, talks about the role and effects of Vitamin D."
Source (with audio)

Sunlight May Not Be All Bad for Some Cancers

Cornelia Rau scandal tip of iceberg

Rau inquiry must be public: Labor

Australia: "The Federal Opposition says an investigation into why a mentally ill woman was held in custody at the Baxter detention centre in South Australia must be held in public ...

"Sydney woman Cornelia Rau was held in a Queensland prison for six months before being transferred to the Baxter detention centre where she was held for a further four months.

"Labor's immigration spokesman, Laurie Ferguson, says the inquiry must not take place behind closed doors."
Source More
PM refuses to apologise to Rau

Baxter? What is it?
So what's the fuss? What is the Baxter detention centre?

Slap-bang in the middle of one of the world's hottest deserts, Baxter is a facility (prison)built by the Australian federal government for holding asylum seekers, some of whom have been languishing there for years. Cornelia Rau should not have been imprisoned there (because she is an Australian citizen, and was listed for months as a missing person). On the other hand ... nobody should be imprisoned there. From all accounts, if you're not crazy when they throw you in Baxter, you will be by the time you get out.

Read about Baxter, Australia's shame

"Present policies of Mandatory Detention, Forced Deportations and ‘border protection’ represent an attack on fundamental principles of human rights and justice. They represent an unprecedented politicisation and corporatisation of the military and public services. They are inflicting appalling suffering on children and adults with long lasting psychological damage. These policies are designed to appeal to and incite racism and fear."
Source: Easter 2005 Baxter convergence - be there if you can!

Google up some Baxter

A phone line to the dear departed

"BERLIN (AFP) - People who feel the need to talk to their near and dear even after they have passed away can now do so quite literally, thanks to a special mobile phone invented by a German who wanted to keep in touch with his late mother.

"The system, patented by Juergen Broether and on sale since last December, consists of a one-way phone and loudspeaker device that can be buried close to the person's coffin, and will transmit a voice message into the tomb for a period of up to a year."

Source

Almost $9bn of Iraqi oil revenue missing

File On 4: Broadcast - BBC Radio 4,Tuesday 1 February

"The BBC's File On 4 programme has learnt that out of over $20bn raised in oil revenues during US-led rule, the use of $8.8bn is unaccounted for.

"US government auditors criticise the Coalition Provisional Authority for failing to manage the money properly.

"In one case, auditors say the key to a safe holding millions of dollars was kept in an open backpack in an office.

"'There was insufficient internal control to assure that money was spent for the benefit of the Iraqis, as the UN Security Council resolution mandated', said the auditors' chief of staff, Ms Ginger Cruz."

Full text and audio: Information Clearing House

Life flourishes at crushing depth

"Tiny single-celled creatures, many of them previously unknown to science, have been found at the deepest point in the world's oceans, almost 11km down. "
Source: BBC NEWS | Science/Nature

Blogmanac is a googlewhack

It was nice to hear from a Mark Dunk today, who wrote to inform me that the Blogmanac has a googlewhack, namely, Androgeny Extradited. He even explained what a googlewhack is and although I had a vague idea before, I have a much better idea now.

Mark wrote:

"If you don't know what a googlewhack is, it's an internet word game/work avoidance mechanism. You have to search google for two words that have to appear in dictionary.com and if Google returns a single result ie. it says results 1-1 of 1 in the blue bar then you've found a Googlewhack which is apparently a 1 in 3 billion probability.

"Other rules are no quote marks in the search, and if the returned page is a wordlist or from a dictionary, encyclopedia, thesaurus etc. it doesn't count.

"I heard about the game from a friend and we decided to give it a go for a bit of fun. After a string of complete failures and a few near misses with 2 or 3 results we searched for Androgeny Extradited and found an archived page from Wilson's Blogmanac and you became our first Googlewhack. Apparently it's the done thing to pass this information on to whoever runs the site if an email link is on the page.

"So there you have it a strange story but nonetheless true."

Thank you, Mark, for taking the time to notify us!

Here come da draft!

You know, it's quite an amazing thing how people can hold such widely divergent opinions. I don't think I've ever met anyone who thinks there are not enough soldiers in the world, but here's a group of highly influential Americans who hold that view and are lobbying on its behalf:

"Dear Senator Frist, Senator Reid, Speaker Hastert, and Representative Pelosi:"

"The United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume. Those responsibilities are real and important. They are not going away. The United States will not and should not become less engaged in the world in the years to come. But our national security, global peace and stability, and the defense and promotion of freedom in the post-9/11 world require a larger military force than we have today. The administration has unfortunately resisted increasing our ground forces to the size needed to meet today's (and tomorrow's) missions and challenges.

"So we write to ask you and your colleagues in the legislative branch to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps ..."

Open Letter: Open Letter: A bipartisan group urges the congressional leadership to substantively increase the size of the Army and the Marines.

[Rumours are also circulating on the Net that intensive lobbying is being conducted in the US for young women to be drafted into the US armed forces. I'd like to learn more as I've seen no evidence of this.]

BORN YESTERDAY...NOT! — Orwell Himself Couldn't Have Imagined This Bullshit!

From Lisa:

While commentators (one pointedly conservative(!)) take aim at BushCo for the Armstrong Williams debacle and previous similarly-themed transgressions, Rove has altered the course of the ship of state ever-so-slightly. Propaganda is no longer being outsourced to the media; rather, public servants will now be called upon to shed their impartiality and pimp the path of righteousness.

CONTINUE

Powell's big lie to UN, two years ago today


On this day in 2003, Colin Powell addressed the UN Security Council on Iraq and falsely said that a tape recording he held revealed that Osama bin Laden was pals with Saddam Hussein.

In fact, a translation showed that in the tape, bin Laden called for Hussein’s assassination, as reported in Wilson’s Almanac. The story hardly surfaced in the media.

Powell, the so called "White House dove" who oversaw the unnecessary death of many tens of thousands of Iraqis in the first Gulf War, excelled himself on September 27 later that year of 2003.

Powell publicly lied that the Clinton administration "conducted a four-day bombing campaign in late 1998 based on the intelligence that he [UNSCOM director, Richard Butler] had. That resulted in the weapons inspectors being thrown out."

In fact, Saddam Hussein, after having ceased to comply with UN weapons inspectors on October 31, had sent a letter to the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan offering to facilitate the inspections. UNSCOM was withdrawn by the US, not kicked out by Hussein (read more). Yet another story that you won't see much in the media.

Powell has an uncanny ability to maintain some sort of image as one of the good guys in the Bush regime. Worth thinking about.

Global warming due to massive amounts of hot air emanating from Washington, D.C.


[The State of the Union speech shouldn't have been surprising for its total lack of content and pure jabberwocky jibberish. We should be used to it by now. Here's a late January example that should have warmed us up. -v]

Bush's Unprecedented Attack on African Americans
By James Ridgeway, Mondo Washington, The Village Voice

"We've got to shed ourselves of bigotry if we expect to lead by example," Bush said. "And I'll do the very best I can, as president, to make sure the promise—and I believe in the promise of America—is available for everybody."

WASHINGTON, D.C. — For four years Bush didn't meet with the Congressional Black Caucus and paid no heed to African Americans, except, of course, to repeat the Republican mantra of how terribly concerned we all are and how we just want to include you under the big Republican tent. But yesterday, reinvigorated by his election mandate, Bush called the caucus and fed them a line of bullshit.

Arguing that his "reforms," ranging from education to Social Security, will help blacks, he offered an insulting cliché: "Civil rights is a good education. Civil rights is opportunity. Civil rights is home ownership. Civil rights is owning your own business. Civil rights is making sure all aspects of our society are open for everybody." When you get past the rhetoric, Bush's ownership society amounts to an unprecedented attack on black people.

[Emphasis added. -v]

CONTINUE

How America Became the World's Dispensable Nation

An article by Michael Lind (senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington) which was originally published in the Financial Times in January. I think it's even more interesting after the SOTU address.

"In a second inaugural address tinged with evangelical zeal, George W. Bush declared: 'Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world'. The peoples of the world, however, do not seem to be listening. A new world order is indeed emerging -- but its architecture is being drafted in Asia and Europe, at meetings to which Americans have not been invited.

"Consider Asean Plus Three (APT), which unites the member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations with China, Japan and South Korea. This group could become the world's largest trade bloc, dwarfing the European Union and North American Free Trade Association. The deepening ties of the APT member states are a big diplomatic defeat for the US, which hoped to use the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to limit the growth of Asian economic regionalism at American expense. In the same way, recent moves by South American countries to bolster an economic community represent a clear rejection of US aims to dominate a western-hemisphere free-trade zone.

"Consider, as well, the EU's rapid progress towards military independence. American protests failed to prevent the EU establishing its own military planning agency, independent of the Nato alliance (and thus of Washington). Europe is building up its own rapid reaction force. And, despite US resistance, the EU is developing Galileo, its own satellite network, which will break the monopoly of the US global positioning satellite system.

"The participation of China in Europe's Galileo project has alarmed the US military. But China shares an interest with other aspiring space powers in preventing American control of space for military and commercial uses. Even while collaborating with Europe on Galileo, China is partnering with Brazil to launch satellites. And in an unprecedented move, China recently agreed to host Russian forces for joint Russo-Chinese military exercises.

"The US is being sidelined even in the area that Mr Bush identified in last week's address as America's mission: the promotion of democracy and human rights ..."

Continues here

Strangely sad



Lava from Kilauea volcano in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park enters the
Pacific Ocean at dawn on Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2005, in Volcano, Hawaii. (AP
Photo/David Jordan) Source

New! Comics page at Wilson's Almanac

Check out the new Comics Page, worth bookmarking if you like a daily dose of funnies.

Peanuts; Dilbert; Believe it or Not!; BC; Wizard of Id; Liberty Meadows; PVP.

What I Heard about Iraq

Eliot Weinberger

"In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq’. I heard him say: ‘The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is: not that damned many.’

"In February 2001, I heard Colin Powell say that Saddam Hussein ‘has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.’

"That same month, I heard that a CIA report stated: ‘We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its weapons of mass destruction programmes.’

"In July 2001, I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.’

"On 11 September 2001, six hours after the attacks, I heard that Donald Rumsfeld said that it might be an opportunity to ‘hit’ Iraq. I heard that he said: ‘Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.’

"I heard that Condoleezza Rice asked: ‘How do you capitalise on these opportunities?’

"I heard that on 17 September the president signed a document marked top secret that directed the Pentagon to begin planning for the invasion and that, some months later, he secretly and illegally diverted $700 million approved by Congress for operations in Afghanistan into preparing for the new battle front.

"In February 2002, I heard that an unnamed ‘senior military commander’ said: ‘We are moving military and intelligence personnel and resources out of Afghanistan to get ready for a future war in Iraq.’

"I heard the president say that Iraq is ‘a threat of unique urgency’, and that there is ‘no doubt the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised’.

"I heard the vice president say: ‘Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.’

I heard the president tell Congress: ‘The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.’

"I heard him say: ‘The dangers we face will only worsen from month to month and from year to year. To ignore these threats is to encourage them. Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX nerve gas or, some day, a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally.’

"I heard the president, in the State of the Union address, say that Iraq was hiding materials sufficient to produce 25,000 litres of anthrax, 38,000 litres of botulinum toxin, and 500 tons of sarin, mustard and nerve gas.

"I heard the president say that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium – later specified as ‘yellowcake’ uranium oxide from Niger – and thousands of aluminium tubes ‘suitable for nuclear weapons production’.

"I heard the vice president say: ‘We know that he’s been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.’

"I heard the president say: ‘Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.’

"I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent. I would not be so certain.’

"I heard the president say: ‘America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.’

"I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘We don’t want the “smoking gun” to be a mushroom cloud.’

"I heard the American ambassador to the European Union tell the Europeans: ‘You had Hitler in Europe and no one really did anything about him. The same type of person is in Baghdad.’

"I heard Colin Powell at the United Nations say: ‘They can produce enough dry biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people. Saddam Hussein has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry: 550 artillery shells with mustard gas, 30,000 empty munitions, and enough precursors to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents. Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan.’

"I heard him say: ‘Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.’

"I heard the president say: ‘Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas.’ I heard him say that Iraq ‘could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given’.

"I heard Tony Blair say: ‘We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.’"
Read on (a big list) at London Review of Books

U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote:

Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.

The Nuke War We Nearly Had in '83

"Today, the 1980s are remembered as the decade in which American strength and determination under the presidency of Ronald Reagan led to the final collapse of communism and the liberation of eastern Europe. Yet the world nearly paid a terrible price for Reagan's uncompromising stand against the 'evil empire' in the early 80s."
Listen

Torn Curtain: The Secret History of the Cold War
This is Part One of the radio doco series Torn Curtain:

"We all know now that the cold war ended, not with a bang, but the popping of champagne corks at the Berlin Wall. But since the collapse of communism, a whole secret history has emerged from the shadows.

"Since the crumbling of the Soviet Union, historians working in the former Soviet and eastern European archives have uncovered an extraordinary harvest of new insights into the cold war. At the same time, declassified documents from sources such as the CIA and the National Security Archive in the United States have revealed a similar hidden history. Complementing these sources on both sides of the Iron Curtain are the first-hand accounts of former spies, senior intelligence officials, politicians and diplomats.

"Torn Curtain synthesises these new insights into an alternative, iconoclastic narrative of cold war history – based on hard evidence from formerly secret sources. We lay some old cold war controversies to rest, and ignite new ones."

Amazing coincidence: Aussie housewife and cosmonaut

Every now and then you hear a true story that's just too, too remarkable.

An Australian woman, Maggie Iaquinto, from Colac, a country town in the state of Victoria, describes herself as a "housewife", but she also teaches at a technical college and is a whiz at ham radio. At the end of the 1980s as the Soviet Union was collapsing, she made radio contact with one of the Soviet cosmonauts on the MIR space station.

"Over a period of five years she spoke to 19 cosmonauts on ham radio and made history by establishing the first computer-to-computer civilian communication with a space station."

She formed a close online relationship with the one cosmonaut in particular, catching him for ten minutes a day as MIR flew over Colac, and later was invited to Houston to speak to an envious ham operators' club about her extraordinary experience. But that's not the amazing bit.

In 2004, also in Australia, unbeknown to Maggie was launched an opera that tells the story of a Soviet cosmonaut who, through radio contact with an Australian woman, learns about the fall of the USSR, and they fall in love. Apart from the falling in love part, the opera's story is an almost perfect match for what actually happened, though the opera's writers did not know about Maggie and the cosmonaut.

Maggie Iaquinto is an incredibly engaging interviewee and her story is one of the best I've heard for ages ... best of all because it's true.

This audio documentary is online here.

Danes mind their language

Interesting piece on language and identity. And very interesting that the writer, when he talks about how we speak in Ireland, doesn't mention how heavily we are influenced by our native language, Irish (Gaelic) -- nor the fact that it is dying fast. My apologies for the long post, but the piece is "subscription only".

By Brendan Killeen, in The Irish Times.

"Letter from Copenhagen:
Danish ducks "rap". That is to say that they do not "quack". Dogs don't "woof", they "vow". Cows "muu", pigs "øf", and so on. In an international marriage, this has surprising impacts. Old MacDonald is a minefield.

"Those animal picture books where you point at a picture and imitate the sound the animal makes are too contentious to be bothered with -- at least in the open. We take turns putting our son to bed so every second night. I can make 'quack-quack' sounds to my heart's content, albeit in a whisper.

"If the famous linguist Noam Chomsky is right, 'language provides a link to the character of our mental processes'. In other words, language and the way we use it says a lot about how we think and ultimately who we are. In this light, the battle to teach a child to say one thing rather than another reflects a bigger battle to imbue your child with your attitude and outlook.

"Danes speak literally. They also think logically. It's a dangerous combination. Ask a Dane if he can play a violin, the joke goes, and he will answer: 'I don't know, I haven't tried'. It's not a funny joke but that's the point -- this literal approach is maddening for non-Danes and results in the strangest conversations.

"'Have we got lights for the bikes?' I asked my wife recently after dinner at a friend's place. 'Yes', she replied. 'But they're at home.' I almost choked. Nobody else batted an eyelid. Why would they? It was a perfectly reasonable answer to a Dane. Imagine your child growing up like that!

"Unfortunately, as an Irishman, I don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to the use of language. We don't speak -- we communicate through a 'half-talk code of mysteries, the wink-and-elbow language of delight', as Kavanagh called it.

"'Will you have a cup of tea?' asks person A, putting the kettle on. 'No, I'm in a terrible hurry', says person B, taking off their coat. 'A half cup then', says person A. That conversation would make no sense to a Dane.

"To be fair, Chomsky himself might be confused with that one. On the other hand, I'm sure he would have lots to say about the political campaign that is in full swing here ahead of next Tuesday's general election.

"Despite involvement in the war in Iraq, immigration rather than nation-building abroad is the dominant topic. A central theme of the anti-immigration campaign is the presumption that the Danish language and ultimately Danish culture, are at risk as a result of 30 years of immigration, mostly from countries in the Middle and Far East.

"'To sprogede børn' -- or two-languaged children -- are the children of immigrants who speak Danish at school but resort to another language at home or with their friends. [Has he never heard the term "bilingual"? - N] Statistics are bandied about wildly as to how many of these children leave school without being either able to read or write Danish properly. The argument goes that 'to sprogede børn' are now so prevalent in Copenhagen that the standard of Danish is dropping generally in schools.

"It is difficult to back these statements up with hard facts but there is no doubt that some immigrants make little or no effort to blend in here. On the other hand, free language classes taking place across the country every night are packed to the rafters with desperate foreigners -- me among them -- trying to turn words spelt 'gade' (street) in to something that is pronounced 'gelh' or 'mad' (food) into something resembling 'melh'.

"Fighting the current election campaign on a mandate of forced 'culturalisation', several parties are promising to put more pressure on immigrants to speak Danish. Removing information in English from hospitals is just one of the options being mentioned. That may not only be extreme -- it may prove dangerous. Having said that, long-term residents here should learn the language.

"The problem is that some of these parties ultimately want to turn all immigrants into Danes.

"Even if every immigrant -- including me -- started speaking perfect Danish in the morning, it would only be a veneer of Danishness. I would still keep drinking half-cups of tea and -- in my head, at least -- ducks would keep quacking. In other words, we will never be Danish and our kids will be Danish with a twist. That doesn't mean they won't respect or indeed enhance Danish culture.

"Ireland, watch out, immigration is a fact of life and we can learn a lot from Denmark. Rather that attempting to reduce a rainbow of nationalities to a monotone of green, maybe we should consider adding a few tones to what it means to be Irish. The Danes will have to do something similar -- many people here just haven't realised it yet."

Full text (subscription)

See also In defence of 'lost' languages at the BBC where Mark Abley says, "The point is that it's not just picturesque details that are lost if a language dies out, it's also a whole way of understanding human experience."

And when a language dies, its body of literature generally dies too.

Lovelock, others endorse nukes

Wired 13.02: Nuclear Now!: "Some of the world's most thoughtful greens have discovered the logic of nuclear power, including Gaia theorist James Lovelock, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, and Britain's Bishop Hugh Montefiore, a longtime board member of Friends of the Earth "
Source: Wired

Ongo Bongo!

New at the Almanac, a new version of Ongo Bongo!. Older readers will probably remember it. I couldn't think of a name for the new version either. :)

Clever name for an Australian nudist resort

This is not an ad. I heard about it on the radio and I thought the name was extremely apt. Wish I'd thought of it.

Here it is. But you have to guess what it's called before clicking (clue: the picture tells all). Funnee.

Review Kill the President?

Looking for some reviewers to tell it like it is about Kill the President, at Blogarama. The review link is http://www.blogarama.com/index.php?show=review&SiteID=27343, thanks a lot.

DNA molecules assemble nanoparticles

"ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- University of Michigan researchers have developed a faster, more efficient way to produce a wide variety of nanoparticle drug delivery systems, using DNA molecules to bind the particles together ...

"Nanoparticle complexes can be specifically targeted to cancer cells and are small enough to enter a diseased cell, either killing it from within or sending out a signal to identify it. But making the particles is notoriously difficult and time-consuming."
Source: Science Daily

Outfoxed to be broadcast on ABC TV Oz

Good to see that something as on the edge as Outfoxed will air on a channel as mainstream as ABC, Australia's national broadcaster (taxpayer funded). Good onya, Auntie, that's really putting our 7 cents a day to good work.

For those still burdened with a telly, it's on tonight at 9:20 PM.