As if I needed another reason to recoil at having to touch elevator buttons: radioactive scrap from India was used to make buttons for Otis elevators in France. It makes me worry where we are getting our scrap from, considering we are in that part of the world where people like Larry Summers think dirty industries should be transferred.
See his old notorious creepy memo.
---
Yemen is flooded by a tropical storm..Dozens dead and tens of thousands displaced.
---
Jordan arrests a poet for using quotes from the Quran in his love poems... Though, it seems that we don't get enough arrests when people use quotes from the Quran to add flourish to hatred.
---
The Guardian has compiled 1000 artworks you should see before you leave the world.
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A McCain worker's hoax might spell doom for him... But then again, scary movie characters always get back up when you think they're finished. Here is some more on the hoax including video.
---
Have a listen to some music that astronomers have recorded from stars... The beat of their pulse helps tell us their age and size and what they are made of... and it's pretty haunting.

I leave you to keep picking up all the pieces I have to put back together...
-
"Green eyes
Blue bedroom
bright machinegun sun"
love is a dog from hell

Since misery loves company, the planet and the economy in meltdown should offer some sort of comfort to my dwindling sanity... but planet you are gonna have to come up with a lot more crazy to make me feel matched.

Where do we start...oh where do we start?

The IMF said the "global financial system was on the brink of meltdown" which is triggering descriptions like "utter carnage" and "a titanic battle between greed and fear"... Last week was apparently the worst week ever... indeed.

And today the little green market arrows are pointing up... who feels reassured?

HuffPo has a list of economists who told you so (one of whom just won the Nobel Prize) and another list of those who got the economy to its dark depths...

Entire countries are feeling the strain, the beautiful Iceland is "on the brink of collapse" according to an interesting and worrying article in the Guardian.
And:

"Iceland is bankrupt," said Arsaell Valfells, a University of Iceland professor. "The Icelandic krona is history. The IMF has to rescue us." Link

And if you were quaking in your boots about the financial crisis where the hell were you when Earth got pushed against a wall and stripped of every last bit of its dignity?

A study by a Deutsche Bank economist says deforestation alone leads to financial losses that make the financial crisis look like piggy-bank pennies... The UN suggests a Green New Deal to save the economy.

Speaking of New Deals, the great Sarah Vowell has been turning to Roosevelt's Fireside Chats to deal with the panic of the economic crisis... I have been turning to the classic film channel for all sorts of other panic.

I leave you with one of my favourite quotes which has never been more stuck in my brain...

"Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead"
King Lear

Yeah.. I am in a video mood these days

Tina Fey as Palin

Palin' before Palin

That icy rush you feel is just brain freeze from the new republican VP.

We can look forward to hearing more frozen-in-time comments that will still manage to warm the toes of those dinosaurs who disrespect all the science and history and philosophy that has blown such huge holes in their mythologies. It's been great news for those frozen relics who belittle all the rights that our beautiful human minds and human hearts have given birth to since that dusty ancient time they so worship.
And just as insidious is the nonsense on the environment and oil.

Here it goes:

The same party that turns off the lights every night and snuggles with oil, coal and gas giants, and then wakes up in the morning and hops into their poisoned pockets is suddenly going to pretend to be against their excesses.

How many times did Palin say she was tough on oil companies in her speech?
A great marketing gimmick since Americans for the first time in a long time are not thinking like oil addicts.

But really? Palin and oil companies, enemies?

"And she has been a friend of Big Oil, opposing a windfall profits tax on the oil industry that could fund affordable clean energy for more Americans." - Friends of the Earth Action Vice President Brent Blackwelder." Reuters

"Palin opposes greater protections for beluga whales found in the Cook Inlet, where oil and gas drilling and other development is proposed"LA Times

She sued to stop polar bears being placed on the endangered speceis list:
"She and other Alaska elected officials fear a listing will cripple oil and gas development in prime polar bear habitat off the state's northern and northwestern coasts..." Anchorage Daily News

"We believe that the ...... decision to list the polar bear was not based on the best scientific and commercial data available" Reuters, August 5, 2008

Not only that, But in an opinion piece she had in the NYT she had delusional symptoms brought on by oil fumes which makes you say things like:

"In fact, there is insufficient evidence that polar bears are in danger of becoming extinct within the foreseeable future"

Really?
Uhm what do experts say?

1-"She's either grossly misinformed or intentionally misleading, and both are unbecoming," said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity. Anchorage Daily News
2- A study by the U.S. Geological Survey "predicted polar bears in Alaska could be wiped out by 2050".
3- "The governor's decision was clearly based on politics, not on science, and was primarily designed to protect the oil and gas industry stampede into the Arctic Ocean," said Steiner, the University of Alaska marine biologist. LA Times
4- This summer for the first time:
Nine polar bears at risk of drowning in global warming meltdown
Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom August 2008
"Nine polar bears are at risk of drowning after the ice floe where they lived melted because of global warming"...

"Professor Richard Steiner of the University of Alaska’s Marine Advisory Program said: “While these bears are swimming around in an ice-free coastal Arctic Ocean, the only thing the State of Alaska is doing is suing the federal government trying to overturn the listing of polar bears" Science Daily

Oh if you think that, and her 1930's german headmistress look, isn't attractive enough to make you want to draw pink hearts to her on your voting card... There is always this:
She also supports the aerial hunting of wolves.
(oh wait, you use those unreliable electronic voting machines there don't ya? Maybe you you carve pretty hearts on the screen with a nice hunting knife)

And she is, of course, thirsting for drilling in ANWR (also known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) I repeat the words wildlife and refuge...Smoke that for a few minutes.

Here is her quotable quote on the topic :
"I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem or that more supply won’t ultimately affect prices. Of course it will affect prices."

hehehehehehehe
hehehehehehehehehhaaaaaaaaa
That laughing interlude will get no apologies from me
As I continue, you can have a gander at:

1- "the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an independent statistical agency within the Department of Energy, concluded that new oil from ANWR would lower the world price of oil by no more than $1.44 per barrel—and possibly have as little effect as 41 cents per barrel—and would have its largest impact nearly 20 years from now" US NEws and World Report

2- "even if we drilled the entire state of Alaska and pulled new refineries out of thin air, the impact on gas prices would be minimal and delayed at best" Time Magazine

Links:
Palin’s first lie as VP candidate
From Salon: " It is hard to think of a more cynical and contemptuous political act this year than John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his vice -presidential running mate."
Here is Grist's opinion.
The Worst Vice-Presidential Nominee in U.S. History Robert J. Elisberg,
An Alaskan blogger's perspective
Sarah Palin, Wrong Woman for the Job The Nation., NY

And now back to local news:
got none for you tonight...
thank you

In our current days of darkness and superstitions... A little history goes a long way.

Science already known BCE/BC:

1- 500BCE/BC : Pythagoreans taught that Earth is a sphere

2- 470BCE/BC : Anaxagoras suggests that materials are made of "seeds"(atoms) (Near Izmir in Turkey)

3- 445 BC/BCE: Leucippus suggests possibility of indivisible atoms (Turkey)

4- 384-322 BC/BCE: Aristotle said it was common knowledge that earth was round.

5- 350s BC - Heraclides explained the rotation of Earth ( Turkey)

6- 220 BC/BCE: Eratosthenes of Cyrene estimated earth’s diameter correctly (in EGYPT)

In Ancient astronomy the seven known 'planets' that could be seen at the time were known as the 7 heavenly objects.

The others were not seen until the 1800's

The name of the sky/heavens god in Cannanite mythology was Shamayim the husband of earth (Eretz).
Their child was El, the supreme god.

In everyday Hebrew the name for sky and heaven is Shamayim and earth is Eretz.

Shamash was the common Akkadian name of the sun-god
(Akkadian Empire: 1050-100 BC/BCE)

Map of trade routes used by 1st century BC/BCE

The Guardian has some nice images of the day of the Eclipse.

Ideas that blow

Nuclear waste containers likely to fail, warns 'devastating' report
August 2008

Power madness: With spiralling costs, leaky reactors and dangerous cost-cutting at plants..
Jeremy Leggett

Greenpeace files complaints on Areva nuclear leaks
Reuters - Jul 31, 2008

100 employees at French nuclear site contaminated
BusinessWeek - Jul 23, 2008

Spanish nuclear plant closed after fire in electrical generator
AFP August 2008

Partial List of accidents

Meanwhile:
UAE invites bids for nuclear power project
GulfNews, United Arab Emirates -Aug 16, 2008

Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook?

And 'meet your meat'




Forget about the ad for PETA at the end, that's not the point...

It's just that:

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Kuwait plans to flex its muscles on web offenders... playground rules...

This is the week of explosions, what is going on? Bangalore, Gaza, Istanbul, Ahmadabad, China, Qantas, Greece, Queens... And weeks and endless weeks for Iraq.

Want to see serious competition for our local brand of ignorance and hatred? Watch this film.

And blowing through our dusty landscape are some cries for justice, that have been long ignored...

Reminders of the human desire for doing the right thing:

Article 23 of the UDHR
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work...
Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

Article24
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Visit:
Anti-Slavery
The ILO

When did it become ok for a magazine to edit (by inserting more errors) and dumb down your articles without letting you know?
I have a growing suspicion that certain editors are actually robots that can't compute more than one layer of meaning in a text.
I will have to get myself a metal detector.

What was the fast moving white blur that just settled over everything and then went away?

I am tired of this place. I go away soon, to refresh the spirit that has no place here.

If I take a multifunction approach, one perk for an obsessive-compulsive like myself is the increase of human brooms in our parliament.
Hey, I could have taken the 100% pessimism in an endless darkness route.

Soon enough.

Us in the news these days:

Kuwait's parliament: It just slows things down

Democratic road to nowhere

Kuwait should liberate itself

My slightly unsteady hand just put my voting card and every document anyone could possibly ask me for into my overstuffed bag...ready for my first ever vote.

I managed to find three candidates in my really frighteningly regressive district that were pleasantly surprising. So even if me and the two other voters in my house are the only support they will get, it will be a small victory against the darkness in these parts.

May the day be hopeful for those of us who want to love this place a little more like we once did... and want to feel like it loves us back, in all our different colors.

Good luck to those that will reap what we sow...
Hope they'll have reason to thank us for our choices.

Who no longer trusts the weather here?
I find myself having to chaperone open windows...
Dust pneumonia, you haunt me.

===

The second most abundant element in our universe was first discovered on the sun, and so was named after the sun God Helios...
It is the second element on the periodic table...
It is produced from radioactive decay...
It is used to help rockets take off and microchips come to life.
We suck it up into our lungs and along the way our vocal vibrations travel 3 times faster than through air, rising in pitch.
Last week a priest strapped himself to 1,000 balloons filled with Helium, floated away, and has not been seen since.
Those 1,000 balloons were filled with a noble gas our planet is running out of.
It is used as a coolant in all them dangerous reactors everyone wants to stupidly build.
So, tick tock...

===

The Herald Tribune says people are playing games
Akh...preemption...Pandora has nothing on you...
Dark comedy, like all comedy, is all in the timing... Interesting that now is the time chosen to point fingers at a country that has a mutual defense treaty with the one place someone wants an excuse to do this to...
Setting it up... Setting it up...setting it up, Setting it up,
So, tick tock...

===

Chin up people, all is not lost. Pierre got a suit. And Owen's got a new mama.
Here is a short folktale for you folks.

===

And from the people at Wired:

"I think people don't understand that e-voting is a bad idea not just because of its insecurities but because it's really bad public policy to have these really expensive machines. The cost never goes down. In fact the cost only goes up as the machines age and need more parts and upgrading.

"They take up huge amounts of warehouse space in warehouses that need to be air-conditioned," she continues. "They have to recharge the batteries every six months. And (yet) we only haul them out about once a year (for elections)."

===
Now there ought to be some yodelin' in this song;
Yeah, there ought to be some yodelin' in this song;
But I can't yodel for the rattlin' in my lung.
Woodie Guthrie

Good luck with most other ideas though...

الصقر: «التصويت والفرز» إلكترونياً.. أفضل

Hmm.. Really hope it's not these machines though...or these...or these...or these...or these...or these...or these... or these... or these...

--
YouTube:

Should electronic voting machines be outlawed?-CNN
Democracy at Risk: Ohio Voting Machines Flawed- CNN
Computerized Voting Machines: Who is Counting your Votes?- Google Tech Talks
Voting Machine Failures- CNN
Demonstration of Electronic Vote Flipping - Fox News
Hacking Democracy- The Documentary
---

"One-by-one, states across the country are finding critical flaws in the accuracy and security of electronic voting machines." Democracy Now with Amy Goodman

But I bet we will get the efficient and non-corruptible machines here though...'cause we get all the reliable stuff.

"Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives."
hmm... read on.
-----------------------
Manga does the Bible
-----------------------
"Today, our public discourse is dominated by people who have been wrong about everything" damn skippy...
-----------------------
While we are too busy deciding whether people kissing on the cheek is a sin... The world continues on...
-----------------------
...and on, so beautifully, without us.
-----------------------
Who was Cassini?

• First to observe 4 of saturn's moons
• He also discovered a gap between Saturn's two ring layers which is now named the Cassini Division
  
• The first to measure the true size of the solar system after figuring out our distance from Mars.
• A crater on Mars and another on our moon are named after him
• Born in 1625
  

I can barely think through these new allergies I have developed in this country but here are some things for you to look at that might give you allergies too..Or worse.

• It’s the ‘Oh Shit!’ Moment on Iran by Dave Lindor
• Drying Up Palestine- Watch this short online film about water issues in the Occupied Territories. (Great site called The Hub)
  
• Iraqi Refugee Children and Prostitution
• 2 Schools in Nablus- Watch a series on schools under occupation. Well made.
  

Numbers:

• Over 4 million Iraqi refugees...and counting
• 70% of Iraqis have no access to clean water
• Over 90% of Iraqi children have learning disabilities due to trauma
• $5,000 a second are spent on the war, how much is being spent on aid and peace?
• Hospitals in Gaza have 12 hour a day power cuts
• 80% of families in Gaza survive on food aid
• 70% of Gaza households earn less than $1.20 a day/person.

For the price of a side of fries...or a new cd...or a cinema ticket...you can save a life. If you are feeling generous the price of your flat screen, your laptop, your fancy shoes, the money we spend on all the things we can live without can provide safe drinking water, life saving medical care, school supplies, protection from exploitation, a future...

• Save the Children are helping Iraqi refugee children in Jordan
• Unicef- You can choose where your donation goes.
• Oxfam- Gaza crisis appeal
• UNRWA- Emergency aid to the Gaza and the West Bank

The petty parliament is finished, here's to the coming scramble. Are we going to be given the chance to hope, or just some more of the same clatter around our aching heads?

Obama is running on a platform of change, and everyone desperate enough to want it is following his pied piper tune even if they don't always know what it's saying...I think maybe we are desperate enough to become addicted to that siren song of 'change' too... And why not? We have tasted that rock called bottom, and in the immortal words of Yazz, y'know, there is only one way we can be headed...
I think.
But thinking is not one of my strong points these days so forgive me if I sound a little silly.

Don't you think it's time we grabbed that beautiful, dusty, crazy old dame called Kuwait and gave her a big shameless and heartbreaking kiss? Then with the blush of rekindled love on our cheeks we got out there and grabbed every single moron who thinks that he can have a piece of her to hang on his trophy wall... every single frustrated lump of hatred who wants to cover up her beautiful, ugly, seductive, funny, living, breathing, different parts because they offend him...every single lazy regressive coward who wants her to be the Miss Havisham she has turned into... and gave every single one of them a big fat kiss goodbye?

This mixed up, repressed lady needs some air and we are taking her out on the town to remind her, and ourselves, what it feels like to be free again...to be proud again...to be in love with everything. And once she can stand up straight again, maybe this beautiful place can take us all back in to her arms and we can finally be home.

No Comment

Gideon Levy of the Israeli Paper Ha'aretz writes:

" Two days earlier Israel killed more Palestinians than have been killed by all the Qassams over the past seven years. Among the dead were four children and an infant. The next day Israel killed another five boys. And who is the victim? Israel. And who is cruel? The Palestinians."
------------------
Ira Chernus Writes:

"Palestinian deaths this week outnumbered Israeli deaths by about 30 to 1, and the count of serious injuries is even more lopsided."
-------------------
On March 2nd The Observer's Peter Beaumont wrote:

"Israel is again deliberately obstructing the transfer of urgent medical cases for treatment outside Gaza in the latest extension of its policy of collective punishment of Palestinians."
--------------------
Nimer Sultany writes in The Guardian:

"Perhaps it is easy to dismiss this suffering by blaming the victims and resorting to ready cliches. Indeed, Israeli propagandists go out of their way to repeat the soundbite: we withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and since then the Palestinians have been firing rockets on our southern towns."..."In his most recent report (pdf) of January 2008, the UN rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied territories has recounted Israel's actions in Gaza, calling them "war crimes" and demonstrating how these have been relentlessly producing a humanitarian crisis."
--------------------
B'Tselem: The Israeli Information center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
--------------------

3:15 pm
AUK has been evacuated after a bomb threat...
Or some kind of threat that is still not clear.
Check on your family and friends.
The authorities are at the university.
All is fine so far.
Earlier in the day, witnesses say, there was an apparent threat at a bank, some say Burgan.

Hell and a hand basket, we know you well.

I need to recharge the fuel that is sapped by the depression of being dunked daily in the vat of ignorance and regressive philosophies of this manufactured majority...the majority created by decades of ensuring that education is no more than recitation... like those ads, these days, that suggest if children learn pages and pages by heart their parents' yellow brick road to heaven will be paved..

When you are too busy trying to learn something by heart you don't have time to understand it, to filter it through that amazing thing we are blessed with called a brain...you have no time to read anything else...and the ignorance works so well for those who have you hanging over a precipice staring into the hellfire that will swallow you up if you think too much.

If you think too much you are liable to tire yourself out, and if you are too tired you won't have the strength to wrap so many things around you to cover that other blessing we have; that body that is so complex, so miraculous and so apparently offensive to some people who claim to love its maker.

We get this one chance at living on this planet... I can't help but pity that so much of it is spent having to stop our society from continuously going into rewind...

Humans have managed to count 70 sextillion stars (that is 70 +21 zeros, chew on that for a while) and yes I am sure they will find something blasphemous about the name of that number. Get ready to waste time and fight that fight next...

We know that our galaxy has 300 billion stars... 10% of which are like our sun...and there are, as of a recent count, 125 billion galaxies in the universe...

We have walked the moon...we have created machines that spin around our planet and watch us and help us watch each other online, on tv, and eventually in little chips swimming around our brains... yes, it is only a matter of time before nano-technology, that frightening new frontier, will allow us to upload our minds onto machines...

We have cured diseases, we created light and flight and breathing underwater....we have painted things we can see and things we only dream of... we have written heartbreaking poetry and thunderous philosophies that have carved new passages in our brains...we beautiful humans have done all this, and more, and yet some of us would still prefer to pick the nose of the past, with faulty interpretations of a text they have the gall to think they can chain us with.

Our religion and all religions are greater than the small minded, blistered, malformed ideas pasted on them by some neurotic men's grandstanding.

I am not ready to suffer for the therapy and medications they didn't get.

Yes, I need to refuel, or rather purge this anger. So when I am not on youtube to satisfy a surprising new addiction to snooker...I like to feed on things that can lift the fog a little.

If you missed any of the events or interviews, to do with the anachronistic battles to regain the last tattered shreds of any self respecting human dignity and freedom, you can watch them at this great youtube collection.

Some news for those who think that all the proof out there supports segregating humans:

Single-sex schools 'no benefit for girls' The Observer,Sunday June 25 2006
"Half a century of research 'has not shown any dramatic or consistent advantages for single-sex education' for boys or girls"
---
"Studies show ..." is the usual lead-in to any defense of single-sex education. In fact studies do not show that girls fare better in single-sex schools. "There does not seem to be research support for this perspective," The Atlantic
---
"Lately the so-called boy crisis in public schools has become every lazy media outlet's topic du jour, fueling the perception that girls get better college preparation than boys. That theory has been officially debunked with genuine research -- race and class turned out to be two of the real culprits for educational disparities, not gender -- but the Bush administration has yielded to the overblown boy crisis hysteria anyway." Salon

I'm tired...But can't sleep...but I will try anyway...like we all do everyday with everything else.

I'm stuffed with rice krispie treats and jalapeno peppers and some organic ketchup... I realise, only faintly, that it might sound sickening, to some of you, but frankly if you can stand being here without flying away forever or flying out a window, then you can handle my eating habits.

Are you tired of being controlled by sex obsessed, self-hating, repressed apes who have no idea that their hair-brained ideas about holiness went out of fashion in the medieval gutters of history?

If some people read anything other than childish mini-books on how to beg God for the things they are too busy in rituals to get for themselves, they would realise that the world has moved light-years ahead of the puerile phobias these emperors of a poisoned panacea peddle to the frightened and the foolishly frustrated.

I am tired of them turning the beauty and peace of spiritual quests into claustrophobia, into the cunning commercialism of stickers and celebrity holiness, into a festival of ignorance and a denial of the miracle of human experience in all its forms.
Our middle ages are upon us, and frankly, I don't intend to pass them onto the next generation.

For a huge collection of free 'written-for-non-readers' versions of viral indoctrination take a trip to some of our ministries. If you can hold your food down long enough to make it through the vulgarisation of the original architecture, through to the debasement of offices that are supposed to house tomes of legal and political thought and professionals that look...well, professional, you will get to the offices filled, no not with books...guess again...no not with paperwork that makes it look like they have work....guess again...no no, silly, not with computers you are getting carried away.

The most you can expect from some of these rooms that represent our country are walls lined with stickers of palpitating hearts, that have confused material expression with experience of the divine. You will find handwritten supplications that look like the ones we used to paint back in kindergarten, hanging crookedly by the tired small sticky tape strips struggling to understand what they are doing suspended like this in official places of work.

There will, of course, be desks... empty except for the stacks of little books that tell you how you can spend all day murmuring " please Lord give me stuff, please don't let me do things someone said are bad, please, please, please let me just continue sitting here on my behind while you ensure that I get rich and healthy and happy."

I fear the nation that is made up of adults who have read nothing but little elf-sized books with one idea and one fear central to them all. Where are history, and philosophy and science and art and music and all those miracles that bubbled up from our depths during our short time in this universe? Why is it that some choose to fear admitting that we are more developed than our single celled ancestors that wriggled about waiting to evolve into things more diverse and colorful and complex?

This planet was alive 4 billion years before our cameo appearance. These painful proselytizers are all just actors with bit parts that still manage to strutt around like they own the place. The world will forget soon enough, the ignorance and fear belched out by these perverters of the religion they dare to suggest, in their hateful arrogance, that they represent. I just can't help but feel a sorrow for our time, for our youth that has passed in their ugly shadow. I grieve, but I will see everyone at 6 tomorrow, and something will be lifted.

I am buying a soccer jersey and its going to be red.

The clouds today wrapped round the blue sky like a belt, a line of white all around the horizon... If you tilt yourself upside down it would look like a real sky with all the pieces where you thought they should be.

Sorta like if you were upside down, this country might look like a real country...

Not the kind of country where universities are expected to be prisons, and straitjackets and where silence is your best friend and independent thought is a handicap...
Not the kind of place where surveillance and a hysteria of scandal mongering have become absurdly holy, and liberty and diversity are considered atrocities...
Not the kind of place where genders are supposed to be so protected from each other, so unknown to each other, so alien that the only thing they know how to do when they meet is no more developed than the feral coming together of wailing cats in our streets...
Not the place where art is dangerous unless it is as still and lifeless as we are supposed to be...
Not the place where families protect you by strapping on the very weapons they want to protect you from and riddling you till there is nothing left of you, or your freedom, to protect...
Not the place where politics is a zoo and we are helping to feed the monkeys.

Maybe if we are upside down long enough, the pressure on what is left of our brains will squeeze out an original thought, or a wild and free idea...

Or maybe just something close to the kind of courage it takes for a woman in this upside down place to stand firm and unswaying... close to the kind of calm that hushes the room when a woman defends against the pranks that should have been left long ago in the backward schoolyards that are the last places that bullies still reign. For the kind of solidarity that comes with people who stand together against the little tyrants that have slithered into the people's house, and smeared our still weeping newborn democracy with a meaninglessness that makes me eye one way tickets like they were the love of my life.

I think maybe some of you have been upside down for a while...because it seems so pretty once again that people are gathered in the building built for the people... And the sky looks right again.

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." Camus

It's late. I'm tired... but my eyes are too swollen to shut so you are going to be lucky enough to get a post after all this time. And of course lucky means get ready for some news you are not going to like, because that's just the way it is.

• Take this quiz or this one, then let's drown our sorrows together because the candidate most likely to match us and, in my opinion, save the world, will probably not become president.
• Over a million are displaced by Tabasco floods. No food, no power. Anyone still want to pooh pooh global warming?
• Is Zain sending anyone else impossible messages about money owed after they have already thanked you for paying your bill? It's probably only me and my electronic curse.
• Ok, so i'm too tired to make it a long list of bad stuff .

We can also try something that might get a smile out of you. And if you smile...I smile.

• Take a look at the young Aboriginal men dancing to Zorba the Greek. "Elcho Island dancers take 'Yolngu Zorba' to the world"

Just askin...

When will the price be too high?

.

When will "democracies" believe in everyone's rights?

.

Will this Exodus be remembered forever in rituals?

.

When are we going to start feeling shocked?

.

I don't know about you...

But this scares the bejeeeezuz out of me...

Been having "stinging eyes and sore throats and headaches" ? You are going to love reading this..

And by love, I of course mean the don't bother to pack just run far, far away kinda love..
-
In case you need more reason to do that...here you go.
-
Iraq in Fragments is on dvd
-
Aid Agenecies that need our help in Iraq are:

• IMC (they have done great work in Iraq and Lebanon and all over the world)
• Save the Children (They help Iraqi refugee children)
• Refugees International

-
Facebook and political activism...hmmm..
-

A child dies of malaria every 30 seconds... How many children will be gone by the time you turn away from this page?

All it takes is mosquito nets to save lives.. The season for generosity and giving is soon upon us. The cost of a lunch could save several lives...One net can protect up to 5 babies.

• Buy two nets for a few Dinars at Oxfam Unwrapped (they have tons of other great things)
• Nothing but Nets is an organisation that provides life saving nets to those who need them.

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I detected a sadness in the eyes of my favourite blogger the other night... I thought maybe I was seeing things in the blackout, or maybe it was the fact that I had interrupted her workout... But I guess it was more than that..because she sounds sad too these days..

And I leave her with lines we have all spoken here:

גֵּר הָיִיתִי, בְּאֶרֶץ נָכְרִיָּה

Exodus 2:22

I was really missing this country...on my month of hotel hopping and racist encounters with certain white folk... but of course the joy at being back in the arms of the fatherland was short lived...Because them arms are brutal.
The pretty cozy mask we all knew was a bit too plastic fantastic is melting fast in our summer of wretchedness... Don't talk, don't be, don't complain and hope the big sticks won't come down on you.. And really I am beginning to despair...because all the protests and songs and slogans are just getting old and worn and frankly comic. And when I say comic, it's that dark thing that eats you inside because it looks so dead and stupid.
And as if it were not enough to see the goose stepping in the corridors of power and know that there is nothing like law and order or rights or compassion in this tiny blot on the planet that thinks it is king of the world, you have to deal with people closer to home that make you understand why this country is flushing itself down the toilet of history.
Is there a prejudice we haven't excelled at? A form of hatred we haven't dressed up in with a moronic pride? What hope is there for a place that fears change and destroys diversity and despises anything other than its bland and rotting self? And to have to do daily battle for the tiny,tiny crumbs of progress and for the ghosts of something humane and generous in people's souls to show itself, only to wake up to everything having automatically rewound to something even further in the putrid past, is outrageous.
I don't have any solutions. Not today.

What do Kuwait, Nigeria and the Ivory Coast have in common? Yup their embassy staff in the UK commit assault, because they can...
German embassy staff drive over the speed limit... tsk...them Germans.

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Live Earth--This Saturday.

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If you have been hibernating you may not have heard that the US is experiencing the worst drought ever... Yup even a lake caught fire...
Anyway, the situation has made the Governor of Alabama come up with a solution that I bet you will envy for its ease and practicality...
Get out that holy mojo for a week of prayer...
And well if the rains don't come down it will undoubtedly be because there was a faithless hedonist among the worshipers that ruined the whole desperate act... and if the rains do come down, make room in the pews, hallelujah!
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Ok, ok what do Kwt and Alabama have in common?
No, silly, not wishful thinking...
They both have a government monopoly on something... And I'm letting you do your homework.
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Goodnight...and no way is luck comin' sniffin' by these parts...

I have been slack...in so many ways. Posting, responding to comments...sorry...and it's not just because I am practicing for the new law...akh the new law...There is no business like monkey business, and there are no monkeys like ours...Could we get them in these getups and let them find somewhere far away for them to trash and degrade...Because there is so little left to love here...especially when yellow sky days like these dim that much more of it. The plants on the windowsill are roasted and crispy, and no amount of water will salvage them...So that's one less thing that depends on me being here...But I stay I stay...for a little longer.
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In news from other failed states... Christie Whitman got a belated orchestra of hisses and boos at a hearing about poisoned air at ground zero... back in the first weeks of the cleanup she said "I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C. that their air is safe to breath and their water is safe to drink" (EPA) ... except, well... Lots of people knew it wasn't and said so...Medical Aftershocks December 2001.. And the EPA seems to have known that "some of the World Trade Center dust was as caustic as drain cleaner, but that neither the EPA nor FEMA, both of which were informed of the results, ever released the findings" (Fair) And it gets creepier... if you can imagine that.
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Venezuela is preparing to defend itself againt a US invasion...I guess Chavez recognises it as the new American pastime...
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The UK may need a new Noah...
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And I need an early lunch...Bye.

Anyone who has been on these flights should get checked for TB..
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Michael Moore's new film Sicko tackles the health industry...
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"Colony Collapse Disorder" anyone?

---
We would like to congratulate Kuwait on recognizing the danger posed by ozone depletion, almost a whopping twenty years after the Montreal Protocol made it more than obvious... It's like suddenly getting all excited about bell bottoms and polyester...
We ratified the Protocol in 1992...
We are still trying to replace ozone depleting products with safer alternatives...
And now I must get back to more behind the times reading...
----
I leave you with Mary Oliver once again:

"Plus, too,
it's love almost too fierce to endure, the bee
nuzzling like that into the blouse
of the rose. And the fragrance, and the honey, and of course
the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over
all of us."

From the poem Hum

Been a bit out of the loop lately, but hey we made international news today... We are one of the countries arming the criminal regime of Sudan, despite a UN embargo...
And we thought we were plum out of reasons to be proud of this little troublemaker state of ours...
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The Republicans are still insisting on filling the office at the top with donkeys...
Which might be why so many are defecting...
But they're not worried, they have Diebold on their side...
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I don't know about you but I am looking forward to candlelight and star gazing during our coming summer blackouts...
Thanks to terrible planning, ignoring the fact that we have an abundance of renewable energy sources like the sun, and constantly being on our knees before our major non-renewable national oil gods, we can expect our gluttonous consumption and the rising planetary heat to result in a series of power cuts in our hottest months...with all the accompanying health hazards..

"The effect of global warming appears to be with us already... The consequences could be water-rationing and the threat of blackouts, as demand for air-conditioning and refrigeration soars in the summer, disrupting economic activity and potentially costing business millions"Observer

But don't worry, the country that bought you oil spills and fires in gas pipes on oil fields is thinking newkulur... Did someone say one way ticket out?

Holy, Holy
Since we are hurtling to yet another barbaric stage of human conflict...
History is a good teacher, who is a good pupil?

All flights out of Dubai Airport have been grounded indefinitely...
So far due to a Bangladesh bound plane having an incident that injured 14 people...
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Today at 5pm this film will be showing at Layla Gallery cinema as part of this week's French Film Fest.
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The sky is really pretty..
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Tomorrow at Shaab cinema at 4:30 this film will be showing as part of an independent film fest...
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Wednesday there will be a Brazilian short film fest at Beit Lothan...
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Next week will be dry and barren as always..
Thank you.

Some articles about the first Arabic production to be staged at the Royal Shakespeare Company... By a Kwti theater company with a pan-Arab cast.
From The Financial Times--- The Guardian--- The BBC
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As a special gift for National Day, Kuwait confirmed 20 cases of bird flu in falcons, chickens and turkeys...Then they confirmed 5-7 more cases today. We can trust that our efficient and responsible authorities will be working day and night to keep us safe.
And now onto news I don't have to have a gun to my head to write...
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Your choice of coffee could help heal the scars of genocide... While taking some vitamins could increase your chances of dying... and eating ice-cream could help you get pregnant

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An Egyptian blogger is jailed...
Some suggest:

"Contrary to the optimism of the Nineties, that it would allow oppressed peoples to escape censors and read forbidden opinions, the net is proving surprisingly easy for dictatorships to control."The Guardian

Really?
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And Iran Iran Iran...akh, that disease Iraq had a few years ago, the one where they were responsible for everything bad in the world, seems to have infected Iran... So if you feel a bit under the weather, if your car won't start, or your marriage is on the rocks or that raw meat you had last night just didn't sit too, well...it's probably all Iran's fault. Those busy Iranians seem to be responsible for everything from arming Iraqi militants to planning to partition Iraq, to kidnapping Yemeni Jewish children...And they are apparently doing all those pesky things (and we are hearing about them) right when the US plans to attack Iran...

You know what they say about comedy, it's all in the timing.

===
Seymour Hersh has a new article about US plans to attack Iran ... He warned us a year ago and even long before that...but we were all too busy, eh?
Fisk says Lebanon will be the First Victim of the Iran Crisis
Kucinich says: "The justification chosen by the Administration is the one circumstance in which a President could bypass Congress and still wage a military conflict" The Nation
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"Russia's president accused Washington of seeking world domination, undermining the UN and other international institutions, monopolizing world energy resources, destabilizing the Mideast by its bungled occupation of Iraq, and unleashing a new nuclear arms race by planning to deploy anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe." Toronto Sun ...News to anyone?

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You have probably heard all the hoopla about Al Gore's whopping electricity bill...a day after he was celebrating his popularity at the Oscars came the 'scandalous' news that his electricity bill should shame the eco-warrior... Kieth Olbermann responds.
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And tonight, look up at around 11:18pm (20:18 GMT) to watch the moon start to move into the earth's shadow...for the best lunar eclipse in a couple of years.

Today there is only a poem...

Sulayman Al-Bassam is in Stratford, the birthplace of Shakespeare to put on an Arabic production of Richard III at the Royal Shakespeare Company...

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mmmmm...mmmm..we have GM crops on our shelves...
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A new Islamophonic podcast at the Guardian...have a listen.
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A study from the University of Chicago says that you can help fight Global warming by going vegetarian...because eating meat is worse than driving a car... That's also what the UN said a while ago...go easy on the carcass munching.
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Speaking of eating dead bodies, my years of decimating the cow population of England might not make my brain go spongy if doctors have indeed started to reverse vCJD
They better be quick about it though...I feel it galloping behind me on the ghost of what became my beef burgers.
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Gotta run...

Sore, sore throat...maybe from screaming over the music at a wedding... or from being too cold because I said no to fur...and will keep saying hell no! to it...or maybe it's the suppressed yelps at being in this sometimes not so hopeful place...

---

كلام الناس. الوسطية والنحاسة الكويتية

He keeps helping us breathe again...

and also laugh again:

بعد اكتشاف خلو الكويت من التطرف"

"(!!)

--

It's one of those things I avoid thinking of because it scares the bejeezuz out of me...but really, where do you think all the millions of phones and pc's and electronics we just toss out end up? With all their toxic insides leaking out into the soil and water? The EU is going to try to make it safer but really, maybe we also need to stop falling for having to buy the latest pretty phone everytime...a duck is a duck is a duck...even if it has a few feathers more or less...

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Photo Essay

That's all I have to say...

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"Saddam Hussein has vowed to go the gallows as a "martyr" ready and willing to sacrifice himself"...That was last week...and this morning, on the festival of sacrifice, they gave him what he wanted...Robert Fisk is disgusted at the idea that in the shadow of over 400,000 dead now, a criminal invasion, a country torn to shreds, Abu Ghraib and on and on... that "we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created."...Human Rights Watch writes of Iraq's Shallow Justice and it's worth a read for its summary of how the trial was a mockery of justice.

Experts on Iraq react to the execution of Saddam Hussein

Saddam trial verdict tarnished by Iraqi court's failings

The Obituary

The finger pointed at Saddam the criminal comes so many years late, so many lives too late, and yet just in time for no more files to be opened up on any of the people who made him who he was...the puppet is dead, the puppeteers are toasting to it. And what good is it all now for anyone in burning Iraq?

--

And the Global Warming News of the day:

A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic

snocone tagged me...supposed to grab the closest book, look at page 123 and write down the 5th sentence and the following couple of sentences....

ok..
Page 123 in Bukowski's 'Love is a Dog from Hell' has only these lines...
.

"a single dog

walking alone on a hot sidewalk of

summer

appears to have the power

of ten thousand gods

why is this?"

-

How's that?

And How's about i don't tag anyone?

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And how's about we really teach anthropology of religion, comparative religions and cultural studies in universities and even schools here?

---

And how's about we revoke everyone's driver's licence and make everyone get tested again?Especially me.

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And how's about i figure out where i got the idea that 'how's about' is correct English?

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And how's about someone get me a little fleece blankie for christmas?

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And how's about everyone keeps building up the courage to be who they are and not who they think people who don't give a damn about them think they should be?

Really How about that?

---

And how's about y'all read this

and this

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How's about the season make up it's mind, winter or summer...

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And how's about we read and remember things like this?

.

"Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world...

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. " M.L. King

A tale of two serial killers:
One has molested and killed over 30 children in 2 weeks the other kills 5 sex workers in 10 days- which story is all over the front pages from the start and is in a country that respects all its victims and its public?
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George Clooney (for president) spoke about Darfur here he is in Egypt on youtube...

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Congratulations to the less than 1% of people in the Emirates who will be voting this week.

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Pinochet is dead...what a whimper of an end for the man that ruined Chile and murdered so many...
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When there are sidewalks, how come people here insist on strolling in the middle of the road? At a reaaallly slow pace, even when you are headed right for them...

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Texas apparently thinks there aren't enough people running around with weapons that blow you to bits...Really?
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Fisk on who's in power in Lebanon and on some people's weird obsession with trying to erase a past when they can't solve issues in the present...

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Yet more documents that reveal the lies that took everyone to war...

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A study shows that the smarter you are the more likely you are to become a vegetarian :)

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Ahhh, drama at La Scala, where it should be...The star tenor gets booed off the stage (and hires lawyers), then an unsuspecting understudy has to finish off the scene and does it sooooo well he gets a 9 minute ovation...and the story goes on...

===

Arundhati Roy has an article titled India's Shame in the Guardian...it includes information like this:"

"The Indian government declared that Pakistan - America's closest ally in the "war on terror" - was a terrorist state"...."moved more than half a million troops to the Pakistan border. Foreign embassies evacuated their staff and citizens, and tourists travelling to India were issued cautionary travel advisories. The world watched with bated breath as the subcontinent was taken to the brink of nuclear war. All this cost India an estimated pounds 1.1bn of public money. About 800 soldiers died in the panicky process of mobilisation alone."

That happened in 2001.

Another Russian is poisoned.... radiation is found in 12 sites linked to the poisoning of Litvinenko... it's World AIDS day...and it's a beautiful grey out...

====

Signora says that today's protests are a threat to democracy and Sama7a says, on Al-Manar, that Nasrallah wants nothing but democracy and an end to sectarianism...and in related flights of fancy, apparently ahl il-kahf could sleep for centuries because they got a massive ear trauma from the Almighty...which a 'scientist' has proved is possible to send one into a state between sleep and death...for hundreds of years...wawawewa..

مؤكدا انه توصل في بحثه الى امكان استخدام الضرب على الاذن كوسيلة من وسائل التخدير الحديث

How God-like of this scientist to be able to do that...and if you can prove a miracle is actually science, ain't it no longer a miracle?

====

And it would really be lovely if we could stop buying the myth about being against citizenship rights for Palestinians in the Arab countries they live in because 'we care about them and want Palestine back'...Are we supposed to think that some countries are against التوطين because if it happened Palestine would not exist?? Why, because 60 years of Palestinians being refugee 'guests' has really been great for that dream? The one chance we all get at being alive on this planet has for many Palestinians meant being hostages in a rhetorical game hung around their necks for half a century. No one did anything to make a realistic and functioning homeland for the Palestinians a reality but can still find it absurdly appropriate to use the idea of it as reason to NOT consider their citizenship. The countries that did give them nationalities didn't do it in some big plot to eliminate the chance that there will be a Palestinian state, despite what our epic seething paranoia about conspiracies might whisper in our ears...They did it because there are laws about citizenship that are applied if you give a damn about the people being born in and living in your country...and when they are not applied it is not 'for the sake' of the person not getting those benefits but for economic, political and social reasons particular to the country that doesn't want the Palestinians as citizens...so the angel wings can be retired when it comes to any talk about Palestinians and citizenship or the lack of it, enough already.

--

The day gets better when this man has something to say...

Olbermann: "What a dark place your world must be, Mr Gingrich. Where the way to save America is to destroy America. I will awaken every day of my life thankful I am not with you in that dark place. And I will awaken every day of my life thankful that you are entitled to tell me about it. And that you are entitled to show me what an evil idea lurks there and what a cynical mind. And that you entitled to do all that thanks to the very freedoms you seek to suffocate."

wow it was kinda hot this morning, and now i need gloves to type...great great stuff to be confused by the weather...
Where is that thing once known as winter?
And where is that online kwti site where people sell their cars?

There doesn't really need to be any relationship between the things i say...
==
Here are a few pardons:
1- Pardon?
2- Pardon?
3- Pardon?

And there's also a but of course...
An interesting...
And finally, a well, well...
==
The Russian spy poisoned with radiation wrote some final words before he died this week...Radiation was found in the Millennium Hotel, in london and the Itsu sushi bar in Leicester Square which he visited on Nov 1st...and people who were in contact with him are being offered free radiation tests...Here's an article about who killed him? He was investigating the death of the celebrated Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was shot last month...

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The Guardian has writers tell you what their favourite books of the year are...

Also there's money and blogging...

Bahraini elections drahhhma...

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It's lovely to welcome someone to the Galactica fan universe...there is good news in this world after all..

Here is a song for you...

There is a contest to name a new batch of 7 wonders...anyone want to nominate this deal with the devil-maker?... Then Lonely Planet suggest Belfast and Beirut are 'must see' cities...anyone want to nominate this other town of tears as a tourist destination?
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Germanwatch says that the US and Saudi are among the top five worst countries dealing with climate change...ahh good to know who our best friends are...good to know they are always helping to set an example in transparency, progress, rule of law, justice...and other fancy things.
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Shorts:
Al-Jazeera launches their new English channel---Because turning Darfur into the hell on earth is apparently not grisly fun enough, Sudan has decided to invade Chad---Ethiopia got arms from over 10 countries and counting, but the ones in the headlines are Iran and Syria---Pakistan has decided it's finally time to change rape laws, to now help the victim and not the rapist---O.J. Simpson writes a book about how he would have done it, if he hadn't done it, and wanted to pretend to have done it...erm...if he hadn't...yeah, what he would have done if he had killed his wife and her lover...cuz he did, no, didn't...a book...don't buy it, unless of course you have had Tamiflu recently and are experiencing one of the many documented cases of delirium and 'other unusual psychiatric behaviour'---If you wait long enough however, Global Warming, that thing everyone sucks at avoiding, will wipe out birds and you won't need to take Tamiflu no more...
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It's a lovely blue out again and there is one bird left chirping all on it's own...must feel sort of like all the lonely souls trying to make a difference in this place...keep chirping, someone will join you and then you'll realise it's suddenly springtime...
And then the typical kwti summer will come and singe your wings...but that's just me being cranky...

• Today there is Keith Olbermann...as there should be everyday
• But also there is Iran mad at Google
• And there is of course more Salon love for Battlestar G.
• There is also Jack Straw getting questions he wished he never got.
• Will the democrats make a difference? Larry Elliott thinks, not so much.
• There is a Scary new US court case that could affect the kind of news you get.
• And Lebanon, Lebanon...