Happy 18th Son!

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It's my youngest's 18th birthday today. He's a great kid. Best Friend, Tech Guy. Mechanic. Drinking Buddy. Pain in the Arse. 

I love him dearly.

And when I say dearly, I mean he's cost me a fucking fortune! :-))



And no, that's not his eye shadow running (he uses waterproof mascara, I believe) it's dirt and grime from his sterling efforts cleaning our next door neighbour's boat.

Many Happy Returns, son.


Seeing is believing

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Some great graphic explanations of the current financial mess. (Mostly US based)

27 Visualizations and Infographics to Understand the Financial Crisis
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If there's anything good that has come out of the financial crisis it's the slew of high-quality graphics to help us understand what's going on. Some visualizations attempt to explain it all while others focus on affected business. Others concentrate on how we, as citizens are affected. Some show those who are responsible.

Via

Bad cop, bad cop.

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Did Israel Intentionally Undermine Obama's Outreach To Iran?
Yesterday, when the New York Times inexplicably gave Shimon Peres' insulting message to Iran equal play with President Obama''s, I thought it might be no coincidence.

Peres, who is an uberhawk on Iran, suddenly sends "greetings" to the Iranian people urging them to rise up against their government at the same moment that Obama respectfully addressed the "Islamic Republic of Iran" with the most conciliatory US message in decades. Coincidence? Maybe.

Of course, the Iranians would not view it that way. They would see America and Israel playing "good cop, bad cop," diminishing the effect of Obama's remarkable overture.

I hear that the White House is furious.

Evil IDF

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'No virgins, no terror attacks'
Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."

There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages. For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, "Bet you got raped!" A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies - such as "confirming the kill" (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim's head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.
And yes, I am a certified "anti-Semite" i.e. someone who criticises Israel, so don't bother emailing me with the usual shit. Thank you!

"Papenfuhrer Ratzinger"

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Gay Rights - Change.org: Pope Benedict XVI is a Global Health Nightmare
For the Pope to say that condoms aggravate the problems of HIV/AIDS is sillier than calling the world flat. As Rebecca Hodes from the Treatment Action Campaign said, "Pope Benedict XVI's opposition to condoms conveys that religious dogma is more important to him than the lives of Africans."

This Pope deserves to isolated on the global scene. The Catholic Church has become one of the most irresponsible institutions on the international scene under his watch, siding with countries like Sudan and Iran when it comes to imprisoning or executing LGBT people, and now flagrantly saying that condoms spread HIV.
Via The New Civil Rights Movement

A hard rain

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Rotted From the Head:  Chris Floyd Online - Empire Burlesque
The best article so far on the Red Cross report is Mark Danner's lengthy piece in the New York Review of Books. Danner has been on the torture case for years, and presents an excellent history and summary of the Bush torture system, along with its craven approval by the Democratic-controlled Congress in the notorious -- and never-repealed -- Military Commissions Act of 2007. [For more on this act and other authoritarian encroachments, see here , here and here.]

Danner also lets the tortured speak for themselves, in the harrowing testimonies they gave to the Red Cross. Danner's entire article deserves a close reading but it should be remembered that while the article and the Red Cross report focus on the treatment of 14 "high-value detainees" in CIA custody, many if not most of the same torture techniques used on these "hard cases" were also employed on countless other captives swept up by the thousands in the Terror War dragnets.

Remember too that according to the Red Cross, at one time up to 70 to 90 percent of the thousands of captives held by the Americans in Iraq were innocent of any crime whatsoever. For torture, like rain, falls on both the just and the unjust.