Iraq

Over 500 dead in a stampede on a Shia pilgrimage in Baghdad today...A rumour spread that a suicide bomber was about to blow himself up and the crowd started to flee the bridge they were crossing...just before the rumour 3 mortar rounds landed near the Khadimiya mosque..

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Who started the rumour?

500 Shi'ites dead on a Shia holy day...as if the situation in the country weren't bad enough...

Especially since the past weeks have been filled with these headlines:

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CIA Officers Warn of Iraq Civil War, Contradicting Bush's Optimism

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Why the US Is Supporting Civil War

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Civil war looms in Iraq as constitution talks end in disarray

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A fiction as powerful as WMD
It is not withdrawal that threatens Iraq with civil war, but occupation

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Seymour Hersh: Iraq "Moving Towards Open Civil War"

Listen to this report

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Iraq's sectarian myth
The sectarian forces drafting the new Iraqi constitution do not reflect grassroots sentiment

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Unfortunately some people would like to see the previously non-existent divisions between sects in Iraq sink into a world of double, double toil and trouble....

Blog Day

So it's Blog Day...August 31st...and I have found 5 blogs i had never read before and am offering them up for your enjoyment...since I can't pick any Kuwaiti blogs due to the 'new to me' rule I will just direct everyone to Kuwait Blogs to take a look for themselves..

Here are the new blogs I found in no particular order..

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A Woman Without and Man (is like a fish without a bicycle)

-lady in Iceland...fun layout..funny posts..

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The Poison Kitchen

- A Canadian Blogger..Nice peaceful colours for reading a blog, I like the writing..you can navigate through the diferent topics like politics, film, music, philosophy and the list goes on..Learn a lot..

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The Accidental Hedonist

A food blog--fun info, nice layout, lovely pictures..

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IranScan

Set up by a group of Iranian bloggers (blogging is a huge, huge phenomenon in Iran) to blog the recent elections--It continues to be a source of information about politics and other things in Iran-has a lot of links..

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Blonde Sense

A group of politically minded ladies giving us the news with a bite of humour..

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And go visit Sabbah's Blog...the one who invited me to join Blog Day..

Photo of the Hayatt Regency hotel in New Orleans after Katrina's attack...haunting like a war photo..

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More Photos at the BBC and Air America

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Over 90 people dead...perhaps many more unaccounted for..bodies floating in the flood water..people's homes destroyed..a lot of the people in the area can't afford to lose their homes and their livelihoods..Martial law might be imposed, to add insult to injury...good luck to everyone in the path of the storm..

If you want to help the victims go to The American Red Cross

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Another fire in Paris in immigrant housing units...what is going on?

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I've been tagged by Sabbah's Blog to join the Blog Day bonanza..the brainchild of the Israeli blogger Nir Ofir...this means I have to look for 5 new blogs that I have never read before and offer them up on blog day which is tomorrow..the 31st of August..that date was picked because 3108 looks like the word Blog..

You don't have to be tagged to join in...its a day for you to discover and share new and interesting blogs with the world..

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A woman tried to commit harakiri in front of the Japanese Prime Minister's office..

I like to see newspapers with a sense of humour...
In Saturday's The Daily Star, on page 19 we have two main stories... when you stare at the page for a few minutes and compare them you will either want to laugh or bang your head on the nearest solid object..

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One is about the Palestinian mountaineer Suzanne al-Houby who has managed to climb the highest peak in Europe (Mount Elbrus) and also Africa's Highest peak Mt. Kilimanjaro, France's Mont Blanc and Everest Base camp..She is the first Palestenian woman to do all that and she uses her fame to spread a message of peace...She also plans to start a charity program for children in the Occupied Territories...She is also the Director of the Dubai Bone and Joint Center...an example of what women are capable of..

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The second story and one which has the blurb "I call for women's rights" and then kinda smacks you with: "their right to get married, even to a married man"...where do you even begin...This woman, who was too busy or too uninterested to be a partner and I suspect other things to her husband is encouraging him to take another wife..not only that but she has also founded an organisation that promotes and facilitates polygamy...Just because she doesnt feel like being married or would rather someone else did all the chores (idea:how bout ask hubby to cook, instead of buying him a new wife) doesn't mean other women want her helping their husbands to fool around...

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The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a Hemingway short story which I felt like recommending after reading these two stories together...it's about a couple stranded on safari...about the resentment that can build up in a marriage ...about wasted talent..about excuses we make for what we settle for in life..

Obviously, the only link this has to the first news item is the location...the burden of the rest of the sad story lies on people with pretend marriages and lame excuses..

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I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."
Hemingway

For anyone that has been to beautiful Kerala, the news last week that the Coca Cola factory there is being ordered to shut down will sound like music to your ears...

You are sure to have seen signs all over the place and especially in restaurants saying that they will not serve Coke because the company has polluted the land and also denied people access to clean water..water which it takes in large amounts, from land with water shortages, to make it's soft drinks...

Finally the court has found it guilty of offering the locals sludge waste contaminated by poisonous cadmium to use as fertiliser...that's poisonous sludge for their veggies and fruits..very nice of Coke, non?

Not only that, now a member of the pollution board is being investigated for corruption and for accepting bribes when he said that the Coca Cola plant was not polluting beyond acceptable limits...except that it was and everyone knows it..

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The poisonous sludge was once sold !! to the locals...before it got given out for free..or just dumped on the roadsides..

For photos of protests against the company go here, and notice that unarmed men and women were beaten with sticks by officers protecting the factory..

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How Coca-Cola Gave BackTo Plachimada
By Alexander Cockburn

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Other not so nice things Coca Cola does

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Coca - Cola Admits That Dasani is Nothing But Tap Water

by Trevor Datson

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Coca Cola has been accused of involvement in the murder of ten union leaders in Colombia... see American Prospect and the Guardian for more info..

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Coke and other soft drinks manufactured in India were found to contain pesticides:

lindane, DDT, malathion and chlorpyrifos

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The diet versions of Coke and other soft drinks contain the neurotoxin Aspartame..which when it is kind gives you joint pain, eye pain, dizziness, confusion, headaches,irritability, nausea..etc..

and when it is in the mood to play with you it causes death, brain damage, ulcers, severe depression,alzheimers, multiple sclerosis, non-hodgkin's lymphoma..all in all it causes over 92 side effects..

I know someone who's chronic pain and symptoms of senility vanished when she stopped taking anything containing Aspartame..do yourself a favour and don't order the diet versions of soft drinks..aspartame also causes gradual weight gain..so you're doing nothing useful..

Also if you are pregnant stay away from aspartame because it can affect fetal brain development..

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The phosphorous in coke and other soft drinks dissolves bones..by leaching calcium out...leading to osteoporosis...and the risk of obesity becomes 1.6 times stronger...read more here..

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So next time you reach for that coke, and especially when you take a look at where it was bottled..give a thought to the poisoned land, poisoned farmers, your own beautiful body and maybe go for the fresh juice instead..

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When it comes to boycotts...Coke is it article in Enough Fanzine

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Coke: The New Nike- Michael Blanding

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KARMA BANQUE

"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it"

Mahatma Gandhi

By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. -

Immanuel Kant

Just an update on the last post..Robertson is now saying he didn't say 'assassinate' the president of Venezuela, he only said 'take him out'..stupidity is in fact limitless, because he said it on air, so we can all watch him utter the very words he insists he didn't...

A religious fundamentalist is on the airwaves calling for the president of a country to be assassinated...A president that was elected by a majority of his people I might add...except this fanatic preacher of death is not being pursued by the authorities, shut down, put on the terrorist list, kicked out of the country...The US State department is only saying these comments were 'inappropriate'.... Is it because it comes from Pat Robertson, one of the major figures of the Evangelical movement, 9 out of 10 of whom voted for Bush? And is it because the President that Robertson wants killed is the democratically elected leader of a Latin American country that has been critical of US policy in the region?

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``We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,'' Robertson said. ``We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator.'' Guardian

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"For five centuries, Venezuela has been run by a minority of very white people, pure-blood descendants of the Spanish conquistadors. To most of the 80 percent of Venezuelans who are brown, Hugo Chavez is their Nelson Mandela, the man who will smash the economic and social apartheid that has kept the dark-skinned millions stacked in cardboard houses in the hills above Caracas while the whites live in high-rise splendor in the city center. Chavez, as one white Caracas reporter told me with a sneer, gives them bricks and milk, and so they vote for him.
Why am I explaining the basics of Venezuela to you? If you watched BBC TV, or Canadian Broadcasting, you'd know all this stuff. But if you read the New York Times, you'll only know that President Chavez is an "autocrat," a "ruinous demagogue," and a "would-be dictator," who resigned when he recognized his unpopularity." Alternet

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Some Americans who were upset by the remarks made by Robertson flooded the Venezuelan embassy with messages of support---Chavez has long been saying that the US is trying to kill him---the US is known to have helped military forces in Latin America take out (read assassinate, kidnap, torture) people for their political ideas---This site simply lets Pat Robertson's own words hoist him with his own petard---

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Just to cheer you up here's a quote by the very same Robertson, about feminism:

"It encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

Wait sorry, I thought that would make you laugh...no don't cry...it's ok, stupid people can't stay in power forever..uhm..wait..yes they can...

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"Calling for violence has become common among Christian extremists such as Robertson. Jimmy Swaggert said he would kill any gay man who looked at him "that way" (in his dreams). The remark was followed by applause from his congregation. James Dobson advocates the harsh physical punishment of children and brags about beating his dog. Christian extremists picketed Matthew Shephard's funeral with signs that read AIDS Cures Fags. Women's health clinics are bombed. In a community twenty miles from my home, a cross was burned in front of a yoga clinic. Christians gave comfort and shelter to Eric Rudolph." MoJo Blog

• Blame Vulture Capitalism, not God, for Pat Robertson! Media Monitors
• Why Hugo Chavez Won a Landslide Victory Medea Benjamin

What the hell to watch or read to figure out what the hell the fuss is about:

Open Veins of Latin America: An excellent writer, and excellent book..

Venezuelan Politics in the Chavez Era: Class, Polarization, and Conflict by Daniel Hellinger, Steve Ellner

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Revolutionary Songs of Latin America ~ Soledad Bravo ...Something to listen to while you read...

The Eyes of Tammy Faye...Darkly humorous and true tale of the rise and fall of one of the biggest televangelist industries in the US..even if it had nothing to do with the topic I'd still tell you to watch this.

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The Most Dangerous Man in America?: Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition by Rob Boston Haven't read it, but it looks interesting..

Interesting films to look out for:

The Constant Gardener

Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz

Fiennes is a diplomat in kenya who uncovers a huge Phamaceutical conspiracy when his activist wife is murdered. The acting should be impressive... Love topics like this. For real life Pharmaceutical scandals going on right now see here and here.

The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till

Documentary by Keith A. Beauchamp

Emmett Till was the 14 year old African-American boy who was murdered in Mississipi,1955, for whistling at a white woman. His murder helped to mobilise the civil rights movement, but his murderers got away thanks to an all white jury. This new documentary is forcing the case back on the table. Maybe after all these years Emmett will finally get a little justice.

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The Aristocrats

Documentary in which a hundred comedians all tell the same filthy joke, and the art is in the telling...

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News of sorts

Credit card sized battery powered by urine has been created in Singapore---ExxonMobil is funding ($40 Million) think tanks and media outlets to convince us that global warming is not caused by human consumption---Some organic food is not really organic

And last but not least, from Harpers:

Percentage of the 651 fatal or wounding terrorist attacks worldwide last year that took place in Iraq: 32 [National Counterterrorism Center (Washington)]

Percentage that took place in India: 44

The Cindy Sheehan protest is still on and also gaining steam...all these women and men are driving miles and miles to stand by her...it's like she has somehow given people a valve to let off their pent up frustration with everything that is going on..watch this..

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Something called freeway blogging is also going on where anti-war messages are being 'blogged' or hung on the highways all over the States...

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A nun is staging her own protest...against the Da Vinci Code being filmed at Lincoln Cathedral...she says the book is heretical...

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Famine in Niger...if you want to help out go to Doctors Without Borders

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Christopher Walken is running for Prez in 2008...Is he?

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Heathrow Airport got a taste of what happens when workers' rights aren't as important as the bottom line...

70,000 people were stranded in one way or another because of the strikes at Heathrow...this came after Gate Gourmet, a catering company, sacked hundreds of employees over a megaphone when they had staged a walkout...Gate Gourmet has been trying to slash pay, and bust the unions...It is also in a dispute with unions in the US because it's trying to cut pay and benefits...the company is losing money, and now it is losing much more than that...thousands of check-in staff and baggage handlers at Heathrow went on unnofficial strike in solidarity with the fired Gate Gourmet staff...
The 70,000 stranded passengers are innocent victims of this industrial battle...and we can all disagree on who went too far...the company that sacked over 600 employees over a megaphone or the workers that unofficially walked off the job paralysing the airport...but underneath it all is the same old story of profit over people...

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Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Abraham Lincoln

With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men. Clarence Darrow (Famous civil rights lawyer)
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Films about Labor Struggles:

Norma Rae: Great film with Sally Field (won an Oscar for her part) about a woman working at a textile factory discovering the power of union work..and it has an Oscar winning song that always makes me cry: "It Goes Like it Goes"..

Matewan: The wonderful John Sayles directs this movie about mine workers trying to unionize...a true story of unions and a masacre.

Harlan County USA: A famous documentary about a coal miners' strike in Kentucky.

Roger and Me: The film that put Michael Moore on the map......over 30,000 jobs were lost in his home town of Flint, MI when GM closed its plant...a funny and powerful glance at how out of tune workers' lives and company profits are...

Bas Ya Bahar: The Kuwaiti film that shows how some divers were at the mercy of some of the ship owners who bought their lives with loans divers could never repay...It was about more than that, but the age old struggle between business and labor is interesting to note.

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Music

Woodie Guthrie anything by him... he sang one called Ludlow Massacre which was about striking coal miners who wanted to join the union, the company guards shot at them and burned their tents killing 20 people, 13 of whom were children.

Bruce Springsteen-Long time supporter of workers' rights, the haunting title song from The Ghost of Tom Joad is taken from the character from Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath:

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Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand
Or decent job or a helpin' hand
Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free
Look in their eyes Mom you'll see me."

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Check out these Singer-Songwriters: Pete Seeger, Ani Difranco, Rachid Taha, Billy Bragg, Bob Dylan...

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Bless the child of the workin' man
She knows too soon who she is
And bless the hands of a workin' man
He knows his soul is his

So it goes like it goes and the river flows
And time it rolls right on
And maybe what's good gets a little bit better
And maybe what's bad gets gone

It Goes Like it Goes from Norma Rae

Just a reminder that there is an organisation in Kuwait that rescues and resettles animals in need of a home... If you are looking for a new friend or have the space to give a kitty or pup a home, go to PAWS...their website is full of info you will need and has pictures of the animals that are available for adoption...And if anyone wants to volunteer to help out or donate funds let them know..they are doing a good thing..we should help them continue...

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"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."

Gandhi

I can't take anymore of this dust....there is mud coming out of my eyes...when is it going to end...all the idiotic weather reports on line say we have clear skies....

At 8:15am Japanese time, on August 6, 1945...exactly 60 years ago today...a bomb called Little Boy found its mark in a city called Hiroshima......three days later on August 9th...Nagasaki was treated to the same fate...

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"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."

Einstein

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It took an instant for 200,000 people to be incinerated...then it took hours, days, weeks and months for burnt flapping flesh to peel and boil over and fill the nightmares of the survivors...it took years for them to sicken and then die....and it has taken since the begining of time for everyone else to try to try fathom man's inhumanity to fellow man...

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"I am Constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man"

Primo Levi

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This watch stopped at exactly the moment Hiroshima was obliterated

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"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

Einstein (Discovered atomic theory)

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When the news of the Hiroshima bombing reached Los Alamos, the scientists rejoiced. Some raced to the telephone and booked tables at La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe. Others stayed at Los Alamos and celebrated. They substituted dynamite for fireworks and snaked through the streets banging garbage-can lids. "Everybody had parties, we all ran around. I sat on the end of a jeep and beat drums and so on," recalled Richard Feynman, a math wizard and future Nobel laureate.

Quoted from The Plutonium Files, an amazing book by Eileen Welsome which chronicles the story of the bomb and also the secret experiments carried out on unsuspecting civilians..like injecting radioactive substances into pregnant women and telling them they were vitamins...only to have the children develop violent forms of cancer...pick up the book and you won't be able to put it down...the writing is magic and the story savage to the extreme..Welsome's reporting on these facts got her the Pulitzer prize..

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I saw an exhibition called none other than Little Boy, of Japanese art organised by the Japan Society in NYC... it included Godzilla and other apocalyptic artistic visions that were born of the horror of the atomic age...

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Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St Paul
Give me Christ
or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don't like children anyhowI've seen the future, baby:
it is murder.Leonard Cohen

On this day it is common to see Peace Cranes made of folded paper...this tradition comes from the story of a young girl called Sadako Sasaki who was two years old when Hiroshima was hit...at the age of 11 she developed Leaukemia...her friend told her that there was a Japanese legend that said that anyone who made 1,000 paper cranes would have their wish granted...she died at the age of 12 having folded over 1,000 cranes...since then the cranes have been a symbol of peace, and a reminder of the senseless destruction of war...

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" This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

Einstein

Where to look:

A haunting site with photographs taken the day after Nagasaki...put together for the 50th anniversary of the attack..
Hiroshima Mon Amour...the screenplay by Marguerite Duras and the film by Alain Resnais...haunting tale of the experience of war and the healing power of human relationships..
Hiroshima: Was it necessary- A site that deals with the idea of its necessity...and tears it apart.
The Day After- An 80's film that gave me nightmares and had me spend sleepless nights calculating how to get everyone in my house to safety and how we were going to survive in a shelter...we had to watch it when we were in junior high school here...
Recent Articles:
The myths of Hiroshima L.A. Times
Hiroshima health effects linger BBC

The Hiroshima Cover-Up Mother Jones Magazine

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"As the bomb fell over Hiroshima and exploded, we saw an entire city disappear. I wrote in my log the words: 'My God, what have we done?'"

Capt Robert Lewis (Co-Pilot of the Enola Gay that dropped Little boy)

'I kept saying, "Help me, help me." But no one did'

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The Guardian had a very sad article today about people on a London bus doing nothing to help a stabbing victim...they just watched or walked away...I understand the shock or fear that you might get hurt, but after the threat is gone and a man lies bleeding his life out on the floor, what is it that makes you not want to get involved?

We slow down on the highway to stare at accidents, we tune in to news about disasters and watch like addicts but how often do we actually shift from voyeurs relishing the adrenalin of these horrible scenes to actually helping those in need?

How many of the people who witnessed the bus stabbing added the experience to their list of 'stories to tell'...how many were honest in these stories about how they just slinked away and left a man bleeding in the arms of the only young lady tending to him who was asking for their help?

If we can walk away from people who are obviously in need of help while someone looks us in the eye and asks for it...how easy is it for us to turn our backs on people who don't know we are watching? People in a newspaper headline, people on the news people beyond the dark curtained windows we are staring from...

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One of the most famous instances of witnesses doing nothing to help a victim is the Kitty Genovese case in 1964...38 people witnessed Genovese get raped and murdered over a half hour to 45 minute period of time and did nothing to intervene...most of the witnesses did not see the entire attack which happened later in her apartment, but many had seen the initial attack in the street in front of her building in NYC... the case was hyped in the media at the time and it was famous for furthering the study of the 'bystander effect/apathy' where the more witnesses there are to a crime, the less likely individuals are to do anything....

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One of my favourite comic books/graphic novels is The Watchmen, By Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons...In it, one of the characters called Rorschach is transformed by the news about Kitty Genovese into a masked vigilante/superhero, avenging powerless victims...but his version of justice is absolute..there are no grey areas...wrongdoing is punished with no mercy...which makes him a mirror image of his opposites, the criminals...but his code comes from an outrage at the crimes people commit and the unwillingness of anyone to do anything to help the victims...

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"This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces, It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us."

Rorschach, p.26 Chap VI, The Watchmen

A new planet is found in our solar system and they want to call it Xena ...yes after that Xena, bless the astronomers...

A company called BioBling in the US is connecting people to flashy 70's and 80's cars that run on biodiesel, the clean fuel...

The space missions were grounded for two years after the Columbia disaster was caused by a piece of foam breaking off and hitting the wing on launch (which made the Columbia break apart and overheat on re-entry), the Discovery is up in space now trying to deal with a the effects of a launch problem that left the craft vulnerable to overheating on re-entry..glad they took those two years to improve the shuttle...good luck to the souls on that mission...

Bush played a little constitutional trick and went round the Senate and stuck John Bolton up the U.N's ass against most of the world's (and Congress') wishes. Isn't democracy just sparkling these days?

A board member at Harvard University is resigning in protest over a salary increase for prez. Larry Summers ...you know, Larry Summers, the guy who said women aren't as smart as men in science and math and the guy who insisted that toxic materials from developed countries should be dumped on the third world...

Atkins Nutritionals Inc, the company that makes the low carb foods for Atkins fanatics is filing for bancruptcy...is it because Mr Atkins was found to weigh over 18 stone (114 Kilos) and had a diseased heart when he passed away, or because the diet gives you bad breath ...or because like all fads it's day must come---

The prez of Pakistan is trying to stop a new law in a conservative province which would create a new morality police there: "The province's hisbah (accountability) bill would empower an Islamist police force with draconian powers to close down cinemas and businesses at prayer time, interrogate couples about their relationships, and arrest beggars. Offenders could be jailed for up to six months." Guardian