Radio Free Taiwan

This is interesting. Go visit the site to watch their rejected TV commercial. The commercial implies that other churches may reject people or not fully accept them, whereas this church accepts everybody. Apparently, that message is not acceptable, although it is likely true in my opinion.

Bonus links for the stronghearted: [1] [2][excerpt from 2]

Click me!
I was just reading a dose of real news (meaning unsanitized) from my favourite new source. This Website is more like an excuse for a mailing list. You can visit and browse, but you may as well just get their newsletter. It works just like real news - topical, current issues are addressed usually from a journalistic analysis viewpoint. But the perspective is that of a global citizen that values all lives as equal, not just Western lives, and reality in all its stark horror is not shied away from. I’d say it is a pretty Humanist publication. It’s based in India.

Here are some excerpts from their content, chosen by me of course:

India And UK-US Bush Wars By Gideon Polya

[brief excerpt]
The latest UN and UNICEF data indicate that the post-invasion excess mortality in Occupied Iraq and Afghanistan totals 2.3 million and the annual under-5 infant mortality totals 0.5 million (1,300 daily and 90% avoidable) – and this largely due to non-provision by the occupying Coalition of life-sustaining requisites demanded by the Geneva Conventions. Further, the latest UNODC data indicate that the post-2001 global opioid drug-related deaths totalling 0.4 million (including 1,200 Scots, 1,600 Australians, 3,000 Canadians, 3,200 Brits and 50,000 Americans) are largely due to Coalition restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry back to global dominance (76% market share by 2002).

The Jericho Prison Raid By Ramzy Baroud

[brief excerpt]
The Palestinian parliamentary elections last January, which introduced Hamas as a power player, have yielded a most unfavorable formula from the point of view of the US and Britain. Both governments have invested in a carefully designed and self-serving democracy program that would cement and justify their costly meddling in the region and, of course, their lost war in Iraq. Whether they wish to admit it or not, the advent of Hamas, which has provided a moral boost to Islamic political movements everywhere, has most likely signaled the end of the US-led quasi-democracy project.

Man Will ‘Wipe Out’ Rare Creatures Of The Deep By Severin Carrell

The deep ocean is one of the world’s last great wildernesses. But not for long. Two kilometres below the surface, scores of rare and exotic species are being wiped out at a dramatic rate.

These unique species include the goblin shark which boasts a unicorn-like horn, prickly sharks with humped backs and glowing eyes, vast single-celled organisms as large as footballs and tripod fish that stand on their fins.

In a letter passed to The Independent on Sunday, Britain’s leading marine scientists have warned these species face extinction because of the global growth in deep-sea trawlers fishing for edible species such as the orange roughy, hoki and round-nosed grenadier.

The destruction of the oceans will have to wait. This just in, and it could be just as bad, according to this guy at least. He seems to be waiting for the day the American military goes all out and brings back nuclear warfare proper. And he says the effects are global and worse than “they” have admitted.

Bush’s Nuclear Madness By Stephen M. Osborn

The latest information I have had from the followers of Bush is that he has demanded and received permission to use nuclear “bunker busters” in Iran in a preemptive strike. As a nuclear veteran (Operation Redwing, Bikini, 1956) I can affirm that this is absolute madness. The “bunker buster” is a cute sounding name for a nuclear horror. Air bursts are horrible enough, doing incredible destruction through heat, shock and high initial radiation. The fallout from an air burst is registered around the world. A surface or subsurface burst is even deadlier and more long lasting.

Osborn was a witness to a nuclear test and believes the effects on “downwinders” are clear - birth defects, cancers, etc. But, he says, the radioactive fallout reaches globally and will cause “another” rise in cancer. I gather he is suggesting there was a global rise in cancers during the age of atomic testing. I wonder if he is right.

There are not too many of us left that witnessed the tests, but there are a number of groups that monitor the effects through cancers, birth defects, both physical and mental and monitoring of contamination in the environment. We are still feeling the results of those tests. I have exchanged e-mails with downwinders and with the children of downwinders who have had children with birth defects that had no previous history of such things in their families; who suffer from cancers that are peculiar to nuclear radiation.

The reason I came across this story is, once again, my depleted uranium alert at Google News. Osborn has some words to say about that too.

Now we are facing the specter of Depleted Uranium, which is turning up in atmospheric filters around the world. Depleted Uranium is a nuclear byproduct of the nuclear industry. It is a low level radioactive material of extreme density. The half life of DU is 4.5 billion years. Workers in DU have to wear full protective equipment and respirators. DU ammunition is extremely hard and dense. It penetrates armor like tissue paper, vaporizing and burning, leaving dust and particles as shrapnel to be ingested or breathed. DU is not what the public thinks of as a radioactive material. It only emits alpha and beta radiation. A piece of paper will stop it. However, when it is in the lungs or elsewhere in the body, it is in contact with living tissue, bombarding that tissue with low level radiation for the rest of your life and beyond. That radiation can lead to cancers, genetic damage and eventual death.

Independent laboratories like Johns Hopkins have studied this and made predictions of the harm it can do. The government says, as it did with Agent Orange, “There is nothing to it, it is all in your head.” Meanwhile, people continue to sicken and die and will for generations.

I recommend reading all the article. It’s easy to hear the commitment in his words, and he represents a perspective we could all use a dose of. He is someone who knows.

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.

This is amazing. Just go see it! Gotta love Texans. They want to clean up their own mess. I guess it’s not fair to blame Texas for GWB. But we sure can blame his dad for DU.

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.