12 August 2006


Lipstick Conspiracy

Trans gal band....

This is a great interview of two very articulate members of what may be the world's first male-to-female transgendered rock band.

Check it out here! (And while you're at it check out the rest of Trevor's great blog!)
And then there's this gem....

Powerful, and to the point.



From here.

11 August 2006


(Photo: Daniel Lai - USA)

Farewell to Global Eye....

Chris Floyd's farewell column is, like all his writing, worth the read. I particularly like this:
...It was immediately apparent that George W. Bush and his henchmen were going to use the "new Pearl Harbor" — which they had openly pined for, in print, before the election — to advance their long-standing agenda: "full spectrum dominance" over geopolitical affairs and world energy resources; rampant cronyism to loot the public treasury for private profit and partisan ends; a vast expansion of presidential powers, including arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, even "extrajudicial killing" at Bush's whim; and the wanton destruction of civic society, of the very idea of a "common good" that might impinge upon the power and privilege of the wealthy elite.
He'll be moving to TruthOut.


Kiss of death....

This piece by one of my favourite Salon writers, Joe Conason, succinctly critiques the Right's panicked response to the Lieberman defeat.
...Such slurs and slanders were only to be expected from the ruffled chicken hawks, squawking over the potential loss of their favorite Democratic enabler and scared of the electorate's growing wrath. Equally predictable was the reaction of pundits and analysts, shocked by the diminishing impact of their bad advice and incoherent ideas. The great and the good of the punditocracy told the voters to shun Ned Lamont and to shut up about the war, and were duly ignored. Now those naughty children will pay the price, or so we are told.
Complete story here (requires subscription or viewing an advertisement).
George Galloway tells it like it is....

I don't always agree with Galloway, far from it, but this clip in which he “educates” Sky News is simply awesome.



HT to Red State Son.

10 August 2006

Awesome French AIDS awareness video....

In case you missed this (it was circulating on the web a while back) by animator extraordinaire, Wilfred Brimo.




I love the points of view, the transitions between scenes, the excellent choice of music and the utterly sweet romantic ending.

Original here.

09 August 2006

08 August 2006


(AP)

Premeditated murder....

In his incomparably thorough fashion, George Monbiot details the cross-border squabbling between Hezbollah and Israel that proceeded Israel's recent invasion and murder of more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians, the dislocation of a quarter of the country’s population, and the ongoing destruction of its entire infrastructure.

While Hezbollah had reason to believe their murder of three Israeli soldiers and abduction of two more on July 12th would be just another in the chain of preceding events resulting in little or no further bloodshed, Israel was actually poised and waiting for an excuse to go into Lebanon with full force.
...On July 12, in other words, Hizbullah fired the first shots. But that act of aggression was simply one instance in a long sequence of small incursions and attacks over the past six years by both sides. So why was the Israeli response so different from all that preceded it? The answer is that it was not a reaction to the events of that day. The assault had been planned for months.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that "more than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and thinktanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail". The attack, he said, would last for three weeks. It would begin with bombing and culminate in a ground invasion. Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, told the paper that "of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared ... By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board".
I still seriously wonder if the July 12th episode itself was not deliberately provoked by Israel. In my experience, the Israeli military does not typically make tactical errors like exposing a vulnerable patrol to ambush along the border.

In any case, I believe Hezbollah's fierce resistance has stunned Israel.

Complete column here.

Good news for a change....
(Berlin) A German court ruled on Monday that an Iranian lesbian cannot be deported because she risks a death sentence because of her sexuality.

The 27-year-old woman, whose name was not released, traveled to Germany in September 2003 and applied for asylum.

She argued that she would be persecuted if returned to Iran but was turned down by German immigration officials. She appealed, telling the court that she felt excluded from society in the Islamic republic and wanted to "live out her homosexuality openly without having to fear persecution."

The Stuttgart administrative court ordered the government to grant her request for asylum.

[snip]

According to Iranian human rights campaigners, over 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed since the Ayatollahs came to power in 1979. [emphasis mine]
That's an average of 160 LGBT people executed per year!

Horrific!!!

Thank goodness the woman has been granted asylum.

Story here.

06 August 2006

Pat Robertson speaks his mind....

Check out this clip of Robertson caught unaware during a break on the Larry King show in 1992.

(Sean Smith, The Guardian.)

Bring on more pilots like these...!
...Yonatan Shapiro, a former [Israeli] Blackhawk helicopter pilot dismissed from reserve duty after signing a 'refusenik' letter in 2004, said he had spoken with Israeli F-16 pilots in recent days and learnt that some had aborted missions because of concerns about the reliability of intelligence information. According to Shapiro, some pilots justified aborting missions out of 'common sense' and in the context of the Israeli Defence Force's moral code of conduct, which says every effort should be made to avoiding harming civilians.

Shapiro said: 'Some pilots told me they have shot at the side of targets because they're afraid people will be there, and they don't trust any more those who give them the coordinates and targets.'

He added: 'One pilot told me he was asked to hit a house on a hill, which was supposed to be a place from where Hizbollah was launching Katyusha missiles. But he was afraid civilians were in the house, so he shot next to the house ...

[snip]

So far none of the pilots has publicly refused to fly missions but some are wobbling, according to Shapiro. He said: 'Their target could be a house firing a cannon at Israel and it could be a house full of children, so it's a real dilemma; it's not black and white. But ... I'm calling on them to refuse, in order save our country from self-destruction.'
More here.