Archive Category: People
Living with the War
Posted on April 27, 2006 02:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Impeach
Lying then Spying now.
Posted on January 11, 2006 11:11 PM | Comments (0)
Pope #111
About the year A.D. 1139, Saint Malachy O’Morgair, Archbishop of Armagh, Ireland, wrote down a list of Popes. He listed 112 future Popes, each described by a phrase in Latin. According to Malachy, there are only 2 Popes left after John Paul II (From the Labor of the Sun): De Gloria Olivae and Peter the Roman. And it will be the end of the papacy.
The Future and the Popes (Ronald L. Conte Jr) and The Last Pope: Examining Nostradamus and Malachy are interesting read.
Posted on April 10, 2005 02:12 AM | Comments (0)
Warmer Winters, Not Bad?
Higher temperature, rising ocean, retreating glacier, lower water table. They are not our problems, at least not this generation.
Sceptics in global warming use the same tactics as tobacco companies in the early days when smoking was found to be the cause of cancer and a whole assortment of illness. We were told that the evidence was not conclusive and there were many other reasons for cancer. We were also told that the evidence was statistical and not medical. Now that medical researches have silented all but the most irrational sceptics.
We can keep debating about the causes of global warming. No one can tell how much time we have before a certain threshold is reached and there will be no turning back. We simply don’t know. But we we do know now is that we can no longer blame the sun and volcano activities for warming our earth. It’s us.
We do not even know whether Kyoto is the answer. But if the worst (USA) and the 2nd worst polluter (China) of the world are not signing up. It probably will not give us the answer.
Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California released a report about Global warming concluding that the “warming signals” in the oceans could only have been produced by the build-up of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and not attributable to non-human factors.
The report also looked at the likely climatic effects of the warming which should come as no surprise to anyone who had watched ‘The Day After Tomorrow’.
Well, it could be a very dark day.
Posted on February 18, 2005 08:09 PM | Comments (0)
The Christian Women
- Shut Da F*$# Up
Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. — I Corinthians 14:34-35 (NIV) - Marry the Rapist
If a man [meets] a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her … He must marry the girl … He can never divorce her as long as he lives. — Deuteronomy 22:28-29 (NIV) - War Booty
“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he [Moses] asked them…. “Now … kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” — Numbers 31:1-18 (NIV) - A Tangible Asset
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s. — Exodus 20:17 (AV), The Tenth Commandment - Rated XXX - Not a bedtime story for an average daughter
Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. — Genesis 19:32.
Read the Bible.
Posted on January 31, 2005 12:03 PM | Comments (0)
In the Beginning
“This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” (Sticker placed inside Cobb Co., GA, biology texts)
Organized religion is as bad as organized crime, if not worse.
Creationists have had a hard time discrediting all those hominid fossils - Homo sapiens was created by Intelligent Design while the rest of the hominid fossils were just apes and chimps, including this newly discovered Homo floresiensis.
“I think that the detrimental aspect [of the Cobb County situation] is that creationism will be taught as a theory, and it’s not a theory. It’s a fact, whereas evolution is a theory — and not a credible one at that.” ~ Pastor Joe Morecraft of a nearby Chalcedon Presbyterian Church.
“Man is the noblest work of God.” Well, now, who found that out? ~ Mark Twain
Title: The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman: The Marvel of the Human Body, Revealed
Released: October 2004
(ASIN:0385509294)
Posted on January 14, 2005 02:02 AM | Comments (0)
George Monbiot
Monbiot is an exceptional investigative reporter. I missed his article “Dreamers and Idiots” when it was first published in the 11th November 2003 edition of Guardian and only came across it yesterday when doing some causal web browsing.
“Dreamers and Idiots” highlights a set of lies which some of us may not be as familiar with as the now well-known tales about WMD and Al-Qaeda link: the diplomatic options which were available to Bush and Blair prior to the war.
Deception as a principle of war has been around since before the time of Sun Tzu who wrote some 2,500 years ago in “The Art of War”, one of the most widely read military treatises in the world, that “Warfare is deception”. But once our elected government starts blurring the line between its duties in public affairs and its tactics against an enemy during wartime, we should know that our cherished democratic value is at risk. When disinformation and outright lies are tolerated in our zealous fight against terrorism, we are in effect slowly transforming ourselves into a terror state because we can no longer teach our children how to differentiate rights from wrongs.
Indeed, when Sun Tzu wrote “Warfare is deception”, he didn’t mean that deception should be used merely as a tactic to inflict casualties on an enemy. If interpreted with other passages in the book, the objective of “Warfare is deception” is to achieve what Sun Tzu considered “the acme of skill” - “to win without fighting is the acme of skill.”
And by falsely brushing off the diplomatic options that were offered by Saddam and Taliban as mere delaying tactics, we had perhaps missed the chance to win without a fight and to put Osama bin Laden in custody without risking the lives of thousands of American soldiers.
More importantly, a chance to create harmony between two huge civilizations was given up in exchange for perpetual anger and resentment and an endless cycle of revenges and counter-revenges.
Monbiot is author of the following books:
BOOK TITLE: Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain
Released: September 7, 2001 (ISBN:0330369431)
BOOK TITLE: The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order
Released: April 2004 (ISBN:1565849086)
Posted on January 11, 2005 01:45 AM | Comments (0)
Relief
- G O A L
- C A R E
- U N I C E F
- A m e r c i a n R e d C r o s s
- I F R C
- I M C (Internetal Medical Corps)
- W A V E of G I V I N G (Lutheran World Relief)
- A J W S (American Jewish World Service)
- A D R A (Adventist Development & Relief Agency)
- B W A (Baptist World Alliance)
- C R S (Catholic Relief Services)
- A A H (Action Against Hunger)
- P C I (Project Concern International)
- P L A N
Posted on December 30, 2004 12:47 PM | Comments (0)
C'mon Let's Be Real
I knew a friend who went to PP island1 for Christmas with his entire family, 11 of them in total including grandparents, sisters and 4 kids. Only one of the grandparents and a sister managed to return home - the rest went missing. There were tens of thousands of families who were not that ‘lucky’. It’s horrific - over 70,000 deaths in a matter of hours.
And we have once again demonstrated our generosity in emergency relief - a global outpouring that totals more than $100 million so far! Even the Secretary of States took no time coming out to rebuke an allegedly mis-interpreted statement from the UN’s chief of emergency relief about ‘stingy’ contribution.
Generous or penny-pinching? Well, with an initial $15 million followed by a renewed promise of another $20 million. And what about contributions from Japan, UK, Australia and China?
$100 million is about half of what the US is spending daily on the war in Iraq (the official number is $177 million a day). $20 million is exactly half of what Bush will spend in his privately funded inauguration next month. $20 million is peanut compared to the money we spent during the Christmas weekend in any mid-size shopping center in UK or the States - and these monies were for things that would end up in the trash bin in the next 6 months or so.
We are generous and we really don’t have to be too hypocritical about it.
fn [1] Phi Phi Island was first made famous as a film set for the James Bond’s “The Man with the Golden Gun” in the 70s. The west of Thailand and Malaysia have remained a very popular spot for tourists ever since. Christmas is the season for tourists after the summer typhoons and rain storms are gone.
Posted on December 29, 2004 01:56 PM | Comments (1)
Self Deception, Again
Well, this is not about their beloved Weapon of Mass Deception. Not the Jan 30 election either.
For many of us, blogging has become an integral part of our lives. Apart from the arts, the insights, and the creativity, the obsession has likely sprang from the fact that in a faceless community, we can write about anything, be it as substantial as the American Foreign Policy or as trivial as a snorting wife – there is no fear of being identified. Mask off. We can be what we really are. There is no need to put on a pubic face.
The blogging community’s exponential growth in the last couple of years was, I thought, due to the opportunities it gave to us to interact with others with real feelings. No inhibition of our individuality. No pretense.
But human nature gradually prevails, even in this supposedly faceless community, many of us still prefer to putting on a mask. We try to be unique in expressing our views and our feelings on the Internet for all to see and yet despite the absence of identity, every entry we make is unconsciously censored. We tend to write about what we think may interest others to read and in the process creating yet another self that is not exactly what we are. We tend to link to others so that we would be perceived as if we were within the same group. We spend hours in front of the computer to come up with a web layout to complement the lousy content in the hope that it will be unique although it involves nothing more than changing the colors of a standard template. Even the anonymity of Internet cannot defeat self-deception.
Blogging let us experience the mind, the creativity, the ideas and genuine feelings of others while doing away with our bias about the cultural background and ethical origin of the writer. But once we start imposing artificial border on an otherwise borderless community and begin to operate in the shadow of reality, blogging will become less fulfilling an experience.
As in real life before we interact with a stranger, the tendency is to first read his face and listen to his accent, then form a view about the person’s character based on a certain pre-determined group in our head. And more often than not, the first impression is wrong.
We would have easily eliminated this bias in the blogging community but in our pursuit of make-believe uniqueness and self-deception, we not only impose artificial classification on others but self-imposed a classification that we wish other to perceive us to be.
When we read a good poem, we should derive our appreciation from the content - the identity of the author is almost irrelevant, be it Benjamin Zephaniah or Li Bai. When I read the personal diary of Dubya, it does not matter if the writer is a conservative or liberal. I would be interested to know if his daughter got an unwanted pregnancy, would he send for a doctor to do the job or insist to be an unwilling grandfather and how he would reconcile his moral and family values in his decision process.
Posted on December 27, 2004 02:01 AM | Comments (0)