Radio Free Taiwan

I haven’t been using this blog at all, but just now I came across something that just had to go here. It’s a sound recording of Chinese traditional music by a group named Firedrake.

Description on YouTube:
This is the studio version of the music used by the Chinese Government to jam international broadcasters. It was taken off of Chinasat 6B,which is used by China National Radio 8 (CNR8). This music is fed to various transmitter sites around China to jam the broadcasts of Voice Of America, BBC World Service, Radio France International, Radio Deutsche Welle, Radio Canada International, Radio Taiwan International, Radio Free Asia and many many more.

I suppose Radio Free Taiwan would be on that list if it existed in fact.

I came across the video because the same user recently posted this video of Sean at Animals Taiwan explaining about Rocky, a neglected dog who is now blind.

That’s what I like to call it. Remember when the teacher would punish the whole class because some punk wouldn’t admit to smacking gum? Every kid knew it was wrong - of the teacher, that is. Here’s a letter I wrote to the Taipei Times yesterday. I’m not sure they’ll print it, but I’ll stick it here too.

To the editors:

Thank you for writing a timely and sensible editorial on the escalating situation in the Middle East.

Clearly, most, but not all, people in the world find Israel’s approach to conflict offensive. The question is why. I believe that these things come down to what might be called doctrines. Israel deals with affronts to its standards in a way that is different from most other countries. As spoken in the recent film, Munich, the basic goal seems to be sending a specific message: “Don’t f**k with Israel.” But while hunting down specific terrorists might be acceptable in many people’s eyes, Israel has broadened this approach considerably since the seventies, using some pretty extreme rationalization in my opinion. Israel’s doctrine now seems to be a simple and blunt one that can be summed up in two words: collective punishment. Israel’s attitude seems to be that a crime committed by one Palestinian is a crime committed by all Palestinians. This allows Israel to rationalize helicopter gunship attacks on apartment buildings in retaliation for primitive rocket lobbings or attacks on small groups of Israeli soldiers.

To be fair, it must be said that the Palestinians also seem to follow the doctrine of collective punishment. The suicide bombings are an obvious example. Either one side or the other needs to take the moral high ground in this conflict and stop punishing a whole population for the crimes of a few. Doubtlessly, a majority of people on both sides of the dispute would prefer to live in peace. After all, both Palestinians and Jews are Semetic people who have co-mingled in this part of the world for thousands of years.

Since Israel has so much money and technology, I feel the moral onus is on that country to raise its standards and make a visible effort to avoid collective punishment when engaging in conflict. But Israel currently appears to be doing the opposite: favouring blatant collective punishment, still dreaming that this will somehow make the Palestinians wake up and realize the simple solution that is, “Don’t f**k with Israel.” Such an approach is obviously stupid and invites escalation. But few are willing to label the situation accurately, so this horrible situation keeps getting worse.

Peter Dearman
Taipei

Here is a photo of Beirut under attack:

Apparently this video is being suppressed. Fox has been pressuring Web sites to remove it. They, of course, did a while back. I haven’t looked too far into it, but I hope it’s one of those conspiracy theories that isn’t true. I often think we should all be surprised at how much freedom of the press is actually extended to us (and to Americans especially). I saw Chomsky lecture once at McGill, and he said something like, the secret tactic of the American military-industrial-complex is to tolerate dissent so that true dissidents can be written off as crackpots while the elite screw everybody.

But if they’re really going to go ahead and make a move toward rewriting history a la Orwell…. well, perhaps that will bring a turning point, or perhaps they will be successful, and people will start the process of getting used to having their memorable history (the stuff they lived through) recreated right before their eyes.

But, at least for now, we still have our Chomskys, our Michael Moores, and - bless his needy soul - our Charlie Sheens.

You can download a nice hi-rez copy of that Fox report here:
CARL CAMERON’S FOX NEWS
STORY ON THE ISRAELI SPY RING

Click the photo to see more pictures.

I just got around to uploading some old photos of the Hand-in-Hand rally to protest China’s passing of an “anti-seccession law.” It was March 23, 2004. The Taiwan election was coming. This event proved to be a key factor helping Chen gain a second victory. The plan was to form a chain of people holding hands from one end of the island to the other. The actual link-up didn’t go off too well, as no one seemed to be looking after the synchronization issue. But hold hands we did, for a good minute or two when it became obvious the time had arrived. The whole event was very pleasant and peaceful. It seemed to mean a lot to all who participated, and even many of those just driving by. As a response to the negative election campaigning by the KMT and PFP parties, it was perfect. I think we need to do it again next year.

I’m fed up with the lack of media coverage of depleted uranium, so I set up a BBS discussion board to foster open debate of this controversial issue. You can help this site, www.DUBBS.info, attract more attention by making a link to it on your Web page, Google Base or MySpace page. Ideal links will look like these:

Please visit this Depleted uranium BBS.
Please visit to debate depleted uranium.

On the site, you can also find some link buttons and banners to use if you like, such as this one:




The address is: www.DUBBS.info

There are so many things I wish I’d make it a habit to do at least once each day. One of them is blogging. Hah. There’s also flossing, studying Chinese, tidying up my trail of newspapers and notes. And wht was it I heard from Tony Robbins or someone like him once? Spend an hour of each day working on success. Yeah, well. That’d be nice. I waste more than several most days continuing my education on how horrible everything is. And I consider myself to be somewhat prone to depression. I guess I still see it as training myself. I expect things to get worse.

The horror is making it into the newspapers almost every day these days. Yessiree, with the groundlessness of the Iraq attack, white phosphorus, even depleted uranium getting some coverage, it’s quite remarkable how well everybody is holding up. Well, I guess some of them lived through the Kennedy era, and there was the Gulf War - a turning point for my basic mentality - but I am still in awe of everybody’s ability to behold the horror and pretend that everything is perfectly normal. What solace is there? Some stupid theory like this one?

I really do want to make the world a better place. That’s why I “waste” so much time — more and more lately — honing my skills as a social critic that no one ever listens to. Why should they? People won’t even listen to me when I tell them Aspertame is bad for them. People who know I have biology and journalism degrees; Even after I tell them I researched it thoroughly and that I’m telling them because I’m their friend and I care. Not only do people believe what they want to believe. I’ll tell you this. People, more surely, don’t believe what they don’t want to believe.

Just Googled it. Only six hits for “don’t believe what they don’t want to believe.” Had the thought as I was writing. I’m a genius. That’s it. All my wasted time was worth it. I now know the truth. We got it all wrong. Some people believe what they want to believe, but most people don’t believe what they don’t want to believe. Okay, obviously I didn’t quite coin it, but hey. Maybe this is a place to start, ’cause we got a lot of fixing to do to deserve our consciences to be free from the guilt of apathy and inaction.

I was going to move on to Exhibit A, a story from today’s paper about dying children (billions of them nearly - just because we won’t donate a pittance to establish basic water services), but maybe I better stick with the new revelation for a moment. Let’s say that is the problem. Thinking out loud here. Duh. Smack me. Um… I was reading a great book a while ago, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” really it’s a great book, and I remember he starts off, and that was about as far as I got although I insist it’s a great book, and he says firmly, with a lot of evidence (I talk like this too) that you simply cannot convince anybody of anything by fighting with them.

He’s right. I know it’s a bit hard to believe, but he convinced me with all his evidence, that successful people have an uncanny ability to never browbeat others into agreeing with them. Carnagie says successful people rather engineer their opponents into agreeing with them. Can this be done on issues of global concern, like our environmental mess and the fact that idiots seem to control everything and are driving us toward total destruction at an accellerating rate? How can concerned people engineer a soft sell on this one? I’ll have to think about that one.

On with the exhibit! Here’s the link:
Many kids still dying for a glass of water

Excerpt:

In the next 24 hours diarrhea caused by unclean water and poor sanitation will claim the lives of 4,000 children. The annual death toll from this relentless catastrophe is larger than the population of Birmingham. Dirty water poses a greater threat to human life than war or terrorism. Yet it barely registers on the radar of public debate in rich countries.

At any one time, close to half the population of the developing world is suffering from water-related diseases. These rob people of their health, destroy their livelihoods and undermine education potential. The statistics behind the crisis make for grim reading. In the midst of an increasingly prosperous global economy, 2.6 billion people still have no access to even the most rudimentary latrine.

Over 1 billion have no source of drinking water.

In Britain, the average person uses 160 liters of clean water each day.

Ouch! Read that again. That’s gotta be heavy, right? Really. Read it again. Can that be for real? I’ve been backpacking to a lot of nooks and crannies of Asia and I’ve never seen a place where I couldn’t get bottled water. Then again, I’ve never been to Africa. And anywhere that backpackers go, a trail of money provides bottled water for all.

Bottled water is part of the problem really. Read on.

The slum was Kibera. With a population of 750,000 it is one of the largest informal settlements in Africa and accounts for one-quarter of people living in Nairobi. Over 90 percent lack access to a latrine, giving rise to a phenomenon that didn’t figure in the movie: the “flying toilet.” Lacking any alternative, people defecate into plastic bags that are thrown into the street, with terrifying consequences for public health.

Kibera is a microcosm of what happens across the developing world. Rapid urbanization and a crumbling water and sanitation infrastructure in cities like Jakarta, Manila and Lagos have left millions of poor people in overcrowded slums facing a constant threat from water infected with human excrement.

To add insult, the poor pay more for their water than the rich. In Kibera, you pay three times more than in Manhattan or London, and 10 times more than in high-income suburbs of Nairobi. Similar patterns are repeated across the cities of the developing world. The reason: water utilities pump subsidized water to well-off customers, but seldom reach the poor. Most slum dwellers face a choice between buying water from high-cost private traders, or taking a long trip to the nearest stream.

Meeting the UN’s millennium development goal of halving the proportion of the world without access to clean water would cost US$4 billion a year for 10 years. That amount represents just a month’s spending on bottled mineral water in Europe and the US.

For less than people in rich countries now spend on a designer product that produces no tangible health gains, we would roll back one of the main causes of preventable childhood death. And for every US$1 invested, another US$3 to US$4 would be generated through savings on health spending and increased productivity. So why have rich countries been cutting aid to water and sanitation for the last five years?

I would like to add for comparison that the Iraq Invasion has cost nearly US$250 billion so far. So I guess that money could hve been better spent. If you feel sorry for children dying needless painful deaths that is.

But don’t believe it! I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m sure that story is simply not true. There is no way that the leacders of America, who have the best intentions in their hearts, would ever knowingly allow money to be diverted away from saving the lives of children and put into efforts that destroy the lives of (Arab) children. What is described in the story is an oversimplification and obfuscation of the real truth which is that America does everything a country could possible[sic] do to export Democracy and a proper Way of life for all the people of this great world, thank you very much, and what was the question? Do we ignore mountains of death due to simple problems with low tech solutions? Well, we can’t have high tech without the low tech, now can we? No we certainly can’t. Amen.

I can’t wait for the day I stop including myself in the we. Is there a real war, a just one, I can sign up for and earn my stripes fighting this all-too-old world order? God bless America. Really. Her people need some help. After we help the children. I don’t know how. Go ask Bono.

And go read the whole story. It’s by Kevin Watkins, who is director of the UN Human Development Report Office. Man, the UN can sure come up with key staff members that know how to tell whoppers! Do you remember those weapons inspectors? How about that, huh?

Next issue: the raping of the oceans; Back to you, Jane.

Just kidding. But shaving the dog, yes. And wagging the dog will come later.

As you can see, we sent Didi in for a shave. Apparently he was very well-behaved and loving toward everyone. Anne said he seemed very proud of himself after the treatment. He certainly is a bit more cuddly, as we’ve had fairly chilly weather this week. We let him on the bed now because he seems cleaner. He’s getting into it. Whereas before he would get too hot or fidgity and jump down withing a few minutes, now he’s likely to stay all night.

Everyone says he’s very cute. I think he looks a bit silly, and nude. Fewer people are scared of him now. You’d be surprised how many people in Taipei will go all nervous when happy, harmless Didi trots toward them.

Moving on now to selected horoors of the world, a recent online discussion got me looking into the Diebold e-voting machines that are at the center of considerable controversy in the US. If one leans toward the side of not trusting GWB and the neo-cons to follow the normal rules of democracy, these e-voting machines are scary. Much of the scandal has been broken by Brad of The Brad Blog, the tagline of which reads, ‘Be the media. Somebody has to.’ I now proudly sport a bright green link to that blog on the right.

Brad is much more effective than a journalist since he expects powerful people to lie to defend themselves and their power. Here is a link to his convenient summary page. He’s done a lot of writing on this one.

To make half of a long story short, Ion Sancho, Leon County, Florida’s election chief was a little suspicious of his voting machines made by Diebold, an American company that makes most of their profits from ATMs (I can’t resist the urge to add, supposedly). So he called in a computer expert, Harri Hursti from Finland, who figured out a way to drastically change election results just by preprogramming some data on the memory card that collects the votes. This was about a year ago. Sancho has had a lot of negative pressure on the job since then. Diebold denied that Sancho had proved anything, but oddly enough, other tests of the machines seemed to convince most witnesses of their fallibility. More recent tests even pushed Sancho’s complaints back into the press. See this story from the Miami Herald.

Sancho first clashed with Diebold in May, when he teamed up with a nonprofit election-monitoring group called BlackBoxVoting.org, which has made a crusade of showing that electronic voting machines are subject to fraud. BlackBox hired Herbert Thompson, a computer-science professor and strategist at Security Innovation, which tests software for companies such as Google and Microsoft.

Thompson couldn’t hack into the system from the outside. So Sancho gave him access to the central machine that tabulates votes and to the last school election at Leon County High.

Thompson told The Herald he was ‘’shocked” at how easy it was to get in, make the loser the winner and leave without a trace. The machine asked for a user name and password, but didn’t require it, he said. That meant it had not just a ”front door, but a back door as big as a garage,” Thompson said.

From there, Thompson said, he typed five lines of computer code — and switched 5,000 votes from one candidate to another.

”I am positive an eighth grader could do this,” Thompson said.

After BlackBox and Sancho announced the results, Diebold’s senior lawyer, Michael Lindroos, wrote Sancho, Leon County and the state of Florida questioning the results and calling the test ”a very foolish and irresponsible act” that may have violated licensing agreements.

Apparently the voting maching software actually uses Microsoft Access databases. That’s reassuring. Moving on, a quick look at Wikipedia tells me:

Together, ES&S and Diebold Election Systems are (as of 2004) responsible for tallying approximately 80% of the votes cast in the United States. The software architecture common to both is a creation of Mr. Urosevich’s company I-Mark. Some experts claim that this structure is easily compromised, in part due to its reliance on Microsoft Access databases.

and

In August 2003, Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold, announced that he had been a top fund-raiser for President George W. Bush and had sent a get-out-the-funds letter to Ohio Republicans. In the letters he says he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” Critics of Diebold interpreted this as implying that he might rig the company’s electronic voting machines to give an unfair advantage to Bush. The letter also was seen as an indication of a perceived conflict of interest by critics. He has responded to the critics by pointing out that the company’s election machines division is run out of Texas by a registered Democrat. He also claims the statement about delivering Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush was simply a poor choice of words. Nonetheless, he vowed to lower his political profile lest his personal actions harm the company. O’Dell resigned his post of chairman and chief executive of Diebold on Monday December 12, 2005 following reports that the company was facing securities fraud litigation surrounding charges of insider trading.

DES claims its systems provide strong immunity to ballot tampering and other vote rigging attempts. These claims have been challenged, notably by Bev Harris on her website, Blackboxvoting.org, and book by the same name. Harris and C. D. Sludge, an Internet journalist, both claim there is also evidence that the Diebold systems have been exploited to tamper with American elections — a claim Harris expands in her book Black Box Voting. Sludge further cites Votewatch for evidence that suggests a pattern of compromised voting machine exploits throughout the 1990s, and specifically involving the Diebold machines in the 2002 election. DES also has come under fire for the recent discovery that the Diebold voting machines do not and did not in 2004 meet the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) error standard.

Well there you have it. Do you trust this picture? I don’t. Not now, not ever. It depends far too much on the presumed honesty of people holding power. Do you think the ‘founding fathers’ of the USA would have gone along with such nonsense? What is it for? The vote counting system isn’t broken, or at least it wasn’t for the most part before e-voting became commonplace.

And again, I know I sound like a broken record on this one (as if anyone is reading anyway), but where is the media on this one? How can they sleep at night? Please visit www.blackboxvoting.org and learn more about this

FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM

with modern day American democracy.

I’m sure I won’t be, but I just want to be the first to say that I think the Mohammed cartoon flap will go down in history as an event nearly as important to our current historical epoch as 9/11 itself.

I mean it. The first thing that set me off was my own reaction the moment my Web-surfing girlfriend told me from across the room that mobs attacked certain embassies because of offensive cartoons - an issue which I had never heard of before. I suddenly became enraged, and torrents of rhetoric laced with the word they came spewing out of my mouth. How dare they declare what we can’t print? And so forth. Lot’s of people are still spewing yet.

Why do I now say it was spew? Because I reacted without thinking. In fact, it almost felt as if I’d been programmed to react that way. The next day, without learning too much more about the situation, I thought to myself and declared to my girlfriend that I thought this cartoon thing was gonna become really huge. I was feeling a little shocked by my initial agressive reaction, but I was still thinking it was ridiculous for muslims in their native countries to be protesting against what some cartoonists and newspapers had drawn to defile Mohammed. Surely they would know better than to try and enforce a censorship on the West.

I forget exactly what I was thinking during the next couple days as I read more about the flap during my compulsive daily newsreading. After a bit, I got around to checking out a rebuttal from the other side. I went to Wikipedia to get my balance. I found out that the cartoon controversy had been going on for a few months and that the cartoons were printed with two specific intentions in mind: to test/demonstrate freedom of the press, and to provoke the anger of muslims.

I take issue with the second point, as does most of the muslim world. Since when have mass-circulation newspapers been acceptable tools for the provoking of ethnic or religious groups? (Okay, I do know that mass media in many Arab countries is used this way, but I am taking to task the standards of Western society not discussing the faults of the Arab world.)

What I find disturbingly insidious is that I had gone through my initial heated reaction and its denoument basically in the frame of mind that the cartoons had depicted Mohammed almost as if by accident, as if the cartoonist didn’t know that that was sacrilege. I think I was under suspension of disbelief. I was implicitly assuming that “we” were not out to get “them.” But it turns out we were. Which is, I theorize, why “we” have reacted so strongly. Heck, our embassies have been attacked many times before.

The standard muslim defense for the protests and embassy sackings is that the West holds double standards on the issue of printing cartoons in order to offend ethno-racial-religious groups. Would the same papers run cartoons mocking the holocaust? Running cartoons of Jesus doesn’t count because nobody really takes offense to that. Targeting a group is the neccessary condition of the test.

It is quite a good defense I think. I’ll double check later, but I don’t think any Western papers ran any holocaust cartoons to demonstrate that such a right to offend is applied equally.

Still, a subconscious sense of guilt over our own hypocrisy hardly explains the reaction I see, with everyone and their dog slapping ‘Support Denmark’ banners onto their blogs and Web sites. Maybe it was just that it was Denmark. I suppose if that country had made it to the hockey finals in the Olympics most of the Western world would be rooting for them too. Who wouldn’t support little Denmark against the throbbing masses of fundamentalist Muslims?

But that can’t be the whole explanation either. No. It is deeper. We are programmed, though we don’t like to admit it. Freedom of speech is our opiate-cum-security blanket. It is the lynchpin of the American system of oligarchic control. Although obvious examples of injustice in the American socio-political system abound (Eg. lying about Lewinsky vs. lying about everything), the American public has been almost totally pacified by the deification of freedom of speech.

I once saw Noam Chomsky speak, and the first thing he said was that no wise person should trust him since, after all, by speaking he was fundamentally empowering the oligarchs by providing a strong example of the toleration of dissent. Far better, he reasoned it would be, if the powers that be sought to suppress his message. By tolerating dissent, the American (and Western) system insulates itself against nearly all dissent which might otherwise prove dangerous. Nobody has proved this like GWB and his administration.

This is why I say, the Western indignance over the cartoons reflects the hopes of Westerners that they do in fact live under a system that is reasonable. There are few other signs of that reasonability these days. The rich are getting richer; the poor, poorer; the strong do as they please; governments abrogate all responsibility to their electorates.

It seems to me that the average Westerner will defend free speech to the grave, especially to justify his sense of cultural superiority. Without this comfortable illusion (because our freedom of speech is far from absolute), he would not have many clear principles to point to when justifying the feeling in his heart that his own culture is somehow better than that he has been trained to hate.

I just successfully upgraded my Wordpress software installation. I sure hope this reduces the comment spam. Yesterday, thinking I could never successfully upgrade it myself, I registered at Wordpress.com for a free online blog. But I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted, so I tried the upgrade. Boring, I know. My point is, I was ready to turn over a new blogging leaf. Henceforth I will attempt to use this blog as my personal soapbox, rather that as a “dimunitive little blog.” What follows in this post was the first and only entry I made at my Wordpress.com blog. But I do recommend that service for those wishing to begin a blog.

This is my first post in Year of the Dog. I’m a dog-born myself. I’m not usually superstitious, but I’m a little psyched for this. Maybe my serotonin is running high.
____________

Let’s start with depleted uranium, the bugbear that I think will destroy it’s masters in the near future.

The graphic above links to a LIFE magazine photo essay on Gulf War Syndrome and the possibility that children of American vets are suffering a higher rate of birth defects because of it.

This is strange. This Web page is not linked to from any of LIFE’s top pages. A search on Google tells me only 24 pages on the whole Internet point to this story. I have been researching depleted uranium for over a year and just discovered this page yesterday by following a link from an anti-DU site.

Also strange is that I cannot discover the date of the story. (Can anyone help me here?)

The story makes reference to DU as one of the possible causes of Gulf War Syndrome. It goes into more detail about other causes, such as vaccinations and bug spray. There are, however, two sidebars linked to in the story. One of the links works fine, but the other one, which would pop-up some further information on DU doesn’t show any text. That’s odd. So, I checked the source HTML and there was the text, which I will quote here:

DID EXPOSURE TO DEPLETED URANIUM CAUSE ILLNESS?
Allied tanks and airplanes fired a new kind of ammunition in the Gulf War: shells
jacketed with depleted uranium, a waste product from nuclear reactors. When such
a shell hits an enemy tank, it heats up, incinerating the vehicle’s crew. In a
1993 report, the General Accounting Office concluded that while troops using such
ordnance were unlikely to receive a radiation dose exceeding Nuclear Regulatory
Commission limits, “the Army has not effectively educated its personnel in the
hazards of DU contamination and in proper safety measures appropriate to the
degree of hazard.” And the safety of even low-level radiation exposure remains a
subject of scientific debate. For troops salvaging shrapnel-pocked equipment, or
working in areas filled with the dust and debris of tank battles, the risk may
have been especially high. Nearly a million DU-tipped shells were fired during
the war. Says Paul Sullivan, president of the Gulf War Veterans of Georgia:
“We’re talking about tons and tons of radioactive wastes floating around.”

WERE NERVE AND MUSTARD GASES PRESENT, AFTER ALL?
In 1975 a landmark Swedish study concluded that low-level exposure to nerve and
mustard gases could cause both chronic illness and birth defects. The Pentagon
denies the presence of such chemicals during the Gulf War. But the Czech and
British governments say their troops detected both kinds of gas, presumably
released during allied bombing of Iraqi chemical plants. And veterans’ advocate
Paul Sullivan recently obtained 11 pages of a secret Defense Department log
revealing that U.S. chemical alarms went off repeatedly during the war. Pentagon
spokesmen blame those alarms on faulty equipment and note that there have been no
reports of massive Iraqi gas deaths near the bombed factories. But former
congressional investigator Jim Tuite speculates that gases were blown straight
upward, then settled miles away as fallout. And, he says, Iraqis are suffering
health problems “similar to what we’re seeing in our veterans.” Ironically, much
of Iraq’s chemical arsenal was made by U.S. companies–80 of which face a
class-action suit by 2,000 ailing vets.

It seems a quotation mark was missing from the HTML code making it display wrongly. Surely, it was just an accident right? And unfortunately went undiscovered for years (this article certainly predates Gulf War II) on that page that is difficult to discover using Google or even the LIFE homepage. But hey, it is a story on DU in the mainstream media right? And this proves that there isn’t any censorship, right? And I’m sure this page will be referenced when the hearings come and people are taken to task for knowingly poisoning an entire country and exposing American and allied troops to a proven carcinogenic toxin.

The truth is that DU has made it into the mainstream news before. Here’s an example from 2003. And here is the 2003 BBC in-depth expose. It just has trouble staying in the news. Few other newspapers ever seem to pick up the story. This happened again last week. The Sunday Times of London reported that four sampling stations detected a significant rise in atmospheric radiation over England following the ’shock and awe’ assult on Bagdhad. The government simply stated it was impossible for the radiation to have come from Iraq, although weather records from that time showed favorable winds. Whether or not the radiation came from Iraq, I am disappointed the story was not pursued further. So far, only one other online news source has followed up.

TAGS: Technorati Tags: depleted+uranium

My Google News email alerts on depleted uranium (DU) and white phosphorus (which you must have heard about by now unless you live in Canada) gave me a link to this opinion piece. It seems to be on an English language Web site highly supportive of Chavez and his “Bolivarian Revolution.”

VHeadline.com commentarist Mary MacElveen writes: US Senator Hillary Rodham-Clinton called the lack of body armor provided to our military personnel as being “unforgivable” this past week and wants an investigation into this matter. While our troops do need that body armor, it is like placing a band-aid on a gaping wound especially when it comes to the use of depleted uranium in Iraq.

She goes on to touch on the recent bombing of a village in Pakistan, the nature of a DU weapon attack, the complicity of the mainstream media and more before getting back to calling Hillary a hypocrite for ignoring unimportant lives while calling for body armour. It’s a righteous read.

HERE IS THE LINK

And here is an interesting excerpt from a related article on the same site:

Should the US be bold enough to take an aggressive action again Hugo Chavez in a fourth attempt to unseat him, it’s almost certain they’ll use DU weapons in large numbers on Venezuelan soil and targets causing widespread radiation fallout and the lethal effects from it. Potentially millions of Venezuelans could be affected who would suffer severe future health consequences of virtually every imaginable type.

I wrote this essay to sound an alarm and alert the world hoping that if people everywhere know the danger now and demand a halt to the use of these illegal weapons it will give the US military pause.

I won’t try to add much here. This Liberty Times (pro-green) editorial states that foreign money is pouring into Taiwan despite the fact that most Taiwanese feel their stock market is the pits. The problem is that too many locals impatiently expected huge, fast profits from investing in companies that jumped on the China bandwagon. When this impatient rush led to losses, everyone blamed Chen Shui-bian’s government for their own poor judgement. This is the stock market folks. Play at your own risk.

China investment restrictions work

THE LIBERTY TIMES EDITORIAL
Sunday, Nov 27, 2005,Page 8

Since early this year, foreign investors have poured more money into Taiwan’s stock market than any other stock market in Asia, with the exception of Japan’s. As of this month, foreign investors have contributed over NT$400 billion (US$11.9 billion) to the nation’s stock market. This month alone, the influx of foreign capital into the market has reached more than NT$140 billion, a record high for a single month.
…
These statistics indicate that although the media believes the nation’s economic outlook is dismal, Taiwan is still a top investment target for foreign investors. Evidently, the pro-China media outlets were ignoring the facts and pursuing their own interests when quoting some foreign investors’ criticisms of Taiwan’s China policy.

If we analyze the portfolios of foreign investors we find that last year they invested NT$283.9 billion in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC, 台積電), China Steel Corp (中鋼) and Chunghwa Picture Tubes (華映). This month, foreign investors have also focused on buying shares of TMSC, AU Optronics Corp (AUO, 友達光電) and United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電). It seems that when looking for companies to invest in, foreign investors still prefer Taiwanese firms that are based in Taiwan.

This is the link to the story.

And a related article here.

This frank article in the Defense Industry Daily makes several references to the Taipei Times and infers the DPP’s fortunes may improve as some dark mud finally starts sticking to the KMT. Interestingly, the pan-blues won’t be able to say this one is a DPP plot. The impetus to accellerate the French frigate scandal investigation comes from Switzerland who promises to return the money to the middleman if Taiwan doesn’t make some kind of formal move by the middle of December.

Here is a link to all the DID stories on Taiwan.

And here is a very recent article from the BBC giving a good rundown on the whole scandal.

Book delves into frigate scandal

By Hugh Schofield
In Paris

It has been one of France’s biggest political and financial scandals of the last generation. It has left a trail of eight unexplained deaths, nearly half a billion dollars in missing cash and troubling allegations of government complicity. And yet 10 years after it first broke, the story of the “frigates-to-Taiwan” scandal has yet to be told in full.

And the greens lost badly in the election today. Rats. I posted about it here and here.

Click to go to the movie download
This is fabulous. One American filmmaker got fed up with hearing Candians gloat over their supposedly superior health care system and decided to check it out for himself. He discovered that the Canadian system has some bizarre features. For example, you can get a CAT-scan for your pet any time you like, but probably will have to wait months to get one for yourself. By making government the only legal provider of “necessary” care, the system sets itself up to suffer shortages - of specialists, equipment, operating rooms, even hospitals as I’m sure everybody is finally starting to realize. Only Cuba and North Korea share Canada’s philosophy in this area.

But the biggest stumbling block to changing Canda’s ridiculous health care system is probably the fact that Canadians have got their national identity all entwined in it. The evidence for this assertion is the millions of Canadians who sit idly waiting for their place in line to come up. (Apparently it is even common to have your scheduled service postponed several times for certain operations.) Why don’t they stampede across the border to buy the same services easily? Either they’re too Canadian or they really don’t get the free trade concept at all.

Aw, shucks. Wouldn’t ya know it. The cowboy’s unpatrolled mouth is gonna sink the ship. Hopefully, that is. You never know with this Voldemortarian administration that has an uncanny ability to wage evil right under the noses the lapdog press. But, check this out!

23 November 2005
LAW CHIEF GAGS THE MIRROR ON BUSH LEAK
By Kevin Maguire

THE Daily Mirror was yesterday told not to publish further details from a top secret memo, which revealed that President Bush wanted to bomb an Arab TV station.

The gag by the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith came nearly 24 hours after the Mirror informed Downing Street of its intention to reveal how Tony Blair talked Bush out of attacking satellite station al-Jazeera’s HQ in friendly Qatar.

WARMONGER: Bush

No 10 did nothing to stop us publishing our front page exclusive yesterday.

But the Attorney General warned that publication of any further details from the document would be a breach of the Official Secrets Act.

They published that photo, with that caption. It made me realize that probably 98 percent of Europeans HATE Bush. How long can this farce go on?

Here’s the link:
http://tinyurl.com/9bl5n

Man, politics has been mental for me the last few weeks. I’ve been too busy too write anything in my blog. White phosphorus has finally hit the news. MK77 (napalm) too. I only recently discovered the horrible fact of depleted uranium. Voldemort seems to be doing well. And then I found THIS. Click this link, and I guarantee, you will start to take my Harry Potter analogy more seriously. (You must have read at least book five to really understand what I mean.)

Ambassador de Sade

Oh, I can’t resist. Exerpt:

(intro)
Bush rewarded one of his loyalists with the ambassadorship to Italy — despite his past as the founder of an cult-like teen rehab clinic.
…
Melvin Sembler stepped down earlier this year as Our Man In Rome — he also served under the first Bush as Ambassador to Australia. Were Monroe’s story unique, his STRAIGHT clinics might still be in business. Instead, his creation, which he stubbornly defends, closed under a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by 1993, ranging from sexual abuse, beating and stomping to boys called “faggots” for hours while being spat upon — humiliation so bad that a Pennsylvania judge recently ruled it potentially mitigating of a Death Row sentence for a former STRAIGHT teen who committed a homophobic murder.

Although prosecutors closed the clinics, six-figure settlements sucked it dry, and state health officials yanked its licenses after media reports of teen torture and cover-up, Sembler himself escaped punishment. As one of the preeminent and hardest-working GOP fundraisers, Sembler has received the honor of living during the George W. Bush presidency at the Villa Taverna, the official residence for the U.S. ambassador, which has the largest private garden in Rome. One night in May at “The Magic Kingdom” (as Mel and Betty call it), the dining room filled with smoke from fine cigars, as the ambassador entertained Bush Sr. and an entourage — until Betty complained that the old friends were stinking up “my house,” the Washington Post reported.

That’s just a taste…

I like this story in the Taipei Times. Chen hs launched on a tirade of calling the oppositions bluff totally. I think it’s about time. Those wannabe emperors have been wearing no clothes for a long time. Chen is now getting vocal about his belief that the PFP is holding the KMT to blocking the arms bill by threatening to let the party assets bill pass if the KMT lets the arms bill pass.

KMT has `evil’ intentions, Chen says
PARCEL OF ROGUES: President Chen Shui-bian yesterday said that the KMT’s election campaign conceals its evil intentions, while the PFP is the `most loathsome’ of the two
BY JEWEL HUANG
STAFF REPORTER , IN TAICHUNG COUNTY
Monday, Oct 24, 2005,Page 3

“The PFP is the most loathsome. If they really love the country, why did they obstruct the arms sale bill?”

President Chen Shui-bian
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday said that the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) campaign theme titled “winning Taiwan back” concealed evil intentions, which revealed the KMT’s attempts to sell its stolen party assets for less than their true value, abandon Taiwan to China and restore its “black gold” politics.

Chen made the statement yesterday evening at a campaign rally in Taichung County, which was the fourth stop on his campaign-truck tour.

Chen asked voters to support his six reform goals and vote for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) so that the three scenarios can be prevented from happening.

“I believe that everyone knows clearly that Taiwan never loses. How come the KMT said that Taiwan failed?” Chen said.

He pointed out that Taiwan has been ranked tops in the Global E-government evaluation conducted by Brown University for three consec-utive years and that the nation ran-ked among the top five in the Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum this year.

That’s what I keep saying! The lack of economic growth is due to overinvestment in China for cripe’s sake. Anyway, here’s some more of the article:

Chen said that Soong not only opposed the passage of the arms-procurement bill but also threatened Ma not to allow the KMT lawmakers to support the bill, otherwise he would let the proposed statute on the disposition of assets improperly obtained by political parties (政黨不當取得財產處理條例) pass the legislature.

“As a result, Ma was scared to death. The KMT only cares about its party assets stolen from the people of Taiwan and ignore national security,” Chen said.

“The PFP is the most loathsome. If they really love the country, why did they obstruct the arms sale bills?” he said.

Chen said that the arms bill is aimed at enhancing the nation’s self-defense abilities and forcing China to consider the costs of attacking Taiwan, and it was never part of an arms race.

Caption:

Democratic Progressive Party legislative caucus whip William Lai, center, yesterday appears to look on helplessly as the pan-blue legislators in the legislative procedure committee reject placing the arms procurement bill on the legislative agenda for the 33rd time.
PHOTO: LUO PEI-TEH, TAIPEI TIMES

Priceless. I just had an idea on how to break the legisltive impasse. I’m sure that some of the blue-siders who are so eager to sell out to China could be bought. N’est pas vrai? The DPP should just reach into its coffers and try to bribe some of them into switching sides. Since all they care about is money, I don’t much problem with doing this.

++++++++++

in other news…

Here is an email I just sent to the better part of my address book. Sometimes I write emails like this to compensate for the fact that nobody reads my blog.

Hello friends,

I was moved to send another mass emailing to most of the people in my
address book that I can still remember. (Don’t you feel special?) Why?
Well, it’s this pesky issue again of the most evil thing ever dreamed
up by architects of death. Depleted uranium is something most people
would think only the most vile of Hitler’s henchmen could ever
endorse. Really. No kidding. It is ridiculously awful stuff. And the
US military happily exposes its fodder, burp, soldiers to it. There is
no mystery to Gulf War syndrome. The only mystery is the way the media
tends to cover the story. Not! Just try a search on Google News. You
will find that not one major media source covers this story even
though it is most certainly real. Well, it came up in a Harold Pinter
quote a few times. I guess the journalists didn’t know what it meant.

Here’s the link. If you are feeling unsure of your ability to cope
with the dark truth that is the present reality of Bush, America, and
the N.W.O., then I advise you, DO NOT READ THIS LINK! You have been
warned.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/samples3.html

To read other great rants by Sheila Samples, change the digit 3 in the
above link to 1,2,4,5,6 or 7. It’s all good reading. She is a
sharp-tongued Bush scorner.

Here’s a good DU link from Japan.
If you want to
learn more about this issue, (and who does?) this is a good place to
start. It’s a whole book on the subject, in English and well organized
for browsing.

We should coin new terms like the pentagone does. How about WSD -
weapon of slow destruction?

Please pass this email along. Strip the headers if you know how, and
be sure to put all the recipients but one into the BCC field. If you
voted for Bush, you should add a single line to the email saying, “I’m
sorry.”

–
Best regards,
Peter mailto:dearpeter@gmail dot com

Here is a letter to the Taipei Times that insists treason is afoot in Taiwan right now - tht it is clearly out in the open, and that it is bizarre the population accepts it, blithely reasoning that the ugly side of dictatorship could never reoccur in a consumeristic socitey like this one.

The letter is quite long, and I recommend reading it. Here is a short quotation from it:

There is no depth to which the pan-blues will not sink to defeat democracy and freedom in Taiwan.

If you doubt this is the case, you can start with the pan-blues’ refusal to consider buying weapons to defend Taiwan against China. This single action should alone be a sufficient wake-up call to the people of Taiwan to understand the true purpose of the pan-blues in Taiwan’s politics today.

That purpose, as per an agreement with the CCP, is to emasculate Taiwan and to bring it to its knees so that the pan-blues can take over.

With that, democracy as we know it would quickly disappear, and the country would rapidly be plunged once again into a period of “White Terror.” We would see “purges” of “splittists,” the passage of laws eroding political and personal freedoms and perhaps even martial law.

The pan-blues would never want to hand the reins of power back to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The way to do that would be to outlaw the DPP. As incapable as the DPP has been in dealing with the KMT’s ruthless treason, that is how ruthless the KMT will be when it arrests the leadership of the DPP and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU).

You doubt this? The KMT has brazenly identified itself as the servant of the CCP in Taiwan. The CCP has conducted purges during its history that have eradicated all freedoms for all people, except for cronies and high officials.

My favorite Web tool, Stumble Upon, (find it for yourself) led me to www.pulitzer.org. It’s great!! Try browsing the photo and cartoon winners for a quick gush of awe.

This year’s winner is here. (But it’s better to navigate from the original URL.)

I wish I thought of this one.

Here’s a more serious concern the New Orleans mess has brought to the surface yet again. Click the picture to visit Snopes.com and get the juice on this one.

Here is a link to a blog called Taiwan’s Other Side which seeks to redress the apparent bias that most Western commentators have favoring the DPP and President Chen ShuiBian.

And some other Taiwan blog links jut for fun:

One whole jujuflop situation

Wandering to Tamshui

Michael Turton’s Blog, The View from Taiwan His Teaching English in Taiwan Web Page is a good place to go to “get a feel for” Taiwan, assuming you’ve never been here.