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(part 1):
New shopping, new life: (Which is intended to help Your Correspondent supplement his disability benefits, for the most part, as well as Some Good Causes, foremost among them being Reduction of the U.S. National Debt):
(part 2):
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RANDALL TERRY'S NOTORIOUS ANTI-ABORTION GROUP OPERATION RESCUE HAS THIS CERTAIN NOTORIETY for sheer and banal crudity of the highest order in protesting the activities of abortionists and scaring women seeking abortions into reconsidering pro Deo et patria.
In particular, its urging supporters to use their children @ anti-abortion protests Operation Rescue conducts, and hoping for the police to arrest the kids; the better so the parents can get off on lesser charges than would ordinarily be expected of mere adults protesting abortion.
Next thing you know, expect Operation Rescue to be in league with the weird and unwholesome elements of racism and white supremacy (in particular pseudoreligious elements invoking a "scientific" approach to bigotry, or otherwise associated with the false doctrine of Christian Identity) in seeking to "rescue***a once-proud and simple White Christian community from danger of persecution"--the Afrikaner peoples of South Africa, largely Calvinist/Dutch Reformed in religious leanings and whose "fear of persecution" comes from a "Communist-influenced regime" dominated by "sub-human elements***having reckless and utter disregard for White honour and privilege."
As in evacuation of the Afrikaner populace from South Africa as "refugees" and their timely resettlement in the United States, preferably as "humble and simple pastoralists."
Unfortunately, however, there are still doubts as need to be raised whether their "refugee" claims are sincere and legitimate, let alone supported by credible substantiation; there's always the danger that the claims of "fear of persecution" may be deliberately scripted to deceive or mislead immigration officials.
That, and whether the funds being raised to assist with such "rescue" efforts will serve their intended purposes--especially after questions start being raised in certain circles.
No doubt something to expect from Operation Rescue--or can you?
Interesting examples of infrastructure problems trans-Atlantic
NOT EXACTLY THE TALES OF BRAVE ULYSSES, READER, especially when you consider that, for starters, a three-mile stretch of I-95 in Philadelphia is closed for emergency maintenance after a substantial crack was found in a concrete support beam thereof between Girard Avenue and the Betsy Ross Bridge, the stretch in question.
Said crack is 4' long by 2" wide, and parts of the metal rebar have reportedly shown up in the crack.
Not to mention brick-sized chunks of concrete having been discerned from street level.
In any case, such should serve (along with the I-35W bridge collapse) as clear-cut examples of how far His Fraudulency's Great Within has allowed American infrastructure to deteriorate for the sake of his misadventures otherwise known as ur-RAHOWA Against Terrorism--and I feel qualified to call same "misadventures" because such was provoked based on flimsy and misleading intelligence serving to cover the "real" reasons thereof: Viz., the maintenance of continued dependency on oil imports in the face of stateside oil fields (especially so those in Texas, Oklahoma and California) close to reaching the end of their productive lives and "undue and unnecessary regulatory burden" seen as "preventing" further stateside exploration and development which could tend to the wasteful and counterproductive.
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MEANWHILE, IN NIGERIA, GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATORS HAVE UNCOVERED EVIDENCE OF WHERE 34 SHAM COMPANIES controlled or owned by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo or his droogs were awarded some US$2.25 billion in contracts related to modernisation of the Nigerian power grid and related infrastructure as failed to be carried out.
As the BBC explains:
The BBC's Ahmed Idris in the capital, Abuja, says this week's parliamentary hearings, which are being aired on television, are causing a stir with their revelations.
He says many parts of the country go for days without electricity and businesses and many homes rely on their generators.
When President Umaru Yar'Adua came to power last year he announced he would declare a "state of emergency" on the country's energy crisis.
Nigeria currently has 10 power stations - they are all between 20 and 30 years old.
Last month, Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan said power cuts were an "embarrassment" to Nigeria - after black-outs affected a meeting he was attending.
Testimonies
The House of Representatives committee is investigating why six power stations - already paid for by the government - are yet to be completed years after they were begun.
It has called all the contractors to give testimony about their progress.
Two witnesses told the hearings, which began on Tuesday, that bushes from the the site where a South African company, Pivot, had been contracted to build a station in the oil-rich Niger Delta have yet to be cleared.
Expect plenty of "419" scam letters related to the aforementioned mess in your junk mail folder before too long....
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OOOHHH, THOSE AUSSIES!!!
From our Australian brethren comes word of where new mothers entitled to a special A$5,000 new-mothers allowance as turn up being "chronic and habitual" alcoholics, drug addicts or gamblers on welfare records will receive the bonus in question as vouchers for diapers, infant formula and infant-care medications; the better to "encourage responsibility" on the part of vulnerable mothers.
And, for those of you still desperate for Miracle Weapons in the Greater War Against International Terrorism (especially where biohazards are real or suspected), The Sydney Morning Herald reports on Australia's latest contribution to the Holy and Noble Cause (or so the Zealots and True Believers want you and me seeing the same):
AUSTRALIAN scientists have developed what is believed to be the world's first hand-held device that can almost instantly tell the difference between a biological terrorist attack and a hoax.
Developed by the CSIRO and the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, it has already shown it can quickly spot anthrax and the deadly poison ricin. It can also identify avian and equine influenza.
However, the research team's leader, Tim Davis, from the CSIRO's material science and engineering division, believes the technology's biggest future could be as a device to instantly diagnose diseases, including some cancers.
"We are interested in using it for medical screening," said Dr Davis.
In the short term the device, publicly demonstrated for the first time yesterday, could be used to thwart hoaxers who create havoc by posting packages containing harmless powder to businesses and government buildings, including Parliament.
Dr Davis said his team set out in 2005 to create a device so cheap and easy to use that all emergency workers investigating suspicious chemicals could carry one: "People want to know how dangerous it is and whether they have to evacuate."
Such testing now requires suspect substances to be sent to laboratories.
Dr Davis said the US had developed "suitcase-sized" kits but they were expensive and still too large.
Someone using the new biosensor, little bigger than a video tape, would dab a swab over the suspicious substance and then wet it with a liquid solution. The swab would then be wiped over a sensor, a thin gold strip with a chemical coating.
By monitoring any changes in the way the gold strip absorbed light, the device would make a positive or negative reading.
"A result would usually take a couple of minutes. If it was highly concentrated you could get it in 10 seconds."
The prototype tests only for one biochemical at a time. A user must change the chemical coating, depending on what counter-terrorist agents think they are looking for.
However, with about $300,000 in newly announced funding from the Federal Government, the Federal Police, Emergency Management Australia and the CSIRO, Dr Davis said the next version would simultaneously test for at least 10 substances.
So much for the Aussies being known only for Vegemite (which, in case any of you ask, is a brewers' yeast extract you spread on toast, which is also good for soups, gravies and roasts), kangaroos, rugby and a beach-mad lifestyle, among other things....
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LIFE IMITATES CHOWDER DEPARTMENT: Nong Shim prawn crackers, a popular South Korean snack, have been recalled after a woman found what the BBC described as "a piece of oily, skin-like material" including teeth and an eye in a jumbo-size packet last month.
Plants in South Korea and China are being investigated by health authorities to determine how the rat could have come into a packet of the finished product. In the meantime, the Nong Shim company has issued this apology:
From the bottom of our heart we apologise to clients who have been supporting us for 40 years.
IN CASE IT SHOULD EVER HAPPEN THAT ONE IS LOOKING FOR NEW AND INNOVATIVE WAYS BY WHICH TO DISTRACT FOX NEWS VIEWERS PSYCHOLOGICALLY (especially considering their being, for the most part, poor, undereducated and easily-led), I offer this suggestion:
Once the messenger starts to get rather ridiculous with their ranting, cue up as a distraction the music you hear in the background--"55 Days at Peking," an insturmental by Australian act Rob E.G., vintage 1963--so as to distract the Fox News viewer from the message Fox News is presenting @ the moment.
For maximum effect, do so about mid-sentence, so as to maximise the suspense potential and further distract Fox's vulnerable audience.
To All Members Minnesota State Senate Minnesota House of Representatives State Capitol St. Paul, MN 55155
To whom it may concern:
In view of what amounts to a continued and continuing attitude problem on Governor Pawlenty's part vis-a-vis tax policy (as discussed previously in this weblog, know), in turn raising questions of where his mind seems to be, may I recommend to you @ this time, for the sake of the Greater Collective Good of Our Beloved Minnesota, what I think may be the most logical option you have that I can think of short of out-and-out impeachment proceedings:
Videlicet, having someone in your respective chambers come forward to introduce a Motion of No Confidence in Governor Pawlenty as a show of protest in his out-of-touch-with-Reality mindset towards taxes and socioeconomic policy in the faces of serious challenges facing Our Beloved Minnesota made all the more worse by Governor Pawlenty's hard-wired Zealotry and True Belief.
A Zealotry and True Belief which seems to be right out of the playbook of the so-called "Club for Growth," a hyperconservative pro-business entity whose articles of faith could best be summarised as "low taxes=jobs=social stability"--which, if anything, lacks serious credibility, let alone having been previously discredited.
In other words, simply asking "does the Honourable Governor, Mr. Pawlenty, have the confidence and trust of this Legislature?" and putting same to a straight up-or-down vote.
Though rarely used in American politics, perhaps the use of a Motion of No Confidence could be enough to send him a message that:
his policies and attitudes are out of touch with the Greater Reality that Minnesota faces, especially with the I-35W bridge collapse making the situation all too clear to the millions; and
the vast majority of the Good Taxpayers of Our Beloved Minnesota cannot put up with such bromides and platitudes as just summarised any longer if they expect to receive value for their tax dollars.
Especially so under current socioeconomic conditions made all the worse by misguided and perhaps corrupt governance @ Federal level crossing the line into scandal.
Hence, if any of you members of the Minnesota Legislature would have the courage to come forward and introduce a No Confidence Motion against Governor Pawlenty in view of recent developments, such would be a great service to Our Beloved Minnesota in this her Sesquicentenary Year. Even more so if such an action translates into a Call for Elections subsequently being issued, which may or may not likely require appointment of a Caretaker Government in the interim.
Our Beloved Minnesota will be none the worse for a No Confidence Motion being presented as a message against Governor Pawlenty's hard-wired mindsets as go against Harsh Reality. Let it be hoped, then, that such will be forthcoming in the current Legislative session.
IN THE EARLY PART OF THE 19TH CENTURY, INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND WENT PARANOID AND BALLISTIC over the emergence of roving bands of unemployed workingmen who feared the installation of new, automated machinery in the cotton-weaving industries of Nottinghamshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire as a threat to their jobs, livelihoods and honour.
Calling themselves "Luddites" (probably after Ned Ludd, who smashed a spinning jenny in a Leicestershire cotton mill in 1779 to protest his job being thus lost), its followers worked largely in camera under cover of darkness before going on their orgies of destroying what they saw to be the loss of their jobs and honour. (This was years before the welfare state and unemployment benefits, remember.)
After a series of notorious orgies with sledgehammers and iron bars, 17 Luddite ringleaders were sentenced to death on the gallows @ York in 1813, soon after an Act of Parliament made "machine breaking" (as in industrial sabotage) a capital crime; numerous others involved with the Luddites were sentenced to transportation to the Australian penal colonies. (IMHO, the Luddite types thus sentenced were more than likely assigned to the Van Diemen's Land [Tasmania] penal colony, Alcatraz, as it were, in contrast to the main such in New South Wales and Queensland.)
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"WHY," YOU MAY ASK, "BRING UP LUDDITERY AS PART OF A DISCUSSION on objections to abortion?"
Good question there, reader.
Come to think of it, Your Correspondent has to wonder if those who object to abortion on socioeconomic grounds (i.e., to "protect and maintain American jobs," perhaps by way of "industrial heritage" arguments) are probably Luddites @ heart.
Put another way, the protection and continued maintenance of a Luddite socioeconomic model and paradigm--itself expected to be based on free-market capitalistic models and "experience" as are themselves expected to be one with the defence of America's "antient and pecuilar soverignty and soverign identity"--requires maintaining a workforce expected to remain deliberately poor, ignorant and easily-influenced, especially on "patriotic" matters.
The only way they know how to "protect" what is essentially a labour-intensive socioeconomic model as is @ the core of Luddite thought? You guessed it--a "complete and final" ban on abortion, contraception, family planning and sex education.
All excused officially in the name of "economic reasons"--the very patsy which Romania's Communist regime under Nicolae Ceauçescu invoked to ban abortions during his tenure from 1966 until his overthrow in 1989.
Only in Ceauçescu's case, the core desire was to "hasten the final onset of Pure Socialism," which, in Marxist/Leninist thought, would be the final perfection of Communism. Never mind where super-secret estimates suggested that such a policy would only create a significant labour surplus some 30 years on, anathema to a political model which saw mass unemployment as a fatal flaw of capitalism and socioeconomic development based upon centralised Five-Year Plans.
And it's not just about banning abortions: Discouraging investment in new plant and industry, essentially expecting existing industries to keep soldering along with largely outdated, inefficent and labour-intensive manufacturing equipment and processes (excusing such as tax-break-protected "industrial heritage" all the while), is also key to such a strategem.
The which, in any case, needs to be challenged because of its potential socioeconomic consequences. (Unless, of course, you can provide a rational argument in defence of these points.)
