dinsdag, januari 27, 2004

Bits N Bobs

Now that its Colder in NYC than in Iceland I wonder how that Legislated Morality Twit's no smoking in public places plan is working out. I feel sorry for those poor bastids smoking their cigarettes that must freeze to their lips outside while their self-righteous non-smoking brethren are inside nice and toasty warm.

*****

On the other end of the spectrum, some might say, is the motto: "prolong your pleasure at home." being promoted by Daniel Karrenbauer, the owner of Chez Paul in Paris, in response to the French government's crackdown on unsafe driving.

*****

"I'm starting to think the two noblest words in the English language are "Fuck NASA". Seriously, why are we still going into space? To find out if broccoli can grow upside-down in zero gravity? WHO FUCKIN' CARES? EVERYONE IN AFRICA IS DYING OF AIDS, FOR GOD'S SAKE! I don't give a fuck whether albino snails can have sex in a fucking space shuttle! You need to shut down Cape Canaveral and FIX EARTH, GODDAMNIT!" Christ, I love Get Your War On.

*****

Since John Kerry is such a poetry-writing, motorcycle hooligan stud aristocrap in his hockey gear, why didn't he suggest going over to Iraq and hip check Saddam into the past tense? I'll bet the drooling monkees over at Jesus Bush, Inc are mad as hell they couldn't get the toothless expat Canadian vote to swoon like that themselves.

*****

No wonder no one wants to vote for this jerk-off. Look at Joe "Isadore" Lieberman's profile: Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow? My favourite book is the Bible? What kind of freak is this guy?

Joseph Lieberman

Born: Joseph Isadore Lieberman, Feb. 24, 1942.
Hometown: Stamford, Conn.
Parents: Henry, who drove a bakery delivery truck and owned a liquor store; and Marcia, a stay-at-home mother of three.
Religion: Orthodox Jewish.
Family: Wife, Hadassah; Children, Rebecca and Matt (from first marriage), Hana (from second marriage), and stepson Ethan. Three granddaughters.
Education: BA, Yale University, 1964; JD, Yale Law School, 1967.
Previous occupation: Attorney.
Military history: None. Obtained student deferments during Vietnam.
Political hero: President John F. Kennedy.
Favorite book: The Bible.
Favorite songs: "Don't Stop Thinking about Tomorrow," by Fleetwood Mac; "My Way," by Frank Sinatra.
Favorite phrase: "I know that I can beat George W. Bush in 2004. Why? Because Al Gore and I already did it."

Favourite phrase SHOULD be: I'm a loser, get me out of here!

*****

The US is Now in the Hands of a Group of Extremists -- George Soros says "Fundamentalism has Spawned an Ideology of American Supremacy" -- gee, thanks George for letting us in on that "secret" -- we couldn't have figured it out without your wisdom. Now why don't you spend your ill-begotten BILLIONS of dollars of wealth on building an army to overthrow them, you naive bastard?

*****

More Slop For the War Pigs Trough

"In this new age of empire, when nothing is as it appears to be, executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions. The Center for Public Integrity in Washington found that at least nine out of the thirty members of the Bush Administration's Defense Policy Board were connected to companies that were awarded military contracts for $76 billion between 2001 and 2002. George Shultz, former Secretary of State, was chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He is also on the board of directors of the Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict of interest in the case of war in Iraq he said, "I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as something you benefit from." In April 2003, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction."

--Arundhati Roy on The New American Century.

*****

Tony Blair's Last Minute Whine

While Mr T Blair wound up his last minute begging and pleading (on his knees, as PM Blair is most familiar having served President Jesus Bush so often in this position), the Independent was busy summarizing thusly:

A defeat for Tony Blair today would represent a devastating and possibly terminal blow to the Prime Minister's personal authority on the eve of one of the most difficult occasions of his premiership.

If the rebels carry the day and throw out the Higher Education Bill, it will be only the fourth time in more than a century that a Prime Minister has lost a Bill at the first stage of its long passage through the House of Commons.

The last time MPs voted down the second reading of a Bill, traditionally the stage when the Commons gives its agreement on broad principles, was on 14 April 1986, when Mrs Thatcher's Shops Bill was sunk.


Really now, think about it. These imfamous top-up fees without which England's educational system is doomed to peril and without which England will likely sink into the morass of the Third World, according to most of its hysterical adherents, would scarsely amount to more than 1 billion pounds sterling in added funds.

Now here's the funny thing: the reward for playing poodle to President Jesus Bush's Neocon Variety Show of Bombing and Killing in Iraq, is going to end up costing in the neighborhood of 7 billion pounds!!! --

So why the feck should anyone be willing to shell out more quid for these hysterical fuck ups who've already cost the UK 7 billion quid getting it wrong? The track record of the evil Blair regime is almost as big a cock up as his hero on the otherside of the Atlantic, President Jesus Bush, who must somehow squelch the largest deficit in the history of America.

Good luck to both of you cunts, you'll need it, and, as we said earlier, la-dee-da, humming to ourselves with salivating anticipation, you're time is almost up.

For our next course, we will be serving The Hutton Inquiry in just a little over 28 hours.

maandag, januari 26, 2004

Holy Hot Potatoes, Batman, Blair is in a Pickle!

Well, its neigh upon high noon for Prime Minister Tony Blair. First up for the chopping block is the tuition top-up fees issue which Blair, in typically idiotic fashion, has made a make-or-break issue for his premiership. It isn't bad enough he has to support Bush to the hilt, he makes matters worse by trying to swagger like him as well. Instead of negotiation, Mr "I have no reverse" has used a tactic of the Jesus Bush crowd, bullying hyperbole supported by...wait a minute, the British aren't a nation of moronic somnambulists, this isn't America! There is no support! Not sure how "absolutely ruling out compromise" on such a volatile issue is democracy in action but, well, Tony Blair has been setting himself up to play the martyr for quite awhile now and its beginning to look like he's used up the last of his good credit.

Well, at the very least, it's a nail biter which has been more profound by Blair's mistaken identity: he puts on the face of a bulldog yet we've all see his true character as President Jesus Bush's little pet poodle who will perform little dances for the crowd of bloodthirsty neocons when commanded.

Then there's the little matter of an Invasion of Iraq where Blair once again faces a disadvantage President Jesus Bush hasn't had to consider: the British public are actually literate! The British public actually hold their leaders accountable for lies that sent their sons to unnecessary deaths! Of course, the pikers that populate and vote for the unaccountable stupidity of the Jesus Bush Administration have no such recourse. They love Jesus and don't forget 9/11! That excuses all!

In any case, Mr Blair's got a little business about those

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

they don't seem to have existed, to contend with. Making matters worse, as the Independent noted today, the insistence of Mr "I have no Reverse!" that the intelligence on Saddam Hussein?s weapons of mass destruction was right is beginning to look detached from reality.

Making his moronic position even harder to defend was United States Secretary of State Colin Powell's admission, in the wake of the resignation of the head of the WMD-hunting Iraq Survey Group, that he did not know whether illicit weapons would be found in Iraq.

Now, let me reitterate, if Tony Blair were the President of the United States, he could be like Jesus Bush, making billions for his oil cronies, pissing on his allies, smirking like a self-righteous little idiot and fucking his entire country down the toilet for the sake of his own stupidity. Sadly for Mr Blair, he lives in a different world that isn't filled with uneducated zombies and he will be held accountable for the lies he told eventually.

As for Bush, who knows? Maybe someday his limp corpse will be hanging from a lamp post on Pennsylvania Avenue alongside people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and all the other sanctimonious arseholes who brought you the smug yet suicidally stupid invasion of Iraq. Maybe he'll escape free and win his reelection. Certainly there are enough Jesus zombies in America to validate such stupidity. But Blair's not got that luxery. His clock has almost expired.

*****

Sure to overwhelm the Jesus Bush Super Action Figure Doll, riding on the heels of his "I have a Scream" speech, Democrat and Doctor, Howard Dean now has a Mean Dean action figure to hawk.

zaterdag, januari 24, 2004

Let's Debate the Vacuity of the Presidential Candidates!
Quotables:

"While profits went up 46 percent for companies, wages for workers went up three pennies. This is a Wall Street Republican recovery, it's not an American worker recovery," Kerry, the lastest Democrat zen master.

"I didn't get to the Senate by accident," said Sen. John Edwards a North Carolinian who defeated a Republican incumbent to win his seat in 1998 and cited his support for gun rights. On the other hand, Edwards made his millions as a Personal Injury lawyer, so if it weren't for other peoples' accidents, he'd never have had the money to buy a seat in the Senate in the first place!

We've not had one Republican president in 34 years balance the budget. You can't trust right-wing Republicans with your money. You ought to hire somebody who has balanced a budget. Howard Dean, still living down his hooting and hollering in America apparently. I understand the America media has played that clip over and over again. Funny we don't see the replay of clips of President Jesus Bush Administration's lies, deceptions and rationales for sending thousands of people needlessly to their deaths. Instead, we get Vice President of Blood For Oil, Distoritionist-In-Chief, Dickhead Cheney distorting as he loves to do, reported by Common Dreams:

"In January 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney did a round of media interviews with NPR and others in which he reinforced his claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. To back these claims up, he cited documents already discredited as ?inaccurate? by the Bush Administration.

SADDAM-AL QAEDA CONNECTION

CHENEY CLAIM: "There's overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government. I am very confident that there was an established relationship there." - Vice President Cheney, 1/22/04

FACT: According to documents, "Saddam Hussein warned his Iraqi supporters to be wary of joining forces with foreign Arab fighters entering Iraq to battle U.S. troops. The document provides another piece of evidence challenging the Bush administration contention of close cooperation between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda terrorists." [NY Times, 1/15/04]

FACT: "CIA interrogators have already elicited from the top Qaeda officials in custody that, before the American-led invasion, Osama bin Laden had rejected entreaties from some of his lieutenants to work jointly with Saddam." [NY Times, 1/15/04]

FACT: "Sec. of State Colin Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no 'smoking gun' proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of al-Qaeda.'I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection,' Powell said." [NY Times, 1/9/04]

FACT: ?Three former Bush Administration officials who worked on intelligence and national security issues said the prewar evidence tying Al Qaeda was tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies.? [National Journal, 8/9/03]

FACT: Declassified documents ?undercut Bush administration claims before the war that Hussein had links to Al Qaeda.? [LA Times, 7/19/03].

FACT: ?The chairman of the monitoring group appointed by the United Nations Security Council to track Al Qaeda told reporters that his team had found no evidence linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.? [NY Times, 6/27/03]

FACT: "U.S. allies have found no links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.'We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda,' said Europe's top investigator. 'If there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever.?" [LA Times, 11/4/02]

YASIM ALLEGATION

CHENEY CLAIM: ?Abdul Rahman Yasim arrived back in Iraq and was put on the payroll and provided a house, safe harbor and sanctuary. So Saddam Hussein had an established track record of providing safe harbor and sanctuary for terrorists.? ? Vice President Cheney, 1/22/04

FACT: ?Even if the new information holds up ? and intelligence and law enforcement officials disagree on its conclusiveness ? the links tying Yasin, Saddam and al-Qaeda are tentative.? [USA Today, 9/17/03]

SUPPORTING EVIDENCE

CHENEY CLAIM: "You ought to go look at an article that Stephen Hayes did in the Weekly Standard here a few weeks ago, that goes through and lays out in some detail, based on an assessment that was done by the Department of Defense and forwarded to the Senate Intelligence Committee some weeks ago. That's your best source of information? to justify the Saddam-Al Qaeda claim. ? Vice President Cheney, 1/9/04

FACT: ?Reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate. Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal.? [DoD, 11/15/03]"

Now, back to the debate, during last Thursday's Democratic Primary debate in New Hampshire, moderator Peter Jennings asked Al Sharpton whom he would name as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, then, with wicked irony, added: "And maybe just take a minute or so to give us a little bit about your views on monetary policy." Al Sharpton!

Sharpton made a quip about Howard Dean's "hooting and hollering," then offered some criticism of the International Monetary Fund. To which Jennings replied: "Forgive me, Reverend Sharpton, but the question was actually about the Federal Reserve Board." Sharpton's answer (the transcript omits his numerous "uhs"):

Oh, in the Federal Reserve Board, I would be looking for someone that would set standards in this country, in terms of our banking, our--in how government regulates the Federal Reserve as we see it under Greenspan, that we would not be protecting the big businesses; we would not be protecting banking interests in a way that would not, in my judgment, lead toward mass employment, mass development and mass production. I think that--would I replace Greenspan, probably. Do I have a name? No.

Do I have a clue about anything going on around me? Whose money am I wasting on this campaign? No. and I don't know.

*****

Roman Rebound : lovely article on the renewal of Latin:

TO SCARY music, a furtive Jewish nationalist of the first century paints on a wall the words Romanes Eunt Domus. A centurion enters:

Centurion: What's this, then? ? ?People called Romanes they go the house??
Nationalist: It?it says, ?Romans, go home?.
Centurion: No, it doesn't. ?Go home?? This is motion towards. Isn't it, boy?
Nationalist (being savagely beaten): Ah. Ah, dative, sir! Ahh! No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! No! Ah! Oh, the...accusative! Domum, sir! Ah! Oooh! Ah!
Centurion: Except that takes the...?
Nationalist: The locative, sir!

The scene, from ?Monty Python's Life of Brian?, marked the apotheosis of Latin in film?until last March. At that point Mel Gibson, star-turned-director, announced that his new film ?The Passion?, about the last hours of Christ, would be made entirely in Latin and Aramaic. At first, the hero of ?Thunderdome? and ?Lethal Weapon? did not even want subtitles. When he realised that audiences needed to know, just roughly, what the characters were saying, he reluctantly backed down.


*****

More Hyperbole or is Diebold Diabolical?

It is Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States:

NYT's Paul Krugman notes:

"An analysis of Diebold software by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities found it both unreliable and subject to abuse. A later report commissioned by the state of Maryland apparently reached similar conclusions. (It's hard to be sure because the state released only a heavily redacted version.)

Meanwhile, leaked internal Diebold e-mail suggests that corporate officials knew their system was flawed, and circumvented tests that would have revealed these problems. The company hasn't contested the authenticity of these documents; instead, it has engaged in legal actions to prevent their dissemination.

Why isn't this front-page news? In October, a British newspaper, The Independent, ran a hair-raising investigative report on U.S. touch-screen voting. But while the mainstream press has reported the basics, the Diebold affair has been treated as a technology or business story ? not as a potential political scandal.

This diffidence recalls the treatment of other voting issues, like the Florida "felon purge" that inappropriately prevented many citizens from voting in the 2000 presidential election. The attitude seems to be that questions about the integrity of vote counts are divisive at best, paranoid at worst. Even reform advocates like Mr. Holt make a point of dissociating themselves from "conspiracy theories." Instead, they focus on legislation to prevent future abuses.


rest of the story is here


*****

Meanwhile, the Arseholes You Knew All Along Were Arseholes And Thieves, Begin to Confess

This is more a matter of if they're willing to confess to this one, what other far more enormous acts of thievery, killing and corruption are they still hoping to hide? This is the sacrificial lamb for the much bigger farm of lies they're trying to protect:

"Halliburton Co. said Friday that it was refunding the government $6.3 million its employees had improperly received in a kickback deal with a Kuwaiti company.

Halliburton said it discovered the improper payments in an internal audit and reported the results to Defense Department officials last week, after company officials discovered that one or two Halliburton employees were apparently paid by the Kuwaiti company for giving it the work helping rebuild Iraq."

The disclosure of another financial anomaly involving Halliburton and Iraqi contracts raised new concerns among Democrats who have been critical of the contracting process for Iraq in general and of Halliburton in particular, in part because Vice President Dick Cheney was the company's chairman until 2000.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., a persistent critic of the company, said Friday that he found it troublesome that Halliburton, which has more than $9 billion in contracts for Iraq, won its latest government deal, worth up to $1.2 billion, last Friday, just a day after the company informed the Pentagon of the possibilities of kickbacks.

The contract calls for additional work in the oil fields in southern Iraq.

"It is incomprehensible," Waxman wrote to Rep. Thomas Davis, R-Va, chairman of the Committee on Government Reform, in a letter calling for hearings, "that the administration could give Halliburton another billion-dollar contract without fully investigating such serious criminal wrongdoing."

Incomprehensible? Where has Rep Thomas Davis been living these last 3 years? This is the modus operandi of the Jesus Bush Administration.





woensdag, januari 21, 2004

"America is offensive"

Read the full text of the state of the union address:

"Mr. Speaker, Vice President of Oil Mongering and Stealing From the Poor to Give to the Rich, Dick Cheney, insignificant sycophants of Congress, hand-planted handclappers and guests, Born Again Christian Conservatives and fellow haters of mankind:


America this evening is a nation called to great responsibilities of giant acts of hypocrisy and unjustifiable killing of innocent civilians. And we are rising to meet them. As we gather tonight, hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women are deployed across the world to get a firm grip on oil fields for the benefit of such fine and patriotic corporations like Haliburton, to name a few. Sometimes, it's the war on terror, sometimes it's freeing oppressed peoples, removing tyranny in every country but our own, sometimes its just killing for money and prestige. By bringing capitalism and back stabbing for self-interest to the oppressed, and delivering our particular brand of justice in the name of Jesus Christ and Democracy's heroes to the violent, we are making America more. More what? More violent, more hated, more arrogant. Just the formula we were looking for to maintain our Machiavelian stranglehold on power.

Each day, law enforcement personnel and intelligence officers are tracking terrorist threats; although many of those threats are blown out of proportion to justify our actions or to distort reality so it appears we are doing a much better job against a perceived threat than we actually are, and although we've never been straighforward about any of so-called threats and even lied or distorted facts to both the victims of 9/11 and the soldiers getting killed like dogs in Iraq, we've initiated a gargantuan bureaucracy of government domestic spying, analysts are examining airline passenger lists and highlighting anyone with a remotely Arab name and pulling out of line, all dark-skinned people or people who don't look like they love Jesus; the men and women of our new Homeland Security Department are patrolling our coasts and borders. And their vigilance is protecting America while America goes about the business of destroying and dividing for their own cynical profit.

Americans are proving once again to be the hardest working people in the world. We like working 80 hour weeks because it allows us to buy more material goods that makes our lives feel special, even if it comes to destroy the very fabric of the American family because we work so much and ignore or kids in order to buy a new car or the latest fashion for Jesus. The American economy is growing stronger. The Rich are getting richer, the way we like it. The tax relief we've passed out to my cronies, all rich pigs who would kill their own mothers if it meant an upside of profit, has had the desired effect of making them richer and that, in the end, is why the election was stolen for me to begin with. So I'm doing my job, serving at the best of Chairman Cheney and Jesus Christ and loving the American people for being such great fighters of terrorists.

Tonight, money-grubbing whores/members of Congress can take pride in great works of compassion and reform that skeptics had thought impossible. You've made even more money from special interest groups than seemed imaginable. You've screwed over more constituents for your own self interest and better still you've done it in such a secretive manner, your own constituents are too ignorant to know any better. You are lowering the standards of our public schools to third world levels since we spend all our money on wars and building oil infrastructures in third world countries we are trying to suck dry and yet, you make it seem as though you've done the country a great favor while you take kickbacks and enjoy the lavish lifestyle of millionaires. You are giving our senior citizens plenty of reason to want to die early through your prescription drug coverage under Medicare.

We have faced serious challenges together - and now we face a choice. We can go forward with confidence and
resolve - jackbooted and filled with the lust of killing in our throats, or we can turn back to the dangerous
illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to us and elect some whimpy Democrat who will let sin run rampant with homosexual marriages while terrorists go on blowing up all the decent Christians left. We can press on with tax breaks for my rich friends so they can get even wealthier feeding the bottomless pit of greed,
- or we can turn back to the old policies and old divisions when all those liberal, lefy nations like France like us, but secretly spit on the backs of our shoes and laugh at what a bunch of immoral Democratic faeries Americans are.

We have not come all this way - through all this money to subsidize billion dollar contract for defense contractors, all the great tv of killing, the toppling of Saddam's statue, the capture of Saddam himself, the imbodiment of evil in our Universe and an enemy of all mankind - only to falter and leave our work unfinished. We will not be happy until everyone is subjugated into the corporate and the losers and kill everyone in between in the name of Jesus and Democracy. Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us. In their efforts, their ignorance and their idiotic paranoias and overwhelming force used in the face of it, the American people are showing that the state of our Union is confident and strong on the outside but rotting away on the inside with a steady diet of Jesus, defence contractors and hypocrisy.

God Loves America like a televangelist loves a cheap whore.

...For "security purposes" the remainder of the State of the Union speech, the ongoing slogans of such themes as the growing disparity between the rich and poor is making America safer, has been censored by the Department of Homeland Security. If other bits of the speech come up which the Department of Homeland Security deems to be suitable for an ignorant population who are half-asleep in their chairs by now anyway, stuffed like Thanksgiving with lies, deceit and hypocrisy, the Department of Homeland Security will be pleased to allow the speech to continue to be published at a later date. We have now raised the security code to ORANGE again.

Otherwise, you can read about how the policies of President Jesus Bush are making America safer (for someone, we're just not sure who) and be reminded that America is Safer will probably be the campaign slogan of the next 10 months leading to elections.

*****

On the OTHER side of the ocean, things are looking brighter:

The cannabis laws are being downgraded in Great Britain, reclassified from a class B to a class C drug next week, which will place it the same category as tranquillisers and steroids.

Of course, the spoilsport doctors of the British Medical Association, sticks in the collective mud of happiness and freedom, whining all the time about smoking in any form, eating food that actually tastes good instead of merely being good for you, railing against alchohol abuse and basically, anything fun, as being unhealthy, as if life itself weren't unhealthy, are now whining that "We are very worried about the negative health effects of smoking cannabis and want the government to fund more research on this issue." Pissing down on our parade, yet again. When are people going to wake up and realise that useless organisations like the British Medical Association, who cry Chicken Little over every breath we take, every pleasure we indulge, should have their tents folded up and be shown the door?

We want easy access to pleasure, yea lads and lassies of the British Medical Association. Keep yer traps shut. We don't want your opinions. We know EVERYTHING is bad for us so just keep it to yourself and go about running around trying to find more funding for your useless research to come up with these kinds of idiotic deductions that smoking too much cannabis can be unhealthy. Find something useful to do with your time. Find out how to rid the world of real dangers to your health like Dick Cheney, Jesus Bush and Poodle Blair.

dinsdag, januari 20, 2004

Dick, We Hardly Knew Yea

A funny website for a quickly has=been.

maandag, januari 19, 2004

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.


Martin Luther King Jr.

zondag, januari 18, 2004

Bush Announces Mars Initiative To Find Elusive WMDs, More Oil and To Ship Pesky Palestinians

"Any idiot can face a crisis. It's the day-to-day living that wears you out."
Anton Chekhov

Fresh from the euphoric success of the American mission putting the Spirit rover on the surface of Mars, U.S. President Jesus Bush announced plans Wednesday to a series of WMD teams to the moon as early as 2015 and eventually to Mars -- an election-year initiative that critics derided as a costly extravagance that will be funded on the backs of U.S. Taxpayers and whose profits will be enjoyed by former board members of Enron and Halliburton.

"We will build new ships to ship Palestinians, Fundamentalist Muslims, Liberal Democrats and anyone else who dares speak out against me, into the universe. We will send them out to find WMDs, to begin to colonise the moon with Palestinians to serve as their new Homeland as a "new" Road to Peace and prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own, worlds where there are no carping liberals, no democracy getting in the way of oil mongering and no heretics trying to discredit God and Jesus who gave us Democracy and all the good in the world" Bush said at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The announcement came less than a year after the messy breakup of the space shuttle Columbia, which killed all seven astronauts aboard last February. Bush said that in the future, Jesus will protect all U.S. space missions.

The new initiative would be "an effort to find weapons of mass destruction and bring peace to the Middle East" Bush announced, calling on other nations to join the U.S. effort or suffer the consequences for their lack of support.

It could also help extend U.S. military supremacy in space at a time when China is planning lunar exploration missions and continue to refuse to embrace Jesus Christ as their saviour.

Alice Slater, head of the environmental advocacy group Global Resource Action Center for the Environment, warned the Bush initiative "will create a new arms race to the heavens and eventually, the REAL Jesus is going to show up and there's going to be hell to pay."

U.S. security officials have said military dominance in space was essential, especially after China's first manned space flight last year. NASA's 2003 strategic plan says its mission was widened to include the Pentagon's space effort.

In Beijing, Xinhua news agency reported that China aims to launch 10,000,000 satellites this year, one for every day they've hated their American counterparts while preparing for its second manned space flight and a lunar probe that would go where no Chinese spaceship has gone before.

The agency quoted Zhang Qingwei, head of the China Space Science and Technology Corp., as saying the Chinese orbiters would be shot into space atop nine trillion rockets from its Jiuquan, Xichang and Taiyuan launch sites.

China has already announced plans to launch a lunar probe program this year, which includes a lunar satellite by 2007. "That will be followed by the landing of an unmanned vehicle on the moon by 2010 and collecting samples of dead Americans in lunar soil by 2020,"Xinhua said in a thinly veiled threat.

Moscow may also send a manned mission to Mars, Itar-Tass reported. "Technically, the first flight to Mars may be made in 2014. It will take about $15 billion to do it. American specialists estimate their project at $150 billion," the news agency quoted Leonid Gorshkov, designer at the space rocket corporation Energia, as saying.

Bush proposed discovering oil and launching a unilateral invasion of the moon as early as 2008. Humans would return to the moon by 2020, after the nuclear fallout had cleared. The moon would serve as a stepping stone to an eventual manned mission to Mars where Palestinians will be shipped to fascilitate the Road to Peace.

To pay for it, Bush proposed a five-year, $1 billion increase in taxes for the poorest 10% of the American public, or, failing that, starting another war in Saudi Arabia and using their oil reserves for personal profit.

The initiative would slake a human "thirst for killing" and yield technological breakthroughs, he said. The moon also has "abundant resources" that could be exploited for potential uses such as killing faster and more efficientlyl, added Bush, a former oilman.

Critics said the initiative could cost hundreds of billions of dollars at a time when the federal budget deficit is expected to top $500 billion this fiscal year alone.

"I think it's just a total fiscal absurdity. Bush has been spending money like we've got money to burn, and we don't," said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a politically powerful conservative group, shortly after being led off in handcuffs by key leaders in Homeland Security.

dinsdag, januari 13, 2004

Bush Was Demanding Excuse To Invade Iraq During Freshman Year At Yale Says Ex-Schoolmate

The President Jesus Bush started making detailed plans for the invasion of Iraq within hours of enrolling for his freshman year at Yale, with the President himself anxious to find a pretext to overthrow Saddam Hussein, a high-ranking former cabinet member said yesterday.

The revelation is the latest in a string of potential embarrassments for the White House offered by the former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, who now says he was an ex-schoolmate of the President and who has gone on the record for a new book looking at his bumpy two years at the centre of US power, If You Don't Like What I Say, Then Cut Out My Tongue.

Mr O'Neill said invading Iraq was "topic A" at the very freshman orientation meeting of President Jesus Bush's Kill Saddam Klub at Yale University in 1964, and continued to be an abiding theme in follow-up meetings.

"From the very first instance, even when Saddam was just a member of the Baath Regional Command, back in '63, it was about Iraq," said Mr O'Neill, who was a participant in all the meetings and provided voluminous minutes and other documents to the book's author, Ron Suskind. "In his high school yearbook, all his friends wrote little quotes about digging Saddam out of a rabbit hole and he was voted Most Likely To Capture Saddam by his classmates. Need I remind you, Saddam wasn't even the leader of Iraq by then. The President was far ahead of his times."

Mr O'Neill isn't the first cabinet member to implicate directly Mr Bush in planning a war against Iraq so early in his life. Dick Cheney, Vice President of the Killer Klub admitted that they'd annointed President Jesus Bush as Saddam's capturer, "almost from the womb."

These disclosures will provide further ammunition for Bush critics who believe the administration cynically exploited the 11 September terror attacks to launch an aggressive policy of global military interventionism that neo-conservative hawks such as Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, had been advocating for years. Of course, we all know that only terrorist-loving hippy America-haters would spout such hateful speculation but their day will be coming soon enough as Deputy King of Evil, John Asscraft sharpens his executioner's blades and loads the cyanide pills for the population.

One might think that this makes clear that hints of a link between Saddam and the 11 September attacks, repeatedly made by administration officials in the run-up to the war but never substantiated, were a political convenience, were always the wool over the population's eyes, that the American public were really just a collective puddle of mass stupidity waiting to be pissed in. And it also poses a considerable challenge to the official version of history, which has sought to portray President Jesus Bush as undergoing a religious conversion after 11 September from a meek ass-kissing business failure to Holy Crusader for Jesus Christ with a global mission to stamp out Muslims and kill their children in fiery bombings.

Mr O'Neill, who spoke to CBS's 60 Minutes news programme yesterday, said he was surprised nobody at the NSC meetings asked questions such as "Why Saddam, Why Not Jimmy Carter?" or "Why now, Why not tomorrow?" "For me," he added, "the notion of killing was so satisfying, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, in order to obtain the maximum amount of blood mixed in with oil to make a nice soup of money and dead Iraqis."

It has been clear for some time that the neo-conservatives in the administration were pushing such unilateralism. Mr Bush came to office pledging the opposite - an aversion to so-called "nation-building" and the commitment of US troops to world trouble-spots. He wanted to use them to capture Saddam Hussein and rescue world humanity because he is the Greatest Leader in the History of Earth and anyone who doesn't scream it from every street corner and hilltop will have their tongues cut out for lack of proper usage of them.

The former treasury secretary gives a unflattering portrait of the President in the book and in follow-up interviews, describing him as having a flair for women's clothing and apparently uninterested in dialogue with anyone but his dog, whom he lathered in slobbery kisses and liked to talk baby talk to. In cabinet meetings, Mr O'Neill said, the President was "a masturbating eunich in a roomful of deaf people" - having nothing to say whilst keeping his hands busy at all times turning page after page of pictures of Saddam torturing Iraqis and allowing others to talk dirty to him.

vrijdag, januari 09, 2004

A Quick Sneak Through Ireland

The Boxing Day flight to Dublin was early morning and bode poorly for us when the pilot got on the intercom before we’d even taken off, complaining about having to work on Boxing Day and chiding the passengers for not paying close enough attention to the in-flight emergency procedure demonstration because “although it was an obscure possibility, we should always be prepared for the worse”.

The few passengers amongst us murmured and speculated with their semi-decaffeinated opinions that the pilot might even be a lunatic, or worse still, drunk. Fortunately, the flight is a short hop, less than an hour to Dublin and in no time, before we’d had time to fully digest our fears, we've already landed, disembarked and are moving swiftly through the airport in search of the domestic bus line we hope will still be running to Galway on their version of Boxing Day, St Stephen's Day. Internet research the previous day had proved inconclusive but it seemed that at worse, we’d have a long wait if we didn’t catch this first coach, first thing in the morning, the moment we’d landed. In fact, we didn’t think we had a prayer and we’d be stranded in the airport for the morning.

As it turns out, the buses were indeed running, despite the holiday, though there'd have been an additional two hour wait had we not just caught the driver, still idling in the parking lot in the nick of time. You ask him what time it leaves and he jokes, well, it was supposed to leave five minutes ago. Fortunately for us, it hadn’t. We hadn't had time to change any Euros at the airport but the bus driver was pretty easy going, our first taste of the laissez-faire Irishman: he accepted what few euros I had left over from the last trip to Holland for a single fare and told us “somewhere” along the way we could make a stop at a bank and there we'd be able to withdraw euros for ourselves. By the time we’d gotten on the road we’d noticed it was pissing down rain, well expected, even as we waited 15 minutes in downtown Dublin for a scheduled departure.

Perhaps it was merely in comparison to what we’ve grown accustomed to in the Warwickshire countryside but the Irish landscape did not seem anywhere near as lush and green as advertised. The houses we passed were newer, none made of solid stone, just small and cheap and without any great dignity. Every once in awhile there was a great cluster of identical housing shaped in the form of a neighbourhood, an Irish suburbia of disturbing proportion. Who would pay money to live in a house repeated identically ad infinitum, throughout your suburban village? You wondered further what happened to the old houses. After all, Ireland hadn’t been bombed during World War Two. The buildings had all fallen down by themselves, either poor workmanship, shoddy material or the dreary weather itself brought it down like structural suicides.

Even more interesting was the fact that a distance between Dublin and Galway, although on opposite ends of the country, by most counts, was no more than about 130 miles apart and that those 130 miles would take almost 4 hours to traverse given that the "main" highway ran through one piddling village after another causing constant slowdowns and an average speed of about 30 mph.

But arrive we finally did in Galway, to a relatively dead St Stephens Day Galway. I was eager for my first pint of Guinness but we still had to sort out a place to stay for the night. The plan in mind was to spend the day here then rent a car the following day, drive around Connamara and the following day head back at a leisurely pace to Dublin.

So we walked through the Eyre Square, renamed Kennedy Memorial Park after JFK’s visit to Galway in 1963, and toward what looked like the vibrant area of town finding shop after shop, pub after pub, indeed, hotel after hotel, closed for the holiday. It was a bit disorienting in fact. One expected, by virtue of the reputation preceding it as a nation of drinks and drunkards, that regardless of the holidays, regardless of the time of day or year, the brightness of the sun or the dreariness of the rain, if one thing in Ireland would be open for business, by damn it, it would be the pubs.

But this was a delusion. As we wandered down street after street of quietly shuttered shops, we began to seriously question whether we'd ever find a place to stay, let alone an opened pub. We walked along the Corrib River, meandering past the Claddagh and then back with barely a map, barely an idea of where we were going or where we would stay.

Finally, after finding yet another of our vaguely planned lodgings closed for the holidays, we stumbled across a pub that was open and settled in with our baggage, eager to sample the first pints of "real" Irish Guinness, our housing dilemma be damned and query the locals about a place to stay for the night that would be open on the holiday. After all, it is the local pubs where information is exchanged and friends are made and we weren’t having much luck struggling along on our own with only a cheap internet hostel map and nary a clue of where we were.

And in fact, as I waited for my first pint of Guinness to be poured, that was the first question I asked the old gentleman to my left, pulling out the folded sheet and asking him to point out in a general direction, more or less, where we were. He seemed nice enough although not altogether with it. He took a brief glance at the map and instead of showing where we were, relied on pointing in the direction out the window behind him illustrating that the main square was just down the road, instead.

Perhaps it is inevitable, when having savored for so many years an experience one could only imagine once the experience veers from the imagination into the realm of the real, some of the flavor is lost in the expectation. At least that's the thought I comforted myself with as we sat drinking in the locals and tasting an unexpectedly cold pint of Guinness for the first time in Ireland.

It was hardly what one had spent all these years waiting for. I was more accustomed to a frothy, creamy stout served barely below room temperature yet these pints were as chilled as iced tea. All around us they savoured their pints, seemingly oblivious. Surely they knew this wasn't how Guinness was to be served! Surely they knew this in Ireland! You began to get a deja vous experience, like the kind you get in England when you hear an English spoken in what sounds like horribly disfigured grammar, catching yourself in mid-sentence trying to correct an Englishman on English grammar indeed! One thought on the one hand, yet believed, with a sinking feeling in the stomach that surely if this was how it was being served, this was how the locals wanted it. Had we been duped all these years prior, jaded by the experience of the creamy stout of Guinness in the pubs of old Irish Manhattan?

After the first pint, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to mix it up with the old men sitting at the closest edge of the bar to us. I wanted to know about the Guinness, if this was an apparition or the truth and I wanted to find out if there were any other pubs that were going to open in the whole of Galway (as though the sampling might vary from neighbourhood to neighbourhood.) Most importantly, we had to get a grasp on where it was we might stay for the night.

As I gave in to the second pint and stood querying the locals, we were told that

A): this is how the pints where served throughout Ireland, chilled to a certain temperature, regulated in fact, by a system on the kegs which would automatically set off when the temperature rose above a certain level. We also heard the theory that it was colder than usual because this was winter and after all, the kegs were stored in the basement, a cold place to begin with. We were told a similar tale most everywhere we eventually made it through in Galway and it wasn’t until we’d found a barman in Dublin who understood precisely what we were talking about when he related a tale of some of the older guys in his home town who soaked their pints in buckets of hot water before drinking them to bring them down to the proper temperature and then did so for us, to demonstrate.

B): we were told nothing would be open on St Stephen’s Day and gave us the idea we were lucky to have even found this particular pub opened only because it was a “family establishment” – another lesson learned about the Irish we came across: either they didn’t know, didn’t care, or just plain made it up.

C): While they acknowledged it was St Stephen's Day, no one seemed to know or care who exactly, St Stephens was and why he was being celebrated. The only matter of importance was that it produced a day off for them.

All this being established and knowing the local wisdom often varies from locale to locale, after the second pints had been emptied, we picked up our bags and headed out, determined to find some different answers.

Without too much of a struggle, within an hour we'd found not only a cheap place to stay just on Quay Street, the main street of Galway's Latin Quarter and a mere football field from the River Comb running through to Galway Bay, but also found out to our delight that whilst it did indeed seem dead, by the evening, most of the pubs and restaurants would be opened once again, regardless of the holiday.

So we set out to find something to do, to sample more Guinness from place to place in escape of the periods of huge downpours, rain pissing down upon us, rough even by local standards, finding variations of taste from place to place but never finding a truly room temperature pint. One begins to understand after a few hours that the Irish are not curious people by nature. Perhaps they are exhausted with Americans, but unlike England, no one was curious about us or our accents, no one knew a smidgen about St Stephen or even cared to speculate for that matter. Worse still, we found scads of younger generations lounging in pubs in the land of Guinness heretically drinking Budweiser by the pint! Figuring that perhaps the flavour was much different, we trepidly tried a half pint of Bud to find out for sure and sure enough, it tasted just as bad as it did in the states. You had to wonder if it was just another custom passed over the Atlantic by their relatives who’d made it ashore to America, along with the Irish love for cursing in distinctly American terms, words egad, you'd never hear a good Englishman spit out!

We ventured out a few times, driven back in on each occasion by the rain and the fact that nearly anything worth seeing was closed for the holiday. We watched football matches on the telly, had stilted conversations with the locals (all conversations with the older generations seemed to begin and end with ruminations on what a great man President Kennedy had been and what a shame he’d been assassinated as though it’d just happened last week instead of 40 years ago.) You begin to figure that not much has happened in Galway since the excitement of his visit in 1963.

The following morning, up at 5 to wander the rainy streets, take photos of the signs in Gaelic, sit on the docks along Quay Street and the river emptying into the Galway Bay with nothing to occupy the ears but the sound of the rushing flow of the river and the occasional gulls who would pop up, appearing suddenly in the dark sky as though faintly fluorescent until disappearing once again into the shadows. Wandered beneath the 16th century Spanish Arch, trying to read 350 year old graffiti or imagine it. What were the Spaniards doing in Galway in the 16th century anyway? The Arch had been built to prevent looters from breaking into the Spanish Merchant ships that’d come all the way to Galway to trade.

Later on, after a free breakfast of toast and instant coffee that tasted like it'd been brewed through someone's stale socks, we grabbed a taxi to the airport where we were to pick up our rental and begin the day of touring the Irish countryside. The Galway airport is surprisingly small, commuter-plane runways, nearly empty, nothing yet open, including the car rental agencies. I was able to query one of the airport staff who seemed certain it was only a matter of time before someone showed up at the Hertz check out counter. Probably just checking the cars in the back lot, they speculated.

But this went on for 20 minutes, well past the pick up time, and we were getting antsy to get a start on the day. Cursing the third world Irish ways, thinking the manager had just been out drinking the night before and overslept, I made my way, into the back lot to have a look on my own, fruitlessly peering out at the occasional stragglers, trying to ascertain if one of them might be the rental car agent. No luck. Back in the airport again I spotted a tiny sign that noted a manager's name if no one was present on site when needed and preceded to dial through a public phone only to find out that the groggy man I'd just woken had no reservations under our name or for any cars that morning for that matter, they'd been rented out weeks ago!

Whoaaawhoooen did you say you rented it? He kept stuttering in a thick brogue, thoroughly confused and only half awake. Now convinced that the mix up had occurred back in England through the internet broker we'd used to rent the car, I gruffly apologized to the gentleman for waking him and hung up.

A few furious cigarettes later in the parking lot fuming literally and figuratively, a cab finally pulled up disembarking a lucky family arriving at the airport to leave Galway. We were able to get another ride into town, clearly the only cabbie around for miles, and found much to our dismay that it was likely all the rental agents would either be sold out or closed for the holiday weekend. Rubbish! It was already approaching ten in the morning and we'd still never left the damned city! Sensing our dismay, the cabbie suggested an agent in the middle of town and dropped us off there where luckily enough, it was open and ready for business.

However, there was a large caveat that put a rather substantial dent in our previous plans. Since they were a small local company, they couldn't afford to allow us to return it to Dublin Airport the following day as we'd previously planned. Instead, we could rent it only for the day; return it by 5 and all for the smashingly ridiculous, desperate tourist rate of 225 euros for the pleasure! I nearly vomited with disgust. Even in NYC, the most expensive place in the world to rent cars, the most we'd ever seen claimed was $125 a day. This was nearly twice that for a matter of about 7 hours!

When it was clear to the little scam artist that we weren't THAT desperate: miraculously, the missus had even managed to pull off a weak, geez, I dunno, I'll have to consult with my husband smile at which point I was turned to the guy laughing asking him if he was out of his lovely little Irish mind. Quickly, he offered to lower the price on the spot to 150 euros but by then, I was disgusted and ready to leave Galway altogether rapidly becoming convinced that we'd be stranded there for the duration of our holiday if we didn't get out soon. We picked up our bags again and headed out the door, down the street towards the train and bus station hoping beyond hope there was a way to escape, even if it had to be to Dublin.

A few moments later, the man came scurrying out of his rental car hut, flagged me down and took me by the elbow. Here, he says, scratching a number out on a pad of paper. I can do it for this amount for you but you've gotta wait outside until the other customers leave because they're paying full price. The number he scratched out was 70 euros.

Facing another slow 4 hour bus ride back to Dublin or a stay in the nothing-to-do-but-talk- about JFK and drink cold Guinness town of Galway, this seemed too inviting to pass up: a 75% discount. Never mind how in the world one could go from such a high to such a reasonable rate in the matter of 15 minutes, clearly a scam, sufficient was it to know that within an hour, we'd finally be on the road and exploring, even if it still meant we'd have to be back in Galway by 5. That's how desperate we were. 70 euros was a fair price for a few hours of freedom on our own bloody Christmas holiday!

After tracking down the car, which was located a good four blocks away and two multi storied car parks later in a nefarious series of transactions, we were finally on the main road out of Galway headed towards Cannemara. Almost immediately, the landscape changed to a rugged coast that surrounded the Bay and much like the ride from Dublin, the drive was stunted by the main road leading through tiny villages and excessively slow speed limits.

We took the scenic route for awhile along the coast before turning inland, quite by accident at first and then later, as the landscape changed from rolling hills to snow capped mountains, on purpose, we drove deeper inland, past what were supposed to be some of the best fishing lakes in Ireland that shine like mirrors back up at the mountain, downward toward Maam Cross where the farmers dig the peat from the bogs, all in search of the cabin where John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara filmed the movie “The Quiet Man”. We made several stops along the way, quick ones, to snap photos with the car running as the roads were quite narrow with no shoulders to speak of which meant one was virtually blocking a lane of the road when one stopped.

Finally we made it through a series of hills and villages and miles of grazing sheep, past what we thought might be the town that held the idyllic public house we were looking for all along, an Inn tucked away in the middle of a series of small sheep farming villages. We opened the door to a conversation among a few locals, asked a few questions and had a pint to relax. Finally, a creamy pint of Guinness as good as any I’d ever had! A pint that recalled all of Ireland in that one sip, the harsh tongue of the Gaels, the bogs, the sea air and tranquillity. I wanted to stay there forever but we still had more of the region to explore and quickly as well considering the car had to be returned by five!

So onward we drove, determined to figure out how one made a living from sheep farming, so far here, it seemed from civilization and life’s cares, driving onward through the Inagh Valley toward our destination of the seaside Connemara capital of Clifden. In Clifden, what seemed to be one of the further outposts of the Irish west coast towns, it was still impossible to escape the Americans. As we tried to warm up over a pint and a plate of Guinness Stew there were some giggling American girls loudly gossiping about how drunk they’d been in town the night before as though we might have been sitting in some faux Irish pub in some suburban mall in America. The pub we sat in held a photo of Bill Clinton, who’d been by for a visit and a pint and it wasn’t until you were back outdoors, overwhelmed by the damp cold and away from passersby, that you could relish the charm of being in Ireland again.

And yes, eventually we made it back to Galway again and stayed another night and eventually we were up at dawn the following morning to catch the first bus back to Dublin and have a taste of the big city before our flight left later that night. But frankly, by then, the damage had been done, the impressions had set in and Connemara was frankly, the only highlight of a relatively underwhelming journey.



donderdag, januari 08, 2004

Fortress America Queue Will Now Include Brits

Apparently having President Jesus Bush's primary ass and boot licker as your Prime Minister isn't sufficient currency any more. Whilst currently, British travelers don't require a visa to enter the sacred and hallowed halls of Fortress America, under "new" rules, they will not only need a visa, but after October 26 this year all passports must contain "biometric indicators" - computer chips carrying a digitally encoded record of the bearer's face and possibly fingerprints.

On Monday, stringent new security regulations were introduced at 115 of the US's international airports and 14 major seaports, requiring people entering on a visa now to be fingerprinted and have their photographs taken, allow themselves to be anally probed, bow and kiss a giant portrait of President Jesus Bush and carry at least two copies of the bible at all times.

Of course, Tony Blair has been the test puppy for this successful new experiment having already demonstrated that the chip inserted in his skull by Jesus Bush Administration scientists will compel him to bark on cue, roll over and fetch for the World's Greatest President.

World's Greatest Puppy Isn't House-Trained

Meanwhile, the World's Greatest Puppy, Prime Minister Tony Blair, faces a new battle and believe it or not, it has nothing to do with lying to the British public about the reasons for invading Iraq and sending innocent British soldiers to their deaths needlessly. Today, he and his ministers are gearing up for one of the biggest parliamentary battles since Labour came to power in 1997 with the publication of the long-awaited university top-up fee legislation and the renewed effort to shove a very large, square peg into a very small round hole. Hmmm. Well, having screwed them once, perhaps he figures the population's arses are well oiled now for another go.

Reefer Madness

Don't "look" now, but the Blind Fascist Home Secretary David Blunkett has been blind about the dangers of cannabis, according to the Henny Penny-in-Chief, Robin Murray, head of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, who told The Times that inner-city psychiatric services were nearing a crisis point, with up to 80 per cent of all new psychotic cases reporting a history of cannabis use! He whines that cannabis use is now the leading problem facing the country’s mental health services! Imagine that. Of course, the warning might fall on deaf ears. Regular doses of cannabis halt this painful and progressive loss of vision called glaucoma by reducing the pressure which builds up within the eye. Think Blunkett will see the point?

Truth in Advertising

A great new political advertising contest which underscores what the real world might be like in the land where the truth could be told: Bush in 30 seconds

woensdag, januari 07, 2004

Resist the New Rome

This is an edited extract of a recording believed to have been made by the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, transmitted by al-Jazeera and translated by the BBC Monitoring Service:

"My message is to urge jihad to repulse the grand plots hatched against our nation, such as the occupation of Baghdad, under the guise of the search for weapons of mass destruction, and the fierce attempt to destroy the jihad in beloved Palestine by employing the trick of the road map and the Geneva peace initiative.
The Americans' intentions have also become clear in statements about the need to change the beliefs and morals of Muslims to become more tolerant, as they put it.

In truth, this is a religious-economic war. The occupation of Iraq is a link in the Zionist-crusader chain of evil. Then comes the full occupation of the rest of the Gulf states to set the stage for controlling and dominating the whole world.

For the big powers believe that the Gulf and the Gulf states are the key to global control due to the presence of the largest oil reserves there. The situation is serious and the misfortune momentous.

The west's occupation of our countries is old, but takes new forms. The struggle between us and them began centuries ago, and will continue. There can be no dialogue with occupiers except through arms. Throughout the past century, Islamic countries have not been liberated from occupation except through jihad. But, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, the west today is doing its utmost to besmirch this jihad, supported by hypocrites.

Jihad is the path, so seek it. If we seek to deter them with any means other than Islam, we would be like our forefathers, the Ghassanids [Arab tribes living under the Byzantine empire]. Their leaders' concern was to be appointed kings and officers for the Romans in order to safeguard the interests of the Romans by killing their brothers, the peninsula's Arabs. "


Hmmm. Maybe bin Laden should be running for the Democratic nomination instead of mealy mouthed anti-war obfuscutionist like Howard Dean

Anyway, the rest of the transcript is here.

For more on the ahem, Roman occupation of the Middle East, or perhaps just another distorted view of history, have a look here.

dinsdag, januari 06, 2004

The Stupid Factor

Finally, a voice of reason in the wilderness!

Seattle Post Intelligencer's Neal Starkman has landed upon the true reason behind President Jesus Bush's popularity:

"It's the "Stupid factor," the S factor: Some people -- sometimes through no fault of their own -- are just not very bright."

Is this like a special gene or chromosome for the voting public?

"It's not merely that some people are insufficiently intelligent to grasp the nuances of foreign policy, of constitutional law, of macroeconomics or of the variegated interplay of humans and the environment. These aren't the people I'm referring to. The people I'm referring to cannot understand the phenomenon of cause and effect. They're perplexed by issues comprising more than two sides. They don't have the wherewithal to expand the sources of their information. And above all -- far above all -- they don't think.

You know these people; they're all around you (they're not you, else you would not be reading this article this far). They're the ones who keep the puerile shows on TV, who appear as regular recipients of the Darwin Awards, who raise our insurance rates by doing dumb things, who generally make life much more miserable for all of us than it ought to be. Sad to say, they comprise a substantial minority -- perhaps even a majority -- of the populace.

Politicians have been aware of this forever; they cater to these people. They offer simplistic solutions to complex problems. They evade directed questions with non-sequiturs. They offer meaningless, jingoistic pap instead of thoughtful policy. And these people, the "S" people, eat it all up with a ladle."


So get thee to the Idiot Buffet and eat away the Great American Future!




zondag, januari 04, 2004

Country music icon Willie Nelson has written a Christmas song with an edge -- a protest against the war in Iraq that he hopes will stir passions in those who hear it. Nelson, 70, told Reuters on Wednesday he wrote "Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth" after watching the news on Christmas Day and will play it in Austin, Texas on Saturday at a concert to benefit Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich. Concert poster here

What Ever Happened To Peace On Earth


There's so many things going on in the world
Babies dying
Mothers crying
How much oil is one human life worth
And what ever happened to peace on earth

We believe everything that they tell us
They're gonna’ kill us
So we gotta’ kill them first
But I remember a commandment
Thou shall not kill
How much is that soldier’s life worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth

(Bridge)

And the bewildered herd is still believing
Everything we’ve been told from our birth
Hell they won’t lie to me
Not on my own damn TV
But how much is a liars word worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth

So I guess it’s just
Do unto others before they do it to you
Let’s just kill em’ all and let God sort em’ out
Is this what God wants us to do

(Repeat Bridge)

And the bewildered herd is still believing
Everything we’ve been told from our birth
Hell they won’t lie to me
Not on my own damn TV
But how much is a liars word worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth

Now you probably won’t hear this on your radio
Probably not on your local TV
But if there’s a time, and if you’re ever so inclined
You can always hear it from me
How much is one picker’s word worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth

But don’t confuse caring for weakness
You can’t put that label on me
The truth is my weapon of mass protection
And I believe truth sets you free

(Bridge)

And the bewildered herd is still believing
Everything we’ve been told from our birth
Hell they won’t lie to me
Not on my own damn TV
But how much is a liars word worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth